@Hikmah Heikal Thanks for joining the group, Hickmah. Sorry for the delay in welcoming you and others — took two weeks off to recover from a minor surgery. In the context of all existing theistic religions, god is merely humanity’s projection of an all powerful being who serves as a strong black garbage bag into which all mysteries are dumped. The best account of this explanation was provided by Feuerbach’s writings. In the context of philosophy, the only logical way for god to exist is Spinoza’s “god or nature” — namely identifying nature as god (in essence as good as denying god). In the context of science, whatever exists is but a form of energy — there’s no god whatsoever, just energy in its myriad forms.

@Lisa Dyer Thanks for joining the group, Lisa, and for your seemingly rather straightforward question. For many religious people, the answer is seemingly straightforward too: as taught by the Bible, God the Creator created humans. But it isn’t really an ultimate answer because one can continue to ask: who created God? Now the challenge has shifted: at first, the question was to explain the origin of humans who are known to obviously exist, however, with that answer, a new question has been raised — how to explain the origin of God who’s not known to obviously exist. That’s no answer at all. The correct way to answer your question is to deconstruct it: more specifically, to deconstruct the notion of creation. Whatever exists is but a form of energy — in the forms of humans, animals, vegetation, bacteria, clouds, and what not. Any perceived action of creation is in fact merely transformation of energy: every part of the universe plays a role in the formation of anything in the universe, be it a grain of sand, a mountain, a grasshopper, or a human being. Amidst all these transformations, one thing remains constant: energy conserves. More specifically, angular momentum conserves. This transformation of nature and within nature is the true meaning of Darwin’s evolutionary theory: humans are part of this evolutionary process just like all the insects, all the stars and all the galaxies. To look for the details of this evolutionary process, to find out about all the forms and structures and functions, to figure out the causal relationships, constitutes science or the pursuit of knowledge. To appreciate the wonders of the universe, of the transforming nature, of which we are an integral part, constitutes genuine spirituality — something humanity as a whole hasn’t evolved to acquire yet.

Abstract: This short note outlines the philosophical reasoning that the perceived imbalance between matter and antimatter is a conceptual problem for which there exists a theoretical solution. The current definition of matter automatically excludes the possibility for particles and antiparticles to form matter despite the fact that antiparticles (positrons) can be produced in the decay of matter. The assumption that particles and antiparticles always annihilate each other does not reflect an initial condition in which elementary particles and antiparticles are relativistically rotating around each other as pairs in a rotating universe. With this initial condition, matter is necessarily made up of electrons and positrons, thereby accounting for all the antiparticles and explaining why there is matter rather than antimatter. 1. The Big Bang was accompanied with an equal number of particles and antiparticles, but contrary to common assumption, this doesn’t automatically mean that there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter at that time. To assume this would be to miss the critical step involved for these particles and antiparticles to form matter or antimatter. 2. Composite particles such as protons and neutrons, due to their composite nature, can be treated as matter since they must contain elementary particles. In other words, before the emergence of composite particles or antiparticles and other more complex forms of matter or antimatter, there was a time when there must be only elementary particles and antiparticles. 3. Elementary particles, being elementary, cannot interact with other types of elementary particles if they are fundamentally different in nature – that fundamental difference would make such interaction impossible. This means that fundamentally there can only be one type of elementary particle or antiparticle in the universe. This contradicts the current conceptual framework that demands a bewildering variety of unrelated elementary particles and antiparticles. It also explains why an elementary particle can interact with its antiparticle – they are fundamentally the same.

@Arthur Scheepers Thanks for joining us, Arthur, and for such a poetic question. Instead of admitting that I have no idea, I would like to offer an uneducated guess: since an act of creation was being assumed or imagined, perhaps the assumed or imagined creators were crying very hard for some reason, resulting in the salty oceans? Heavenly tears over earth? Foretaste of sadness over the fate of humanity? What do you think?

@Cameron AzimiTabrizi Thanks for joining the group, Cameron, and for your thoughtful question. The nature of this question is such that we know what we want to see happen: that the world can meaningfully advance, that we are not stuck in the current situation, that we will make best efforts in that direction. Wishful/hopeful/visionary thinking aside, there is the diagnostic question of the current situation. My answer is more pessimistic in short term but ultimately optimistic in long term: worse than being stuck, the world is increasingly spiraling out of control as evidenced by how easy it is now for morons to gain a dangerous concentration of all sorts of power. We’re sowing the seeds for more violence and terrorism down the road. The world isn’t just stuck, but is sinking deeper and deeper into insanity: it’s decaying. The long term good news is, of course, a new world awaits ahead: once this one implodes under the weight of its ignorance and stupidity, new and better forms of society will emerge driven by enlightened people. The current age is the darkest period in human history — look at the so-called dark energy and dark matter — but we have found the light decades ago. It’s just a matter for people in the future to rediscover that light.