Challenge Response: Who Created God?

Posted: September 2, 2010 by Brett Kunkle in God is Real, Weekly Challenge

Thanks for weighing in on this week’s challenge.  Here are a few of my thoughts:

Comments
  1. Nick says:
    September 2, 2010 at 2:23 pm

    Yeah, I was imprecise in my definition. Props to Adrian for clarifying. Human communication often falls short discussing these nebulous things (not that I did a very good job trying).

    I am enjoying these challenges.

  2. Nick says:
    September 2, 2010 at 2:45 pm

    Just saw this today as well.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100902/lf_nm_life/us_britain_hawking

    I find it interesting he uses the term “spontaneous creation.” Is there really any creating without a creator? He tries to describe something, I’m not sure what, but it is not creation.

    • Adrian Urias says:
      September 2, 2010 at 5:09 pm

      Yes, alluring isn’t it?

      Hm, I wonder then…

      Hawking says gravity can explain creation ex nihilo. From my understanding, gravity is a kind of force of attraction between mass. The greater the mass, the greater the force of gravity. No mass, no gravity. So gravity implies mass. And to say that gravity creates mass ex nihilo begs the question.

      I dunno, something to ponder. Limited information in the article, so a limited response.

      • Samuel says:
        September 3, 2010 at 2:37 am

        Classical gravity is a force of attraction between 2 masses… but it’s not that simple in reality. General Relativity postulated that what we observe as the force of attraction is actually the two masses following the closest thing to a straight line along the surface (a geodesic) of curved space-time, which is a 4-D geometry with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension. Furthermore, space-time curves in the presence of energy, and mass and energy are equivalent by the relation e=mc^2. So when Hawking says gravity can explain the creation of the Universe ex nihilo, he’s referring to the fact that energy (and therefore mass and curvature) is randomly spawned from the vacuum by the uncertainty principle, and in certain situations these fluctuations could provide the initial conditions for the classical Big Bang.

        At least this is what I think he’s referring to… this text could have been extracted from his unreleased book, so we’ll just have to wait to get the context and his full argument.