Upvoted, but one quibble:
If you, say, claim that "Time didn't exist before the Big Bang" is a complete and satisfactory solution to the problem "Why does something exist instead of nothing?", rather than (as is the correct answer) trying to explain why saying "God" (a) doesn't help and (b) constitutes the cardinal sin of Just Making Stuff Up, then you have lost all claim to any moral victory.
The point of that sort of argument, in my view, is not to propose a satisfactory solution, but to demonstrate why the question isn't meaningful. When a person asks a question like "What caused the universe?", ey is assuming that the universe needs a cause. However, causality is a property of events within a time-ordered system, and the universe is such a system, rather than being within the system. Time and space are unified, so considering them separately (which is what the question does) is erroneous.
This is similar for questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?". Implicit in the question is the possibility that there could have been nothing, and that's wholly unsupported by observation; even the vacuum is full of virtual particles. We may think that we can imagine that possibility, but that doesn't make it viable. That kind of question is never going to have a satisfactory answer, because the underlying premise is faulty.
I agree that it's important to point out how "God" isn't a good answer to those questions, but I think it's more important to point out the flawed thinking which leads to asking the questions in the first place.
Implicit in the question is the possibility that there could have been nothing, and that's wholly unsupported by observation; even the vacuum is full of virtual particles.
The still-confusing part of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" isn't "Why is there stuff within this universe rather than no stuff within it?", it's "Why are there these particular laws of physics in the first place?". That may yet (probably will) turn out to be confused/meaningless, but nobody has satisfactorily shown how it's meaningless. I st...
This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group. The question was, should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther? We argued for a long time. The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth. The anti-atheism group said that, while that may be true, it's going to doom us to be a group exclusively for eccentric nerds, and we need to develop broad appeal, even if that's hard and requires us to leave our comfort zone.
Things got abstract very fast; my take was that we need to get back to practicalities. Different attitudes to religion have different effects on different types of people; we need to optimize for desired effects and accept what tradeoffs we must. We can't appeal equally to everyone. So I came up with a sort of typology.
The Four New Members
Annie