If the object were bigger, then yes, I'd still be curious about how it came to be. I'm not sure if you're implying that I'm NOT curious about the origins of our universe? Because I definitely am. I'm just not prepared to make claims about the origins of the universe that aren't backed up by evidence.
That's fair, but I want to drive home that the point I'm making in all of this is not specifically that you must subscribe to this line of thinking, but rather that
there is a reasonable philosophical basis for believing in God. I started down this cosmological rabbit-hole because several users here were accusing religious followers of simply being devoted to blind faith.
(And blind faith is actually a heresy in Catholicism! It's referred to as "fideism" and it's highly frowned upon in the Catechism)
If you don't think I'd accept the premise that some object was always here without being contingent on anything, then why do you think it's fine to accept that for yourself?
I'm not sure I understand the question; I would also question an object existing that wasn't contingent on anything else. If you're referring to God, I'll answer that momentarily.
You can't assume that the same rules of our universe apply to before the Big Bang. One planck time after the Big Bang, our universe and all of our physics as we know it apply. Before then, we don't know because our current models of physics break down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
You are getting caught up in the semantics of what "nothing" is and that makes you feel like that is a contradiction in the first law of thermodynamics. Matter is energy and energy is matter, and if the total energy of the system is the same from the beginning of the Big Bang until now, then nothing is contradictory.
By "nothing," I mean very specifically that--no quarks of matter, no energy, no vacuum of emptiness, no actual laws of existence itself.
If you're trying to make a case for what was around before the Big Bang, you can't because "before" implies time, and we don't know if time exists before the Big Bang because all of our models of physics break down the further back we try to extrapolate.
It's indeed possible that time could not have existed "prior" (for lack of a better word) to the Big Bang, but that still leaves the question hanging in the air of why there is something rather than nothing.
This is something of a sidetrack, but I'm curious which of these three options you feel is most likely:
A) The universe has no explanation; it exists for no reason
B) The universe explains itself
C) The universe has an explanation outside of itself in something that explains itself
1. What is your evidence to support premise 1? We can trace the present forms of all current matter back to their composite fundamental particles to almost the beginning of the Big Bang, but we don't know if there was a cause for that because we can't observe that far back.
Isn't evidence for "everything that began to exist has a cause" all around us? Basically anything, really--my lamp's existence was caused by being manufactured in some factory, my Mounds bar's existence formed from the perfect marriage of dark chocolate and coconut flakes, etc. But more specifically about the matter itself, have we ever observed something coming from nothing? And if it's false, shouldn't we have at least some observations of that happening rather than our scientific method doing nothing but verifying this premise?
2. What is your evidence to support premise 2? The current presentation of the universe as we know it today "began to exist" 14 billion years ago, but that could have been the same matter and energy just arranged in a different way "before" then, but we don't know because we can't observe that far back in time, if time even exists.
In that case, the cause of our universe would just be another universe, which only pushes the discussion back an extra step (what made THAT universe?). I don't think it's an infinite chain either, as all physical systems move toward disorder and decay according to the second law of thermodynamics. If the universe never began to exist (that is, if it was eternal), everything in the universe would have run out of energy long ago.
3. You're trying to prove God, right? If that's they case, why is the word "God" not present at all in either your premises or your conclusion?
I'm not exactly trying to prove God, but pushing back on the claim in this thread that there's no evidence for a reasonable belief the existence of a god. The "cause" mentioned in the conclusion points to the existence of God, but we hadn't really gotten there yet. It's true that one could agree with the premises and conclusion and still push back on the idea that the "cause" could be God, but that's a different part of the discussion with its own ideas to explore.
4. I assume you're talking about an eternal God right? What is the cause of God? And, if God doesn't have a cause, why do you make a special exception for that in violation of Premise 1?
Yes, the God in this case would be eternal, and as such, not "begin to exist" at all. The premises apply to our reality as we know it, not things outside of that. If the first cause created all space and time, by definition it couldn't be bound by space or time, since it made those things. I believe that this cause of the universe would have to be extremely powerful to make something from nothing. To me, that starts to add up to something like God.
Thanks for the discussion thus far, by the way. But to reiterate, my goal isn't specifically to convince you that God could exist, but to show that people can believe in God without requiring blind faith.
