Overview

This book was originally intended to be an update of my first book, Is Our Vision of God Obsolete? Often What We Believe Is Not What We Observe. However the modifications were so extensive that I realized this was a new book which required a new title. Since my first book was written, science has come to believe that the universe had no beginning (it always existed and was not created) and I have philosophically moved from being an agnostic to a full-blown atheist. Why believe in a creator who does not create? In a universe with no beginning, the concept of god the creator no longer has any meaning or relevance. The book's cover reflects the hypothesis behind this book's new title. The image portrays the crucifixion of Jesus which ended with his death. Jesus is god, according to Christian theology, and Jesus is dead in the portrait; hence god is dead. God is dead is a quote made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche from his classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. God is dead never meant that Nietzsche believed in an actual god who first existed and then died in a literal sense. It was Nietzsche's way of saying that the increasing secularization of European society had effectively killed the Abrahamic god, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. Christian values and dogma could no longer be the source of our moral compass. But it was not Nietzsche who killed god. It was Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. However the origin of the universe stood in the way of my eventual atheistic beliefs. Newton second law of motion deals with cause and effect. Most college science students learn about the Big Bang theory and that our universe began from a single point in space and time. But what happened before the Big Bang? Hawking has argued that asking about what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole. I am not satisfied with this notion. How could a universe be created from nothing? And if the answer is god or The Creator, who or what created the creator? And who or what created the creator who created the creator who created our universe? This presents an endless circle of questions for which there are no answers. Thus for a while I was an agnostic in that I could not reconcile in my mind what happened before the Big Bang or who or what was responsible for it. The question remained, if the universe was not created, how did it come into existence? Lawrence Krauss provided some possible answers to this inquiry in his book, A Universe From Nothing, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself. As Krauss explained, there really is no such thing as nothing. Even if all of the atoms are pumped out of a space and a perfect vacuum is created, the space is not really empty. There is still the energy which resides in the empty space. In empty space, the resident energy creates particles out of pure energy. In our universe, empty space creates particles and antiparticle partners continuously. They exist for a moment but as soon as they make contact, they annihilate themselves and convert the matter they contain back into pure energy. No matter or energy is created or destroyed. Energy is simply converted to matter and then matter is converted back to energy. This same concept can be applied to singularities, the particles which reside inside of black holes. A black hole can erupt into a universe when sufficient energy is provided to it by the fabric of the cosmos, in the same way that particle-antiparticle pairs are created continuously in the universe. Thus universes are created out of nothing all of the time, if one defines the fabric of the cosmos, which is a true vacuum, as nothing in that it has no matter. It is simply pure energy. God is not necessary to explain the origin of universe, and by extension, the origin of man.

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G.R. Pafumi is a former quantitative financial engineer and consultant specializing in quantitative investment analysis and financial accounting. He developed risk analysis products for hedge funds and was chief investment strategist and co-portfolio manager of a Sao Paulo based hedge fund. Mr. Pafumi has 40 years experience as a securities analyst and portfolio manager in domestic equities, international equities and derivatives (listed equity and index options). He was previously associated with Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and HSBC Bank. Mr. Pafumi received his B.S. degree in finance and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He also has an M.S. in Quantitative Analysis as well as an M.B.A. in Finance from the Stern School of Business at New York University. He has been cited in a variety of financial newspapers and investor magazines and has appeared on the CNBC, CNN, NBC and PBS television networks. His first book, Is Our Vision of God Obsolete? Often What We Believe Is Not What We Observe, compared the universe and our place in it, as articulated in the Bible, with the evidence available from contemporary science and discovery. His second book, The Origin and Rise, Decline and Fall of the God Known as Yahweh: Why the God of Abraham Is Incongruous in the 21st Century, traced the history of the Jewish people back 4,000 years to Egypt, based on recent historical and archaeological finds and discoveries. Both books present powerful evidence that god is a product of the human imagination.

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