Quote: Originally Posted by The Old Medic
... nothing can possibly come out of absolutely nothing.
At the quantum level it happens all the time.
Quote: The primordial material that exploded in the big bang had to have come out of something.
Not necessarily, it could have been a quantum fluctuation that came out of nothing. Theory indicates the net energy content of the universe is zero, and that nothingness is unstable, something will form out of it that will still add up to nothing, but in the meantime there'll be positive and negative somethings like what we see around us. And in order for critters like us to exist to wonder about things, the somethings must have certain properties. There might have been a boolagazillion Big Bangs and they might still be going on, producing universes with different properties, with only a few, or maybe only one, with properties suitable for life. We don't know yet, just accept it and wait for better answers to be discovered.
Quote: So, absent God, just where did that material come from?
Invoking a deity doesn't explain anything, because then you have to explain where the deity came from. If you're going to argue that he was always present, you might as well just say the material was always present, it explains the complex and difficult problem of origins just as well as the god hypothesis, without invoking something (the deity) that's even more complex and difficult to understand than the problem it's intended to explain.