The Limits of Human Logic: understanding the eternal

Christians (or similar types of creationists) believe that the universe is finite and God is eternal. They argue against atheism by asking "how can something come from nothing?". Which is a fair question, but then they jump to the "God must have done it!" argument.  It seems creationists are intentionally missing the forest full of trees here. If energy cannot come into existence from nothing (i.e. be created out of state of nonexistence), then it must never have been created and must itself be eternal. While this is very basic physics, many people are not aware of the law of conservation of energy. 

Here is the Wikipedia entry on the law of conservation of energy for those that don't know what it is...

The law of conservation of energy is an empirical law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time (is said to be conserved over time). A consequence of this law is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only be transformed from one state to another. The only thing that can happen to energy in a closed system is that it can change form: for instance chemical energy can become kinetic energy.


While I'm a layperson when it comes to physics, it seems to me that concepts such as time are a creation of the human mind (i.e. do not exist outside of human imagination). If energy just exists and flows around, it can seemingly do this for an infinite amount of time (can't be destroyed). However, if human-consciousness is destroyed, then does time still exists? There are people that get nasty head-injuries that can't remember the past. Hell (npi), when we sleep at night, we see that time is not as fluid as we perceive it when we are awake (it can flow faster or instantly bring a person several hours into the "future"). It seems to me that, as far as human experience is concerned, time is purely subjective. This is an impossible concept to truly wrap the head around, and an obvious failure in human logic.

I can say with certainty that time within the context of human experience is a product of the imagination. Physicists want time to exists; time seems like such a fundamental concept, for it to not exist would be a complete mindf@ck. In my opinion time is just the combination of all underlying factors that influence the rate of change in observable (which is meaningless without an observer) energy (and do so in a perceived reliable pattern, i.e. like clockwork). The human mind organizes information into patterns, when we observe things like the sun rising, we count it, and create the concept of days out of it (which allows us to create a measuring stick of time). If there were no patterns for us to observe, time would stand still, i.e. would cease to exist. Time (or at least our perception of it) seems to be our imagination connecting observable patterns together for the purpose of understanding (this creates the fabric of our reality).

Christians do this with God. They see babies being created, and extend that pattern out and falsely apply it to the universe (believing it must have been created by some sort of life-form). Atheists do a similar thing with the Big Bang, and often misunderstand that the creation of the universe does not equate to the creation of energy. The Big Bang is descriptive of the way in which energy was organised -- the big bang created no energy -- it merely reorganized it.

The point in all of this is to point out the failure in human logic when it comes to understanding the eternal. When contemplating the eternal, it makes me aware that my imagination is running wild, and I could never live in this world without it. Our imagination encompasses much more of our reality than we are consciously comfortable with, and it seems we are all living in a fantasy world.