:rotfl: Nice try! I'm not talking about our solar system or our galaxy, but the ENTIRE physical universe. That is a closed system.
All you've done is push the problem outside of our galaxy.
The universe is very largely considered
infinite (or at least a subset of an infinite number of multiverses), and can therefore not be considered a closed system.
Turbo said:
Well, you have to start somewhere. I never claimed that this argument proves that the supernatural creator is the God of the Bible; I only claimed that it proved there is a supernatural creator, that the universe must have a supernatural origin.
It is absolutely impossible to offer a scientific defense of the supernatural, since by definition it is not bound by nature. As such I find no reason
within nature to demand the existence of the supernatural.
Again, the "first cause" argument is little more than the last vestige of a "God of the Gaps" approach to reality. Far removed from a time when virtually every natural phenomenon was explained in supernatural terms, we have developed fully satisfactory scientific explanations for virtually every aspect of reality. As this has occurred, the role of a god, or the spiritual, in the universe has grown infinitesimally smaller at a startlingly rapid rate, shrinking to the point that virtually the
only naturalistic argument remaining for a god is the "First Cause" argument - which assumes the unnecessary premise that the universe
need have a first cause.
In other words, your god has but
one gap in which he remains a remotely plausible explanation, and there is overwhelming dispute as to whether that gap need even exist in the first place.
Tell me - will you at long last abandon your pretensions of a "rational" faith once that final remaining gap has been inevitably filled by science?