No, Atheists Aren’t Stupid:
It’s Theists who Claim Something Came from Nothing
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
Let’s consider a familiar ad hominem attack theists use against atheists. We’ll call the ploy the “I don’t have enough faith to believe in atheism.” gambit. Theistic excusagists (what apologists act like) assert that atheists believe that “In the beginning, there was nothing, then it exploded.” That’s Freudian projection. It is Jews, Christians, and Muslims who believe in creatio ex nihilo.
I’ll grant that some atheists are stupid; there are also dullards among theists. But, regardless of their God beliefs, most people are of average intelligence, and a handful are geniuses. I will grant that the majority of earthlings, whether theist or atheist, are not experts in astrophysics and/or cosmology. Even cosmologists and astrophysicists are uncertain why there is something and not nothing. The truth is none of us know the answer to this question.
Perhaps something can come from nothing. We’re fond of saying we’ve never seen such a thing happen. But we know our Universe is immense and old. What if it was commonplace back at the beginning of time?
How Old is the Cosmos?
The Big Bang model says that the Universe is 13.787 years old. Recent data from JWST and other sources have led Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa to propose a model with a 26.7 billion-year-old Universe. For nearly all human history, we could only see what was in our immediate vicinity. Let’s say we began to investigate beyond what our unaided eyes saw in 1608 when Galileo constructed his first telescope, an 8-power device. So, we’ve been able to see beyond Earth for 416 years. I did the math. We have only been looking for something coming from nothing for 0.000000003% or less of the time the Universe has existed.
How Big is the Universe?
The currently visible universe is 92.2 billion lightyears across. We can see no more than 4% of this visible universe. Cosmologists can tell from observation of the cosmic microwave background that a vast expanse of our universe is racing away from us faster than the speed of light. We will never see its light. CMB data and observations from The Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Planck Satelite show that the entire Universe is at least 23 trillion light years in diameter.
Those who say that “Atheists are stupid because you can’t get something from nothing.” are either ignorant of the infinitesimally small portion of the universe they could have surveyed, or they are unimaginably arrogant.
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
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