Is this how an Atheist sees part of the debate here?

Unanswerable.

Step 1, "Why did the universe start, suddenly?

This is not answerable from an Atheistic point of view. There is no viable scientific paradigm.

All answers require Faith in something . Even in Science.

-excellent debate!

What on earth are you babbling about?

Atheists look at the debate this way.

There is no God. It doesn't matter if you call it Jehovah, Allah, Vishnu, or The Flying Spagetti Monster.

The Bible is a nice piece of work. Many men wrote it, and it has some great bits of violence, drama, and smut. However, it IS just a book.

Dogma and doctrine are not religiously exclusive. However, one cannot reasonably expect that anyones religious dogmatic beliefs are the ONLY true way to the discovery of an invisible friend.

The idea that there is an all-powerful sky-daddy IS absurd. It is just as absurd as Santa Claus. Don't you think it's kind of strange that there is actually MORE evidence that Santa exists than God though???

A better place to start would be to honestly ask yourself why you believe what you believe and how you came by the faith you have.

Someone told you God existed and gave you a book. More people who have read that book get together with you from time to time to talk about how great and wonderful that book is, and how much your invisible friend means to you all.

Occasionally you go to the God store and give money to a guy who tells you more about the book and your invisible friend. Church IS a business. A churches business is to get people to give money for someone to talk about a book and their invisible friend. He can give you no tangible evidence or reasoning, but that which is in the book he is paid to talk about...

Don't you find that rather suspicious?

-SD-

You seem to be suggesting that Atheists are confused about which God is the real one. Speaking for myself, since each person on this planet believes differently from the rest, I am not the least bit confused about my religious beliefs. I am not looking for a religion, having been brought up as a Catholic.

I have made a very extensive study of all major beliefs, and have come to the conclusion that they're all simply superstition. To me, any belief in the supernatural is superstition. Gods, devils, angels, Santa Claus, zombies, and all the others are not natural. They're beyond the natural. They're supernatural, therefore only in the imagination of the superstitious.

The bible, the torah, the koran, and all the other "holy" books are just that - - books. None have been written by any God. None have been inspired by a non-existing God, all are right out of the imagination of superstitious people who were looking for a way to escape death.

You're wrong in believing we're at step no. 1. That would suggest that Atheists are looking for a God. Perhaps you're right, some Atheists. For me, and I believe most of the others we do not believe in the supernatiral, therefore, we're not hunting out any Gods to worship.

Only the visible universe started. The rest of it always existed as a consequence of that which we call the Heisenburg Indeterminancy Principle (HIP). A vacuum with 0EV as its vacuum energy (aka: zero-point energy) would be perfectly determinable and a violation of the HIP.

This initial baseline is known as the inflaton.

Imagine a big rubber sheet, infinitely long and wide, and extremely thin. The thing will be vibrating fairly randomly just from the non-zero zeropoint energy. These energy fluctuations propagate as waves. Get enough waves adding up, and you'll get some pretty high crests and valleys. Get a big enough deviation, and you'll stretch the rubber in that immediate area so much that its elasticity will change. This is analgous to a vacuum phase change. In the rubber, the sudden rearrangement of the molecules will be released as heat, in a vacuum phase change, the potential energy is released as a massive swelling of spacetime and particles. It's as though the hill gets so high that the rubber loses a great deal of its elasticity and spreads out hugely because it no longer has the same force pulling it back to itself.

Its presence in the rubber sheet will remain only the size of the original hill. Its internal size however, will be much, MUCH larger. This also extends to the real situation. Within the inflaton, the whole universe, our visible universe is smaller than planck scale. However, internally, we're so big that our universe would literally be spawning nearly infinitely many universes itself. We can't see them because they are sub-planck to us, nor can they see us because we are behind their inflationary wall. Inflation happens at speeds that are superluminal, so causality breaks down at this point. The interesting thing of the wall though is that it perfectly MAINTAINS causality.

Long story short: what we see started, randomly. Where it exists had to ALWAYS exist, it could not have not existed.

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The inflaton isn't being damped. Quantum wave functions are perfect in that regard -- they aren't ACTUAL waves... or they are waves propagated by lossless particles... or... well... you seem an intelligent gent, I'm sure you realize quantum physics has some non-normal takes on a few things. It's sufficient to say that quantum wave functions are fundamental. The vacuum energy of a vacuum is a constant. In fact, it's possible via quantum tunneling for a vacuum's energy to increase in a small area, and this itself would cause a propagative state change.

Let us say, for example, that the base inflaton has a 10 ^ 100 EV baseline. Our visible universe's particular vacuum state has something significantly lower (I don't recall off the top of my head -- a single cubic centimeter contains enough vacuum energy to boil off earth's oceans though). Let's say 10 ^ 90 EV. Because of the nature of quantum randomness, it is possible for a sub-planck fluctuation to momentarily jump to 10 ^ 110. If that fluctuation then spawned a sub-universe, it's vacuum energy might be 10^100 EV -- the same as the original inflaton, more than the 'parent' universe.

There, by the way, is your quantum entropy. The average total of all universes' vacuum energies would be fluctuating around a central point in a probablistic manner.

Your question is not answerable. Not even by religion. Because you DON'T know anymore than an Atheist if you're right. You BELIEVE you're right, just as they believe they're right. Knowing and believing are two different things.

It's not about not wanting to believe. It's about having no REASON to believe other than fear. Many people are deciding not to allow fear to rule their lives.

Just remember this... atheism is NOT a religion and an atheist has NOT turned themselves into a god. That's so closed minded and uneducated there aren't even words. Apparently there are far too many people on here that don't seem to understand the definition of Atheist. To them, I say go back to school because if you can't read a simple dictionary, you shouldn't have graduated high school.

Put it this way... if you're right about your god, then we'll all find out when we die. If you're right about your god, then he will forgive us that transgression of not believing in him and allow us into heaven anyway if we lived our lives in a "good" way. After all, forgiveness is divine, isn't it?

If you're not right about your god being loving, forgiving, and accepting, and throwing us into hell anyway, then I don't want to spend eternity basking in his glory just so he knows how wonderful he is. He lied to us anyway. Which, in my estimation, makes him as bad as Satan.

Yes, I think that you have summed it up, and looked it from both perspectives, which most seldom do. There is too much confusion and not enough clarity when it comes to religion. And when people are confused, because the ones that claim themselves to be teachers or examples of god are confused as well, then what do you believe. I dont think it matters whether or not you believe in god. What matters is that your actions upon this world, and toward your fellow man is with good intention, and compassion. This is to be said god like. I wish you well

I don't quite get the question??

Are you saying that atheists are stupid to be atheists or believer stupid to be believers?

I, frankly believe that God exits, not in a physical but a spiritual form. He or She or It, has no wives no husbands no children nothing "real" or "physical", but he exists in our minds to help and guide us. We don't need a doctrine to realize God, because God is within us. WE are God, God is Us.....That leaves aside the pointless question of does he really exists.... Yes he does, in my mind, not on paper, wars...I will not make decisions because God wanted me to do so...but on logic...but i will still belive in such a power. Even though there was a big bang, all the energy that exists, is what i consider to be God.

It even allows me to look elsewhere and realize, there is no wrong interpretation of God. What value does good have without evil. And what is the point of evil, if there is no good. Let them be one ..balanced...and infinite. One cannot see God...touch God...taste God...hear God...etc..because, i stress here again...this is just my opinion, he has no physical form.

I see it as children who are overexcited about something they can see in their vivid imagination, but that we adults know to be a fantasy. That's how I see it. And some believers get mad, too, when you don't buy their stories... just like children.

EDIT: I don't see how the fact that so many Americans are religious affects what I've said. Anyway, I'm not 'American' in the sense you put it. I am American, because I live in America, the Continent, not in the United States of America. I'm from Argentina, where we have a saying, BTW, about the decisions by majorities. We say: "Eat trash. Millions of flies cannot be wrong."

EDIT2: "You are associating belief in God with a childish mentality."... Sorry, but yes. I am.

Yes, this sounds condescending, but I don't mean it to be, but it's the same as trying to get a baby to drive a car when they haven't yet learned how to walk.....they have to take their first step of faith before their eyes are open to understand. There really isn't much point in continuing with the "go-round" all the time.

Well, to a Christian, there is only one God. As for which sect, it does not matter as long as you are worshiping the same God and believe in Jesus. There is one Bible, as for the books that are claimed to have not been put into the Bible, they are just that-other books. Faith is part of Christianity, that is just a fact. Atheist's do not WANT to believe, there reasons are just excuses.*