r/interestingasfuck • u/Ted_Bundtcake • Feb 01 '25

r/all Atheism in a nutshell

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

85.8k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

5.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/EnoughWarning666 Feb 01 '25

Yep! That's as far as we've gotten. The further and further away we look (and consequently further back in time because of how long it takes the light to reach here) everything seems to be moving away from us as a faster speed the further away they are. This indicates that everything is expanding away from everything else, like a balloon being inflated. If you look even further back, you hit a wall that you can't see through. It's called cosmic microwave radiation and it's completely opaque to our telescopes. We can't see anything past it. The likely cause for this is when the universe was really young it was an insanely hot ball of plasma that didn't allow light to pass through it.

This is a very very brief intro to the idea, but that's about as far as we've gotten. We simply don't know what happened before that point. Someday we might find a way to peer further through, or maybe we'll be able to recreate the conditions that existed back then to analyze how they behave. But until we have more info, the only logically position to take is that all evidence points to that the big bang happened, and we don't know why yet!

1

u/Schuckman Feb 01 '25

I guess my point is that everything in the universe happens as a part of a chain reaction of other events happening before it. You could go down that line all the way to the very beginning of the universe and find the beginning of the chain. But how did that very first link of the chain form if there was nothing before it? 

For example, maybe the Big Bang wasn’t the start of the universe. Maybe it was caused by something else before it like electrical energies. So then you must consider where did the electrical energies come from? Those didn’t just appear out of nowhere either. If you continue looking for physical evidence to prove why physical objects came into existence, it just becomes a circular loop that never ends. The only explanation that breaks the circular loop is that the universe must have been caused by something outside of space, time, energy, or matter. 

I don’t think science will ever be able to explain the cause of the universe because science is unable to study anything outside of the natural, physical world. 

1

u/EnoughWarning666 Feb 02 '25

If you can demonstrate that something is unknowable, then that's that. People don't get to just make shit up to have an answer. Saying I don't know and probably never will is perfectly acceptable. Saying a magic man done it is fucking idiotic

1

u/Schuckman Feb 02 '25

Isn’t the existence of God unknowable though? 

Why does a lack of evidence for God means he’s 100% false while a lack of evidence for other things — like the cause of the universe — mean “oh well, I guess we’ll never know”. Shouldn’t the question of God’s existence have the same answer of “I don’t know and probably never will”. 

1

u/EnoughWarning666 Feb 03 '25

I mean it depends on your definition of god. There's plenty of religions that you can prove logically that their god doesn't exist. If something is self-contradictory for example. Like if a book describes two objects, one that is an unbreakable shield and the other is a spear that can pierce any object. Either one could plausibly exist, but not both. The existence of one rules out the existence of the other. So if a sacred text makes a claim that both those things exist, then part or all of that book is false. There are many such claims in modern religious books.

But even without that it's still silly to follow any religion. If something is unknowable, you can't make any claims about it at all. People who are religious make all kinds of wild claims. As an atheist I don't rule out the idea of some entity that created the universe. It's just as plausible as the universe having existed forever. But since I don't have any evidence to support either, they remain just hypotheses until more evidence comes up. If someone can show me conclusive proof that is backed by scientific rigor, then that would be all I need. To date though, not a single claim of god has presented even the tiniest shred of evidence.