Reddit reviews The Grand Design

I think you're being unrealistic about this. As a first-order approximation, to counter all extant religious beliefs you'd need an amount of text equal to the sum of the texts behind those beliefs; i.e. you'd need one 1000-page book to thoroughly refute the Bible, one for the Upanishads, one for the Koran and so on. And that hasn't yet started talking about philosophy or sociology or the wealth of information that science brings to the table.

Realistically, an author of an atheist reference needs to restrict his focus or risk creating a work that is too big for even a consortium of authors to write and too big for any normal reader to read and use.

Once you do that, you discover it's been done before and is constantly in the process of being done.

• Look at Dawkins' seminal introductory work, The God Delusion as a starter.
  
• A more philosophical/scientific outlook is in Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell.
  
• Sam Harris devotes a whole book, The Moral Landscape to a discussion of what morals could work like if not defined by religious dogma.
  
• In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking explains how the universe didn't need a god to come about.
  
• The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a classic lamenting the gullibility of the public regarding supernatural phenomena.
  
• Bart Ehrman has spent much of his life writing a whole series of books, such as Jesus, Interrupted to show how the Bible is inconsistent and a haphazard collection of human errors from antiquity.
  
• David Fitzgerald devotes a whole book, Nailed, just to explaining why the central figure of Christianity most likely never existed.
  
• Richard Carrier explains in Sense and Goodness Without God one possible world view for atheists, Metaphysical Naturalism. Many others are possible!
  
  In theory, your book would have to combine all these and more. In practice, what people do is read and recommend books like these, and then if they discover a question they feel has not been adequately addressed or that they have special insight on, they write yet another one.
  
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  EDIT: I guess a collection of important atheist classics would not be complete without Darwin's The Origin of Species - this link is to the complete book text of the First Edition, online. Not an atheist work in and of itself but the ramifications of Darwin's theory blasted a gaping big hole in the Biblical concept of creation and Biblical inerrancy - perhaps even more so than the Copernican (among others) discovery of heliocentricity.

If I recall correctly it's pretty good. The basic concepts behind relativity (and quantum mechanics) haven't really changed over the past, say, 50 years. Even the Standard Model, developed in the 1970s, is the best description of elementary particles we currently have.

The most important novelties would be the very "flat" Cosmic Background Radiation, nevertheless having small seemingly random fluctuation; and inflation, which is one attempt to explain those phenomena.

I would argue that many modern books are actually straying from accuracy in favour of speculating about solutions to open questions with for instance string theory and multiverses, for which there is no evidence. Hawking himself is guilty of that too:
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371

try reading "The Grand Design" and "A Brief History of Time" for more understanding on the universe, time and the big bang.

also
>I am an atheist except in one very crucial sense - I believe SOMETHING supernatural created the universe at the moment of the big bang.

this is a "god of the gaps" type argument, just because science has not yet found all the answers does not mean that a god exist.

We are venturing into a semantic problem. The universe is a closed system. This means that space and time are finite. But that is how we interact with the universe. These are the dimensions we know. So trying to talk about what happened before space and time is contextual nonsense for us as humans. Therefore trying to talk about what happened before the big bang is talking about nothing. Just as talking about anything outside of space-time. This instantly makes us want to say that makes space-time infinite, but that is not true. I would recommend this or this book. The second being a "softer" read.

Trying to state that the universe needs a creator but the creator does not is a little bit of slight of hand.

You are saying by definition God does not require a creator or he would not be God. Well, by the same right I am saying by definition the Universe does not need a creator.

But this gets into something even more complex that I wouldn't begin to have the time or space here to write. When you talk about cause you need to also be thinking about what type of cause you are speaking. here is a place to start.

>but from nothing cannot come something.

That seems like an argument against the existence of a god as well. Else where did the god come from? Theologians can say the god has always existed, but one can as well state that our universe is part of an endless cycle of collapses and expansions or that time did not exist before our universe arose from the quantum foam, so it is meaningless to ask what came before. One could explain the existence of the universe as the eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist Steven Hawking did in The Grand Design.

>In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
>
>He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

Reference

And:

>As Stephen Hawking says in his book A Brief History of Time (quoted by Victor Stenger, Has Science Found God?, p. 148): "In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." In other words, it is not the case that something came out of nothing. It is that we have always had zero energy.

Reference

Some people don't like the notion of a universe forming from quantum foam, they would much rather imagine a god forming it, which is why we have thousands of creation myths, including the two biblical ones, the one written by the Priestly Source in Genesis 1 and the older creation myth written by the Jahwist in Genesis 2, which borrow from Sumerian mythology.

Some people feel that they must have an answer as to how the universe came to be. They don't like "We don't know all the details"; for them "God created it" is so much more satisfying.

Some prefer the answer given thousands of years ago by our distant ancestors who said Atum or El, or Ptah, or Vishvakarman, or Yahweh, etc. created the universe. For some, that is a much more comforting answer.

This. This also helps explain it.

• Minsky, Marvin - The Society of Mind
  
• Minsky, Marvin - The Emotion Machine
  
• Coetzee, John Maxwell - Summertime
  
• Hawking, Stephen & Mlodinow, Leonard - The Grand Design
  
• Camus, Albert - The Rebel

>First off, he wasn't a teenager, he was probably about 30.

I was talking about Mary.

>What's more likely? A natural universe was created by something beyond physical laws, or it just came out of nowhere.

I think you ought to watch this.

Or read this.

I have this sometimes (I also don't remember events but remember facts). Like something will happen and I feel like I dreamt it years before. But I kind of assume that I must just think that I had dreamt it years earlier. But now that I think about it, I guess it's possible I really did remember something that didn't happen yet in a dream, given what I read in The Grand Design.

Something weird is that I specifically remember getting out of a pool and walking towards a house -- and having deja vu about it -- thinking it had happened months before. And then, it happening again and remembering both deja vu times before. But the "3rd time", it was the first time I had ever been to that house.

You should check out Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design" . I'm not sure I agree with all of it and I'm really not sure about M-Theory, but he makes an interesting case for the big bang resulting from quantum effects and our universe resulting from Richard Feynman's theory of a sum of histories.

It's not a definitive work, but it's an interesting read and will introduce the lay reader to a series of fascinating concept in classical and quantum physics.

the new stephen hawking book the grand design is pretty fantastic. it's a very interesting, easily readable explanation of modern physics as well as the history of physics. this book is where hawking finally comes out of the atheist closet in a very non-political way, basically explaining that while people can believe in a god our knowledge of physics doesn't have a need for it.

buy this:
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371

There's also the cyclic model; there's also a Wikipedia article on the cyclic model. That model seems to mesh better with Hinduism.

>If you are a Hindu philosopher, none of the above should surprise you. Hindu philosophy has always accepted the notion of an alternately expanding and contracting universe. In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan pointed out how, in Hindu cosmology, the universe undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths, and its timescales are in the same ballpark as those of modern cosmology. Here is a quote from Cosmos:
>
>"There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but a dream of the god who, after a hundred Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the cosmic dream.
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>Meanwhile, elsewhere, there are an infinite number of universes, each with its own god dreaming the cosmic dream. These great ideas are tempered by another, perhaps greater. It is said that men may not be the dreams of gods, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men."

Reference: The Conscious Universe: Brahma's Dream

Or for the Big Bang model, one might address the question as Steven Hawking has in his book The Grand Design.

>He adds: "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
>
>"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
>
>"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Reference: Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

In any case, one can ask "where did God" come from as well. One can say "God has always existed", but one can say the universe always existed or there were other universes before this one, etc., also. Our limited intellects and knowledge of the universe may keep humans from truly knowing the answer indefinitely.

This is actually mentioned in Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design.

The Grand Design is pretty good.

I couldn't explain it more than Krauss; he knows much more about it than I do. The net of it though is that known physical laws do allow for a singularity such as the big bang with no "impetus" or external force.

Would suggest Stephen Hawking if you want to do more reading on it.

*edit to add link

http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299425012&sr=8-1

Complicated questions have complicated answers.

I would also say "Grand Design" by Hawking and Mlodinow. If you can at least kind of understand it, you'll be able to answer why there is nothing rather than something and how it happened without a god.

http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300129205&sr=8-1

I'd recommend you to read this book, it provides some answers to great questions like these. Also, this video :)

Give him this book and tell him to shut the fuck up.

awesome, I am currently reading The grand design and I love to go out, smoke a bowl, get to a [4] and then start reading. My mind just wanders about for ages thinking about stars and planets. It's awesome

Uptokes for you and your afternoon xD