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The Rock Question
March 15, 2010 By 65 Comments
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LOL, Nice!…..however, my atheist friends, one must remember that something cannot come from nothing…whether that be an ATOM or a particle of matter, etc, etc…..something cannot come from nothing and maybe that SOMETHING is what some people refer to as GOD.
I don’t follow religion but i do believe that life (energy and matter) came from somewhere and I have yet to find any plausible debates about this that have made me think otherwise…just my thoughts on the matter ;)
Really? then were did god come from?
Exactly bender…where did this ‘GOD’ come from? (GOD being a tiny particle of energy, or an atom, or matter). Where?
I try and find some sort of scientific explanation but have not been successful (and this doesn’t mean that I substitute a theological explanation, but i’m very curious), if you or anyone else has any ideas, would love to hear them…
While King Lear might say nothing will come of nothing, at the quantum level the rules of the game change dramatically. Still, whether the universe sprang out of a singularity, was always there to begin with, is an offshoot of another universe or whatever other explanation, I don’t see the point in calling this explanation “god”. It reduces the term to meaninglessness and is basically a security blanket thrown over the universe to give it a comforting form.
and so what is the explanation then? where did everything come from? and then, of course, where did THAT come from?
I’m not offering you an explanation or trying to find one at this moment. What I am saying is that calling the explanation, whatever it might be, “god” is meaningless. There’s no more reason to say that when we don’t know what started the universe it must be god than there is to say it must be cheese. We only find the idea of calling it god acceptable because it is engrained in our culture that there is some kind of celestial being responsible for everything. However, when we invoke god as the cause of the universe, all we’re doing is throwing a word at the gap in our knowledge and pretending it creates a bridge.
Actually, “come from” only makes sense if there’s a before and an after. It’s illogical to ask what came before time, isn’t it?
We don’t know, yet.
The difference?
Religious people do not know, but pretend they do.
Physicists don’t know and struggle and work hard to find out.
Think about 2000 years ago.
“What are the stars made of?” was a question without answer, yet the philosophical explanations turned out to be largely wrong.
“and so what is the explanation then? where did everything come from? and then, of course, where did THAT come from?”
Personally I think that you are limiting your ideas to that of the human realm of physics and time. Something must come from something right? This whole sequential idea is simple but yet very constraining. What if everything, yes, EVERYTHING, always was and always is and has no bearing on TIME whatsoever. Our minds are confined to a very, very, very tiny little box – and thus when we try to fit everything into it, it just doesn’t make sense. The trick is seeing how limited we are – how limited our imaginations are….
“I try and find some sort of scientific explanation but have not been successful ”
And you never will be…with your overclocked ape brain and all :)
I never understood the logic that nothing can come from nothing.
WHY?
Why would the universe follow human logic?
what do we have other than human logic to reason with?
Space Man logic? if a single atom created everything, where did the atom come from?
Human logic is an oversimplified model of the universe.
Quantum wierdness clearly show that the universe is far stranger than any human can ever imagine. We have formula’s but those formulas cannot be translated in a human understandable model and logic.
Before time has no meaning in this universe. What came first has no meaning in this universe. Time did not exist at the moment of the creation.
You are trying to fit the universe in an oversimplified model to get a grasp on.
To make it even crazier time is different for every observer. There is no one abolute time in this universe.
> “Quantum wierdness clearly show that the universe is far stranger than any human can ever imagine. We have formula’s but those formulas cannot be translated in a human understandable model and logic.”
I disagree slightly. I doubt the universe is beyond our comprehension. But I agree it is well beyond our intuition – the quantum realm being an obvious example.
Ironically, I think it could be said that our ability to readily accept religion and live with the huge cognitive dissonance it creates in our minds suggests that we could accept at least some quantum weirdness and this unintuitive nature of the universe. We are used to believing crazy things that contradict themselves and, on the surface, make no sense.
That’s a very intriguing point. I would say only that religion is a bit more acceptable to the human mind only because it seeks to provide meaning and purpose behind the apparent mysteries of the observable world, whereas with quantum mechanics the rabbit hole only gets deeper, with no emotional side-payoff.
I’d also say that religion traffics in concepts that are readily apprehended by human beings because their metaphorical counterparts are ever-present in daily life; saying that “God is the Father” is easy on some level to grasp because most people have some sense of what being a father means. That the concepts are so familiar I think partially obscures the internal logical contradictions, because the religious teacher always has an out with “it’s like [metaphor xyz]…only not exactly.” Human brains like puzzles, and often can be entertained endlessly by unsolvable ones. While quantum mechanics may be more internally consistent, it traffics in more abstract concepts not as amenable to easy metaphors.
A good post here, gives me something to think about. I would agree that much of religious metaphor and mystery is grounded in language and concepts we can more readily accept, but the one I was thinking of in particular I think is something quite alien and difficult for us, yet very similar to a concept in quantum physics – the trinity. With the idea of the holy trinity we are supposed to accept three entities in one entity, both sharing powers and personalities while being distinct and limited at the same time. It is baffling yet readily accepted by so many Christians, and reminds me of the problem in physics of light being sort of a wave and sort of a particle and sort of both at the same time.
With the idea of the holy trinity we are supposed to accept three entities in one entity, both sharing powers and personalities while being distinct and limited at the same time. It is baffling yet readily accepted by so many Christians, and reminds me of the problem in physics of light being sort of a wave and sort of a particle and sort of both at the same time.
True. Even among theists, the Trinity is regarded as weird (in particular, Jewish and Muslim religious authorities have great fun making fun of the doctrine).
In my field, this has led to an exploration of inconsistency-tolerant logics which deny the principle of non-contradiction as an axiom. Advances in computer science, cognitive science, and physics have made these sorts of tools more important (when many of them were created, they were merely curiosities).
Exactly. God, as usually defined by whatever religion, is always oddly human simply because it makes more sense for us. Like we try to impose human thoughts/point of views in animals.
You are right.
A good question, and we are finding that the universe may not agree with our assumptions about causality.
…we are finding that the universe may not agree with our assumptions about causality
David Hume may be the person who holds the record for the longest wait before being able to say “I told you so!”
Well, if he weren’t, y’know, dead.
John:
Check out quantum fluctuation. Apparently, some physicists are claiming that some matter does in fact come out of absolute nothing and may be important in the formation of the universe during inflation (big bang):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_flux
Short answer: No.
Slightly longer answer: Conservation of energy is still a law, but the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian are not in general equal to the particle number operators. That is, conservation of energy can appear to be violated for very short durations of time. These only play a role in the early universe in that they created a nonhomogeneous universe, and inflation amplified the nonhomogeneities greatly. Thus, all large scale structures (e.g. galaxy clusters) are the result of these initial fluctuations.
The actual origin of matter is probably related to the Higgs mechanism, but even this does not explain the origin of the universe.
Quantum fluctuation is responsible for creating (and almost instantly annihilating) virtual particles, but these are not matter (baryons), they are bosons (force carrying particles).
As you can see, I’m not a physicist and I don’t even play one on TV. :)
Reminds me of a Comic Book where one of the secret questions, which would disable a robotic character was, “Can god make a sandwich so large even he couldn’t eat it?” The answer was, “Yes, then he’d eat it anyway.”
I never grow tired of this comic, which is amazing, when you think about it…
If someone said to me, “I want to make a dinosaur comic with cheesy-looking clipart graphics that always stay the same, but just change the text for each comic,” I’d tell them it was a stupid idea.
And even though I’d be right, I’d also be wrong.
A prime example of this trope (with many awesome examples) in action
Sort of like xkcd, a stick-art comic with jokes about programming, math and the internet.
I had a Buddist friend tell me once that god was so powerful, he could choose to not exist.
Ummm….yeah…..
I think I’ll stick with just the non-existent part.
Maybe this is the problem, god chose to not exist after a while. Though it must be an odd type of Buddhism to invoke an omnipotent god.
There was a BBC miniseries about this sort of idea, with God deciding to commit suicide so that humanity could grow up. It was called “The Second Coming” or something like that.
Oh, here it is.
I remember when this was on, it caused a bit of controversy, and more accusations that the BBC were anti-Christian. Wish I had watched it now, I’ll have to find the DVD.
…aaand was it any good, pray tell? (on the off chance that I could find a copy if I wanted to)
Well, Christopher Eccleston played a British Jesus, so that was fun. It was, on the whole, good, though the beginning wasn’t so great. It’s worth a Netflix or a download, but I wouldn’t buy it.
John, how is that in any way an “odd type of Buddhism?”
Or are you just pointing out that all types of Buddhism are odd?
Well, Buddhist traditions, as far as I know, do *not* include gods (or rather, gods, whether they exist or not, are personally irrelevant; they are as limited and bound to samsara as humans).
Buddhism is essentially atheistic or at best agnostic.
As I said, it’s odd to see a Buddhist invoke an omnipotent god. Buddhists generally don’t have a distinct deity in charge of everything (or capable of being in charge of everything); as Siberia says, even their more powerful entities are bound by the system, and it is that system which is supreme, not a single being.
I just figured that that comic would end with the rock falling on the dinosaurs and killing them.
Yeah, but that would require Ryan North to actually find a new bit of clipart.
Interesting take, I’ve never seen these comics, lol. As aside this is one of my favourite subjects to deal with, especially with my Calvinist friends. The problem is that the argument formed in the the cartoon is really a straw man, and in the end a non-starter. Its on par with asking if God could make a square circle or a married bachelor, all logical impossibilities that aren’t really a knock on God. What’s amazing is how many people, including a lot of theists, take for granted that the default definition of omnipotence is the ability to do anything, rather than the ability to anything that is possible.
The more important and interesting question is how do omnipotence and omniscience interact? For my Calvinist friends i ask them the great question: How can God change the future (goes to omnipotence) if the future is exhaustively foreknown, due to decree (goes to omniscience)? Chew on that one, it tastes better and is more filling.
Well, far be for me to defend notions about god, as I don’t believe in one, but…
Omniscience could be relatively uncontroversially defined as knowing the full “decision tree” of all possible courses of action. In which case the omni* god knows all possible futures (omniscience) and has full control over which one becomes realized (omnipotence).
Yup.
Like the God-Emperor of Dune, it is a matter of knowing all possible futures and choosing the one it considers the best.
That’s one way out of the problem, it’s known as molinism and it’s a much more coherent option than calvinism. Calvinists can’t accept that definition of omniscience though, because then God’s knowledge of the future is contingent on future free decisions, which is problematic in it’s own right. Bill Craig defends the molinist position against both Calvinists and open theists who also doubt the ability of even an omniscient God to know libertarian free decisions in the future with absolute certainty. Maybe omniscience should also be defined as having all possible knowledge which includes future possibilities instead of just settled facts.
If god’s is omnipotent in the sense that he/she/it can do all that is possible, it makes god incapable of conjuring the universe from nothing and thus makes such a deity pointless. I understand you were more referring to logical impossibilities than physical impossibilities but I’d argue the point remains – if god can only do what can be done, then god is no more an answer for the universe than anything else.
Yeah! I read about that on Godless by Dan Barker. I didn’t know about the paradox. Good stuff.
…Lord it’s so hard to stay polite on these blogs. How in the name of god could you find any worth in this comic? a) It’s not funny. It’s the kind of humor that’s pumped out by people that chuckle to themselves and think “Wow we were are so clever!” Umm, no. That’s the hallmark of piss-poor humor.
And b)…I feel dumber for having read this. This is their grand point? “The paradox of omnipotence”? A rock so heavy god can’t lift it?? This is the grand, unassailable logic that’s supposed to prove to all deeply devout religious zealots that god couldn’t exist? They’ll break down, weeping openly in the streets after reading this? And atheists around the world are supposed to rejoice in a resounding chorus of “YESSS!!!!! We were right, we knew it!!”? This is the prize everyone’s been waiting for?? OH…MY…GOD. This comic isn’t worth the bandwidth that was needed to post it; it has absolutely no cutting, compelling point that might have even a modicum of originality. All it has is a throw-away example that might be an eye-opener for a three year old. I’m disgusted by this level of discourse.
(P.S. – I apologize; I try to restrict openly hostile judgments to my personal site…but this is just too damn difficult.)
A rock so heavy god can’t lift it?? This is the grand, unassailable logic that’s supposed to prove to all deeply devout religious zealots that god couldn’t exist?
Dude … calm down.
No, that’s not supposed to be an argument against the existence of God. The “rock question” is an a very old example of the omnipotence paradox that has been discussed by devout believers for many centuries. It reveals more about the limits of our concepts and our language than it does about God.
The humor comes from the very flip way the comic deals this hoary old philosophical conundrum. If you don’t get that, just let it go and don’t blow a gasket.
See I figured I’d get a response like that. (Probably since it’s the kind of response I would give.) I’ll tell you why I blew a gasket; it’s because this is a “hoary old philosophical conundrum”. Some genius figured out this paradox what, centuries ago? And here people are, to this day, still discussing it? These simple words that carry no kind of concrete meaning? That’s what’s amazing to me; if we were in the year 1 AD and people had just started discussing this…all right, cool. Makes sense. 2000 years later, when we know this very childish, hollow “logic” doesn’t present any kind of concrete problems or solutions…why are we still discussing it? I could see its worth if someone was in junior high, might be an eye-operner, but beyond that, I’m not sure how you don’t just roll your eyes. It’s not even interesting. Or entertaining. It’s a pure eye-roller.
It’s… just a cartoon.
Lol. True words. Forgive me for releasing my frustrations on it, happens every now and then.
The humour lies in the fact that God actually resolves the paradox, and in a complete off-handed way too. And then there’s the general absurdity of the comic.
I found it amusing, but following your example, I should probably instead be complaining that dinosaurs can’t talk.
So much for being the Prince of Peace…
Have you seen his website? The one that opens with “KILL YOURSELF”?
Buddy, I hope your viewers are better at reading for comprehension than you are.
:) Come now. You know something that over-the-top has to have something behind it, right? Where there’s smoke there’s fire. On the real, if you get past the hook there’s worth to be had.
Looked like a lot of self-centered wanking to me, but it was about 4 in the morning when I tried to look at it, plus I was on the phone, so it may be a bit unfair for me to judge it under those circumstances.
I do absolutely appreciate the open mind. I guess over-the-top can be difficult to digest, but maybe the contrast between that and a comic like this illustrates the whole point. A comic like this lost the worth of its meaning centuries, millennia ago. What can anyone say, in this day and age, that hasn’t been said & thought a million times before? All that’s left is over-the-top, and then maybe you might have something with a modicum of originality that could spur some type of original thought. That’s what’s very, very frustrating….everyone rehashing the same ole’ arguments a million ways to sunday, ad nauseam.
Again…it’s a cartoon. A lot of cartoons “rehash the same ole’ arguments a million ways to Sunday.” This isn’t the Spanish Inquisition, which no one seems to expect.
I guess me personally, I’d rather see a good “Far Side” or “Non-Sequitur”, those are entertaining & witty, by anyways….point taken.
Speaking of humor, I do find it amusing that when I took a quick look at your Christian site I was greeted by ads for slutty avatars and numerology.
Dude…oh yeah there’s humor in that. I hate it. F&*(#@& google.
… but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
(sorry, couldn’t resist.)