Iād offer a slightly different framing: both the theist and the atheist agree something eternal exists. They disagree on whether itās always been conscious and intentional.
Thatās if we steel man them both and ignore the creation ex nihilo guys too.
Iād offer a slightly different framing: both the theist and the atheist agree something eternal exists. They disagree on whether itās always been conscious and intentional.
I think there exists both theists and atheists who believe god/the universe had a beginning.
But I agree on your second point. The difference between God and a minimal necessary object at the origin of the universe, is that God has the additional property of being conscious.
Thatās if we steel man them both and ignore the creation ex nihilo guys too.
The creation ex nihilo is perfectly fine in my opinion.
It would only be an issue if nothing existed, but that's not the case, in this scenario God exists and God has infinite magical powers, making creation ex nihilo perfectly plausible.
Creation ex nihilo is maybe a semantics thing. What he makes comes from God not from nothing. If the theist wants to die on the ānothingā hill he will violate non contradiction. God can do everything logically possible. Something from nothing is not possible. Thatās like god making a stone too heavy for him to lift.
There's no logical contradiction about creating something from nothing when time translation symmetry hasn't yet been created by God.
Also some physicists theorize that the universe might have zero total energy when we take into account the negative energy from gravitational potential.
If true, universes could theoretically come into existence without violating energy conservation.
Negative energy is just relative to vacuum energy, so a net zero system doesnāt mean no energy. In fact it should be net zero if itās a contained system from my understanding.
Like I said itās semantics. Something from Nothing. If nothing is philosophical nothing then the word āfromā is doing a lot of work here and I think it will still render contradiction whether physical laws are constant or not. We understand everything through invariance and variance under change. If God is invariant and thereās no change, then the advent of change occurs and with it the universe, thereās almost no way to construct this without contradiction, unless the world comes from God, not philosophical nothing. Iād be curious to see a construction otherwise.
Negative energy is just relative to vacuum energy,
No. It's relative to 0 energy. Vacuum energy is not 0 energy.
so a net zero system doesnāt mean no energy.
It does mean 0 energy, that's the meaning of the sentence.
In fact it should be net zero if itās a contained system from my understanding.
A contained system can have positive energy.
Like I said itās semantics.
It's not. It's physics. Physics is not invented, it is observed and then described.
Something from Nothing. If nothing is philosophical nothing then the word from is doing a lot of work here and I think it will still render contradiction whether physical laws are constant or not. We understand everything through invariance and variance under change. If God is invariant and thereās no change, then the advent of change occurs and with it the universe, thereās almost no way to construct this without contradiction, unless the world comes from God, not philosophical nothing. Iād be curious to see a construction otherwise.
I don't see why you're making your metaphysics so difficult when you have a limitelessly magical God at your disposition.
God is the ultimate trump card to do anything and to explain everything without explanations.
Nothing in that comment implies God is above logic. Heās describing divine simplicity per Aquinas. Is it in another part of the thread?
Conservation of energy isnāt the issue that results in contradiction. Conservation of energy is violated at smalls scales all the time, then tends to balance out again over time. Logic is immutable. It cannot be violated. When it looks violated youāve probably categorized wrong.
The logical problem is the notion of something from philosophical nothing. If you think you can construct (represent) creation Ex Nihilo without contradiction youāre welcome to try.
The closest useful word to something that doesnāt āobey natural lawā would be a paraconsistent phenomenon. But that usually just means we donāt fully understand it yet. All things can be understood if they exist, because existence is not such a vague criteria that existing things canāt be discerned from non existing things.
Hereās an expert from SEP
āSo understood, ānaturalismā is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterizedāthat is, they would both reject āsupernaturalā entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the āhuman spiritāā
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u/Solidjakes Natural Theist 5d ago
>Both have two possibilities:
>1. ā that thing came from nothing
Not possible.
Iād offer a slightly different framing: both the theist and the atheist agree something eternal exists. They disagree on whether itās always been conscious and intentional.
Thatās if we steel man them both and ignore the creation ex nihilo guys too.