When Nothing Created Everything

[Achronos]

I'm not Catholic, but I loved this article and thought I'd like to share it.

"Throughout history people have been awed and thrilled by retellings of their culture’s creation story.

Aztecs would tell of the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes, Phoenicians about the Zophashamin, and Jews and Christians about the one true Godâ€"Jehovah. But there is one unfortunate groupâ€"the children of atheistic materialistsâ€"that has no creation myth to call its own. When an inquisitive tyke asks who created the sun, the animals, and mankind, their materialist parents can only tell them to read a book by Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins.

But what sort of story are they likely to find? Should they be told, as famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking claims in his recent book The Grand Design that “the universe… create[d] itself from nothing”?

Since Hawking's explanation is a bit too drab and nospecific for bedtime reading I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into a purportedly accurate, though mythic, narrative. This is what our culture has been missing for far too longâ€"a creation story for young atheistic materialists.

******

In the beginning was Nothing, and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it expand. The expansion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.

For no particular Reasonâ€"for Reason is rarely particularâ€"Time and Chance took a liking to this little, wet, blue rock and decided to stick around to see what adventures they might have. While the pair found the Earth to be intriguing and pretty, they also found it a bit too quiet, too static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and sloshing through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere, there was a missing ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings.

They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the missing ingredient. And indeed she did. Hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the former planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth.

Now that they had Information, Time and Chance were finally able to create a self-replicating Something which they called Life. Once they created Life they found that it not only grew into more Somethings, but began to become Otherthings, too! The Somethings and the Otherthings began to fill the Earthâ€"from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the sky. Their creation, which began as a single Something, eventually became millions and billions of Otherthings.

Time and Chance, though, where the bickering sort and were constantly feuding over which of them was the most powerful. One day they began to argue over who had been more responsible for creating Life. Everything (who was forever eavesdropping) overheard the spat and suggested that they settle by putting their creative skills to work on a new creature called Man. They all thought is was a splendid planâ€"for Man was a dull, hairy beast who would indeed provide a suitable challengeâ€"and began to boast about who could create an ability, which they called Consciousness, that would allow Man to be aware of Chance, Time, Everything, and Nothing.

Chance, always a bit of a dawdler, got off to a slow start, so Time, who never rested, completed the task first. Time rushed around, filling the gooey matter inside each Man’s head with Consciousness. But as he was gloating over his victory he noticed a strange reaction. When Man saw that Everything had been created by Time, Chance, and Nothing, his Consciousness filled with Despair.

Chance immediately saw a solution to the problem and took the remaining materials she was using to make Consciousness to create Beliefs. When Chance mixed Beliefs into the gray goo, Man stopped filling with Despair and started creating Illusions. These Illusions took various formsâ€"God, Purpose, Meaningâ€"and were almost always effective in preventing Man from filling up with Despair.

Nothing, who tended to be rather forgetful, remembered her creation and decided to take a look around Everything. When she saw what Time and Chance had done on planet Earth she was mildly amused, but forbade them to fill any more creatures with Consciousness or Beliefs (which is why Man is the only Something that has both). But Nothing took a fancy to Man and told Time and Chance that when each one’s Life ran out, she would take him or her and make them into Nothing too.

And that is why, children, when Man loses his Life he goes from being a Something created by Time and Chance into becoming like his creatorâ€"Nothing."
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/ ... everything

[Gawen]

As long as we all remember that:

I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into a purportedly accurate, though mythic, narrative.

[Achronos]

As long as we all remember that:

I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into a purportedly accurate, though mythic, narrative.

A mythic narrative, whose lesson is the absurdity of materialism.

[Stevil]

As long as we all remember that:

I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into a purportedly accurate, though mythic, narrative.

A mythic narrative, whose lesson is the absurdity of materialism.

The absurdity is a theist defining a story for young atheists about creation by personifying things such as Nothing, Time and Chance. This is a simple, lame and warped attempt by a very manipulative and deceitful theist at trying to make an atheistic view seem in the same ball park of absurdity to that of a theistic view.

Utter trash if you ask me.

[Recusant]

A[n inaccurate] mythic narrative, whose lesson is the absurdity of materialism.

I fixed it for you.  No thanks necessary.

I actually enjoyed it for the most part.  However, if it were intended to show the absurdity of "materialism" (by which I take it you mean our current scientific understanding of reality) then it should sound more like the actually absurd stories told to children by priests and Sunday school teachers.  I guess that the author didn't want to do that, because it might be shooting himself in the foot.  

 On the other hand, with some work to actually bring the ideas contained into line with current cosmology and biology (information from beyond Pluto?  really?) and some polishing in the writing style, it could make a fine children's book.

In my opinion it was not bad at all for a first draft.

[DJAkuma]

It sounds just like any other creation story, written by someone with a slightly better understanding of science than the people who wrote genesis. I sounds really ignorant when people try and make atheism out to be some kind of religion, even then it still ends up being less ridiculous sounding than any other religion.

As for absurdity, would you believe that some people base their entire conceptualization of the universe around some story involving a talking snake and a magic apple?

[Ihateyoumike]

That Really was One Long waLl of text that wasn't worth reading. But thanks anyway.

[OldGit]

Sorry, Achronos, I'm with Ihateyoumike.  It looks as though it ought to contain some deep meaning, but I can't find any.  IMO it gets you no further.

[Voter]

Here's a fun one:
The Wizard of Ooze

[Davin]

A mythic narrative, whose lesson is the absurdity of materialism.

I think the lesson here is that someone had to turn science into a mythic narrative in order to make it absurd while religion is that way on its own.

[LegendarySandwich]

Here's a fun one:
The Wizard of Ooze

That was a fun story. The ending was kind of a cop-out, though. I mean, she didn't even learn a good moral or lesson or anything. In fact, she got stupider.

[joeactor]

... I've always liked FireSign's creation story:

Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around. And he saw his neighbor, which was his mother, and he lay down on top of his neighbor,  and behold, she bore him in tears, an oak tree, which grew all day, and then fell over, like a bridge. And low, under the bridge there came a catfish, and he was very big, and he was walking, and he was the biggest he had seen. And so, with the firey balls of this fish, one of which is the sun, and the other, they called the moon…

Full text in this thread:
http://www.happyatheistforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2595

[Recusant]

Here's a fun one:
The Wizard of Ooze

Now this one is, as the great H. L. Mencken might have said, a farrago of buncombe.  It's pathetic; filled from beginning to end with lies, canards and straw man arguments.  I'm only going to list some of them:

Lie: "They have such strong arguments against the theory of evolution that I can’t refute them."

Canard: "...life originated, all by itself, in a puddle of ooze..."

Lie: "I can’t give you any good scientific arguments supporting evolution."

Lie: "Louis Pasteur proved there is no such thing as abiogenesis." (I'm kind of surprised that Francesco Redi isn't mentioned as well.  I often see his experiment mentioned alongside Pasteur's, and it is of course equally irrelevant to modern concepts of abiogenesis.)

Canard: “How do you know conditions were different then? [Talking about reducing atmosphere of early earth, for which there is evidence.] Were you there? [One doesn't need to have been there if there is scientific evidence.]”

Straw man argument: (Very fitting that it's the Scarecrow, in the canard given above, who introduces this one.) '“No, but things had to have been different then, or else life could not have evolved. Since we know life evolved, it logically follows that the conditions had to have been favorable for the spontaneous generation of life from non-living material some time in the past,” she said very confidently.

“That’s circular reasoning, which is not a valid form of logic,” the Scarecrow correctly deduced.'

Canard: "The wisdom to run from a fight against an overwhelmingly superior force may be the most important factor in survival. In fact, that must be true. Otherwise this cowardly lion would never have evolved. Since he did evolve, it must be true that timidity is the driving factor in evolution."

Lie: '“There is only one thing that we have found that can protect us from her [Wicked Witch of the Christian Right] magical spell. It is Darwin’s Origin of Species."'

Canard: "The double helix DNA molecule was far too complex to have happened by chance. Furthermore, the information contained in it had to have come from an intelligent designer. "

Canard: "The more I studied science, the more I found wrong with the theory of evolution..."

Canard: “I had data showing the theory of evolution was wrong, but there is an unwritten rule that one may not publish data refuting one theory without proposing another one to take its place. So, I published papers that showed some particular evolutionary ideas were wrong and made up a different evolutionary explanation that fit my data better.”

Lie: "Creationists have the latest scientific evidence on their side, but it takes more than science to fight against traditional beliefs."

Lie: "No creature will ever evolve wings. No creature ever has. The fossil record shows that birds and bats had wings right from the beginning."

All in all, an unimpressive effort at propaganda.

[Stevil]

Let's put things into perspective here

Most faiths have come up with Myths to explain everything because children want to know the answers to everything and adults want children to look at them as being all knowledgable. Hence Myths have been created as children's stories to explain things that the adults don't know the answers to. To help the story be understandable to children key actors within the story need to be personalities or visable common objects as children don't understand concepts.

Science on the other hand has looked towards observations and provable predictions of future observations to substantiate hypothesis before writing books, articles explaining things. A key part of that process is having a skeptical view and review to findings with a comprehensive attack to find fallicies with findings.

A theist thinks it is unfair that science sounds like adult information and instead wants it written in the style of their own childish myths. Hence they basterdise concepts into personalities to make these easier for a child to understand. If we were then to try and rebuild actual scientific knowledge based on this theist authored fake myth but not taking into account any of the knowledge and documentation that we know and hence simply working off this fake myth we would find it impossible to restore scientific knowledge accurately or any where even close to the truth. Science would instead simply discard the myth and start from scratch and would eventually come to the exact same state of scientific knowledge that exists today.

The lesson in all this is that the faith myths are just that, a bunch of useless children's stories which are impossible to decipher. For example, that which the old testament calls God for example may be an actual personality or may simply be a personification of the concept of Random Chance. There is no way to know what the origins of the God noun were. Hence it would be reasonable to suggest that the myths should be thrown away and faith should look to rebuild their knowledge from scratch.

[Achronos]

Let's put things into perspective here

Most faiths have come up with Myths to explain everything because children want to know the answers to everything and adults want children to look at them as being all knowledgable.

Interesting, but I don't think there is any evidence the writers of say, The New Testament, created the myth of Christ because they all had some inquisitive children who needed some new myths to shut them up, so they got together to create a new one, the resurrection.  And then they left their families and children to tell this story to all the people clammering for a new story, and then ultimately died for something they knew they had made up. "Science" can really cause one to make up some humdinger stories!

Here's my perspective:

I agree, people would want to believe in God whether he existed or not.  I took probably 6 classes on Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell in college, the idea of mans need for "myth" is truly fascinating. And they would want to believe for a variety of reasons. This deep yearning, this spirituality, would cause people to create myths if there was not something real to fill the void.

But I am a Christian, because I believe Christ's resurrection is real.  It is not a myth.  I believe this for many reasons, but primarily for two:

1) Too many people would have known the story was a lie.  Almost immediately they were being killed for this lie.  Within 30 years of Christ's death the faith had spread so widely, it was persecuted specifically by Nero from 64 to 68 AD.  There are people who died in this persecution who would have known Christ, known the Disciples and Apostles, there are disciples and apostles who probably died in this persecution.  These "first-hand" believers, the ones who knew Christ, would have known they were being killed for a lie.  Yet no one recanted, no one said, "it's all a lie, this is how we did it."

2) In the Saints of the Church, while I do believe many of their accounts could very well be made up stories, I believe many of them and many of their miracles.  And I have seen miracles with my own eyes.  These to me are living testimonies of the miracle that took place over 2000 years ago.

As to the Bible.  It was written by men.  The only thing I believe, I'm no biblical scholar so I could be wrong, that was directly written from God's mouth and immediately written down, were the ten commandments.  Other than that, men.  Men who believed and were inspired by God, but were men nonetheless.  So the fact these fallible men wrote a testament of the journey from creation to Christ that sometimes seems odd, sometimes contradicting, sometimes like "sheepherders" is no surprise, in fact, to me it seems perfectly natural.

Human beings are flawed.  We kill people for stupid reasons. We do things to hurt ourselves and our families when we know they will hurt ourselves and our families.  We complain about our lot in life then spend all night wasting time on discussion boards!  We often think we are trying to listen to and follow God, when we aren't really interested in listening or following at all.  The fact the bible reflects all these problems of ours, just makes it more real and valid to me.

So anyway, these threads have been interesting.  Just thought now might be a good time to relate my view.  The idea that science can't prove God is as old as the bible itself, and the idea that faith can never become a science is just as ancient. We've yet to really say anything profound or new on any of these threads.

In the case of Christianity, it really comes down to one thing, do you believe God became man, died and rose from the dead, so we could become more like him and live forever. I believe it.