Summations Only

So "non-creationist" means you have a particular conceptual deficiency? Like "colourblind" means you have a particular vision deficiency?Okay, you might very well be the only one here with that specific deficiency.Edited by ringo, : Fixed garbled logic.

I don't see how it's any more far-fetched than conceptualizing something existing "forever". Our ability to conceptualize reality isn't what makes reality. One person's failure to deal with reality doesn't make reality less real.

I haven't said that I even have a conception of "how" an atom can be created from nothing. I'm saying that that conception is no more dfficult than the alternative - and the difficulty of conceiving something has no bearing on the reality of that something anyway.Edited by ringo, : Aded missing word "created".

But reality is seldom simple. Easy answers are seldom satisfying.

Who says a singularity is simple? After all, it "contains" all of the complexity of reality.You seem to be setting up a simplistic strawman that you can tear to pieces and replace with your own even more simplistic ideas.

I don't think it does, actually. As I understand it, the volume of the singularity was "pretty small", not (necessarily) zero. So there's no contradiction on my part, only lack of understanding on yours.

According to Wikipedia, "4.22419 10^-105 m3 is the Planck volume" - which is, as I said, "pretty small" but not zero.

What's the difference between "some form" and "non-exstence"?

How would you tell the difference? Given an object - something that "exists" - what tests would you do to determine whether it "began to exist" at some point or changed from one form to another at some point?For example, when you go to bed the grass is dry but when you get up the next morning, there's dew on the grass. How do you know whether the dew was always there and just changed form or whether it came into existence overnight?I'm looking for a real answer here, not just an assertion that something is "impossible". You're making a dichotomy between A and B and I want to know what concrete methods you use to determine that A and B are different.

I'm not talking about an entire universe. I gave a specific example: dew on the grass. How would you determine whether the water previously existed "in some form" or whether it didn't previously exist at all?Either way, you still exist and all of the apparatus that you might need still exists. The question is, How can you tell whether something changed form or just began to exist?

The question was: How would you tell the difference between something that changed form and something that instantaneously came into existence?

What result would you expect if the "something" changed form? What result would you expect if the "something" instantaneously came into existence?

Why? How do you know that something coming into existence spontaneously wouldn't congregate on the colder glass? It isn't "my problem". I'm not taking a position at all. I'm trying to make sense of yours.As far as I know, nobody is suggesting that the universe came from, "The absence of the existence of any thing, including a place or dimension for any thing to exist." What science is telling us, as I understand it, is that we have no way of telling whether there was anything "before" the Big Bang because there as no "before" the Big Bang - i.e. there was no time.Your claim that, "It is impossible for existence to begin to exist," is nonsensical because there's no way to test it.Edited by ringo, : Punk chewation.

Then why would you expect it? We've never seen anything instantaneously beginning to exst and we've never seen anything existing eternally. Both hypothesis are equivalently imaginary. Existence isn't a thing; it's a property of things. Existence doesn't exist; only things exist.There is no known mechanism by which the universe could begin to exist from nothing nor is there any known mechanism by which it could exist eternally. (Eternity is an essentially meaningless concept anyway.)

Yes, it's a state of being, not a being. A state of being doesn't exist, per se; it pertains or applies to the thing possessing that state. But which one is not known. You can arbitrarily pick one or the other but neither is supported by fact. Both are equally imaginary. You can not claim that one is impossible so the other must be true. Time is a component of space-time. It's as real as space (and space is not "nothing"). Time and space are the fabrc that the universe is made of. We have no way of seeing "before" the Big Bang because there was no universe before the Big Bang. There was no fabric, no space, no time.But that doesn't mean there was "nothing". We just don't have any way of knowing.