Greetings, I've been pissing off my scientist friends and delighting creationists with the notion that both contemporary cosmology and Christianity share a fundamental ontology - first there was nothing and then there was everything. The Big Bang is a story of miraculous creation. Therefore, both have equivalent epistemological status - either both are the Truth, or both are just good stories. I am particularly interested in arguments against. Cheers, Chris Alexander, NC

Is it conceivable that something finite can become infinite? Isn't there an inherent conceptual problem in a transition from finiteness to infinity? (My question comes from science, but the scientists don't seem to bother to explain this, such as in the case of gravity within a black hole -- a massive star collapses into a black hole and gravity in it rises to infinity? The more interesting example to me is the notion that the universe may well be infinite, but the main view in cosmology is that it began as finite and even had a definable size early on in its expansion. How could an expanding universe at some point cross over to have infinite dimensions?)

Mathematics is extraordinarily effective in revealing and stating the basic laws of physics. Why is this so?

Are symmetry principles laws of nature, or meta-laws of nature? The intuition is that laws of nature are contingent. That is, it could be different in different logically possible worlds. Does this hold true for symmetry principles? Could there be some symmetric principles that had to hold in all possible worlds?

How can the diameter of a rainbow be measured?

I have come across a dilemma, I could not find the question on the site presently so I hope it has not been answered yet. If an atom is the smallest piece of matter that we are aware of, doesn't some form of matter have to make up an atom? And whatever the form of matter that makes up an atom, would have to be made up of some other form of matter and that matter would have to be made up of a kind of matter as well, and on and on forever. Where does that stop? How can a human being ever comprehend something like this? Thank you.

If quantum mechanics or other fundamental theories of physics have it that small physical entities which make up everything else do not behave deterministically, does that indeterminism inherited by all other larger entities, whether those are molecules, gases, instantiated computer programs, and people? In general, does indetermism on one "lower" physical level imply indetermism on a "higher" one?

If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into ?

Astrophysicists maintain the idea that time and space came about with the Big Bang. Is there any way in which this notion can be related to Kant's concept which states that time and space are not objectively real, but that both are transcendental conditions of the perception of objects in terms of phenomena? Yours, Stephan R. (Aachen, Germany)

Is it true that "Things fall because of gravity?" "Gravity" is just a placeholder word for the tendency of things to fall. So to say "Things fall because of gravity", is to say "Things fall because of their tendency to fall." Which is vacuous. A better explanation would be "Things fall because they have mass and are nearby another massive object (the earth)." Am I right here?