Play Trap the Atheist (The atheist delusion)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 05, 2012, 12:13 (4373 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Quote from my post of 18 hours ago: "Still, cosmologists have plenty of other big questions to keep them busy. If the universe owes its origins to quantum theory, then quantum theory must have existed before the universe. So the next question is surely: where did the laws of quantum theory come from? 'We do not know,' admits Vilenkin. 'I consider that an entirely different question." When it comes to the beginning of the universe, in many ways we're still at the beginning.'" 
There must be a lawgiver! Only nothing comes from nothing.-I'm not at all sure about the logic here. It is humans who derive theories from what they perceive as realities, and quantum theory throws up all kinds of problems about the nature of reality. The very suggestion that the universe might owe its origin to quantum theory seems to me like saying that it owes its origin to something we simply do not understand. That "first cause" something may be your law-giving God, or it may be an impersonal Nature which acts unconsciously with a mixture of the predictable (natural laws, which humans are able to work out) and the unpredictable (quantum randomness). Either of these first causes must have been there forever, since "nothing comes from nothing", and so there cannot have been a beginning. -(NB That does not invalidate the Big Bang theory. It does invalidate the claim that nothing preceded the Big Bang, if it happened.)