PERENNIAL QUESTIONS 
35 Files: 21 thru
21ah
IF GOD DIDN'T CREATE THE UNIVERSE, HOW DID IT COME INTO EXISTENCE?
This question rests on four UNVERIFIABLE assumptions:
1) that there is a
god (We will not, here, examine this assumption.),
2) that God must have created the universe or it would not exist;
3) that the universe at one time did not exist;
4) that the universe came into existence out of nothing.
First, consider Aristotle's admonition:
All talk of a beginning or an end of the universe is unintelligible.
Scientists have offered various
theories.
Updated June 29. 2000
The one most accepted, based on verifiable available evidence, is THE BIG BANG THEORY.
There are presently questions being raised about this theory, but there is no other theory, yet, with sufficient evidence to replace it.
Its major weakness, if scientists are correct, is that the amount of matter known to exist is insufficient to make the universe collapse upon itself, hence the search for "dark matter."
Edited Nov. 20, 2000
If we accept Einstein's mathematically derived concept of the universe as that of a
balloon with the stellar matter alternately expanding and contracting on the surface of the skin of the balloon, then we have the basis for the theory that the universe always existed, and is in an eternally repeatable process of expanding from the cosmic equator eventually contracting to the cosmic equator ("on the other side") collapsing upon itself into a black hole, only to BIG BANG again.
One fact to keep in mind:
It can be verified that there is a universe, even if it were nothing more than a single quark or your own mind, i.e., the functioning of your brain.
Updated March 7, 1998
There is NO reason to believe that, at one time, the universe did not exist or that it had a beginning emerging out of nothing.
It cannot be verified that there was a god to create it.
If it is claimed that God does exist and the response to the
question, "Where did He come from?" is, "He existed forever," such an answer has no epistemic value because God's existence cannot be
verified.
Moreover, the existence of the universe offers no evidence to the claim that God created it (out of nothing, yet) and verifies only that the universe does exist.
Hence, there is every reason, given the non-epistemic nature of theistic language, to believe that the universe was not created, not alone by an unknowable, unverifiable, incorporeal, supernatural entity.
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