Are natural laws proof of "God"?

[Q]

While I constantly debate what I do or don't believe, lately I have come across something thats seems to imply some type of greater entity. Evidence of this seems to be in the existence of natural laws. Didn't SOMETHING have to exist before the big bang which could have "conceived" things such as gravity, or laws of physics and rules of calculus, among many other things of that nature? I realize physics and calculus are just our way or interpreting how the things around us work, but what about something like gravity? Wouldn't something prior to our universe have had to establish a concept of something thing being attracted to each other based on relative size and distance?

-confused

[ST88]

Wouldn't something prior to our universe have had to establish a concept of something thing being attracted to each other based on relative size and distance?

There is nothing about the way we understand the universe now that precludes a naturalistic explanation. It's just that we don't know what that explanation might be, and there is a good bit of evidence to suggest that we may never know.

That aside, the claims made by the theistic side that says something like this is support for the God hypothesis are unwarranted.

[Q]

I realize that debating what happened before the Big Bang is kind of pointless because we really have no idea... But if we're to assume that the universe just suddenly began existing, isn't that less logical than something "creating" it. I believe everything that happens in the universe is natural, but at the same time its hard to accept that the universe used to be non existent and then one day just happened. Either way I guess this topic is kind of a moot point with what we know right now...

[McCulloch]

As I understand theories of reletivity and quantum mechanics there was no before the big bang. Not only was it the beginning of matter and energy, but it was the beginning of space/time as well.

I suppose that one could argue the existence of a being beyond our space/time, but such a being would be difficult to reconcile with the christian god.

[ST88]

I realize that debating what happened before the Big Bang is kind of pointless because we really have no idea... But if we're to assume that the universe just suddenly began existing, isn't that less logical than something "creating" it.

I don't think that a JC God is a more logical concept than the type of Big Bang event you are talking about. There is a good deal of pre-Big Bang astrophysics that is based in actual science (harvey1 could go on about this better than I could). As far as I can tell, an actual scientific explanation is probably out of our grasp with the instruments & techniques we now have, but the fact that some of these proposed explanations are plausible in terms of a mechanical universe makes the idea of a God-created universe all the more implausible. The proposed God-created story is wrong based on what we know of what actually happened, and the mathematics of what we do know comes very very close to the naturalistic story that has been proposed.

[Q]

ST88, I don't believe in anyway that IF there is a God it is anything like the JC version. I was saying that it just seems as though if you go back far enough, i.e. before the Big Bang, there would be something "bigger" than science taking place. I am definitely on the fence as far as what my belief is on the subject...