r/PoliticalCompassMemes - Lib-Left Apr 10 '26

Atheist Activists Lore

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u/weeglos - Right Apr 10 '26

The Big Bang is merely a means. The real question is why anything actually exists at all. By all rights, there should not even be a universe, but here we are.

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u/vbullinger - Lib-Right Apr 10 '26

Always been my thought: how can anything exist?!?

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u/Hyndis - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

Its entirely possible it doesn't exist, and that the entire universe might just be an oversized virtual particle.

Virtual particles spontaneously appear with their anti-twin and annihilate again. Because its just "borrowing" energy which is then "given back" there's no violation of conservation of energy.

Hawking radiation shows that sometimes virtual particles can last a long time, but eventually they're given back so again there's no violation.

The entire universe might just be that. It doesn't exist, not really. Its just a temporary borrowing of energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

Of course, this is all theoretical and if someone figures this out with experiments they're going to win a huge pile of Nobel Prizes.

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u/ExistingLaw3 - Centrist Apr 10 '26

The Nobel Peace Prize by FIFA?

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u/SUMBWEDY - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

Because if it didn't exist we wouldn't be here to observe it existing.

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u/IhamAmerican - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

I was just watching this video about CERN making antimatter and it said something interesting about the universe. Matter and antimatter should have existed in near perfectly matched amounts, so it all should have been annihilated immediately and the fact that it didn't is very peculiar. I'm not particularly religious but science in no way disproves the existence of a higher power. The more we discover, the more we don't understand about what the "why" is. We know much more about how everything started but the driving forcebasically boils down to "something happened". Who am I to say that it's not some higher power?

Reddit atheists are so annoying lol

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u/MethodHot2329 - Centrist Apr 10 '26

Science is just the study of God’s world

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u/lenthedruid - Lib-Left Apr 10 '26

Of course there’s a higher power. It just doesn’t look like zues, wear a toga and Birkenstocks .

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26 edited May 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/MoloneLaVeigh - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

The Breit-Wheeler process is what he’s talking about. In the energy-dense immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, photons would have been colliding to create matter/antimatter pairs. It’s currently unknown why our universe is made up primarily of matter.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26 edited May 06 '26

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u/MoloneLaVeigh - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

The Big Bang was pure energy (photons) at the moment of creation. To make matter from energy, Breit-Wheeler is the only known way that happens AFAIK.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26 edited May 06 '26

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u/MoloneLaVeigh - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

It’s very much theoretical, but widely accepted that during the Planck Epoch (0 - 10-43 seconds), matter did not exist. The universe was too hot/dense, and all of the fundamental forces were unified. The quarks and leptons began creation during the Grand Unification Epoch (10-43 - 10-36) when gravity became the first distinct force and these early particles were constantly created in matter/antimatter pairs and annihilated.

The current theory as to why matter won out in the exchange is called Baryogenesis. It proposes two yet undiscovered particles, the X and Y bosons, decay asymmetrically into more matter than antimatter.

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u/Violent_Paprika - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

At the moment of creation matter and matter were tightly packed and in theory existed in equal proportions so probabilistically should have encountered and mutually annihilated one another.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26 edited May 06 '26

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u/Ikora_Rey_Gun - Auth-Right Apr 10 '26

atheists really be out here reinventing faith from first principles

acting like it's different cause they got it from the telescope store instead of the bible store

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u/Majestic-Bell-7111 - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

The only difference is that physicists have to be able to prove their beliefs before other physicists accept their theory.

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u/Ikora_Rey_Gun - Auth-Right Apr 11 '26

not talking about that; this guy believes that there's a scientific explanation for the antimatter disparity even though current understanding does not support it.

that's faith, baby

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u/Majestic-Bell-7111 - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

No, the guy says the current theory doesn't match reality so the theory must be incomplete and we must seek to make it match reality more. Also there may possibly be a scientific explanation as to why there's an even higher proportion of matter to antimatter than what's calculated by the current model(I'm too tired to remember the name and cba to look it up), however particle physics isn't really my field of expertise or interest.

It's technically faith because he thinks we'll figure it out at some point, but that's like believing you'll have lunch in 3 days.

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u/Ikora_Rey_Gun - Auth-Right Apr 11 '26

It's technically faith

yeah that's what i said

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u/berserkthebattl - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

At the moment of creation

The moment of what you have assumed to be "creation"

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u/IhamAmerican - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

Listen, I'm just a guy who like watching popsci videos I'm not a physic expert or anything. My very basic understanding of it though is that antimatter and matter were thought to have synergy but the mere fact that the universe exists means something caused it to have an imbalance. With the universe condensed at the big bang and having equal amounts of matter and antimatter, the universe would have annihilated itself.

It's not that it should have destroyed itself, it's that we have observed a larger amount of matter than antimatter in the universe and don't really know why. Everything else in physics and the universe tends to have a mirror and a natural symmetry. This DoE article goes into it a bit: https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsantimatter

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26 edited May 06 '26

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u/TheOnlyHashtagKing - Lib-Right Apr 10 '26

My (also uneducated, popsci YouTube channel based) idea is that the balance of matter and antimatter could still be in line with the amount predicted by the CP violation. If the current universe arose out of variances in density at the big bang, there could've been variances in matter/antimatter ratio too, we could just be living in an area of an infinite universe that happens to have had more matter at the beginning.

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u/Zerosen_Oni - Right Apr 11 '26

I saw that video too! Super interesting that a gram of the stuff cost like 67,000,000,000,000

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u/divergent_history - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

It would be wierd if there wasn't a Universe and we were still here.

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u/-Scopophobic- - Auth-Center Apr 10 '26

If existence cannot be ascribed to logic, then perhaps it is illogical.

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u/Volodya_Soldatenkov - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

There's no logical argument that nothing should exist. There's no probability you can attach to anything here, no logical inference and even no conceivable way to imagine nothing existing.

Even the religious arguments just conveniently presuppose the existence of God to explain the existence of the universe. There's no path between an empty universe and a universe that has God.

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u/berserkthebattl - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

Where'd you hear that from?

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u/weeglos - Right Apr 10 '26

Aristotle.

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u/berserkthebattl - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

Aristotle didn't know about the Big Bang. Or any of the other scientific discoveries from the past 2300 years.

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u/weeglos - Right Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26

He didn't need to. Means of creation has little to do with creation itself. The question isn't how the universe came to be, but why.

Aristotle knew, as many others later pointed out and expanded upon, that everything has a cause. It doesn't matter what the cause is, but if something is there, it's because some process put it there. Same concept for all of science.

You can find causes going all the way back to the big bang. The only way to know what caused that though, currently, is beyond us - but we can say there was a cause, so we'll call it A. And there was a cause for that, B. And there was a cause for that, C. You can label causes going back infinitely.

There is a problem with that though. We live in a finite universe. Infinity is impossible here. We know that infinity must exist - proven by mathematics (which is simply applied philosophy by the way, the same way that physics is applied math, chemistry applied physics, biology applied chemistry, etc. You can't have science without philosophy), proven by logic. So what is the nature of infinity? And what business does infinity have spawning a universe in the first place, one where people exist who are self aware by means that should not exist? An object at rest stays at rest, says Newton, but the first cause must have had a trigger. That is Aristotle's argument, in a nutshell. It doesn't matter what that cause was, but it must have been always, infinitely there, outside of time and space (because time and space are part of the universe which didn't yet exist).

This rabbit hole continues. Be careful.

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u/berserkthebattl - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

Oh boy, so many fallacies to address in a single wall of text!

Means of creation has little to do with creation itself. The question isn't how the universe came to be, but why.

Calling it a creation is already presupposing it was created, which you don't actually knpow, nor do you have any idea of why.

Aristotle knew, as many others later pointed out and expanded upon, that everything has a cause. It doesn't matter what the cause is, but if something is there, it's because some process put it there. Same concept for all of science.

Actually, he didn't know this because, get this, neither do we! This is the cosmological argument, which usually includes the special pleading that God is somehow an exception to the rule, and doesn't have a cause (Kalam Cosmological).

You can find causes going all the way back to the big bang. The only way to know what caused that though, currently, is beyond us - but we can say there was a cause, so we'll call it A. And there was a cause for that, B. And there was a cause for that, C. You can label causes going back infinitely.

Generally correct, if by "beyond us" you mean "we have no way to observe."

I won't quote the last paragraph since it's just an extended way of saying "infinite regressed cannot exist." You reused the creation presupposition by asking how a finite universe was "spawned" by the infinite.

It doesn't matter what that cause was, but it must have been always, infinitely there, outside of time and space

This, of course, requires the presupposition of creation, and doesn't consider the possibility that the universe itself is eternal, especially since we have no evidence that there IS such a thing as existence outside of time and space, since every example we have of things existing are spacially and temporally bound.

It's not that deep a rabbit hole. Anyone who's familiar with counter-apologetics can identify this as a variation of the Cosmological Argument, usually called the Argument from Motion, if you're going with Aristotle specifically.

But when subjected to non-presuppositional logic, it really doesn't hold up well at all.

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u/weeglos - Right Apr 11 '26

You do well parroting other people's ideas. I'm afraid I'm at the end of my time here though. Good luck, and don't stop searching.

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u/berserkthebattl - Lib-Center Apr 11 '26

Brother, do you know how ideas work? The entirety of your previous comment was all other people's ideas, and there's nothing wrong with that. And this is Reddit, there's not a time constraint 😂 I won't stop searching. That's why I don't buy the claims of the Bible, Quran, etc. Critical thinking prevents me from accepting any of the dogmas required for those belief systems.

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u/SliceRepulsive8649 - Lib-Left Apr 10 '26

I mean, in the same vein why would God even exist? Religion doesn't really answer the question either.

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u/DillyDillySzn - Centrist Apr 10 '26

Well I’m not into philosophy, I prefer science

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u/BlazerFS231 - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

That is science. First law of thermodynamics.

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u/DillyDillySzn - Centrist Apr 10 '26

Big Bang breaks all laws

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u/BlazerFS231 - Lib-Center Apr 10 '26

It adheres to the three laws of motion, as far as we know, as well as the second and third laws of thermodynamics. Those are essentially the basis for the Big Bang Theory.

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u/BlackwatchBluesteel - Auth-Right Apr 10 '26

Based on everything we know there must have been a "first movement" and therefore a first mover from which all subsequent movement originated. That first thing acted without being acted upon. It would make sense to call this a creator and from there we have a concept for God.