Philosophising on the Evo vs Creo debate.

What I meant was that something or someone has to be eternal unless something can come from nothing.

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What I meant was that something or someone has to be eternal unless something can come from nothing.

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So if something can come from nothing, then nothing needs to be eternal?

I don't think that the problem is the clash between technology and whatever. I think that technology, or science cannot be to blame of themselves. It is just that the Western interpretation of natural phenomenon in terms of mechanistic processes that causes the problem. For example the finding of a watch in the wilderness is not analogous to finding something that has grown naturally. But because the explanation of natural processes is often in terms of mechanisms, for example "replicating machinery", or some such inappropriate analogy people just get confused and think that all this machinery must have had to have a maker .It used to bug me that in learning about biology they taught me about all these separate processes, whereas I saw them as all parts of the same process, so personally I have a desire for something less.

Would you consider this to be something out of nothing?

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The calculation of the vacuum energy in quantum field theory in terms of Feynman diagrams can be pictured as accounting for virtual particles (also known as vacuum fluctuations) which are created and destroyed out of the vacuum.

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Wiki - Vacuum EnergyI can understand that a feeling that something cannot come from nothing might lead to a belief in the existance of the eternal be it God or gods or just stuff, but if the understanding of physics allows for something out of nothing I can’t see why this would affect one's religious beliefs.Anyway what has something from nothing actually to do with the Evo/Creo debate? Or even philosophising about the debate?
I don’t think that believing that something cannot come from nothing precludes the posibility of evolution in the same way that the belief that everything has to have a maker does.

That's right.

I'm not sure what this means, but if a vacuum has "energy" then I guess it's not nothing but something.

Does it follow from this that the reason we have not seen something coming from nothing is because no-one has ever actually seen nothing? So is the general idea that something cannot come from nothing effectively an abstract hypothesis rather than a well supported one?TTFN,WK

That's right. It just seems impossible to me, but others disagree. I would think a causal agent of some sort would be necessary.

Since 'something' has been observed to come from 'nothing' , and non-casual events have been observed in quantum mechanics, why are you still clutch the deterministc view point.

I'm not so sure that that is the case. A "non-causal" event might just mean that we don't know what the cause is. Something from nothing might just mean it comes from something obscure or mysterious.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 05-10-2006 06:06 PM

What a place. It seems that there isn't a word(ing) in the UK English, the US English, any other English or any other language (the ancient ones spring to 'mind') which isn't open to debate.I prophesy a thread title - good for at least 300 posts at that."What is nothing?"