"Something from nothing"

There seems to be a new attempt to justify the “something from nothing” claim in the creation debate by playing with the definition of “nothing”. With the discovery of what is being termed "first tremors of the Big Bang,", it kind of threw a ranch in their already shaky works and in the process threw out the notion of “Steady State,” which argued that the universe has always existed, without a beginning that necessitated a cause. Let me try and reiterate in clear terms, without the semantic games, to what we know so far even before this game changer.

First up full disclosure, I feel no hesitation in saying that there is absolutely no sound argument to support or credible evidence on record to justify Atheism as a valid choice. My bone is not with those who are duped into believing these lottery-winning  “possibilities” as “explanations” but my aim is directed towards the “smart” ones running a book selling racket and busy pulling wool over the eyes of the unsuspecting. If you are one of them and disagree and can make a case for it please put it on the table. My claim that I and millions like me have empirical and verifiable evidence for the existence of God, an ontologically sound notion, somehow doesn't sit well with some. The difference is that we refused to settle for their illogical "nobody knows" position and was rewarded with actual answers.

Let us start from the beginning, there are at least three ways that one is introduced to the notion of god or God; 

1. An ontological route, where a God by definition is that for which no greater can be conceived.

2. Claims of Revelation from God

3. Someone other than oneself makes the claim that God exists

Once the notion of a God is planted in one's mind one can proceed in several ways;

1. Try to make sense of the notion through the ontological route and determine that God must exist or can't. For accuracy I will state here Gödel proof, which is an actual proof, in how I have understood it in more detail than the rest of the possibilities because the ontological route needs nothing more than a thinking brain to either accept it or reject it :) first the summary; 

If it is possible for a rational omniscient being to exist then necessarily a rational omniscient being exists.

Now for the slightly longer version; 

Gödel as we know used modal logic to prove the existence of a God. Modal logic was invented because the everyday logic's limitations were exposed at the turn of the last century. Unfortunately, most of us are still focused on the old logic for everything even after more than a hundred years have passed. As some of you may know it distinguishes between certain different states that certain suppositions have. It follows that some suppositions are possible in some of the worlds, some are possible only in one particular world, and some are true in all possible worlds. From this comes an important rule of Modal logic that if they are true in all possible worlds then they are termed always 'necessary'.

When applied to God, God can either necessarily exist, or necessarily not exist. If an omniscient God is a being, and God possibly exists then God necessarily exists in all possible worlds. If he doesn't exist, he necessarily doesn't exist in any possible worlds. But it is impossible to claim that God does not exist in any one particular world out of all the possible worlds. Just because one can make a case that the chances of God's existence are extremely remote doesn't rule out the possibility of God's existence. In other words, it is not possible that God can't necessarily not exist. Since the choices are either out of the two possibilities; God necessarily does exist, or necessarily doesn't and since we have discounted the possibility that God necessarily doesn't exist hence the only possibility left on the table is that God necessarily does exist. One can try and challenge the premise on which the argument stands but the argument itself is rock solid. Recently, Godel's proof was tested with several different modal logic systems. (please scroll down to the end to find more explanation)*

Here I will now touch upon the two main possibilities in the creation debate.

The two possibilities;

 a) There is an actual beginning to the physical Universe.

 b) The physical realm exists infinitely. Keeping in mind that the steady state model is already as good as dead and buried.

If the physical Universe (s) has an actual beginning it follows logically that the cause of the physical Universe(s) having come into being is time-less, space-less, and immaterial. If “a” is true; then the Kalam cosmological argument is sound as a cause if not necessarily the first cause. In fact, I personally prefer a suitably appropriate and relative cause as opposed to a first cause. The relatively recent contribution by William Craig's to the Kalam argument  has no doubt strengthened it, where he successfully argues that an infinite number of actual events having occurred is impossible if the premise of the regress is an actual event as opposed to a theoretical possibility. Those who have attempted to refute his conclusions have either misunderstood his contention or playing the deliberate straw man by attempting to confuse it with an infinite amount of time or moments.

Some have unsuccessfully tried to refute the Kalam argument with the set theory but in attempting to do so have ignored the fact that set theory itself is not complete when consistent and the other way around and you would need both completeness and consistency to make it stick and once again we have Gödel  to thank for preemptively dismissing all these half cooked notions.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that “b” in the above is true: If so, it would follow that out of an infinite number of possibilities that God would exist in some actual world as well as in some possible worlds possibly and if by necessity it would follow that God would exist in all possible worlds as well as in all actual worlds.

To not wanting to understand this straightforward premise and conclusion points to the ABG (Anything but God) position which is by definition irrational and understandably reactionary.

The reason for detailing the ontological route is to stress that it has more than sufficient juice in determining that there is a God and the probability of such a God to exist is quite high. Dismissing it all together is not a valid option. 

I used the word "main" above for the simple reason that there are of course other possibilities within the ontological bracket, however, remote but let's mention them for completeness sake;

• God did exist and set the creation in motion and now does not exist. (Weak of course because it takes away from the definition that for which no greater can be conceived.)
• The Universe is God.  Once again limiting the concept of a God (a category error)
• There is more than one God (here of course we will have to deviate from the ontological definition of that for which no greater can be conceived hence weak again)

I will now go ahead and list the rest of the possibilities in relation to the notion of God's existence and then elaborate on the one I ended up with. So we continue on to  number two; 

2. Take somebody's word for it and either follow their way of communicating/worshiping/obeying with God or seek another way

3. Deduce God's existence through the world (Universe) around you. 

4. Investigate different claims associated with God and determine which one checks out

5. Start demanding proof of God without defining the proof or the willingness to defend the type of proof which will supposedly be enough to satisfy one's believability threshold.

6. Dismiss the very notion of a God after "exhaustive" investigation. I put exhaustive in quotes to point to the limitation of this claim.

7. Dismiss the notion of God because somebody other than yourself made the claim that there is no God or that they have done the heavy lifting and concluded that there is no God. In other words, believe them.

8. Dismiss the notion

I dabbled in all of them like most and eventually settled on option No. 4. Because this particular option not only gives one the opportunity for direct research but the very fact that more than half of humanity believes in a God through it, a bit bandwagony but also a practical starting point. Following this line of inquiry I was able to determine firsthand what checks out and what doesn't. If one is to avoid the self-validating assumption trap, it is necessary to work with opposing assumptions before drawing final conclusions.

As far as the process of validation and verification for each claim in the name of God goes, it would be beyond the scope of this paper or any one paper for that matter in order to cover it comprehensively. But I will touch on the methodology and the standards of evidence that individuals with normal skill sets can validate for themselves. There is no point in either demanding verification or offering one that is impossible to validate by individuals who may posses adequate education but are not experts. Any verification that requires the kind of resources not at our disposal or require decades to implement individually or collectively is generally not helpful. In the same way that if one had to prove an infinite number of premises first then nothing can be proved or disproved, including my often cited example of 1+1=2. Hence, any validation that is sound within the prevailing validation and verification spectrum today and well into the future is sufficient for an informed choice, as is the case for everything we consider true or false. 

Thus, the search for something that contains God like attributes or in other words the signature of God is worth pursuing. Enter the Quran, the product, Islam’s primary document. The actual number of validations and verifications on offer are many and varied and cut across all domains but the one that is understood and appreciated easily has to be Quran being a Self-Referenced work. The term Self-Referenced is not what may appear on the first mention, it is actually a reference to the use of a word ( the actual word not implied) and its mention within a body of a given text. In Quran's case, the added counting and cross-referencing of words reach such complexity that it is actually not possible to replicate it not now and not thousands of years into the future. Here we must be careful to focus on the huge gap of complexity between the Quran and any other works claiming the same. The significance of light from a candle is not the same as light from the sun.

Since the Author of the Quran is claiming to be God and backing it up with the kind of intelligence that would define a God, so the questions on the table are; what is going on? How did the Quran end up among us? Not only that but we are actually made aware of the uniqueness of the Quran by the Quran itself, in such a manner, that it matches the tools of verification and validation in our times as it did in each era before us. And in each era, Quran’s claim of being  inimitable stands and the fact that it is impossible to replicate is a historical fact and if you don't believe the claim then have a go :)

And the answer to the annoying straw man, promoted incorrectly as circular reasoning, "because it says so in the Quran" is that we first established that Quran is the very word of God and once done we stopped second-guessing God and not just because it says so in the Quran. A very simple and straightforward two-step process. The only way now to challenge this would be for someone to explain how the Quran ended up among us. This is in no way shifting the Burden of proof but more to do with the question as to why would someone dismiss easily verifiable evidence and the more pertinent question as to why God is claiming or being shown to such to be the author of the Quran if it is a work of a man? Especially when it can easily be demonstrated that a man or a group of men could not have possibly produced it then and cannot even produce the likes of it now or well into the future.

If one were to say to me now that I should abandon what I have investigated/deduced and cross over to the "there is no God" position (Be it for now or forever, irrespective of whether by implication or invitation) then I have to ask what exactly are "they" saying? Other than since there is no "Absolute evidence" for the existence of God, therefore, I am not buying. In reality by “there is no evidence of God's existence” they obviously mean they haven't come across such evidence or if they have but they don't agree with it sufficiently or are “convinced” that it is the evidence of the existence of God.

There are no absolutes, at least not in our Universe. Even the so called absolutes are relative. Life for most of us and, for the most part, is nothing but acting on or avoiding highly probable outcomes. Granted, most of us are not consciously and constantly calculating the probability of everything we do before we do it but that is exactly what happens. Some of us eventually figure out how to do it better than most but most of us just muddle through. Life, in other words, it is a story of some and most and choices.

Kids are free of such burdens but as we start to grow, most of us consciously avoid learning the very skills that can equip us to make those calls count. We never learn about limits. We never learn that everything is relative in our Universe. Those who keep looking for absolutes in everyday life processes are guaranteed to fail. 

I cannot stress more the importance of this; if people continue to dismiss all evidence on the basis of not coming across a sufficiently convincing evidence without first figuring out what will convince them then it follows that even if one were to run into God at the breakfast table one won't have a clue that one just did. On the other hand, if one insists that it is God's responsibility to convince an individual in unspecified terms then obviously one have moved away from the proof/evidence domain and resigned oneself to whatever God will throw at someone or not.

There is no point in asking "them" actual questions of course because they don't have actual answers. In fact, they seem to be inexplicably proud of the ever-shifting positions on which their reactionary irrational conviction is literally resting. It's either "we don't know, therefore nobody knows" a strange shade of Argument By Laziness or accept the illogical "something from nothing" as a valid answer or the procrastination route of  "one day we will know" nonsense, sprinkled with words science and rationality, that is the words as opposed to actual science or actual rational thought :) This self-hypnosis prevents them from carrying out serious research. This usually has a paradoxical effect on them whenever a slightly more complicated widely published proof/evidence is thrown at them.

In my experience, whenever  I throw an actual proof their way, the results are often comical. Invariably they rush to try and find someone who actually understands the proof. Often enough it is a tossup, they either land with somebody who will "dismiss" it as proof or someone who can't stop raving about the beauty of it. And that's when they have to take a leap of faith and believe one or the other "expert".

The reality is that if one would take out some time to actually research the whole notion of evidence and the resulting proofs, they would realize that it is all relative. Even those arrived through the most stringent of discipline, mathematics.The general references to science or that there is no empirical evidence is a facade at best. Either verify it or refute it in an empirically consistent manner or figure it out in an ontological way, "wait and see" of the perpetual agnostic is not an option :)

As far as nothing is concerned, it is no surprise, the gang involved in the book selling racket are in the habit of distorting science and the fact that Dawkins actually wrote the afterword for Krauss’s book says it all. Calling quantum vacuum or quantum state with the lowest possible energy  "nothing" is not only dishonest but a calculated move to sell more books to the already duped. 

As previously pointed out in my posts, intellectual dishonesty is the only explanation when philosophical views are mixed with science in order to claim a slam dunk. The likes of Futuyma, Gould, Dawkins and now Krauss have a right to their philosophy but they do not have the right to try and pass the mixed sophistry as though it is all science. In science theories must be tested against the evidence, no exceptions. For those who insist on these "possibilities” and  if we are to go down that route then the real possibility that theoretical physics now predicts the reality of a hypercosmic god should be right up there.

Let's stick to the default meaning of words :) Instead of going behind everybody's back and change their meaning. If not then might as well do away with words, at least, that way we lose nothing :)


* Decoded Science offers a brief summary of this proof, which has five axioms that we assume to be true:

1. Any “property”, or the negation of that property, is “positive”; but it is impossible that both the property and negation are positive.
2. If one positive property implies that some property necessarily exists, then the implied property is positive.
3. The property of being God-like is positive.
4. Positive properties are necessarily positive.
5. The property of necessarily existing is positive.

Gödel added three definitions along the way:

1. A “God-like” being has all positive properties.
2. An “essence” of a being is a property that the being possesses and that property necessarily implies any property of that being.
3. The “necessary existence” of a being means that it is necessary that all the essences of that being exist (“are exemplified”).

Gödel proved intermediate theorems and one corollary in the course of his proof. The first two axioms led to “Positive properties may possibly exist (“be exemplified”). After adding the third axiom, God, the God-like being, may possibly exist. With the help of the fourth axiom, Gödel stated that “being God-like” is one essence of any God-like being.

After adding the final axiom, Gödel concluded that it is necessary that God exists.

Recently a paper was published wherein Benzmüller and Paleo states that they used several different modal logic systems to verify Gödel’s proof. Those are different logic systems, not just different computer programs. The logic systems were:

• ‘K’, a “weak” logical system named for logician Saul Kripke; see the next paragraph.
• ‘B’ logic adds “A implies the necessity of the possibility of A” to ‘K’ logic.
• ‘S4′ and ‘S5′ logic allow some simplification of repeated “possibility” and “necessity” operations

The only way to challenge Godel's proof would be to disprove one or more of the five axioms Godel's proof is based on. Good luck with that.