this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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There's the law of conservation of energy: energy can't be created nor destroyed. Then how did we get the initial energy? The laws of physics must have been violated by some kind of god
No. Conservation of mass and energy only prohibit the total mount of mass and energy changing. The universe could have always existed with that mass and energy. We have good evidence that a lot of mass and energy was spread out by the expansion of a much smaller universe around 13.8 billion years ago, but we don't know what the universe was like before that, it could have always existed, or it could have been formed by the collapse of another universe, we don't know for sure.
Anyway, the laws of physics are just empirical observations, they have been proven wrong before. Einstein's general relativity disagrees with Newton's laws of motion and, further study reveled that Newton was (very subtly under normal conditions) wrong.
If you know the math you know that Newton was in fact not wrong, but merely incomplete. Einstein merely added one addendum, which for Newtons experiments was always zero (for all practical purposes) anyway, so in his empirical setting he was as right as he could possibly get.
I think itβs a misrepresentation to call Newtonian physics βwrongβ
Wrong, it was GodGod
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes 'nothingness' as a default state, despite the fact that nothingness seems to be a philosophical concept incapable of actually existing (even in a vacuum there's zero point energy).
So "how did we get something from nothing" necessitates the task of proving a plausible case for nothingness as an initial state.
And the answer of 'God' as a mechanism just kicks the can up the road, as then you are faced with the question of what created God.
If you claim eternal preexistence of God, then you've landed at the same rejection of nothingness as an initial state just with unnecessary extra steps.