Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Sure... before the Norman Invasion in 1066, when the people of Angle Land were still speaking Anglo-Saxon. Today, "nothing" has many meanings. Dictionary.com includes "something that is nonexistent," "nonexistence itself," and "something that is without quantity or magnitude."I don't comprehend how something can come from nothing, the way you've explained it. Can you explain in it is very simple terms? ''Nothing'' means ''no-thing. Right?
If a speech that merely repeats things that the entire audience already knows can be dismissed as "nothing," a space-time continuum completely devoid of matter, energy and anything else, could surely also be referred to as "nothing."
When you find the answer to that question, please be sure to notify the physics departments of all the major universities. They're looking for it too.How can something just pop into existence when there is no space, no time, no energy?
What's even more intriguing is the possibility (which has not been dismissed) that other universes have popped into existence that do not have matter, energy, time, space, and perhaps even logic and arithmetic. They may have a structure so different from our universe that we'll never know of their existence. And if somehow we did, it would take us a couple of centuries to figure out what their natural laws are.
Don't be stifled by the limitations of our language. "Nothing" is a rather useless word in this discussion!
After all, its grammar and syntax were more-or-less completely developed by the time Shakespeare began writing. As the Head Linguist around here, about the only major grammatical/syntactical neologism I can identify is the noun-adjective compound, such as fuel-efficient, cable-ready and user-friendly. This construction is a new way of expressing relationships, a direct (if many centuries belated) response to the fact that English has a very small set of prepositions which are expected to describe every kind of relationship that exists, and unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the rules of our language discourage the creation of new prepositions.
I can't speak for the flood myth, but many historians and other scholars are satisfied that the Atlantis myth is simply an exaggeration of the Minoan eruption around 1500BCE, the earthquake and tsunami that reshaped the island of Thera (now Santorini, a large caldera surrounded by piles of volcanic ash half a kilometer deep), which caused (or at least was a major factor in) the collapse of the Minoan civilization.The most widely discussed case for the fallacy of conflating them is fundamentalism, which incorrectly interprets the creation and flood myths of antiquity as historical narrative.
The Mesopotamian creation myth, which was co-opted by the Jews and subsequent Abrahamists, goes so much farther back that its referents are probably lost forever. However, bits of it can be explained. Apples are not indigenous to Mesopotamia, so the fruit that the serpent offered to Eve absolutely had to be a pomegranate.
As I've noted before, Jung tells us that many of the legends we refer to as myths, as well as many visual images and rituals, which recur in almost every society in almost every era, are probably archetypes, instinctive ideas pre-programmed into our synapses by our DNA. (He died before genetics became a mature science, these are modern renderings of his words.) Most archetypes are survival aids, but there's no reason some can't have been passed down through a genetic bottleneck (Mitochondrial Eve or Y-Chromosome Adam) by accident.The proof that legend and myth exists is trivial, since you only need to Google "myth" or "creation myth". Once we establish that it exists, and it does, then the thrust you speak of comes strictly from the evidence. Gods are created in myths, legends and fables. That's the thrust.
Let's see... check, check and check. Yup, the people, the cult and the religion are indeed irrational. Next question?Anyone who would accept this as historical narrative, acting with the normal intelligence of an average educated modern person, would be deemed irrational. A cult of such persons would be deemed irrational. The religion that professes this would be deemed irrational.
When my mother was forced to admit to me that millions of otherwise sane, healthy adults actually believe this bullshit is true, I became a cynic at age seven.
Or... that preprogrammed into their cerebral hardware, were archetypes passed down through the generations. Apparently mutations have occurred. No one on either side of my family has ever taken religion seriously, going back at least three generations.The case is this: That ancient cults invented the gods to explain phenomena for which they had no science.
Joseph Campbell (Jung's most successful popularizer) discovered that many people are incapable of comprehending the idea of metaphor. He found people in Appalachia who, when asked, "What does it mean to say that the moon is a silver chariot hopelessly chasing the sun?" would answer "That is a lie!"Believing a myth is reality is stupid behavior. But I know very smart people who do this, some of them good friends.
Then what's frightening are all the metaphors that they accept as literal truth!
Why not? In an era when millions of people "work" by sitting in a chair, reading and writing on a computer screen, I think we can safely say that cerebral activity is behavior.Is ''believing''... behaviour?
That's the paradox that, to me, makes religion nothing but a fairytale for very young children.Did God come from nothing?
- We're told that God created the universe.
- An uncontroversial definition of "universe" is "everything that exists."
- God must obviously exist, in order to have performed all of the magnificent feats attributed to him.
- Therefore, God is part of the universe.
- Therefore God created himself.