If God doesn't exist then how was everything/the earth created?

[iwakar]

The smartest man alive, Chris Langan, with an estimated IQ of 200 says God and Heaven exists. I find that interesting. Apparently he's trying to prove God's existence as we speak. Any thoughts on this man and his endeavour?

Isn't he the "universal theory of everything" guy?

 

[GloriaInExcelsisDeo]

Isn't he the "universal theory of everything" guy?

I wouldn't know. I just stumbled upon this videoclip yesterday while browsing the Internet. He is, according to the video, the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" guy. At least.

 

[iwakar]

I wouldn't know. I just stumbled upon this videoclip yesterday while browsing the Internet. He is, according to the video, the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" guy. At least.

I think it's him. I've seen a documentary about him years ago. He was treated as a bit of a kook. I don't have an opinion either way.

 

[Population: 1]

The smartest man alive, Chris Langan, with an estimated IQ of 200 says God and Heaven exists. I find that interesting. Apparently he's trying to prove God's existence as we speak. Any thoughts on this man and his endeavour?

Interesting guy. Even if he doesn't find the answers to the biggest questions, he's figured out money isn't everything and don't argue with your wife.

 

[Coriolis]

The interesting thing is that the universe is comprehensible, and we have been increasing our comprehension remarkably, from the whole universe accelerating away from us in every direction, to creating the fundamental particles of matter in the cern reactor, to understanding natural selection, to understanding how religion enchants us.

Until recently we thought the universe was incomprehensible so we turned to superstition like astrology to understand the universe, and now we have an enormous grasp of the universe from matter and energy, to dark matter, and dark energy.

Religions were created by those who didn't understand the universe or even the germ theory of disease, and so they fantasied about the universe. Their fantasies we now know were fantastic. But had nothing to do with the actual universe we live in.

So do you deny the existence of anything beyond the physical world? If so, then it makes sense to dismiss the idea of God. Otherwise, God and religion overall rightly pertains to that realm beyond the physical, so whatever we know about the physical world doesn't apply. The fact that God didn't really take a rib from Adam to make Eve doesn't negate his very existence.

 

[Beorn]

The smartest man alive, Chris Langan, with an estimated IQ of 200 says God and Heaven exists. I find that interesting. Apparently he's trying to prove God's existence as we speak. Any thoughts on this man and his endeavour?

I think he should put his efforts to better things. Proofs for God ultimately don't work and the Old and New Testament show us that even direct miracles do not always change hearts. The best type of apologetics is presuppositional and I don't know if there is much he can add to that.

(edit: realized he isn't necessarily christian. I definitely think he's wasting his time on a generic proof of the metaphysical)

 

[Mole]

So do you deny the existence of anything beyond the physical world? If so, then it makes sense to dismiss the idea of God. Otherwise, God and religion overall rightly pertains to that realm beyond the physical, so whatever we know about the physical world doesn't apply. The fact that God didn't really take a rib from Adam to make Eve doesn't negate his very existence.

The relations between physical objects are non corporeal, are beyond the physical world. Relations encompass whole realms of their own, from mathematical relations to mythological relations, from relations between DNA going back four thousand million years to the relation between you and me, from the relations between quarks and atoms to the relation between galaxies, from the relations between poems to the relations between nations, from the relation between relativity and quantum mechanics to the relations between maths and music, from the relations between mirror neurons and siblings to the relation between guns, germs, and steel in colonialism, and so on ad infinitum.

We are meaning creating animals. We create relations as our way of seeing, our epistemology. And the more relations, the more we see.

 

[Gunboat Diplomat]

The smartest man alive, Chris Langan, with an estimated IQ of 200 says God and Heaven exists. I find that interesting. Apparently he's trying to prove God's existence as we speak. Any thoughts on this man and his endeavour?

Isaac Newton said:
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

On the other hand, Chris Langan dropped out of university because he had found it too boring and then spent twenty years as a bouncer. There is nothing wrong with that (especially if you don't want to be mentally stimulated), but as a strategy to develop a Theory of Everything it is somewhat peculiar. Raw IQ is likely not enough to solve the mysteries if the Universe. Some effort (and I don't mean farm work) and acquaintance with the existing body of knowledge is likely a requirement as well. I suspect that he didn't meet many giants among the drunks in the nightclub.

Here is a sample of Langan's thoughts:

When theorizing about an all-inclusive reality, the first and most important principle is containment, which simply tells us what we should and should not be considering. Containment principles, already well known in cosmology, generally take the form of tautologies; e.g., "The physical universe contains all and only that which is physical." The predicate "physical", like all predicates, here corresponds to a structured set, "the physical universe" (because the universe has structure and contains objects, it is a structured set). But this usage of tautology is somewhat loose, for it technically amounts to a predicate-logical equivalent of propositional tautology called autology, meaning self-description. Specifically, the predicate physical is being defined on topological containment in the physical universe, which is tacitly defined on and descriptively contained in the predicate physical, so that the self-definition of "physical" is a two-step operation involving both topological and descriptive containment. While this principle, which we might regard as a statement of "physicalism", is often confused with materialism on the grounds that "physical" equals "material", the material may in fact be only a part of what makes up the physical. Similarly, the physical may only be a part of what makes up the real. Because the content of reality is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics, this issue can be resolved only by rational or empirical evidence, not by assumption alone.

I am not a genius, and it might be that the deep meaning of the above eludes me. But it is also possible that I am not mistaken in the belief that a mathematical model and the reality it reflects are not the same thing.

On the other hand, here's what several mathematicians and physicists think of his CTMU theory. It's a long thread, but they have a ball:

Another Crank comes to visit: The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe | Good Math Bad Math


And here's Langan's response to one of his critics:

I'm terribly sorry, but you're just not important enough to demand that anyone who actually knows what he's talking about "meet you halfway", much less someone who has been featured by several major periodicals and news networks.

Make of that what you will.

 

[Mole]

For 300,000 years homo sapiens had no idea of the universe in which we live, then in 1998 we discovered the universe was accelerating, yes accelerating, away from us in every direction, not limited by the speed of light, click on Accelerating expansion of the universe - Wikipedia

And just down the road from me is the Nobel Prize winner for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is the Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University, click on Google Image Result for http://malechampionsofchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Brian-Schmidt.jpg

So for 300,000 years we fantasised about the universe. And we fantasised that just as a watch has a watch maker, the universe has a universe maker, and we called him Jehovah, Jesus, the Trinity, Allah, Ganesh, the Roman God, the Greek God, the Nature God, the New Age God, the Household God, and thousands of other Gods. But not one of these Gods told us the universe they created was accelerating away from us in every direction, not one of these Gods told us in their sacred scriptures the universe they created was accelerating away from us on every direction, unlimited by the speed of light.

This seems to be an oversight, but perhaps they didn't create the universe, and didn't know what the universe is, or God forfend, perhaps they don't exist at all.

 

[LightSun]

This is an impossible question to answer. The practical answer is no one knows. No one was there to witness the universe in its formation. it is a mistake however to fill in the blanks and say that an undefined and indeterminable being that's named God formed creation. There are creation myths around the world trying to make the inexplicable in terms people can understand. It has been demonstrated by scientific studies that human beings have in their makeup the propensity for superstitious thinking.

That is to say the inexplicable is defined with fill in the blanks explanations which ease the people's conscious. Lacking an explanation causes stress and cognitive dissonance. To alleviate this people have a natural tendency to fill in the blanks with their own interpretation. The explanation is often in terms of metaphors. These metaphors are then taken as gospel truth. The metaphor can not be considered at face value as truth. Rather it fills in the missing pieces of the unexplained.

No one myth takes precedence over another. It is the current dominant society which defines what is myth, religion and cult. None of this uses the scientific method. The simple fact is God can not be proven or disproved. Practical reason tends toward for something to exist it must be first proven with reliable methods. Since the concept of God has never been proven it lacks credibility. Even science has dogma. Currently science ascribes to the big bang. It is mere hypothesis. As our understanding of the universe grows our current understanding will evolve.

Old premises will be discounted along with prior hypothesis. A new paradigm framework will supersede the older outdated understandings. As a parallel both science and the United States constitution evolve over time. The constitution is a living document. As times change new amendments are put into place. Religion lacks this key component to growth and change. It holds unto ideas formed during the bronze age and oral tradition. This does not seem to practical to me. Moreover it stunts growth in areas of new understanding holding unto old outdated hypothetical myths.

 

[Maou]

I don't believe in a "God" in any book or story. But the existence of a creator of everything isn't that far fetched. You can be a creator, and have no affect or influence on your creation. If God exists or not, it doesn't matter in actuality. There is no influence, and nor can we communicate with it.

When I look at existence, I also notice patterns. Cycles so to speak. The Macro cycles tend to reflect the micro cycles and everything has a continuous existence or so it seems. So I would assume existence has a cycle as well, and there is actually no beginning or end, and there is constant destruction and reformation. Perhaps heat death is simply a control on how much of something can happen in the universe in a single cycle. Really, humans are very limited to the 3rd dimensional understanding when there can possibly be 11 dimensions. So I think we will never really know.

 

[Lib]

You don't need god to have the universe, because then you'll need another god to create this god and so on. Things are not created, according to modern physics, all is energy in one form or another. In other words, everything exists spontaneously in a thermodynamic balance locally and universally. Life emerged as the most favorable thermodynamic state for some of the energy on earth back than. We are just trapped energy.

Can we really create anything? No, we can only transform energy and in doing so, we abide by the physical laws of the universe.

Either way, we have no proof whether god exists but we do have a proof that people find the notion of god very necessary, and I think it's rather easy to see it. This, in my opinion, is simply the personification of nature, because in human the connection with it is lost and overwritten by our consciousness. It's very easy to see this in the different ways people comprehend the notion of god. For example, for people who favor authority, god is one almighty patriarch, strong and fierce men ready to punish you for disrespecting him. While for people, who favor compassion, he is the most compassionate, forgiving being. For people, who don't support the concept of authority at all, god is not a person, but a universal soul or something of that kind.

 

[LightSun]

Science operates in and on the physical (material) world. It attempts to ask "how" more than "why". It cannot address questions of purpose, intent, or morality. Inasmuch as religious traditions and spiritual beliefs view God as a being of spirit, transcending the material world, science will never be able to address God in any meaningful way.* Should science determine physical mechanisms responsible for phenomena believers attribute to God (e.g. miracles, or even the creation itself), those mechanisms would lack that essential transcendent property, and thus not rise to the standard of "God". We would then need to determine what, if anything, remained the purvey of a supernatural being.

* Of course scientists as individuals can also have spiritual faith, and can pursue these questions using its methods.


Science cannot really even prove a positive. The most sound and established theories, then, are not those that have been proven, but those that have not (yet) been disproven and therefore continue to explain all available evidence.

The simple fact is God can not be proven or disproved. Practical reason tends toward for something to exist it must be first proven with reliable methods. Since the concept of God has never been proven it lacks credibility. Even science has dogma. Currently science ascribes to the big bang. It is mere hypothesis. As our understanding of the universe grows our current understanding will evolve. Old premises will be discounted along with prior hypothesis.

A new paradigm framework will supersede the older outdated understandings. As a parallel both science and the United States Constitution evolve over time. The Constitution is a living document. As times change new amendments are put into place. Religion lacks this key component to growth and change. It holds unto ideas formed during the bronze age and oral tradition. This does not seem to practical to me. Moreover it stunts growth in areas of new understanding holding unto old outdated hypothetical myths."

 

[Coriolis]

The simple fact is God can not be proven or disproved. Practical reason tends toward for something to exist it must be first proven with reliable methods. Since the concept of God has never been proven it lacks credibility. Even science has dogma. Currently science ascribes to the big bang. It is mere hypothesis. As our understanding of the universe grows our current understanding will evolve. Old premises will be discounted along with prior hypothesis.

A new paradigm framework will supersede the older outdated understandings. As a parallel both science and the United States Constitution evolve over time. The Constitution is a living document. As times change new amendments are put into place. Religion lacks this key component to growth and change. It holds unto ideas formed during the bronze age and oral tradition. This does not seem to practical to me. Moreover it stunts growth in areas of new understanding holding unto old outdated hypothetical myths."

Both of these characterizations are simplistic and fundamentally incorrect. The big bang is a theory, not a hypothesis. As I explained in my earlier comment which you quoted, theories are the explanations that come out of the testing of a hypothesis. A theory is accepted (not believed) if it explains available evidence and can be used to predict future events with accuracy. When it does not, it is indeed modified or discarded. Sometimes this happens when additional observations are made that cannot be explained by the currently accepted theory, as when we gained the ability to make observations on very small scales that could not be explained by classical mechanics, and required quantum mechanics.

As for religion, it does grow and change. Consider the Protestant Reformation, Vatican Council II. Christianity itself was in some respects a reform of the Judaism of its day, much as Bahai Faith was a reform of Islam. The Bible itself serves as a history of how beliefs evolved in one part of the world. Go into any mainstream Protestant church, and you will probably find noticeable differences in doctrine and how it is applied relative to a similar church even just 100 years ago. Of course when religions don't grow and change, it leads to problems, because the eventual change that does come is then more likely to be disruptive and even violent (revolution vs. evolution). I think we are seeing this to some extent in the Muslim faith right now, where some elements want to grow and change, but others cling to the past. Christianity and Judaism have had similar phases as well. I am not familiar enough with other faiths to comment on how change has played out there.

 

[Lib]

So do you deny the existence of anything beyond the physical world? If so, then it makes sense to dismiss the idea of God. Otherwise, God and religion overall rightly pertains to that realm beyond the physical, so whatever we know about the physical world doesn't apply. The fact that God didn't really take a rib from Adam to make Eve doesn't negate his very existence.

Technically, what we do know applies. On earth, everything is subjected to a cocktail of forces - where one force ceases to apply others take hold. There is no missing force in the equation, or at least there are almost no inconsistencies in the prediction of such. If god had indeed existed, he would have been a part of the physical world. If god had created the universe, he would still be a part of the physical world. One thing we can say for sure is that energy (=matter) has limits beyond which it transforms into something else. In order to have a god outside of the physical world, you must have energy that comes from nothing, truly nothing, so it really makes no sense according to the fathers of the modern world - Einstein and Newton. (Nothingness doesn't even exist.) The most fascinating is that they both believed in god and in the same time were absolutely convinced that energy is neither lost nor created. And the even more fascinating part is that they both assigned to god the qualities that they cherished the most:

- Einstein, whose most genius quality was curiosity combined with intolerance to conceptual contradictions, believed that god is nature - absolutely logical, applying everywhere; to him, god was not the creator of universal laws, he's the law itself; this all is in agreement with his groundbreaking scientific discovery that energy = mass. (Higgs Boson too is energy, just with a structure unknown to us!)
- Newton, who had never found peace with people, couldn't accept that their actions could be governed by any logical process that's worth considering, so god was the only figure that possessed truly rational thought and he was his messiah.

Overall, it seems as if people 'create' god according to their needs and values rather than god created people to entertain himself.

 

[Norexan]

Everything in universe is connecting and looks quite very similar. The question is what is beyond the universe? Some alien being can create his reality and we don't know anything about it. And because of knowledge and awareness he possess this is exactly what makes him god! There will be always stairs around of us, one to go up and one to go down, where we came from but we don't remember it anymore.

 

[Mole]

We know the origin of species, including us, so we know God didn't make the individual plants and animals.

We know the origin of chemical reactions in the periodic table, so we know God didn't make the chemical reactions.

We know the origin of the mountains and rivers and seas in the movement of the tectonic plates, so God didn't created our landscape or seas.

We know the origin of the very small in Quantum Mechanics, so God didn't create the very small from which everything else is made.

And we know the origin of the very large in Relativity, so we know the origin of the universe and what will happen to it, so God didn't create the universe.

 

[Justin of Flavia Neapolis]

Everything in universe is connecting and looks quite very similar. The question is what is beyond the universe? Some alien being can create his reality and we don't know anything about it. And because of knowledge and awareness he possess this is exactly what makes him god! There will be always stairs around of us, one to go up and one to go down, where we came from but we don't remember it anymore.

The ladder to God is in our genetic memory right down to the shape of our DNA.

 

[Justin of Flavia Neapolis]

As for religion, it does grow and change. Consider the Protestant Reformation, Vatican Council II. Christianity itself was in some respects a reform of the Judaism of its day, much as Bahai Faith was a reform of Islam. The Bible itself serves as a history of how beliefs evolved in one part of the world. Go into any mainstream Protestant church, and you will probably find noticeable differences in doctrine and how it is applied relative to a similar church even just 100 years ago. Of course when religions don't grow and change, it leads to problems, because the eventual change that does come is then more likely to be disruptive and even violent (revolution vs. evolution). I think we are seeing this to some extent in the Muslim faith right now, where some elements want to grow and change, but others cling to the past. Christianity and Judaism have had similar phases as well. I am not familiar enough with other faiths to comment on how change has played out there.

*Protestant Degradation which is a product of the Roman Catholic schism. Vatican II furthering the degradation and conformity of the spiritual with the physical. Rome was rationalistic state. When the state got a hold of Christianity (in the West), (Western) Christianity also turned rationalistic, culminating to the Protestant rejection of all things spiritual, but I digress.

When a religion does not "grow and change," and "clings to the past" it leads to consistency throughout the ages. See: Eastern Orthodoxy. The purest form is the foundation. Mistaking degradation with progression is the killshot of the West. It's a non-sequitur belief that the reformation of anything automatically leads to progress.

‘What’s The Matter With Orthodox Countries?’ | The American Conservative

 

[Lark]

Why is this question important?