No.
Nature is creation. Species procreate. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Everything - individually - comes from something else, so we assume that everything - as a whole - must also come from something else. The assumption that something created everything is just as plausible - if not more so - than the assumption that nothing created everything... based on everything we know about the functionality of life in the universe, not just human technology.
As for the clockwork theory: it goes hand in hand with evolution.
(If you believe in both evolution and God, that is.)
It doesn't have anything to do with clocks.
As we become more advanced as a species, we create things other than our children.
Less advanced species only procreate. Humans create.
At the upper end of this scale is God, the - theoretical - omnipotent creator.
Maybe Descartes was less confused than you are.
Maybe I should've been more clear. What I was dismissing in my post was, for the most part, the idea of a God, as a creator (not procreator) seperate from human beings, who created the universe.
Now there views toward nature that are more along the lines of what I was saying about the world before technology, where human beings are seen as part of nature, part of the universe, and not seperated from it.
You said that because everything (individually) must come from something else, we must assume
that everything as a whole must come from something else.
This, I do not understand. What do you mean "everything as a whole"?
If you are speaking about everything as a whole, which you cannot do in the first place (do to language, a human invention which closes the mind into thinking about only things that we can talk about) then that means you are not including something else - a god or creator - which is seperate from the whole, which of course makes no sense. There is nothing that can be seperate from the world as a whole because then the world wouldn't be a whole. It needs a god, which is exactly what I was saying earlier. Humans who use language will automatically hang on the belief that there must be a creator seperate from the world because that's how they think.
Of course some do not, and still use language as a tool of course but do not take it to mean that it alone can explain the world.
Language, and further down the line even more abstracting technologies like written language, gives people the power to split things in the world apart. When I speak, like if I say the name of an object, that's great because I can now talk about that object with you, but then that necessarily leaves every other thing in the universe out of the picture. This gives us the feeling that it is possible for there to be a whole (The Universe), and then something outside of that whole. Which, obviously, is completely absurd.
You stated Newton's third law in the beginning of your response. Now that's fine for explaining individual things, like you said. But to use that to explain that the universe was created by something else is completely ridiculous.
As I (I hope at least) made clear already, the whole cannot come from something else (whatever it is. God, creator) because then your leaving out something and you can get into a very long game continuously asking yourseld questions about "Well if God made the universe who made him? Another god? Well who made that god? And that god?" And that would obviously get you nowhere.
The universe could not have possibly come from "something". Because then we would not be talking about the universe but only part of the universe.
The universe could also not have come from nothing because of the reason thatyou stated in your post. (Which I agree with)
This is a paradoxical dualism created by abberations in the mind that come from the inventions of language ( and by a lesser extent time keeping devices like the clock ).
And yes the Clockwork universe idea does have a lot to do with clocks themselves. Not necessarily the idea itself, although the clockwork universe i'm sure would have made no sense to someone not living during that time or after. But in the way that
(again had stated in my post) all cultures use the techology of their present time to explain the universe.
And no, Descartes may have been a genius, and i'm sure he wasn't very confused about his own ideas, but, to my mind at least he was very off the mark.
