7 thoughts on “philosophers & physicists”

1. Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. In his obituary The Times called him the ‘leading spirit’ in the study of Quantum Physics which has shaken physics to its very foundations. Quantum Physics is the academic study that considers sub-atomic particles and tries to account for how they behave. The relevance of this to the cosmological argument is that he discovered that these particles often seem to come in and out of existence. This of course would undermine one of the premise of the argument. Whether Quantum Physics can answer ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ is still being debated.

2. Around five billion years ago the big band happened, and with it everything else. The hydrogen ball of protons and neutrons broke apart with the force a lot of nuclear bombs. Some say that this expansion still going on today, and there’s even speculation that at some point it will retract in to itself, meaning the end to all life. The Big Bang theory’s basics are agreed upon by many scientists, such as Steven Hawking, but the nitty-gritty details are a hot topic, with various speculations made by many different scientists who dedicate their lives to uncovering, how did the Big Bang really happen, and where does it leave us?

3. Stephen Hawking
   Stephen Hawking has recently changed his opinion concerning God’s role in the creation of the universe from accepting that God may have been necessary in creation to the realisation that the law of gravity could have created the universe and all it’s inhabitants through spontaneous creation.

4. The Big Bang Theory

   15 Billion years ago there was a monumental explosion that begun the expansion of the universe we know today. This colossal explosion is known as the big bang. At this point in time all matter and energy of space was contained at this one point. What was there prior to this event is completely unknown to us and is complete speculation. This was not a normal explosion but instead an event which would fill ll of space with all of the particles of what we call the ‘embryonic universe’ accelerating away from one another. The big bang consisted of an explosion that unlike a bomb or grenade that explodes outward, but the e was an explosion of space within itself. The big bang lay the foundations for the universe so the galaxies were not all clumped together in one big pile.

5. David Hume was a famous scottish philosopher and historian 1711-1776.
   Hume has made of variety of counter conjectures to various philosophical arguments in particular cosmological and teleological arguments. David Hume is a philosoper who has a very popular counter argument to Aquinas’s Cosmological causal argument. Hume maintains that it is illogical to make the massive leap from: “everything we observe has a cause” to “The universe has a cause” in Aquinas’s causal argument from Summa Theologica . He says that the argument begins with familiar human concepts but ends with unfamiliar universal concepts and conclusions. He likens this massive jump in logic to an inductive argument such as I have hair therefore every human has hair. This lessens the value of Aquinas’ argument because inductive arguments are generally seen as weak arguments. Hume concludes that it is not possible to assume the nature of a being such as God through such a poorly constructed analytical argument.

6. Richard Swinburne:

   Is overall unsure about whether or not the cosmological argument is true, as he does not believe that the argument is substantial enough to prove God, as he feels it is too deductive and jumps to conclusions. However, he is swayed, when considering other arguments for God in addition to the cosmological one and has come to the decision that God seems true by way of reason.

7. Bertrand Russell

   “Does there have to be a reason for everything??”

   “Everyone has a mother but the human race can’t have a mother”

   “The universe is just there, it doesn’t need an explanation”

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