>> In any case (2) is somewhat suspect; it seems to come from the Aristotelian (and wrong) notion that there can be no motion without external force to sustain that motion (External forces are required for a *change* in motion, but a particle can go along its merry way forever if no force acts to slow it down or change its direction).
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> Er... Non sequitur. I don't follow. What does Newtonian mechanics (i.e. the first law of inertia) really have to do with #2, "Everything was once nothing"? Do you mean that Aquinas made a similar mistake to Anselm, and confused the concept of 'existence' with having motion?

I guess what I was trying to do was attack specifically the "prime mover" argument; that without a God there can be no motion. It is true that if everything was once at rest (and in equilibrium) then there would be no motion absent an unmoved mover. But, at least to me, there seems no valid reason to suppose an infant universe at rest over one in motion.
To be fair though, I don't claim that this is a very convincing argument. The real problem I have is that the assertions 'everything must have a cause,' and 'there exists a being who had no cause,' seem to be mutually exclusive (The statement 'Everything with the exception of God had a cause,' is perfectly fine, but in saying that I don't really think you're doing philosophy, just stating an article of faith that must be accepted or denied).
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> > (1) only holds true if we take "nothing" to be something even less substantial than the vacuum of space; even the vacuum has some energy associated with it. Additionally, as far as I know, (delta E)(delta t) >= (h-bar/2), so something can come from nothing whenever it wants, as long as it's not a lot of something or it doesn't stay very long.
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> I wonder if someone could re-derive these equations for us, showing their proper relevance to the issue?

I've included a link that explains a little, and links to derivations are included (you can read Heisenberg's if your German is good). The uncertainty relations between energy and time are (marginally) relevant in that they imply that 'something can never come from nothing' is not strictly true on small time scales. Of course, trying to say that a universe could just pop out of the vacuum and exist for a few billion years from this is pretty absurd; this was just another (not very convincing) tidbit I threw in after my main argument.

> Natural selection isn't as random and mindless as people typically picture it to be.

I think there also seems to be a misunderstanding about some of the terms used when describing natural processes. There are a lot of processes that go on in the universe that aren't deterministic, but this isn't to say they are "random" in the sense that there's no way to tell what will happen. They are probabilistic, and in a lot of cases, while we can't say what definitely will happen, we can speak rather accurately about what will probably happen. For instance (and I'm remembering these numbers off the top of my head, so they may be innacurate), the molecules of a gas arrange themselves in a container in a probabilistic fashion, so one can't say with 100% certianty what their configuration can be. However, we can use the ideal gas law to model the gas' behavior, since, though other arrangements are possible, the next most likely configuration is about 10^47 times less likely. Just because you can't say with absolute certianty how something will happen doesn't mean it happens "randomly."

> I suppose I have a secondary bias towards Payley's Teleological viewpoint ("the watch implies a watchmaker" argument) in order to buttress my Aquinian Cosmological bias. Even skeptics will often admit to experiencing a degree of awe with the way that the natural world apparently demonstrates synchronicity with itself; we can't help it.

I have a problem with this kind of argument too. When we say that the universe is remarkably ordered, I would ask "Ordered compared to what?" I don't mean to be overly flippant here, but we don't exactly have other, more chaotic and random universes around to compare our own with. If there was indeed a Creator for our universe, we don't have another, "random" one to see how ours is better.

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> Wolf "still can't help think that serious determinism bears a striking resemblance to strong theism, though" spirit

Bal "by the way h-bar = h/2pi for anyone who follows the link and gets confused" anthalus