The alternative to believing in an uncaused first cause it an infinite series of cascading causes that has no beginning or "turtles all the way down." It's borderline idiotic.
Seriously? Was it really that difficult to understand the Pi is infinite instead of eternal or that the universe expanding into the future is eternal and not infinite. Or that describing existence as an uncaused first cause is eternal?
Great. Then explain how it isn't idiotic.
You exist but have no idea of what existence is? Existence is the fact of being, while nature is the description of what that being is like. Ergo nature and existence are inseparable. For example, your behaviors are inseparable from your being.
I'm not following you down this semantic rabbit hole.
Atheists aren't equipped to ponder origin questions. Atheism is an intellectual dead end because they only know how to criticize what they don't believe. They don't know how to make affirmative arguments because they never had to make an affirmative argument to criticize someone else's affirmative argument. But you guys are awesome at criticizing.
Is it semantics or is it philosophy and logic?
Using logic and reasoning in the complete absence of facts.
That's not what the data shows but that is a very polytheistic belief.
You say that like it's a negative but the reality is everything before the universe popped into existence is the realm of philosophy and logic. What facts do you suppose there are besides the laws of nature existed before space and time and that the universe was not created from existing matter?
I'm not.
You can't. You aren't equipped for it.
As usual you conflate the Creator with the God of Abraham. It is the later we know only from the Bible.
You are correct.
I have no complaints, only comments.
I guess it depends on how you define 'intelligence' but, however the universe came to be, it is NOT finely tuned to produce intelligence. Just about every type of life, insects, mammals, reptiles, and dinos, evolved the ability to fly. Even one-celled animals and plants did so. Intelligence like ours is a tiny twig on the tree of life. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 100s of millions of years and are no more intelligent than they ever were.
I haven't gotten within a hundred miles of mentioning the God of Abraham. I am making an argument that existence is the origin of the material world and that existence is the uncaused first cause.
All life has some level of sentience and information processing. As life evolved so did intelligence. All of which occurred for logical reasons according to the laws of nature. Matter itself is fine tuned to produce life. We search for intelligent life outside of our planet (i.e. SETI) because we expect to find it because it is widely recognized that the universe is fine tuned to produce intelligence.
We search for intelligent life outside of our planet because talking with an alien amoeba would be a waste of time.
