Why is there anything at all? (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Sunday, June 08, 2008, 13:06 (6011 days ago) @ Curtis

The "Kalam Cosmological" argument is just a fancy name for the "first cause" argument. - Most modern atheists accept that the universe had a beginning. The scientific evidence is from tracing back the expansion of the universe to the "big bang" and the need for a simple origin to account for the direction of time, as shown by increasing entropy in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. - The second premise, that every effect has a cause, is the questionable one. According to quantum theory an event does not need a cause. It can just happen. The universe can appear as a "fluctuation in the void". This does not violate the law of conservation of energy, since the positive energy tied up in matter is balanced by the negative potential energy of the expanding universe, the total remains zero. - If you argue that everything has a cause, and that a god caused the creation of the universe, there is then the question of what caused the creation of the god in the first place, you get an endless regression. It is simpler to suppose that the universe just appeared, out of nothing, because nothing is an unstable state; it only takes a small change and you have something. - What I'm not sure of with this argument is whether the "nothing" from which the universe came is the same as philosophical "nothingness" or is some sort of physical "void". Can they be identified as the same? Victor J. Stenger in his books, such as "God the failed hypothesis" seems to do this. - An alternative view is that the universe is everything that exists, including space and time, so there is no sense in talking about anything outside or before or after the universe. One can trace back time to a beginning, but there is nothing before that, just as there is nothing north of the north pole.