The Founding Fathers Were Skeptics About Religion

In this essay from 2006,  Christopher Hitchens explains that America was not founded on religious principles as apologists claim, but on Enlightenment principles. He demolishes the suggestion of religion as the root of liberty, and cheers for the separation of church and state.



Christopher Hitchens: Yes, the Founding Fathers Were Skeptics About Religion
  
Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist. The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that did not bind the Framers and cannot be said to bind us, either. Indeed, the established Protestant church in Britain was one of the models which we can be quite sure the signatories of 1776 were determined to avoid emulating.

Moreover, the 18th-century scholars and gentlemen who gave us the U.S. Constitution were in a relative state of innocence respecting knowledge of the cosmos, the earth, and the psyche, of the sort that has revolutionized the modern argument over faith. Charles Darwin was born in Thomas Jefferson's lifetime (on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, as it happens), but Jefferson's guesses about the fossils found in Virginia were to Darwinism what alchemy is to chemistry. And the insights of Einstein and Freud lay over a still more distant horizon. The furthest that most skeptics could go was in the direction of an indeterminate deism, which accepted that the natural order seemed to require a designer but did not necessitate the belief that the said designer actually intervened in human affairs. Invocations such as "nature's god" were partly intended to hedge this bet, while avoiding giving offense to the pious. Even Thomas Paine, the most explicitly anti-Christian of the lot, wrote The Age of Reason as a defense of god from those who traduced him in man-made screeds like the Bible.

Considering these limitations, it is quite astonishing how irreligious the Founders actually were. You might not easily guess, for example, who was the author of the following words:

"Oh! Lord! Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland Pensilvania [sic], New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would. . . . There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation."

That was John Adams, in relatively mild form. He was also to point out, though without too much optimism, the secret weapon that secularists had at their disposal--namely the profusion of different religious factions.

"The multitude and diversity of them, You will say, is our Security against them all. God grant it. But if We consider that the Presbyterians and Methodists are far the most numerous and the most likely to unite; let a George Whitefield arise, with a military cast, like Mahomet, or Loyola, and what will become of all the other Sects who can never unite?"

George Whitefield was the charismatic preacher who is so superbly mocked in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Of Franklin it seems almost certainly right to say that he was an atheist (Jerry Weinberger's excellent recent study Benjamin Franklin Unmasked being the best reference here), but the master tacticians of church-state separation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were somewhat more opaque about their beliefs. In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom--the basis of the later First Amendment--they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous "wall of separation" letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by--the Congregationalists of Connecticut.

This same divide-and-rule tactic may have won him the election of 1800 that made him president in the first place. In the face of a hysterical Federalist campaign to blacken Jefferson as an infidel, the Voltaire of Monticello appealed directly to those who feared the arrogance of the Presbyterians. Adams himself thought that this had done the trick.

"With the Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, and Moravians," he wrote, "as well as the Dutch and German Lutherans and Calvinists, it had an immense effect, and turned them in such numbers as decided the election. They said, let us have an Atheist or Deist or any thing rather than an establishment of Presbyterianism."

The essential point--that a religiously neutral state is the chief guarantee of religious pluralism--is the one that some of today's would-be theocrats are determined to miss. Brooke Allen [ in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (2006)] misses no chance to rub it in, sometimes rather heavily stressing contemporary "faith-based" analogies. She is especially interesting on the extent to which the Founders felt obliged to keep their doubts on religion to themselves. Madison, for example, did not find himself able, during the War of 1812, to refuse demands for a national day of prayer and fasting. But he confided his own reservations to his private papers, published as "Detached Memoranda" only in 1946. It was in those pages, too, that he expressed the view that to have chaplains opening Congress, or chaplains in the armed forces, was unconstitutional.

Of all these pen-portraits of religious reservation, the one most surprising to most readers will probably be that of George Washington. While he was president, he attended the Reverend James Abercrombie's church, but on "sacramental Sundays" left the congregation immediately before the taking of communion. When reproached for this by the good Reverend, he acknowledged the reproof--and ceased attending church at all on those Sundays which featured "the Lord's supper." To do otherwise, as he put it, would be "an ostentatious display of religious zeal arising altogether from his elevated station."

Jefferson was content to take part in public religious observances and to reserve his scorn and contempt for Christianity for his intimate correspondents, but our first president would not give an inch to hypocrisy. In that respect, if in no other, the shady, ingratiating Parson Weems had him right.

In his 1784 book, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man, Ethan Allen wrote: "The doctrine of the Incarnation itself, and the Virgin mother, does not merit a serious confutation and therefore is passed in silence, except the mere mention of it." John Adams was prepared to be a little more engaged with theological subjects, in which he possessed a huge expertise, but he also reposed his real faith in the bedrock of reason. Human understanding, he wrote (seemingly following David Hume), is its own revelation, and:

"[h]as made it certain that two and one make three; and that one is not three; nor can three be one. . . . Miracles or Prophecies might frighten us out of our Witts; might scare us to death; might induce Us to lie; to say that We believe that 2 and 2 make 5. But we should not believe it. We should know the contrary."

From David Hume via ridicule of the Trinity to a prefiguration of Winston Smith! The connection between religious skepticism and political liberty may not be as absolute as that last allusion implies, but there is no doubt that some such connection existed very vividly in the minds of those "men of the Enlightenment" who adorned Philadelphia and Boston and New York and Washington as the 18th century evolved into the 19th.

In a first-class closing chapter on the intellectual and scientific world that shaped the Framers, Allen discusses the wide influence then exerted by great humanist thinkers like Hume, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Locke, and Voltaire. It became a point of principle as well as of practice to maintain that liberty of conscience and the freedom of the individual were quite incompatible with any compulsion in religion, just as they would be incompatible with any repression of belief. (This is precisely why the French revolution, which seemed to negate the promise of Enlightenment, was to become such a painful cause of disagreement, and worse, between Federalists and Republicans.)

In 1821 Thomas Jefferson wrote of his hope "that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago. This country, which has given the world an example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also." I think that Allen is not wrong in comparing this to the finest passages in Edward Gibbon. She causes us to catch our breath at the thought that, at the birth of the United States, there were men determined to connect it to a philosophical wisdom that pre-dated the triumph of monotheism. It is the only reason for entertaining the belief that America was ever blessed by "Providence"--as Roger a named his open-minded settlement in Rhode Island, a refuge from the tyranny of Pilgrims and Puritans.

In a time when the chief declared enemy of the American experiment is theocratic fanaticism, we should stand together and demand, "Mr Jefferson: Build Up That Wall!"

The building blocks of reality

What are the fundamental building blocks of reality?

1 Until the 1970s it was assumed that protons and neutrons were the fundamental particles. Then it was discovered that protons and neutrons consist of quarks and nothing smaller was ever discovered.

2 A model based on fundamental particles is easy to learn, but it's not true.  The fundamental building blocks of nature are actually more nebulous and abstract. They are fluid-like substances spread throughout the universe, which ripple in strange and interesting waves. These fluid-like things are called fields.

3 A field is:

• like a fluid which ripples and sways throughout the universe
• spread everywhere throughout the universe
• takes a particular value at every point in space and time.

4 This is not a new idea. It originated 200 years ago, thanks to Michael Faraday and his experiments with electricity and magnetism. He described the electric and magnetic fields as invisible "objects" spread throughout space. This was one of the most revolutionary ideas in science.

5 We become familiar with fields as children when we play with magnets and feel the force that exists when they repel.  Faraday realised that even though the space appears to be empty, there is something real there which is responsible for the force.  We call it the magnetic field.

6 Faraday demonstrated how moving magnets can induce an electric current, as shown by the movement of a needle in a galvanometer.  This astounded audiences in the 1800s. You were making a needle move without touching it or going near it. We take this for granted now. The point is that the field is physically real – we can affect things far away using the field.

7 Faraday’s legacy

The world does not consist of particles – there is an underlying fabric of reality, consisting of fields, spread throughout all of space.  In 1846, Faraday suggested that these invisible magnetic and electric fields that he’d postulated were literally the only thing we’ve ever seen. In other words, light consists of ripples in the electric and magnetic field.  To appreciate Faraday’s genius, note that it took 50 years for Maxwell and Hertz to confirm this.

8 The concept of fields turned out to be even more important than Faraday realised. In the 1920s, Heisenberg and Schrödinger realised that at the subatomic scale, the world is much more mysterious and counter intuitive than the description given by the classical physics of Newton and Galileo. This was the birth of the theories of quantum mechanics.

9 Quantum Field Theory

Energy is not continuous – it is parcelled up into small discrete lumps known as quanta (quantum means discrete, or lumpy)

If we take the ideas of quantum mechanics (which is discrete and lumpy) and combine them with Faraday’s ideas of fields (which are continuous smooth objects waving and oscillating in space) we get quantum field theory.

Waves of the electromagnetic field are what we call light. When we apply quantum mechanics, we find light waves appear as particles which we call the photon.

That same principle applies to every particle in the universe. Space is permeated with several fields. So, as well as the electromagnetic field, there is the electron field. As with all fields, the electron field is like a fluid, filling space throughout the universe. The ripples and waves in this fluid get tied into little bundles of energy which are what we call the electron.

Like photons, electrons are also not fundamental – every electron in the universe is a wave in the in the same electron field, just like the waves on the Pacific coast of the USA are part of the same underlying ocean as the waves on the Pacific coast of Australia.

There are also two quark fields (there are two types of quark) - these fields give rise to the up quark and down quark.

So to summarise Quantum Field Theory:

There are no particles in the universe.

The building blocks of reality are fluid-like substances we call fields.

[Click here for more detail on quantum fields] 

10 Nothingness

Start with an empty container.  Although it looks empty it is full of molecules of air and a bath of infra-red light from its warm environment. It also contains ambient electromagnetic radiation from our surroundings, and even streams of cosmic particles. So, take every, single thing that exists out of the container – all the particles, all the atoms. Shield it from passing cosmic particles. Cool it to absolute zero. The container then contains empty space. We then discover empty space is not nothing. 

This is what nothingness looks like at the sub-atomic scale:

This is the state of empty space, the simplest thing we can possibly imagine. What we see is that in the absence of particles, a field exists. As with all fields, it is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which explains nothing in reality can be still.  This vacuum state is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. It contains no physical particles. This zero point energy is the energy of a system at a temperature of zero.

Hence we see that nothing is a field full of bubbles and activity - we call these quantum vacuum fluctuations. 
Quantum fluctuations are not just theoretical – they have been measured, they are real (and give rise to the Casimir effect).

11 How Many Quantum Fields Exist?

Let's start with the particle fields. There are twelve particles that comprise everything we have ever seen or detected.

The top row represents the particles we experience every day. The others only appear in extreme conditions, such as in particle accelerators.  Even though we refer to them as “particles” - they are not really particles: Each particle arises from a field and it is the twelve fields shown above that give rise to what we perceive as particles.

These twelve fields interact with each other through four different forces... 

Two of these are familiar (gravity and electromagnetism) but there are two other forces that only operate on small scales of a nucleus – the strong nuclear force which holds the quarks together inside protons and neutrons, and the weak nuclear force which is responsible for radioactive decay and making the sun shine among other things.  Each of these forces is associated to a field.

·       The electromagnetic field is associated with electromagnetism

·       The gluon field is associated with the strong nuclear force

·       The W and Z boson field carries the weak force

·       There is also a field associated with gravity. This turns out to be space and time itself.

So... twelve fields that give matter and four other fields that are the forces. The universe is a combination of those sixteen fields acting together in interesting ways. The universe is filled with these fields, which are fluid-like.

12 How do the fields interact?

Consider an example: Say one of the matter fields starts to ripple, for example, the electron field starts to wave up and down. That could kick off the electromagnetic field which in turn will also oscillate and ripple producing light.  That will react with the quark field which in turn will oscillate and ripple and so on.  We end up with a harmonious dance between all these fields, interlocking with each other, swaying and moving this way and that way. That image represents the fundamental laws of physics.  

13 The theory which underlies all this is the pinnacle of science, the greatest theory human beings have ever come up with. It’s called the standard model and mathematically, it looks like this:

There is one extra field, which became famous recently and that is the Higgs Field.  It was first suggested in the 1960s by Peter Higgs but experimental evidence did not appear until 2012 in the Large Hadron Collider, which made a Higgs Boson particle appear by creating a ripple in the Higgs field.  The particle is incredibly short lived - it only lasts for about 10⁻²² seconds. It is important for two reasons:

a) It is responsible for mass in the universe. Properties of particles are actually a statement of how their fields interact with other fields. So the property we call the electric charge of an electron is actually a statement of how the electron field interacts with the electromagnetic field.  The property of its mass is a statement of how it interacts with the Higgs field.

b) It was the final piece of the standard model jigsaw.   It took 50 years to discover and it behaves precisely as predicted by the theory.

14 The theory of everything (so far)

Refer again to the equation for the standard model (see paragraph 13).  This equation correctly predicts the result of every single experiment we’ve ever done in science. Everything is contained in this equation.

·       The first term comes from Einstein and describes gravity. You can predict how far an apple falls from a tree, or why the planets orbit in ellipses, or what happens when black holes collide, or how the universe itself expands.

·       The second term comes from James Clark Maxwell and it tells us everything about electromagnetism, the results of Faraday’s experiments, lasers, etc. 

·       The next term governs strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces. 

·       The part that describes matter comes from Paul Dirac

·       Finally the Higgs Boson equations produced by Peter Higgs.

(Z is the Partition Function)

We have yet to find a way that this equation stops working, however:

15 What does the equation NOT explain?

Three things:

a) The standard model equation is the best thing we currently have but we know there is stuff out there in the universe that is not explained by this equation, such as invisible particles (dark matter). We can’t see dark matter particles but we can see their effects, for example on how galaxies rotate or how light bends around galaxies.

b) There is also dark energy spread throughout space, which is probably some kind of field but not one we understand. It causes everything in the universe to repel everything else.

c) Evidence suggests there was an unimaginably rapid expansion that occurred prior to the Big Bang (the Big Bang is the aftermath of what occurred at the end of that inflation). That rapid phase of expansion is called inflation. Inflation is also not explained by the equation.

We need to understand those in order to determine the next laws of physics.

16 Inflation

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. During its first 380,000 years it was in  state we refer to as a primordial fireball - a state where atoms could not exist, where matter was distributed as a highly ionised plasma. We know this for sure because we can see the remnants of it, known as cosmic microwave background radiation and it looks like this...

By studying the patterns, patches and flickering in the background radiation, we get a lot of information about what was happening when the universe was born.

17
An obvious question is: What caused the flickering that we see in the fireball? We know that whatever caused this flickering must have happened in the first fractions of a second after the big bang. Immediately prior to the Big Bang, during inflation, the Universe is completely empty. There are no particles, no matter, no photons; just empty space itself. That empty space has a huge amount of energy in it, with the exact amount of energy slightly fluctuating over time. Those fluctuations get stretched to larger scales, while new, small-scale fluctuations are created on top of that (see paragraph 10). These fluctuations became stretched across the universe as it expanded. This is confirmed because the calculations based on our knowledge of quantum vacuum fluctuations match the observation perfectly. 

Which field we are seeing in the background radiation?  We know it is a scalar field, which suggests the Higgs field. Or it could be the graviton. Further experiments are required to determine this, which look at the polarisation of the flickering and perhaps find a pattern of swirls which tells us it was the graviton itself that gave rise to that pattern, that is, quantum gravity.  

18 Is there an even deeper level to reality?

There are patterns that suggest there is something deeper underneath the standard model.

For example, the equation that describes the force of electricity and magnetism is almost the same as the equations that describe the strong force and the weak nuclear force. So maybe it’s not a case of three forces, maybe it’s one force and we are actually looking at that one force from three different perspectives.

The twelve matter fields in the universe each obey the same equation (the Dirac equation). So maybe it’s not twelve fields, but one field, which we see from twelve different perspectives.

These ideas are known as unification.  Electromagnetic, weak and strong forces are three of the fundamental four forces of nature, which are responsible for all of the pushes and pulls in the universe. Finding a single force which underlies those three forces  is called grand unification.   The equations for matter and forces are also very similar. So maybe matter and forces are related to each other, and this idea is called Supersymmetry. 

19 The ultimate step would be to combine all the terms into a single term from which everything emerges: Gravity, Higgs, all the forces, all the particles... everything.  The theory for this is called String Theory. It contains the entire standard model in a single concept.

20 To verify any of this requires experiments. There’s no way to test string theory at the moment, but the LHC is testing the other ideas. However it has not seen anything yet. Three approaches currently being considered to accelerate progress:

• Be patient! Maybe it will see something next year or the year after. (This seems unlikely).
• All our theories are so beautiful they must be right so what we need is a bigger machine. Ten times more powerful. That would cost $10 billion and not many governments want to invest in this, except possibly China. It would take 20 years to happen.
• Maybe the suggestions of unification are red herrings. Maybe if we work harder to understand the standard model equation better (see paragraph 14), other options will emerge.  So maybe we should dig deeper into the equation and challenge some of the assumptions.  There are hints in there of mathematical patterns we haven’t explored.

The above is mainly taken from this lecture by Professor of theoretical physics, David Tong. The timings in the lecture correspond to the paragraph numbers as follows:

1 07:00
2 09:00
3 10:47
4 11:00
5 13:00
6 14:30
7 16:00
8 17:00
9 18:10
10 21:00
11 33:00
12 36:00
13 37:40
14 40:44
15 43:30
16 45:20
17 46:45
18 51:00
19 52:45
20 57:00

Quantum Fields

An excellent overview of quantum fields by Art Hobson. 

Quantum fields

·        BY ART HOBSON

·        FEBRUARY 27^TH 2017

Some say everything is made of atoms, but this is far from true. Light, radio, and other radiations aren’t made of atoms. Protons, neutrons, and electrons aren’t made of atoms, although atoms are made of them. Most importantly, 95% of the universe’s energy comes in the form of dark matter and dark energy, and these aren’t made of atoms.

The central message of our most fundamental physical theory, namely quantum physics, is that everything is made of quantized fields. To see what this means, we need to understand two things: fields, and quantization.

Everybody should play with magnets. Michael Faraday, in the mid-19th century, was impressed with the way magnets reach out across “mere space,” as he put it, to pull on iron objects and push or pull on other magnets. He conceived the modern field idea. His view, still held by scientists, was that a magnet alters the very nature of the space around the magnet. We call this alteration a “magnetic field.” You have probably also noticed electric fields, for instance in the clinging behavior of cloth being removed from a clothes dryer. Faraday and others learned that electric and magnetic fields are aspects of a single “electromagnetic (EM) field,” that all EM fields arise from “electrically charged” matter such as electrons, and that shaking an electrically charged object back-and-forth sends waves of EM field outward in all directions through space. Examples of such EM waves include light waves and radio waves.

Fields are physically real. Suppose, for example, you send a radio wave from Earth to Mars. On Mars, this wave shakes electrons in a radio receiver. Such shaking requires energy, and implies the radio wave has energy—energy that must have been carried to Mars by the EM field. So fields contain energy and for most physicists, energy is definitely something real.

Early in the 20th century, experiments showed that a light beam shining on a metal plate can eject electrons from the metal surface. Analysis showed this was possible only if the light beam was made of small bundles of energy, each capable of dislodging an electron from an atom in the metal. Today we say the EM field is “quantized” into small but space-filling bundles called “photons.”

In 1923, Louis de Broglie proposed the germ of an idea that became the quantum revolution’s key notion: perhaps not only EM radiation, but also matter (stuff that has mass and moves slower than light) such as protons, neutrons, and electrons is also a quantized field. This seems odd: how can these presumed “particles” be fields?

Here’s how. As we saw in a previous blog, when electrons pass through a double-slit experiment, the results imply that each electron comes through both slits, implying it is a spatially extended object, and it then “collapses” to atomic dimensions upon impacting a viewing screen. Quantum physics was invented during the 1920s to make sense of such phenomena. Electrons, as well as protons, neutrons, atoms, and molecules, are not particles. Electrons are spatially extended bundles of field energy, quite similar to photons, but photons are bundles of EM field energy while electrons are energy bundles of a new kind of field, a quantized material field called the “electron-positron field” (e-p field).

Moving to a larger perspective, the central notion of quantum physics is that the universe is made of about 20 fundamental types of “quantized fields,” all of them similar to the EM and e-p fields. Each fills the entire universe, and each is packaged into “quanta”: highly unified spatially extended bundles of field energy. The EM field and e-p field are examples. The former has quanta called “photons” that are massless and move at light speed, while the latter has quanta called “electrons” and “positrons” that have mass and move slower than light speed. There are also six types of quark fields, three kinds of neutrino fields, two other kinds of electron-like fields, and other fundamental fields including the recently-discovered Higgs field whose quantum is the Higgs boson. It’s thought that a “theory of everything” will eventually emerge that will unite all these fields in a single unified quantum field theory analogously to the way the EM field unites the electric and magnetic fields.

Dark matter is probably a quantized field whose quanta have not yet been discovered because they don’t emit or interact with light or with most normal matter. Dark energy is even more mysterious and might be an expression of the quantum vacuum (see below).

How do atoms and molecules fit into this picture? These are composite quanta, made of proton and neutron fields (which are themselves made of quark fields) and e-p fields. Atoms and molecules are highly “entangled” objects, causing them to act in many ways like single quanta.

An important new principle arises when we ask the simple question: what happens when we remove all the quanta from some region of space? Will that region simply be empty of all fields? The answer is that it cannot be empty. In fact, if any one of the quantum fields were entirely absent from some region, the strength of that field in that region would have to be zero. But this value, zero, is precise and has no uncertainty, so it violates a core quantum principle called the “uncertainty principle.” Thus all quantum fields must have a minimum or “vacuum” value even when there are no quanta at all. The quantum vacuum field must be present everywhere in the universe. In fact, photons and other quanta are best visualized as disturbances, or waves, in this universal vacuum field.

A region of space that lacked even the primeval vacuum field would have to vanish altogether. Empty space simply cannot exist. This is perhaps the closest physics can come to explaining why there is something rather than nothing.

Art Hobson has degrees in music and physics and was a professor of physics at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville for 35 years prior to his retirement in 1999. He then found that he had time to pursue a project he had long pondered: to understand how quantum physics works. Following the successful 2013 publication in the American Journal of Physics of a paper titled "There are no particles, there are only fields," he decided to write a book explaining quantum foundations for the general public as well as scientists. At 82, he still loves to ride his bicycle to his ivory tower on the campus every day. He is the author of Tales of the Quantum: Understanding Physics' Most Fundamental Theory (OUP, 2017).

Reality FAQ

An Apologist asks me to provide my opinions on the nature of reality.  Very hard for me to give him anything tangible because no one knows what reality is made of. But I'm happy to speculate...

1 What do you believe has existed eternally? 

1a) I think it's reasonable to assume that reality (whatever it is) has existed eternally. But note the issue with "eternally" that implies a dimension of time that may not be applicable throughout all of reality so it might be clearer to say "reality is uncaused" rather than "eternal". You might then ask why does reality exist and I'd say a state of absolute nothingness is logically impossible therefore there has to be something and I refer to that "something" as reality. You refer to it as God. I say God could be part of reality, but God is not necessary for reality to exist. (See point 24)

1.1 Why is it reasonable to assume that reality has existed eternally?
1.1a) Because a state of nothingness is logically impossible (as stated in 1a)

1.2 If reality is uncaused - what speculative dimension of time would render it "non-eternal?"

1.2a) I don’t know what that means. Time doesn’t "render", time appears to be a consequence of changing entropy. If something is uncaused (God for example) then it must have always existed, because if it is uncaused it had no beginning.

1.3 Why is a state of absolute nothingness logically impossible?

1.3a) There have been philosophical and theological answers to that question for thousands of years, but perhaps the simplest answer is that nothingness is impossible because given that something exists, when we analyse that something, there is no way it can be reduced to absolute nothingness. Another clue comes from nature, where simple systems tend to be unstable and hence spontaneously transform into something more complex. Absolute nothingness would be the ultimate in simplicity and therefore the ultimate example of instability. So another way to phrase it is - something exists because nothingness is unstable. I think this logic can be shared by atheists and theists, where theists use it as an explanation for the existence of God (who is uncaused and eternal). 

1.4 How can you support the "eternal existence" of the "stuff" we are capable of perceiving as "reality" given that it has all had a finite existence?

1.4a) When you say “stuff we are capable of perceiving” I assume that means the observable universe, which has an assumed age of approximately 14 billion years. But the observable universe is only a subset of reality. The observable universe has had a finite existence but that doesn't mean reality has had a finite existence. 

1.5 If you assume that God’s eternal existence is absurd whilst at the same time claiming that there are unobservable aspects of reality which have an eternal existence, then that is special pleading

1.5a) That would be special pleading but it’s not my position.  My position on the origin of our universe is the same as yours – an uncaused cause that has never not existed. You claim that uncaused cause is an eternally existing thing called "God".  I’m saying the uncaused cause is an eternally existing thing called reality. But note that both you and I are speculating. The nature of reality is unknown and furthermore, it is probably unknowable. If you claim that the uncaused cause is very likely to be God the then you will first have to demonstrate that God exists. I have never said God’s existence is illogical or absurd. I’ve said it’s unfalsifiable and unsupported by evidence. 

1.6) Why do you refer to God as an example of an uncaused cause if you don’t believe in God’s existence? 

1.6a) Two reasons: Firstly Because God is a possible explanation (albeit unlikely) but mainly because it might help you to understand my point of view if I refer to concepts that you believe in for the sake of comparison. 


1.7) How can reality be a cause?  Reality exists on some basis, either caused or--if it can be rationally supported--"uncaused" in an eternally extant sense. You can't claim "reality" as a "cause" because "reality" just exists--it exists on one basis or another.
1.7a) My logic is identical to yours, the only difference being that your model has an extra layer (God).  So, substituting the word "God" for "reality" we get this... "God exists on some basis, either caused or, if it can be rationally supported, uncaused in an eternally extant sense. You can't claim God as a cause because God just exists, it exists on one basis or another"

You are actually arguing against your own logic.

1.7b) So to clarify, in my model, reality itself is the cause (of universes) because it is the environment within which processes cause universes to happen (among other things perhaps). It is comparable to the processes that cause trees to appear from seeds. Hence if reality is uncaused, it is an uncaused cause. Or to be precise, the uncaused cause.

1.7c) A simple comparison of the two models looks like this:

God exists without cause	->	God creates an infinite environment (reality)	->	God creates our universe within reality
Reality exists without cause	->	Reality causes our universe to appear

The "God" model has an additional step. I prefer the simpler model.

2 Are verification processes in some sense "observed"--either directly or through instrumentation and analysis of results, and the data that is gleaned from such?

2a) Yes.

2.1 Is verification and observation always accurate or accurately interpreted?

2.1a) No. That's why verification should include many repetitions of observations, by many people. This repetition will either increase confidence in the theory being verified, or will reduce confidence and possibly lead to a better theory. 

3 What evidence do you have that reality is non-theistic?
3a) None, because such evidence is a logical impossibility. One can't have evidence that something does not exist unless that thing is falsifiable and has specific coordinates. So for example, I could provide evidence that there are no lions in my garage, by showing you my empty garage.  A lion in my garage is a falsifiable hypothesis. But I can't provide evidence that an invisible, magical lion does not live in my garage. An invisible, magical lion is unfalsifiable. 

So to summarise: There can be no evidence that God does not exist.

4 You believe that God is an unlikely explanation for the singularity that started the Big Bang. What explanation do you think is more likely and why?

4a) There are several explanations to choose from, and I find it difficult to pick just one. If I'm being forced to pick one, then given our universe began with a singularity, and given that singularities are created in black holes, then it seems reasonable that our universe was the result of a black hole in a different universe.

4b) But as I said, there are other explanations that seem reasonable in other words, based on evidence. If I’m told that X is the cause of the Big Bang, I need to see evidence of X. If (X = God) then I need evidence that God exists. If (X = Black Hole) then I need evidence that black holes exist, and so on. I see no evidence for God therefore the God explanation seems unlikely. (But it’s not impossible of course).

4c) There is a wider question here in that I believe God is an unlikely explanation for anything  - because I believe the existence of God to be unlikely.

4.1 What evidence do you suggest exists that there was no cause for the universe "popping" into existence?


4.1a) There is a range of evidence: from quantum physics we have fluctuations in the vacuum field; from cosmology we have the net “nothingness” of our universe, from relativity we have singularities and black holes, etc. I think it's reasonable to assume that there was a cause for the appearance of the singularity which apparently triggered our universe, but the “universe from nothing” hypotheses also work, and we can't rule out the possibility that the big bang theory is wrong.

4.2 How many hypotheses for the cause of the universe fit as well as the one in which hyperconsciousness is the ultimate basis for all that we experience as "reality?"

4.2a) There are two problems in the question: (a) What does “ultimate basis” mean? “Ultimate” means final or extreme so maybe the suggestion is that hyperconsciousness created reality? And (b) The concept of “hyperconsciousness” is not defined. As far as I know it simply means being acutely aware. 

4.2b) If the question is asking about the possibility of our universe being designed and created by beings that are more intelligent than us, then this is of course a possibility and there are several such hypotheses described in sections 6 and 7 here

4.2c) I don't think these hypotheses fit as well as others because they require the existence of those intelligent creators and there's no evidence that those creators exist. So, claiming that a cause is X is not convincing from my point of view if there's no evidence for the existence of X in the first place. 

5.1 What is your basis for declaring the existence of god/s to be "unlikely?" 

5.1a) The basis for my opinion that the existence of god(s) is unlikely is the lack of evidence. 

5.2 Do you just feel that there is a lack of evidence for the existence of gods?


5.2a) No. The lack of evidence is not a feeling, it’s an observation. I can't see the evidence.

6 Does verification offer only evidence rather than absolute proof?


6a) Verification does neither of those things. A hypothesis explains evidence, and verification tests the truth, accuracy, or validity of that hypothesis. 

6b) Verification does not provide absolute proof because there is no such thing as absolute proof, outside of pure mathematics. Verification provides a certain level of confidence in the accuracy of a model of reality. So for example, you can have a certain level of confidence that a candidate for a job will perform well because you’ve tested her, checked her background, obtained references and so on. That level of confidence can never be 100% (unless you have faith). 

6c) Please go here for a fuller explanation of verification and a definition of the terms.

7 What are the specifics of the opinion you hold that leads you to the conclusion that the existence of god/s is unlikely?


7a) There are no specifics (plural). There is only one specific reason that leads me to believe the existence of gods are unlikely, and that is a lack of evidence. It’s the same reason many people consider fairies to be unlikely.

8 If God isn't responsible for The Big Bang, what forces are?


8a) Unusual use of the word "forces" - I think a better word would be "interactions" but in any case, no one knows what was responsible for the Big Bang. There are ten explanations I can think of, some are natural and some are supernatural, including the God hypothesis.  But given how God is defined, then any given explanation can always be assumed to have God behind it. 

9 How did natural forces bring our life-supporting universe into being when the chances of their doing so are so infinitesimally remote?

9a) The question as written contains a lot of false assumptions which are dealt with below. But essentially, the question is asking how it's possible for an event to happen if it is very unlikely. The answer is that unlikely does not mean impossible, so if something is unlikely, we should expect it to happen eventually.

Regarding the issues with the question...

9b) It does not make sense to talk about "natural forces" bringing the universe into being. Forces are the result of interactions, so it might make sense to ask what interactions brought our universe into being.

9c) The phrase "life supporting universe" doesn't make sense because only an infinitesimal fraction of our universe is life supporting. Nearly all of the universe is hostile to life. It would make more sense to refer to it as a "hydrogen supporting universe" because that's the element that we are most likely to find throughout space. #

9d) The apologist may argue that the laws of physics themselves can be used to demonstrate that the existence of a life supporting universe is highly improbable, because if the mathematical constants and fundamental forces are changed, a universe that can't support life will result.  This is one of the assumptions of intelligent design. It is actually impossible to do such calculations because we don't know enough about how those fundamental forces and constants depend on each other or how they were formed (see 9f for more detail).  For example, it was discovered recently that the weak force can be totally eliminated and a life supporting universe can still exist

9e) We don't know if the natural existence of our universe is "infinitesimally remote" because we don't know how it was produced. Perhaps it was an infinitesimally remote occurrence, perhaps it was inevitable, perhaps it was 50/50… etc.  In any case, it doesn't matter. If we assume it was infinitesimally remote, that means it's not impossible and infinitesimally remote things happen every day.  Similarly we don't know the probability of God existing. Perhaps the chance of God always having existed is infinitesimally small. Just like the universe, we don't know enough about God to assess His probability of existence.

9f) There have been attempts to demonstrate that the probability of our universe existing is improbably small, but these are based on speculative assumptions (and some dodgy mathematics).   Full explanation here and even more here and some more here !


10 Would you care to elaborate on your hypothesis [for the appearance of the singularity which triggered our universe] and suggest why you believe it to be the most likely cause?

10a) I don't have a hypothesis. There are about ten that I can think of - Also see 4a above. This also leads on to a discussion of models of reality which include God, versus which don't (see number 24).

11 Aren't all the hypotheses presented here unsupported by what you would consider to be evidence?


11a) No. Some are supported by evidence and some are not. Some are supported by different amounts of evidence. 

12 Are verification processes in some sense "observed"--either directly or through instrumentation and analysis of results, and the data that is gleaned from such?


12a) Yes

13 is the assertion that the infinitesimally small chance that our universe exists by natural means falsifiable?

13a) No it isn't. It's impossible to test that assertion because we don't know how our universe appeared.  More detail here

14 Do you believe that evidence points to another reality whose basis is non-theistic

14a) I don't understand the concept of "another reality". There can only be one reality and I have no idea what it's basis is. But in any case, I don't see any evidence of gods. 

15 Do you have faith that "there is a lack of evidence for God"?

15a) No, because that's not a matter of faith. When I say there's no evidence for God's existence, I mean that I literally see no such evidence.  It is of course possible that such evidence exists, and I have yet to see it. 

16 If the existence of God is unlikely due to lack of evidence, what is more likely than God?  

16a) The simple answer is that any explanation which is supported by evidence will be more likely than God. 

16b) There's a problem with the question, because it's unclear whether it refers to God's existence per se, or God as an explanation for a specific phenomenon. So for example, how could we answer the question: "If the existence of fairies is unlikely, what is more likely than fairies?" It would make more sense to ask the question relative to a specific phenomenon: "If fairies didn't steal your socks from the washing machine, what is a more likely explanation?"

16c) We can use the example of volcano god to further illustrate the issue with the question: The Apologist who posed the question agrees that the existence of a volcano god is unlikely because of a lack of evidence. We both agreed that a natural explanation for volcanic eruptions was more likely because the natural explanation is supported by evidence. However, that doesn’t rule out the existence of the volcano god. He or she may exist. We will never know because he or she is unfalsifiable (and so are fairies, God, etc.) 

17.1 What--in your opinion--is the more "likely" explanation of the fundamental basis of reality

17a) I don't know what the fundamental basis of reality is, I don't know what reality is made of. I don't even know if it has a fundamental basis. The most likely scenario in my opinion is that reality - whatever it is - has always existed

17.2 Can you make a rational case for why your explanation for reality is more likely than God?

17.2a) My case is that it doesn't make sense to assume God created reality because (a) there is no evidence that God exists and (b) no evidence to show that reality was created.  What is obvious is that God is not necessary in order for reality (or anything) to exist. 

17.3 If there's no evidence to show that reality was created, does that mean you don't believe there was a "Big Bang"?

17.3a) Yes I believe it's  likely there was a “Big Bang” where our universe appeared from a singularity. That's the best current explanation,  but it's not certain and there is a growing school of thought that the Big Bang was not the beginning.   In any case - that's a model for the origin of our universe - not reality.  The Big Bang (and our universe) is but one aspect of reality. Reality didn't necessarily begin with the Big Bang. The Big Bang was an event within an already existing reality. 

17.4 How do you know reality didn't begin with the Big Bang? 

17.4a) Obviously no one knows, including me. It's a widely held belief that there is more to reality than just our universe so it seems reasonable to me that there could have been some kind of environment within which our universe appeared. There are of course many versions of that belief e.g. a belief that "reality is a simulation extant only in a hyper-intelligent divine mind." 

18 Can you reference and interpret your assertion so that it stands on its own, rather than just being the rejection of another perspective? 

18.1 No, because it is impossible to deny a claim that hasn't been made.   The claim that something exists has to be made before the claim can be denied.  It is impossible to consider God's existence to be unlikely until someone has made the claim that God exists. 

19 Everything one can reference of "reality" in your perspective has a finite existence does it not?

19a) I don’t know what that means. I will assume you are saying that the observable universe is finite, which is true by definition. But I don’t think anyone disputes that the observable universe is probably a part of a bigger reality. (Do they?) 


19.1 By observing our universe (which has a specific beginning) there are plenty of processes occurring. You haven't made a case for those same processes to be occurring in circumstances beyond what has been observed. 

19.1a) Correct. We can speculate that some of the processes we observe occur beyond our observation (especially using quantum physics) but it is just that - speculation.  But for all we know there may be an infinite range of unimaginable processes beyond the limits of our observations. 

20 It is legitimate for a theist to refer to the observable universe in order to attempt to draw conclusions about what exists/doesn't exist beyond it. But it is a problem for the atheist because there is no basis for drawing conclusions beyond one's purview. 

20a) This sounds like special pleading, but in any case, it's certainly not a problem! There is no reason why theists should be the only people who are allowed to speculate about the nature of reality, or what may lie beyond the observable universe. 

21) You've reached a fundamental conclusion about basic reality, that being that God plays no part in such, or rather that that is very unlikely to be the case.

21a) I have reached no such conclusion. I don’t know what “basic reality” is – I don’t even know what that phrase means.  Is basic reality different to reality? Perhaps God does play a part in reality. I don’t think anyone knows. I certainly see no evidence of God playing a part in the tiny percentage reality that we are able to observe.

22) You yourself are making claims about the nature of basic reality by claiming that it is "unlikely" that God or a god plays a part in such.

22a) I’ve said no such thing. I don’t know what “basic reality” even means. What I can say is that I see no evidence of God or gods playing a part in the tiny aspect of reality that we have observed so far.

23) You say you have no idea what “basic reality” is. Therefore you have nothing rational to offer in support of your conclusion whose basis you admit comes from a fallacious "argument from ignorance"--agreed?

23a) Not agreed. LOL. First of all, which conclusion?  How is it logical to present an unexplained concept called “basic reality” to someone and then criticise them for not knowing what it means or represents? Secondly, I did not admit any of my conclusions came from the argument form ignorance. I explained in detail that they don’t!

24) What do you believe has existed eternally? 

24a) I suggest the uncaused cause of our universe is an environment that is eternal and possibly infinite, within which universes emerge. I think it's useful to consider a set of universal postulates for reality, which allows us to compare two different models for reality - one which requires God and one which doesn't.  Here is a list 

24b) The difference between our respective models is that yours requires a conscious entity which makes it more complicated - it adds an extra layer. If we assume a series of causes and effects, your series has an extra step.

24c) To help visualise such an environment, imagine that reality is represented by an infinite sea of Perrier water.

Our universe is a bubble in that water. That bubble popped into existence and will eventually dissipate.  We exist within that bubble and we can only observe a tiny part of that bubble. So we are observing a tiny part of something which is itself only a tiny part of reality.

24.1)  Are you proffering an exercise in imagination as rational support for your claim? 

24.1a) No, I’m providing an analogy to illustrate a model of reality. Apart from the tiny aspect we observe, reality itself is unknown and perhaps unknowable, hence the need for an analogy.


24.2) That is a model of reality but so is the claim that an exoplanet is made of green cheese.

24.2a) Actually, an exoplanet made of green cheese is not a model of reality. If such things exist they are a very tiny part of reality. This diagram represents the scope of reality - exoplanets made of green cheese reside in the purple "Speculation" area.




24.3) Are you suggesting that all of "reality" beyond what we can perceive and experience has always existed?

24.3a) Sort of. I'm suggesting that an infinite environment always existed. Within that environment, things come and go. So not all of reality has always existed, but the environment within which things exist has always existed. 

24.4) How can you justify that reality has always existed,  how such might have acted as an agent to bring about the "big bang" that our own senses recognise and refer to, and furthermore would have us believe that such a causal agent was not influenced by "cause' or "will" to bring such about?

24.4a) Multiple questions there: One at a time:

24.4a1) We both agree that something has always existed, because something has to exist rather then nothing. In my model, that "something" is the environment within which our universe exist. That environment is eternal and perhaps infinite. 

24.4a2) This environment could have acted as an agent to bring about the "big bang" through natural processes. I can argue that those processes are just as mysterious and unknown as the processes God used in your model and leave it there.  Both models are equally speculative, but one requires God and one does not.  

24.4a3) I could go further and speculate about reality consisting of quantum fields, the big bang being a result of a fluctuation in the vacuum field, or the big bang being the result of a singularity produced by a black hole in another universe, etc. etc.  That's a level of detail which the God model of reality cannot provide.

24.4a4) One can of course believe that the "causal agent" was influenced by the will of a conscious, cosmic entity (also see the simulation hypothesis),  but why believe that if it's not necessary?

24.5) Is your model internally consistent and self-justifying?

It is definitely not self-justifying because the only thing that can be self-justifying is a fact! My model of reality is speculation. It makes no sense to say that speculation, or even a hypothesis or a theory, is self-justifying.  However, my model is internally consistent, in that it contains no contradictions. 

25) Why do you treat "reality" as if consciousness is the product of mindless materialistic processes when evidence points elsewhere? 

25a) There is no such evidence. 

26) Why do you still pretend that our finite universe was created through mindless mechanistic processes even though the chances of it being created per the known laws of such is practically negligible?

Three points here:

26a.1) I'm not pretending, I'm speculating, which is all that anyone can do with respect to reality beyond our observable universe. 

26a.2) "Mindless mechanistic processes" is a meaningless phrase. If one is looking for a bumper sticker to describe the nature of reality, I would suggest "probabilistic events in quantum fields".

26a.3) The probability of our universe being created per the known laws of physics is not "practically negligible". No one knows what the probability is.  What we do know is the probability that our universe exists as it does, is 100% but if we try to calculate what the probability of the universe existing was before it came into existence then it can't be calculated because we don't know what that environment was, or what variables led up to its appearance.  We go "before" the big bang and look at the parameters involved, so there's no way to put a value on how likely any of them are, let alone all of them happening as they did.

27) The "Big Bang from a Singularity" argument is a non-sequitur

No it isn't. Here's another way of looking at it, using a forest as an analogy for reality:

A tree began as a seed	Trees produce fruit	Fruit produce seeds	Therefore the tree grew from a seed produced by a tree
Our universe began as a singularity	Our universe produces black holes	Black holes produce singularities	Therefore our universe grew from a singularity produced by a black hole.

In the context of question 24.3, in this analogy, reality is an infinite forest of trees producing seeds producing trees. A tree is analogous to a universe. 

28) If "reality" has an uncaused cause, it still must rationally be accounted for within one's hypothesis on the matter. 

28a) I didn't say reality has an uncaused cause. I said reality IS the uncaused cause (see 1.5)

29.1) Your position is based on four hidden assumptions:

i) That "God" and "reality" are two distinct matters. 
ii) That "reality" only consists of mindless mechanistic/chance-or-randomly-determined processes. 
iii) That the philosophical presumptions of "scientific naturalism" are accurate and that there is no "reality" beyond its assumptions/presumptions. 

iv) That consciousness plays no role in determining or shaping those processes. 

29.1a) Actually, my model is not based on those assumptions, it is based on these assumptions. 

But let's examine those four points anyway:

i) God and reality are not two distinct matters.  Rather, there are distinct models of reality.  The number of gods in those models ranges from hundreds down to zero. I would argue that a model with no gods at all is the simplest.

ii) None of those phrases accurately represent the nature of reality in my opinion. See 26a.2)

iii) Scientific naturalism is not an assumption.  I argue that my model of reality is simpler that one which requires god(s). If that model happens to be naturalistic, then so be it. But that's not my starting point.

iv) There is no evidence that consciousness determines or shapes natural processes (whatever that means). Rather, consciousness seems to be a natural process, an emergent property of life. 

29.2) How does your model account for consciousness, intelligence and free will?

29.2a) All of those things are aspects of the mind.  My model is based on the evidence that the mind is an emergent property of life and that such complexities appear extremely gradually in tiny increments, over billions of years. If we run time in reverse, we would see organisms becoming simpler, with simpler minds, until there is no life and no minds, then no planets, then no stars, no particles, no universe at all, and so on back to the simplest possible structure there can be, which is the fabric of reality. 

30) Quantum mechanics demonstrates that consciousness impacts and influences reality rather than the other way around, and does so even when "entangled" particles are separated by vast distances.  Simply put, a particle influenced by conscious observation likewise changes--in the same way--"entangled" particles even over vast distances!

30a) None of this is true. Quantum physics provides no evidence that consciousness influences reality. There is no evidence that conscious observation changes particles, entangled or otherwise. 

31) Here is the evidence that supports Q30 above:

http://happinessbeyondthought.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-consciousness-creates-matterthe-god.html 

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/11/11/consciousness-creates-reality-physicists-admit-the-universe-is-immaterial-mental-spiritual/ 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2017/01/29/a-physicist-talks-god-and-the-quantum/#77eb6f432c86

31.1a) None of those articles provide any evidence to support the claim in Q30. It seems the authors have confused "conscious observation" with detection. The websites seem to be yet more examples of "Quantum Mysticism".

31.2a) Quantum physics experiments such as the double slit, or delayed choice, demonstrate that the quantum wave function collapses for a single photon or electron when it is detected. The same results occur whether or not there is a conscious observer.

32)  Is your view of reality limited to mindless mechanistic physical/chemical processes?

There are three parts to that question but the immediate answer is simple answer is that my view of reality is only limited by my imagination. In an infinite reality, anything is possible, in my opinion. 

32a.1) Anything may be possible but there are distinctions within my view, of reality, namely:  fact; theory; hypothesis and speculation.  See 24.2a above. So the key for me when assessing an idea is to recognise which category it is in. 

32a.2) The distinctions in 32a.1 are how I categorise ideas and that categorisation is based on evidence.  To paraphrase Hume, the strength of my belief is proportional to the evidence. 

32a.3) The reference to "mindless mechanistic" whatnot has been dealt with (see Q26). It is not a concept I can relate to. Quantum physics suggests that the nature of reality is probabilistic (not mechanistic).  Physical/chemical processes used to be a limit to our understanding of reality, but quantum physics went beyond that limit.  The best way to explain the difference that I have seen is a ramp versus a staircase. Physical/chemical processes are continuous, smooth, orderly and predicable. Quantum processes are indeterminate, and transitions happen as jumps or steps, which are not deterministic and not continuous. Having said that, the underlying quantum fields ARE continuous.

33) All you proffer is a vaguely-defined hypothesis which you refuse to clarify or defend on its own basis which is not in the least internally consistent with the universe's finite existence brought about by some sort of an agent responsible for such.

33a) Several false assertions in that statement!

33a.1) What I'm providing is a clearly defined model rather than a hypothesis (see 1.7c, 24 and 27) and it has been (and is being) defended.

33a.2) There are various hypotheses to explain the processes within the steps of the model, but that's a level of detail that should not be required in this context in either model. Having said that, the model with God has no such hypotheses and merely asserts that in each step, "God did it" rather than explaining how.

33a.3) The model is internally consistent because it contains no contradictions.

33a.4) The model is consistent with our universe's finite existence. The model includes an (uncaused) environment within which the universe appeared.

33a.5) Another way to view the model is shown below...

33a.6) The model without God goes straight to Step 2, where an uncaused, eternal and infinite environment exists.  To illustrate the unnecessary complexity of Model A, we have to consider a range of issues within the first step. Did God exist without any environment and then did God create the infinite environment of reality?  This would have been empty apart from God. Or were both God and the (otherwise empty) environment uncaused?  

33a.7) Let's drill down into step 2.

33a.7.1) An obvious question is, what is this "environment of reality" made of?   If we want to answer that question with an evidence-based hypothesis, we can look at the most fundamental structure beyond the subatomic world, which consists of quantum fields. (Go here for more information on quantum fields, in section 5.2) but in short, electrons are not really particles or waves - they are best described as a quantum in the electron field. Similarly, a photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field. So in one sense, particles don't really
exist, except as ripples in quantum fields.  But for now, note that in my model of reality, quantum fields are what existed before there were any particles. Furthermore, quantum fields have to exist in order for particles to exist. 

33a.7.2) Then, we consider a region of "nothingness". This is known as the quantum vacuum state (or the quantum vacuum). This is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy.

33a.7.3) What quantum physics predicted (and what has been verified experimentally) is that the quantum vacuum is not empty space. It consists of a "froth" of electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence...

33a.7.4) So - we have a model of reality, where God is unnecessary, and which is based on an environment that was uncaused, that contained no particles but within which particles appear and disappear. It is a model that is consistent with evidence, mathematically consistent and verified by experiment. Compare that with the alternative: "God did it".

34) You say an electron isn't really a particle but rather a quantum in the electron field. So why do experts describe electrons as "quantum particles" per the double-slit experiment which yield two potential signatures--one consistent with a particle and one consistent with a wave?

34a) The word "particle" is used to describe photons, electrons etc. for historical reasons and it's the word used in every day language.  The "signatures" you refer to are the patterns made by the particles depending on if they are behaving as particles, or behaving as waves, which is what happens when the wave function collapses.  But what I'm referring to here is the nature of those particles. In either case, the particles are not really particles (in the sense of say a grain of sand). They actually consist of ripples in a quantum field.