e·ter·nal [ih-tur-nl] adjective 1. without beginning or end; lasting forever; always existing (opposed to temporal ): eternal life. 2. perpetual; ceaseless; endless: eternal quarreling; eternal chatter. 3. enduring; immutable: eternal principles. 4. Metaphysics . existing outside all relations of time; not subject to change. noun 5. something that is eternal. 6. the Eternal, God. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/eternal
*sigh* That's exactly my point! It's not eternal, therefore it logically concludes that there must be something that IS that transcends it. What could that be?
You cannot logically conclude that there was something before there was anything. There wasn't anything. There wasn't time. There wasn't space. There wasn't atoms. There wasn't anything at all. And SURELY there was no omnipotent being.
You are making a faith based claim, so do be careful. Also saying there was no omnipotent being is a positive assertion that you cannot prove. It's sounding more and more like you just don't want God to exist and will do anything to remove Him from the picture, even if it means shooting yourself in the foot and throwing all logic under the bus. All I'm trying to show is that God is the most logical explanation for causation. From nothing, nothing comes. Eternal nothingness begets eternal nothingness. There is no model or evidence in existence to disprove this.
I am making an evidence based claim. There may have been a hypothesis at some point decades ago about the big bang. The results of numerous experiments continue to do nothing but confirm it as the most likely explanation for how everything began. Period. There is not one shred of evidence for a creator. Period. Not one.
Light is a wave. As it is stretched, its period becomes longer. For audio, it would mean a lower pitch. For light, it means the light will appear red. You know, ROY G BIV, the colors of the rainbow/spectrum? (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet). So we see the light from EVERYTHING we see in the sky has a red shift, which means the source of the light is moving away from us. If you see a car on a straight road goes 100MPH for an hour, you know it went 100 miles in an hour. From that end point, 100 miles further, you can "rewind" the motion to before you first saw it. If the car was going 100MPH the whole time, an hour earlier it was 100 miles away from where you first saw it, in the other direction. Similarly, you can rewind the motion of all the light sources in the universe. And back 13.8B years ago, they all meet at a single point. Before that there was nothing. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of experiments that supports the big bang. Like we can't see anything older than 13.8B years with our strongest and best telescopes. Kind of funny how the age of the oldest thing we can see with telescopes is the same age as the universe according to the big bang theory. Other experiments include measurement of a galactic background radiation, which is the afterglow of the big bang. It is almost uniform and comes at us equally from every direction. It exists because the big bang happened. And it is fact there is no evidence for a creator. Period.
I'm not even denying that the Big Bang happened, it seems to me that you are dodging every question I'm throwing at you. A Christian Astronomer came up with the Big Bang theory. Did you know that? It does nothing to rule out the existence of God. At this point you are just forcing your own personal beliefs on me. there are no testable or recreatable models for the Big Bang, especially if you claim to not know what caused it.
correct correct correct to be fair, we don't know this to be correct. We just know that spacetime had a beginning, or at least our current version of spacetime had a beginning. We do not know if there aren't other universes with their own scales, nor do we know if anything precipitated the big bang.
So basically from I'm understanding is you guys believe everything literally came from nothing. I have faith, but not that much faith.
Also to be fair, belief in God is so much more than an intellectual journey. It takes a heart change and a denying and humbling of ones self. You can come up with the best argument in the world for God and it won't save someone or make them believe, because just as there is a will to believe, there is a will to disbelieve. We are in sin and rebellion against God, enemies to Him by our very nature.
One question I have always wrestled with is this... At some point in "time" there had to be nothing. There had to be a first star, a first planet, a first piece of cosmic dust... What was there before all that? How did God come into being? I mean, some way or some how even He had to not exist.
correct again. You were just being very logical in your analysis but started to tiptoe near drawing a conclusion where we have no information from which to draw a conclusion.
Something must have always existed is where my logic leads me to. I can't conceive eternal nothingness and then *POOF*, everything. God is the uncaused first cause.
The first stars appeared roughly 100M years after the Big Bang. Before that there was a lot of "dust" (atoms) and energy and gravity.
