A universe from nothing

Those who know me know I'm an atheist. More importantly, I am extremely anti-religion. Not to be confused with anti-spirituality, but strictly anti-"organizations who take themselves too seriously in the name of religion and brain wash people into believing that their god is better than yours". It's very hard to talk to these religious fanatics since, when all else fails, they throw words like "dogma" and "inner feeling"... things that cannot be verified by any means known to man. But when I sometimes do talk to them, one of the final defensive arguments is "well you can't explain how the universe began since you cannot create something out of nothing".

That's actually a valid argument and something that the scientific community has always had a hard time answering. My only argument to that point until now has been "well, just because we cannot prove the exact instant and method in which the universe was created billions of years ago doesn't mean the religious theories are correct. There are still several other FACTS that support the evolution theory much more clearly and without doubt that any creationism story can ever hope to do". I still stand by that argument since we've already proven (and I mean without doubt or prejudice) that the sun is close to 14 billion years old and almost at half it's life span, that the big bang did in fact occur, that there are actually several universes (multiverse), that millions of other galaxies exist and have existed over a very long period of time with a very good probability of having sustained life, etc. But that's not enough for the bible thumpers... they need proof (which, coming from a bunch that implicitly believed the first "invisible man in the sky" story that their parents and pastors fed them, is kinda funny!).

So I've always been fascinated by the work done by theoretical physicists and the field of cosmology since that's the field of science that explains a lot of what has happened and what we can expect to see over the next 14 billion years, should we somehow find a way to survive that long. One of the prominent members of this scientific community is Dr. Lawrence Krauss; he's a theoretical physicist who runs the Origins project at Arizona State University's Cosmology department. He delivered a very famous lecture, now titled "A universe from nothing"; it's about an hour long and does get quite technical, though he does a great job of dumbing it down for people like me. Now I'm no scientist or even pretend to understand a lot of what they say. But just because I don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not true. It's that blatant audacity of the religious community that pisses me off the most; that if they can't understand it, it can't be true. If they'd only stop and consider the fact that they are too stupid and closed minded to even comprehend what's being said, then a lot of this nonsense would stop.

In any case, for those searching for alternate explanations and a slice of the complicated truth, this is a must see: http://www.youtube.com/user/richarddawkinsdotnet#p/u/34/7ImvlS8PLIo
Hopefully this will at least open your eyes to the possibility of a vast collection of facts that is out there.

Happy viewing!
- Fred