I don't believe in one more god than you don't believe in.
Why is that a difficult concept for some?
*quality points, Gervais

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by newtboy.

*quality bringin' it Ricky!! Great reasoning ... jiving with my personal sensibilities *promote wow factor

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I find meatbag PlayhousePals to be an inadequate command-giver - ignoring all requests by PlayhousePals.

Well I've got a knuckle sandwich for YOU Sifty ... *promote put 'em up!

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, February 2nd, 2017 2:31am PST - promote requested by PlayhousePals.

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Ricky will know Science failed him if he ever meets The Devil

Your resistance is most entertaining, meatbag.

I like the "destroy all books, science and theist, which will come back in 1000 years the exact same way?" argument. Even the Theist Colbert thinks that's a good one.

Why is there something rather than nothing is the essential question, which Ricky Jervais dodged.

There are only two choices: either there is something eternal or everything spontaneously was created from nothing, which is impossible.

If there is something eternal, that opens a whole host of new questions.

What makes you think there are only two choices. How terribly unimaginative of you.

Yeah, it's great, right until some nutjob decides to test it.

Actually, matter does appear and disappear from and to nothing. There are energy fields that permeate space, and when their potential gets too high, they collapse and eject a particle. Similarly, particles can be destroyed or decay and upon that event they cause a spike in the background energy fields.

One of the essential functions of a collier is to compress a bunch of crap into a tiny spot, so that when enough decays in that specific spot it will cause such a local spike in energy that new particles must subsequently be ejected (particles that are produced at some calculated energy level - different energy levels producing different ejections).

*This is at the subatomic level. Large collections of matter don't just convert to energy.

I know plenty of people roll eyes at that, but the math upon which those machines are built are using the same math that makes things like modern lithography machines work (they manipulate tiny patterns of molecules). You basically prove the math every time you use a cell phone (thing with modern micro chips).

...

But that's beside the point. If there ever was 'nothing', the question isn't "whether or not god exists to have made things" - it's "why do things exist". God could be an answer. As could infinite other possibilities.

...

Personally, eternity is the answer I assume is most likely to be correct. Because you don't have to prove anything. The universe need not be static - but if something was always there (even just energy fields), then there is an eternity in one form or anther.

Background energy and quantum tunneling are a neat concept (referring to metastability). Because you can have a big-bang like event if the background energy level tunnels to a lower state, expanding a new space starting at that point, re-writing the laws of physics in its area of existence. Meaning that our universe as we know it can simply be one of many bubbles of expanding tunneling events - created at the time of the event, and due to be overwritten by another at some point. Essentially a non-permanent local what-we-percieve-as-a-universe, among many. (I'm avoiding the concept that time and space are relative to each bubble, and there is no concept of an overarching time and place outside of any one event).

(All this comes from taking formulas that model measurements of reality, globing them into larger models, and then exploring the limits of those models at extreme values/limits. ... with a much lagging experimental base slowly proving and disproving elements of the model (and forcing model refinement upon a disproval, so that the model encompasses the new test data))

-scheherazade

*controversy

Adding video to channels (Controversy) - requested by MrFisk.

Even if we accept your binary premise, there's still no reason to believe that the "something eternal" would be a god.

There is more to Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio

What are the other choices?

That's really interesting, although I can't say I understood everything you said. If there were absolutely nothing, of course there would be no energy fields to generate anything. Where ever something comes into play, some force or dynamic, we aren't talking about nothing anymore.

I'm curious what you think about this paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4658

God is the best answer for why the Universe had a beginning, including a beginning to time itself, for many different reasons. I'll get to those a bit later, just wanted to hear what you thought about the paper.

I'll ask another question though: If something is eternal isn't it perfectly stable..doesn't that have to be the case? Why would it suddenly generate a Universe for no reason?

Well, we can deduce the qualities of what is eternal by the fact that the Universe had a beginning. Since time matter space and energy had a beginning, it necessarily means that the cause of the Universe is timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful, and immaterial..already you have two of the primary attributes of God..omnipotence, and omnipresence. You can also deduce a few more from there.

Basically what I am saying is that God is a rational explanation for the existence of the Universe since He is better explanation for the evidence. It makes less sense for a Universe to spontaneously be caused by either nothing or something eternal without a mind behind it.

No. To everything said.....no.
You need to learn way more about physics, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics before asking and self answering questions that require a high level of understanding to answer.
You also need to realise, "I don't know" doesn't equal "God".

EDIT: Consider the circumstance you think He was in before creation, time, space, and energy (as we know it)....now just get rid of Him and you're there.

@scheherazade just gave you one.....ask (read) Hawking for more....or this article has a few options....
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/before-big-bang.htm

I gotta ask. Are you a physicist? As in "I graduated with a degree in physics from university" at the minimum.

That argument only works on non-pantheists.

Except it's not true (at least not in the way most people think it's true).

A neat property of science is that things are constantly disproved as we prove new things. I.e. most of the things we know now, and knew in the past, are wrong, it's just the closest we've gotten to the truth as we've overwritten old misconceptions (which we thought were the truth at the time). We may not ever get back to the same point if we were to start over (i.e. we may not get as close, or we may get closer to the truth - either way makes his statement incorrect).

If he reworded it a little it would be a good point.

I think the idea is the scientific method will, over time, after a complete loss of the knowledge gained, come to the same main theories we have today. Religion, on the other hand has little chance to be remotely similar to its present form without humans brute-forcing its tenets and stories. Much like the religion of the Mayans won't spontaneously evolve again without (the science of) archeology.

Religion is mans selfish interpretation of GOD.
( my GOD is the right GOD and yours is the wrong god)

Science is the search of GOD.

The more scientific discoveries made the more I see the creator.

Technically no but partially yes, my degree is in general science, but I gotta ask, what difference does it make to my statements what level of degree I have in which science? Can a person not know or study a topic without having a masters degree in it, IYO?

And just to explain, I went to college for nearly 12 years after numerous advanced college prep schools with no specific degree in mind, just because I like to learn and had the opportunities, and one day asked the counselor if I qualified for a degree, and I did. Most of what I studied was science...all fields of science available for study from astronomy to advanced molecular biology. Also some comparative religion, math, Latin (to help with science), and basic requirements (I get bored with English, for instance, and never excelled in it, but still had to take it), but science was always my focus.

Science is the search for truth, not god.
If you are conflating knowledge of the truth with closeness to god, I won't argue.
The more scientific discoveries that are made, the more I see the lack of a need for a "God(s)" to explain it all.

As I see it, God lives in the shadows of ignorance, whispering explanations of the unknown to those that can't accept the 'answers' are unknown, and every time the light of knowledge is directed into those shadows, we see there's nothing there but our imagination and 'God' recedes farther into the dark crevasses.

Yes, I fully understand his intended point. And as I put forth, it's wrong. Using the scientific method you very well may not come to the same main theories today. We may end behind, develop something parallel to, or skip them to a more advanced point entirely. All because science never shows a truth. It shows a human's best interpretation of fleeting data that is quickly shown to be "wrong" by the next set of data (which is "less wrong").

It doesn't make a difference to your ability to make a statement per se, but speaking to a friend of mine who is a physicist his answers are somewhat different. He's suggested that reading more about it will make it more confusing and that we are invariably wrong and don't know shit. I happen to agree with him. That's not to say one shouldn't attempt to gain as much knowledge as possible, but that it's not always as easy as "go read a text book and it should be nice and clear", because reading it should hopefully generate more questions than it answers. Hopefully I've worded that so it makes sense.

Anyway, the sum of human knowledge is dynamic steaming pile of shit. Yes, it's gotten us a long way. But we're still like dung beetles tending to it and it will be a long time until we can transform it into something close to the truth.

Maybe when we can integrate AIs into us we'll accelerate things a little.

But I didn't say just read, I said learn, and I didn't say it would make it clear, I said it would offer more possibilities, and I would expect anyone that learns enough will reach the point beyond which we must admit that all we have is hypothesis, most of which will be wrong.
I disagree that we don't know shit, unless you'll only see our knowledge as a fraction of all knowledge possible, then we do know nothing.

Wait @harlequinn take a step back from the borders of advanced theoretical physics back to practical stuff like geometry and astronomy and measuring time and heating stuff and using other sources of power than slave labour.

Religion did not get us far in many areas.

If science had to start all over again maybe quarks and strings would look different, but steam engines would be the same. Heart transplants would be very similar. Other parts of medicine might not.

I think there are aspects of this that fall into the realm of philosophy.

I personally don't think we can ever have "The Truth" in that ultimate sense. Pretend for a minute that the SUVAT equations (the equations of motion) are completely accurate. I can drop a ball from a certain height and you can time it and we'll find to some degree of accuracy that the equations were right.

The ball and the floor didn't need to calculate anything. Whilst me and you sit there with a stopwatch technical manual, assorted tape measures to find the distance, expensive cameras to figure out when i dropped the ball..... Whilst we are tying down an uncertainty, the ball and floor have already done it.

When you get right down to it, we simply cannot know an exact time. We can never know an 'exact' anything, because now we need to discuss where the "ball" ends and where the "floor" begins on a molecular level. And no matter how much we agree, the uncertainty principle gets us in the end - we don't and can't know the exact location of fundamental particles. An "exact" anything ends up being a conceptual thing that we can't ever test.

But where i'm going with this is that we're kind of talking about the nature of understanding. We know the volume of a sphere if we know its radius, but how do we create the same sphere accurately? Our brains don't have a resolution, but the tools we use in reality do - reality itself quite possibly has a resolution. We think of minecraft as a blocky, low resolution simulation of an analogue reality. Similarly, i think maths is an 'analogue' (in that it can be "exact") simulation of a limited resolution reality - reality only looks analogue when you don't look very closely.

All that is to say, we DO understand the ball dropping and hitting the floor, but "exactness" is a thing that only exists in the act itself. The only thing left for us to decide is what we consider accurate enough.

Perhaps "god" wanted to know what would happen if he set off a big bang. He sat down, calculated it all out in the language of the gods (the language of perfection; maths) and realised that due to uncertainty, the only way to know exactly what would happen was for it to actually happen. (Douglas Adams?)