Survey

Don't you find it to be most odd that there is something instead of nothing?
Wouldn't it be more logical and simpler for there to be nothing?

Please indicate whether you are an atheist or not with your response.
Thanks

 

atheist......

I came from the darkness
and when my time is up I'll return to the darkness
in between
I'm going to turn on as many lights as I can!

 

I'd find it really odd if there were nothing instead of something and I were still answering this survey. If there were nothing, I wouldn't be here, and neither would you. There would be no I or you to find anything odd or otherwise. But why is there something instead of nothing? The simplest answer is: That's the way it is. Now ask me something tougher, like why is the sky blue? For other views, see Victor Stenger (nothing is unstable); Lawrence Kraus, A Universe From Nothing, distinguishing among several different kinds of nothing; Sartre's Being and Nothingness; and of course Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Not to mention Gershwin, "I've Got Plenty of Nothin'".

Christian

 

I find it most odd that there is life. There is no logical explanation for life. Life on single planet does have no purpose for the universe.

I'm agnostic

 

Thanks. I ask this because I don''t understand atheists, and I think that through my questions above, I found a wedge/tool/"an in".
My thinking is that atheists will answer "no" to the questions, whereas the further towards theism the respondents are, the more likely the answers will be "yes".
It's just a theory I'm looking into, but if [generally] true, I may be able to pry the lid off this(i.e. my not understanding atheists).
I would categorize myself a theist, and I certainly answer yes to the above questions.
And not just about "life" being odd- because I meditate on the molecular machines in the cell, and I feel that there is something in particles that... well, I would call it "Double-slit"-driven-EPR-effective. I.e. particles of matter are every bit as crazy/weird/"impossible"(another word I could have used to phrase my questions) as biological molecules like DNA.
see the video magic at wehi.edu.au (the 6 or so short videos on molecular machines)

 

What don't you understand? We just don't believe in god. We entertain a myriad of quirks and varying degrees of (dis)belief, but essentially atheism is just rejection of the concept of god(s).

There is always something. Every act has a ripple effect, so there can never be nothing. Even a man in a remote village in the jungle somewhere drinking a handful of water is enough to cause a chain of events to unfold, however slight those events might be. So if something as seemingly insignificant as dust particles colliding can create an almost endless amount of possibilities and changes, why do you need to clutter it up with dogmatic theories and deities? Isn't it just extraordinary enough that the world is the way it is? Isn't it more wondrous to try to comprehend our universe as much as we can without adding god into the mix? Some people see the beauty of a flower as proof of god's existence, I see the beauty of a flower and see no need to incorporate god at all.

If anything, god is the simplifying concept. God is an easy out. If you don't understand something or don't wish to explore something, just say it's an act (or creation) of the Lord. Science begs you to say, "But what else?" Religious folks claim god created man and they see no reason to question this or dig deeper into the mystery of human existence. Science dismisses the creation theory based on implausibility and BECAUSE of this, they question and dig deeper and voila! We now know where we came from, how old the earth is, the limits of our universe, etc. God, as a concept, and religion, as a practice, encourages complicity and faith/justification. Atheism, as a concept and practice, encourages inquiry and proof/validation.

Also, in case it wasn't obvious enough, I'm an atheist. :2thumbsup:

 

As a Christian, I must confess my skepticism about your enterprise. I'd suspect that most people--religious, atheists, agnostics or otherwise--don't find it particularly odd that there is something instead of nothing, since it's hard to see something as odd when you've been around it since birth. I find it odd that some physicists can think that it all came from nothing--I guess because my Mama told me I'd never get something for nothing. If it doesn't exist, how could it produce anything? But then we have to define "nothing". Does it mean just the absence of matter or is energy included? What about fields? The laws of physics? All of the above? Like you, I'm a believer because lots of things that could be taken for granted seem odd to me, like the fact that we exist and are carrying on this conversation when evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould tell us homo sapiens is a fluke. I think life is odd, consciousness is odder, and it's really odd that we seem to have the brain capacity to ponder questions like this when it doesn't seem necessary for our survival. (Whether or not we'll be able to answer them is another story.) What we get to are the old paradoxes of First Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc., and whether or not it is odd that such an entity always was and always will be. And I think atheists have a point about worshiping a "God of Gaps".

Scientists are rightly leery of explanations that rely on supernatural agents or purpose, because of bad experiences in the past. Such things are empirically irrefutable, and as you say they tend to close the door to deeper explanations. The only points I'd add are that: (1) the exclusion of God is a convention rather than a scientific fact; (2) many scientists into cosmology (which is really metaphysics) don't dismiss the possibility of a higher intelligent agency; and (3) science itself is in danger of becoming ossified when scientists and their admirers confuse current consensus with truth.

 

Odd compared to what?
There's no point of reference here...We are, things are...theres no way to experience 'nothing' even if it existed...
haha pretty oxymoronic statement huh, 'the existence of nothing'...:tongue:

Edit; I'm not an atheist, but I play one in real life...lol

 

I think it's impossible to imagine there being nothing, since it is beyond all living things experience and is anti-thetical to our being. For that reason, I find it odd to think of 'nothingness'.

 

Athiest:

I must admit there are times when this wave of WTF washes over my mind - There really shouldn't be anything at all. In my mind this would be the most logical state of the universe. Seeing that there is something, the second most logical reasoning in my mind must be that there simply is no such thing as nothing. NOTHING simply does not exist. Now just because SPACE is something, I will not jump to the most improbable of possibilities; that God created everything. The existence of God has got to be a trillion times more unlikely than the existence of space. My world is a world of probabilities.

I think space is most likely infinite. If there's no nothing here then there's probably no nothing anywhere. I think there are multiple universes, I do not believe in 4-11 or more dimensions. Other universes are similar to ours but separated by massive distances, 100 billion or even trillions of light years away. I do not think it's very likely at all there's any worm holes or any type of connection to other universes. They are completely out of range of any gravitational or electromagnetic signals from each other. I think universes cycle through "crunch-bang" cycles and I think I know how and why they cycle.

All that is needed to create a universe is space itself and a couple intrinsic properties of space. That space IS a substance, and the substance of space is not perfect. Fluctuations of space are attracted to each other, they gravitate. Yes, gravity does not cause spatial distortions, gravity IS spatial distortion. Attraction causes movement. Movement IS Energy. Movement is also essentially time BTW. Time can not exist without energy and energy can not exist without time. Energy over time becomes greater than the force of gravity and BANG, universe as we know it. Matter of course is nothing more than condensed energy. When all the energy is dissipated, when all the matter is destroyed or drifted too far away to influence 100+ billion light years of space, the crunch cycle will start all over again... energy from essentially nothing but imperfect space.

 

I have thought this ever since I was a child. I remember asking my mom about it and she didn't understand what I was talking about. I just get that feeling like "BAM! Things are here and ever-expanding, but why?" I don't know why, but I'm happy to be here to experience this strangeness.

 

Well, I see that even though my instincts about what atheists and theists would answer seems to be correct, I realize that it won't get me any closer to understanding atheists, because- just as I have no clue as to how someone doesn't feel there is God- I have no clue as to how someone DOESN'T feel that it's most odd that there is something instead of nothing.

Any ideas as to how I can understand atheists would be welcome, because while I have the ability to understand any other ism/ist, atheists are a mystery to me.

I had a childhood friend who had this sense of eternal cosmos/existence/somethingness, and I remember a coldness that blew through me(I called his thinking "cool-Greek") when he laid it out for me- an alieness that I see I am just as unable to understand now as way back then. This cool Greek sense was manifested in action when he said: "You see that book?(the KJV Bible). Only if there is an earthquake(we live in LA)- a real bad earthquake- will I take it down."

I see NOW that his Saganicity("the cosmos is all there ever was is and will be"- wow!) and his "no use for "KJV Bible"("God") go together; but knowing this gets me no closer to understanding you "cool-Greeks".

 

In order for there to be a "nothing" there must be a a "something". Each one defines the other and neither could exist (as a concept) without the other.

I fail to see any logic here. Do you think the absolute absence of anything can even be truly imagined?

Being an atheist has nothing to do with this. Nor has being a christian or buddhist.

 

I can fully understand many possibilities of why human nature believes in Gods and spirituality. What I don't understand is the point of the OP question. If it is odd that there is stuff, is it supposed to be less odd if God made stuff? To me a God that predated stuff would be EXTREMELY odd. Any God existing at all to me is extremely odd and very improbable. If I accepted God, how would I ever find it NOT odd that God exists?

 

I think it's the difficulty of understanding how nothing could generate anything causally--spontaneous generation, as it used to be called. Ponder this, as stated by a well-known scientist:
"Not only does physics tell us how something could have come from nothing, it goes further...and shows us that nothingness is unstable;something was almost bound to spring into existence from it....it happens all the time...Particles and antiparticles wink in and out of existence like subatomic fireflies, annihilating each other, and then re-creating themselves by the reverse processes out of nothingness." Clear? Do you believe it? Why or why not? Has anybody seen it happen? Does your answer depend on whether or not you're a "believer" (i.e., religious) or an atheist?

 

obviously, if there was nothing, we would not be here to contemplate it.
nothingness and thingness are EQUALLY probable.
so thingness won the toss.

what i am has no name unless i invent one.

 

There's alot to that article that I don't agree with; and I find it flaccid, Christocentric(I'm Jewish), and dated(Communism); but there is one quote by Smith:
"Atheism is... intellectual honesty to a degree that the religious mind cannot begin to understand."
I don't know what he means by this. I know there is God and so it is "intellectually honest" for me to have a relationship with Him. It would be impossible for me not to have a relationship with Him because my intellect tells me there is God. There is no part of my intellect that holds me back from doing this. So again, it is nonsense what he said.