Whatever the nature of the early stage of the known physical universe, existence as such did not have a "beginning" from non-existence.

There is no "outside of existence". It is a contradiction in terms.

No scientific theory can contradict the concept of existence. Whatever the rationalistic "multiverse" speculation winds up as, nothing can be "outside existence".

Valid science does not proceed through the literally abitrary. A "range of hypotheses" is not the "arbitrary".

There are a lot of reason you refuse to learn and understand what Ayn Rand's philosophy is. You are no doubt correct that your desire for the aribtrary is one of them. But it isn't science.

There is a long history of religionists smearing atheism as inherently evil. When the religionists had the upper hand politically they viciously persecuted atheists in just such terms. It's no surprise that they employ the same mentality when denouncing progressives; it's their way of emotionally nailing down their condemnation even though it has nothing to do with the evil of progressivism (and as you noticed, the fact of the religious left theology). Same for rejecting godlesscommunists (one word) without regard to the nature of communism -- including its incorporation of religious altruist ethics.

No, he can't show you supporting evidence because it isn't true.

Worse are his false attacks against Ayn Rand claiming she "cleverly" redefined atheism to evade a "burden of proof" in a "copout" and that it "requires more faith than anyone should have". He has a creationist "design" religious mindset and neither understands Objectivism nor knows why Ayn Rand wrote what she did. His hostility to Ayn Rand is becoming increasingly evident as he makes bald pronouncements misstating what she wrote and invents false motives arbitrarily attributed to her in his attacks. Accusing her of "blanking out" for rejecting Creationism is really stupid, but typical of the religious mindset regardless of its shifting terminology. A sign of rationalizing is claiming what someone else's motives he knows nothing about 'must have' been along with what 'must have' been involved in a 'creation' of the whole universe.

Atheism means a-theism, the nonbelief in theism. Atheism and theism are exhaustive and mutually exclusive. You have to believe theism to be a theist and if you don't for any reason you are not and therefore atheist. A slightly narrower use is the explicit rejection of theism, an active refusal to believe.

In the broadest form, if someone (like a child before indoctrination) has never heard of theism, he doesn't believe it and is atheist. If someone is aware of it but hasn't pursued it and doesn't believe it he is an atheist. If he doesn't know what to believe or thinks it is impossible to know and doesn't believe the theism he is actively an atheist. If he realizes the lack of evidence or proof for theism and rejects it he is an atheist; and if he rejects it because of a mistaken understanding of the alleged proof he is still an atheist. If he realizes that particular notions of God are self contradictory and therefore incapable of existing he is an atheist -- contradictions do not exist, nor are attempts to "conceive" them coherently meaningful. If he sees the claims as vague and meaningless and rejects the theist claims as cognitively vacuous he is an atheist.

None of it requires "faith" in anything to not believe theism. Atheism is a lack of belief, not a positive position and requires no burden of proof. The sole exception is someone who mistakenly claims that a coherent, non-contradictory notion of a god cannot possibly exist in addition to refusing to believe the unproven, but that is rare because coherent, non-contradictory notions of gods are rare, and do not include the Christian God. They are also irrelevant and have little to do with theism because vague, non-committal claims renaming god to mean some unspecified aspect of nature without the supernatural trappings are not what is meant by religion. But the burden is always on the theist to meaningful describe what he is talking about, without contradictions and fallacies, and then to prove it without fallacies.

There have been different usages of the word 'atheism' with different degrees of narrowness, mostly because of theists trying to impose a burden of proof, but regardless of word usage, the rational concept employed by Ayn Rand is not a "clever" evasion of logic or "copout" and obviously does not require "faith". The evasions are by those with a religious mindset taking their fallacies and fantasies as the starting point and demanding that someone who doesn't buy it has to prove an incoherent negative.

Just as obvious is that rejecting theism does not mean refusing to ask or sanction scientific questions about how the universe came to be as it is -- provided that is not converted into the equivocation of the religious, primacy of consciousness fallacy of demanding an "explanation" for a "source" of existence in terms of non-existence, which incoherently steals the concepts "explanation", "design" and "non-existence".

Evolution is not metaphysical chance; life evolved in accordance with identity, causality, and survivability under the principles of Darwinian evolution. Whether or not man is the most evolved form of life or there is any other life elsewhere in the universe at all is not decided by rationalizing off a roulette wheel and is irrelevant to Creationist fallacies insisting that a super intelligence must have "designed" the universe. Denying these fallacies has nothing to do with believing the sun and the stars revolve around the earth. It is not a "similar view of the universe".

You meant mc^2 not mc^3, I think Trump is now down to the nm level :-(, and I wouldn't call mass-energy conversion the same as a different number of units of measurement for the weight of vegetables -- mass or energy transforming into the other are changing to a different kind of thing, just like F=ma is a relation of force to change in momentum, not different units of the same thing. (If there is some other unifying 'super vegetable' existent explaining both mass and energy we don't know what it is.)

But yes philosophy precedes the special sciences like physics. There could be no science and no logic at all without at least implicitly recognizing the axioms of existence, identity, its corollary of causation, and consciousness, and the relation between them with consciousness as awareness, not creation, of existence. The axiomatic concepts existence and identity refer to everything that is, was or will be, not laboratory measurements from experiments prior to the axiomatic concepts. The axiomatic concepts were required before the laws of physics could be formulated or any process of experiment and measurement.

And yes, he got it backwards to say the least. I was not "wrong on multiple points".

"Matter is neither created nor destroyed" is the older formulation of the law of conservation of mass, with the parallel statement of conservation of energy. They were supplanted with the more general principle of the conservation of the combination after more became known. The conservation laws are laws of physics, not axiomatic and not another form of Ayn Rand's axiomatic concept of existence in the form "existence exists".

Then what is the point of citing the article? Not only is the non-religious group incoherent and unrelated to Objectivism, the religious, agnostic, and no preference groups are just as incoherent, including people with all kinds and degrees of common sense and otherwise mixtures of not particularly religious values and views. This is America, not the 3rd century Dark Ages of the Christian era. No study can assess individual success without regard to the meaning of the ideas that the people in fact hold. The "study" is an example of a non-conceptual attempt at 'correlation' while ignoring essentials.

Some of it, especially among the most primitive, didn't get that far because they had no concept of or concern with logic at all. Hijacking reason as the handmaiden of faith in the tortured sophistry of the famous traditional "arguments for God", like those by Anselm and Aquinas, couldn't occur until reason began to reappear in the culture. (That is what I meant by the "traditional" arguments for God.)

I provided a straightforward, serious explanation of the historical and logical origin of the notion of religious arguments about a god as "beyond man's power to conceive", which you apparently don't know anything about. The explanation is a reasoned argument. Ayn Rand did not commit a "logical fallacy".

You said: "I reject your argument (and those of many theologians and accepted by Rand) regarding that a superior being is 'beyond man's power to conceive'. That is a logical fallacy. Many men have conceived of a superior being."

Those are your own words, not a "misrepresentation"

Contractions do not exist and cannot be "conceived": The contradictory parts cannot be integrated into a conception, only stated separately. Identifying that is not a "logical fallacy". It is "why theologians historically ran from their contradictions into the realm of denying that God can be conceived at all, while continuing to talk about It, as if that mysticism could save them.

You do not get to impose the pronouncement that a "reasonable argument" can only be what you say it is as "nothing can be proved one way or the other". The prospect of proof does not even arise for the incomprehensible. Before proving something, one must state what it is that is being talked about, without contradiction.

This is not the first time you have falsely accused me of "misrepresenting" you, only to have your own words quoted back to you and your own misunderstanding revealed. Your false, personal accusations of motives you make up as "continual intentional misrepresentations" piled on with juvenile soap box geek taunting "where n is now beyond count" are dishonest and inappropriate, "professor". They do not belong here.

Blank-Out?! Hardly!

If your issue is " It is far easier for me to conclude that a being of superior intelligence and power is responsible for the universe than it is to not conclude that." you're in the wrong place.

We're not here to find Easy Solutions.

And if anything, atheism 'believers' or should I say 'followers' or use some other word?.. tend to be VERY "scientific" if they're like ME at all!

We're looking for proof. Evidence that could/would/Might Explain the "where did it all come from?" question! Any other "easy answer" is going to be a belief in an explanation that's not provable other Than By Faith, and at least for me, that's No Proof At All.

Science (scientists) are very curious and have put tons of energy (no pun intended, maybe) into trying to Answer That Class of Question!

There are hints and conflicting data on the subject, and there's no consensus, agreement or anything of the sort, YET.

If THE Answer Is Discovered, this atheist will decide for himself if the proof is valid (and hopefully will agree,) and the Question Will Be Answered.

If the answer is God Did It, atheists will be out of business completely, but I'd Love to see That Proof!! If scientific experiments, theories and proofs really make it look like God DIDN'T Create It All.... Well, shit, guys... the religious Believers won't change Their Beliefs at All!!!

I find the discussion hilarious.
Enjoy! :)

According to Dr Lenard Horowitz who claims NASA studies show that the Suns output "contains as kind of a central frequency of 528Hz with in it.

Should we presume the ratio: is the average human two-step gait divided by the average human foot length equal to 528? It might be. That would be an intriguing biometric experiment. Regrettably, I don't have the time or resources to perform that experiment on my own. I'll leave that as an exercise for someone's doctoral dissertation.

By the way, what physical property of the sun resonates at 528 Hz? The acoustic behavior of sound in air hardly models the properties of the surface plasma of the sun.

I am curious. I see the term "secular progressive" as a unit in constant and abundant use throughout media, politics, and elsewhere (such as your comment). Lots of condemnation of secular progressives. Do you consider that secular persons must be progressives or that progressives are secular? Do you despise secular persons generally? What about born-again Christian Progressives?

Personally, I sneer with disdain and contempt at Progressives. But I don't see how secular vs non-secular carries so much weight in the media, politics, etc. Would you consider me to be evil (or Progressive) because, for example, I want courts to honor honesty as a virtue rather than the commands of some particular religion?
If I am on a jury deciding a civil matter, should my judgment process rest, as some courts display with prominence, on which of the parties at odds had chosen to "remember the Sabbath"?

Yes, I fully understand that you are not responsible for the rampant use of "secular progressive" throughout the media. But you linked them, so I'm asking.

Given that I am secular, but not a progressive, do you despise me, half despise me, reserve judgment until you know more about my character, consider me to be an argumentative pain in the ass (I am—it's true), or what? Just curious.

I just find it a very interesting coincedence that 528Hz Is such a prevalent and important frequecy and our anatomical march match that number
Leads me to believe some Ancient people were
Very advanced.
As to The 33/32 symbol examples, I believe it refers to our hearts reasonance above the Schumann resonance and the importance there of to modern Freemasons as well as people thousands of years ago.

I am not sure if I agree with the formulation of the question here. Using the Bible's metaphor, once you take a bite of the apple, there is no way back; there is no red pill to bring you back into the Matrix. Of course, one could ask if having the knowledge is a worthwhile endeavor? But the choice could be made only before the knowledge is injected.

Note to my mystical self: Do not make a voodoo doll of Steven-Wells.

Okay, I wish to call you a mystic. I, myself, am a hard-core atheist. Born once, and that was quite sufficient.

I swear to god I'm an atheist (a word joke) and have effectively been one for most of my 60-something years. During my very early years (say, up to 7 years old), I hadn't thought much about the topic, other than that IF there was a god, he did a lot of mean and stupid things. Since then, I have never understood the belief in deities by other than third-world un-sophisticates, but it happens a lot. As long as others don't force their mysticism on me (particularly by law) I'll be okay.

I would not abandon this forum, nor should you, merely because some portion of the members are variously atheist, theist, deist, pantheist, or what have you. Many people here are good people with sound arguments that are worthy of consideration, regardless that some notions about religious topics (from either side) may be looked on with disdain.
So, no, this is not an atheist-only club, and your opinions are welcome, at least by me, and surely by many others of differing beliefs or non-beliefs.

Impossible.
It's like what a famous ancient Greek philosopher (can't recall which) said about telling a story (albeit a play or The Odyssey): It needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
I submit the same is true of all natural things.

I don't follow the 33 magical number point. Perhaps I'm intellectually unviable.

I won't even ask how 5,280 feet in a mile has something to do with resonance, because it doesn't.
The foot and the mile both come from simple human anatomy, but use different scales..

A "foot" of length (guess how the word was picked) was derived from the length of a human foot, set to its precise size originally per a (presumed) noble foot.

And the word "mile" comes from the Latin word for 1,000. Its length comes from the standard measured step in which Roman legions paced off the Roman empire. Try it yourself. March left-right-left-right. From one step of the left foot to the next will be close to 5.28 feet, the double stride unit of measure. One thousand of those paces became the mile. The Romans were very effective at pacing distances to their standard.
So a mile is merely a metric multiple of a standard legion step, at a reasonable scale for the kinds of distances foot soldiers and horseback riders would find useful.