In the Beginning, there was Nothing–and it Exploded

Gradually, over time, the explosion cooled into little bits that just acted the way they acted because they do. These bits combined into more and more complicated stuff. The stuff interacted according to physical laws that just happen to be fine tuned so that the stuff could manifest characteristics called life. At this point, the All Explaining Theory of Everything called Evolution kicked in, leading in short order to bacteria, jellyfish, trilobites, bony fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, mammal, homo erectus, homo sapiens, various stupid civilizations enslaved to the god meme that accidently evolved in our brains, and Me: Homo Rationalisticus, who has kicked down the ladder of prehistory and taken my place as a Truly True free being. Sooner or later, I will build a rocket and colonize the universe. Or, alternatively, I will be destroyed in an Armageddon ignited by human folly and die declaiming about the pointlessness and futility of the whole meaningless whirl of time space matter and energy. But one thing I will never do is consider the possibility that Nothing does not just explode and create everything, because that would bring me perilously close to suggesting the existence of You Know Who.

That’s more or less the Creation Myth of the reader of popular science mags these days. I think of it because a reader writes:

In the vein of some of your links from yesterday, here is one that put me in mind of the old joke whose punchline is God telling the scientists to get their own dirt. The author seems to think he has found a way for the “entire universe to arise from nothing via natural processes”. I’m pretty dumb, but that seems like a contradiction in terms, if ever such a thing existed. At least part of the sleight of hand involves positing that “zero net energy” is the same thing as “no energy”. I dunno nuthin’ about physics, but I know that zero net energy means there is energy present. And so it seems they still need to go get their own dirt.

Much of the atheist project seems to me to be the attempt to get a free lunch, whether borrowing existence from the I AM while denying you are doing so or borrowing a moral code from natural law and revelation while pretending you Just Know Right from Wrong because you are That Kind of Chap. The atheist achieves his effect of breaking the first commandment (You shall have no other God before me) by breaking the seventh (You shall not steal).