Quote:
Originally Posted by GRH
You reference the realm of the empirically physical, and seemingly defer the majority of your premise to natural law. However, at the same time, you mention the possibility (by virtue of your parenthetical clause) of something existing outside of the universe. This admission clearly falls outside of the realm of empiricism and materialism, and even the heart of your world view. As best as contemporary science can tell, anything that exists outside of the universe is not bound by natural law, as natural law breaks down at the singularity of the big bang.
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You make too many assumptions. Current science cannot describe what happens at a singularity. But current science does not define what the actual natural laws are. It is only our best educated guess at what it is. I see no reason to believe that natural law (not our version of it) reigns everywhere. There are theories that suggest that our universe is one of a countless number of universes. They possibly work differently then ours. You might suggest that they work according to a different set of laws, but I believe that there is a superset of physical laws that you can derive the laws of any universe from. When a universe is born, physical constants are possibly set, such as the speed of light, charge of an electron, gravitational constant, etc. But there is a physical law superset that enables this to happen.
I'm not saying there are multiple universes, but it's a possibility. We've thought that our planet is the only one, only to be proven wrong. Same with our solar system. Our galaxy. Maybe our universe too.
There are two possibilities. Our universe (or whatever spawned it) came from nothing. And by 'nothing' I mean nothing - no energy or matter at all, no space/time, absolute nothingness. Nothingness could only be defined as a complete lack of any attributes because anything else used to describe it would be something.
The other possibility is that our universe came from something, or whatever spawned that, which has always been.
Either possibility seems shocking to me. But to say our universe came from God seems even more shocking. Because you'd have to ask where did God come from? Nothing? That's even more shocking that a god capable of creating the universe could have come from nothing. I don't think we will ever really know which of the two possibilities happened. But I would at least like to see plausible theories that explain, without any holes, how it possibly could have happened. But like I say, I doubt we would be able to test it.