A couple of weeks ago, at the very last service I attended, I heard the preacher say as follows: "One more reason not to believe most scientists is to hear that matter cannot be created nor destroyed". Once more, religious people display their inability to understand science. Have I even met Christians who have got degrees in engineering and nursing who still believe everything the bible has to say. Therefore, more than a lack of education (in these particular cases that is), there is an unwillingness from this people to learn the truth. Am I not going to go into detail as to why I was still attending church until that recently. Suffice it to say that I still had a glimmer of hope for these people. Now however, I would rather meditate and pray at the comfort of my home or wherever I happen to be at.

 

Back to the issue at hand nonetheless. What most people fail to understand is that matter and energy are constantly changing at quantum and atomic levels. Thus, the reason why these changes are not easily perceived by the human eye. The law of conservation of mass states that  in a chemical reaction, mass can neither be created nor destroyed. Whereas the law of conservation of energy states that all energy in a closed system must remain constant. It can not increase nor decrease without interference from an outside source. The aforesaid law is also known as the 1st law of thermodynamics. How can we explain how energy changes forms however? Case in point, when we climb the stairs, chemical energy in our food is changed into kinetic energy by our muscles, which in turn transforms into potential energy as our bodies are raised against gravity.

 

Mass conservation and energy conservation can be combined into mass-energy conservation. In fact, mass is not converted into energy or vice-versa. They are conserved as each other due to E = MC² equation which shows that "massless energy particles can act as mass when confined to a system. Energy = Mass times the constant speed of light squared. Despite the fact that mass and energy are equivalent and able to "convert" into each other without losing or gaining mass-energy, they are not exactly the same. Energy is the essential building block of everything in the universe, and all energy has mass when tied to a system. For instance, fire is a result of a conversion of chemical energy into thermal and electromagnetic energy through a chemical reaction. The aforesaid reaction merges the molecules in fuel (wood) with oxygen from the air to create water and carbon dioxide. It sends forth energy in the form of heat and light.

 

In conclusion, we could say that matter can indeed created or destroyed (only on the surface however). Be that as it may, its elementary particles of energy and mass cannot be destroyed nor created. In lieu, energy and mass are purely conserved as each other when matter transforms. Consequently, there is no such thing as "nothing". The universe is full of quantum field fluctuations (the temporary change in the amount of energy in a point in space). Lastly, we could conclude that: "At its core, all that exists has always existed and will always exist". Have the stultifying effects of dogma prevented religious people from comprehending the importance of the issue explained above? That might be a topic for another day.

 

Sources:

- http://factmyth.com/factoids/energy-is-neither-created-or-destroyed/
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/energy-can-neither-be-created-nor-destroyed/
- Michael Van Biezen YouTube channel.