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I think the answer to that question will always lie unanswered unless you really do believe that a supreme deity created matter, we can not know if matter has always existed or if it was created at some point, it is a question nobody should be able to answer and if they pin that question on you i do not know of any other way than to ask of proof that isn't their belief in this ridiculous deity.
I think that one of the things I've been hearing lately is that we assume the natural order of things in the beginning would be a state of nothing, yet we forget to realize how unnatural that would actually be~ so that while we like to think there must have been a time before there was something, more likely there was always something, as having absolutely nothing is more unnatural (in our observations) than having something.  simply put, there being something might more likely be more natural than having nothing at all.  It would be good to start a dialogue here about different origin theories for matter in the universe, i've toyed with a few (i'm not a physicist) to work the concept, but due to my limited knowledge on the issue (again, my lack of being a physicist) I'd like to have someone who could point out when my ideas have blatant flaws to narrow them down.

The problem lies with the perception that matter is something that we look at and that what we are looking at has always existed in its present form, or that it was created in its present form, and that it will always exist in its present form, none of which is correct. (The same can be said for time, but that is beyond the scope of this answer.)

What we perceive is temporary, and though it is extremely old from our perspecitve, it is not eternal, it is not really "solid", it is energy.

There are a lot of things about matter that we assume that is false, we continually learn more about it and the universe and the more we know the more we know that there is no need for God to be involved and certainly no "personal" god.

All matter was created shortly after Big Bang. The best theory we have is that masses of sub-atomic particles were created and then annihilated and a very small number remained which went on to create what we see today.


Some of the weirder things about this unique (we think) incident is that immediately after the event the universe was expanding at a rate above light speed. Impossible? Not really, because light exists IN the universe those rules had not yet been created.


Google for Planck Time (tP) and you'll find lots of stuff on this event - tP is such a fine grained measure that it's used to describe the moments immediately after Big Bang while the universe was no bigger than a football.


Getting your head around this isn't easy: it's far easier to believe in a god - which is why so many do.

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the universe is still expanding faster than the speed of light.
Indeed it is...hence what we know as the universe is only the OBSERVABLE universe...the rest of it is receding so fast we'll never see it.
I think what you're saying is completely correct, but I'm going to play devil's advocate (no pun intended) and pose the question many theists would pose: What started the big bang? I don't think we can ever know for sure but it sure is easy to put a creator being in that role. Especially since our living situation ended up being so perfect 13.7 billion years after the fact.
I never understood their reasoning.  Everything needs a creator but not god?

its called "special pleading"

also consider that if their god doesn't need a creator, then why does the universe?

I would say that considering that the human brain isn't built to handle numbers larger than ten thousand (try imagining ten thousand one dollar bills~ you can't) that trying to posit something as enormous as the universe is, in principle, silly.  Mathematics helps us out, but again, the understanding is on a fundamentally different scale.  Religion has no mathematical rendering or help, and neither do their ideas (unless you count adding up the ages to calculate the age of the earth).  Imo we as a species aren't developed enough to truly, on a fundamental level, understand the way the universe was created outside of newtonian physics.  Kinda like a toddler understanding the workings of a car.  they can be taught the terms, and possibly understand what happens if something were to break, or even how to operate it~ but at the end of the day, they aren't ready or able to comprehend the physics at work and the intricacies in play.



Yeah, this was what I was getting at.



And additionally, the reasoning that basically states "I don't understand how that works, so it must be magical" is also flawed.  It is quite a jump to a conclusion to state that complete ignorance ("I don't know at all") leads to a definitive conclusion ("God did it").




That's what is hard to grasp in our "natural" world of cause and effect on earth.


Matter is infinate. No need for a beginning. "It" always was and always will be. Sounds like an old Hindu spiritual teaching doesn't it?





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