Religious debate (split from main board)

#776
#776
IPorange said:
You are thinking of time linearly. Current theories suggest it isn't. There is no "beginning" or end, but rather a cyclical booming and busting. We're in a booming phase.
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Really? Many think the Bible suggested the same thing. :)
 
#779
#779
vollygirl said:
Current theories? That replace previous theories, or theories where there wasn't one before.
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I don't understand what you are asking... Are you asking if there were previous theories? Sure. I don't know about there ever not being a theory. Creation itself used to be the theory of origin for scientists up until the mid 1800's, when evidence of evolution discredited the creation story of the Bible.
 
#780
#780
IPorange said:
I don't understand what you are asking... Are you asking if there were previous theories? Sure. I don't know about there ever not being a theory. Creation itself used to be the theory of origin for scientists up until the mid 1800's, when evidence of evolution discredited the creation story of the Bible.
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In some opinions.
 
#783
#783
vollygirl said:
How did the universe come into being?
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I made a long post about this several pages back but there's a few different angles.

1) Something came from nothing: The idea that something can come from "nothing" is normally dismissed as nonsense. But scientifically the only equivalent of this is the law of conservation of mass and energy, which states that mass, or energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed. But if you actually look at the whole universe, and calculate the amount of energy in it, you come up with zero.

Why is that? Surely there's "stuff" in the universe, but it's cancelled out. This is due to gravitational potential energy. If you lift a weight from the ground to your desk, you use energy. Where did it go? Energy can not be "consumed" it can only change form. Well most of it went into "gravitational potential energy". That's the energy the weight has due to Earth's gravity. When you calculate the total amount of energy in the universe due to light, matter (Take the mass of the universe and use E=mc^2, c being the speed of light), and everything else, and you calculate the total amount of gravitational potential energy, you find that they are the same. But gravitational potential energy, it turns out, is negative. So the total amount of energy in the Universe is 0. It's counterintuitive, but it's true nonetheless.

But what about the "stuff" in the universe? What "caused" it to happen into being? That answer lies in physics on the atomic scale (quantum mechanics). One of the founding ideas of QM is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can't know certain "conjugate variables" to equal precision. For example, you cannot "know" both the position and the momentum of a particle to 100% accuracy at the same time. Because if you try to measure the position, you have to shine a light on it, which changes its momentum, and vice versa. There are other pairs of variables like this, the ones we need to look at are energy and time.

If I were to do an experiment where I emptied a box of all its air (that's assuming I have top-of-the line vacuum pumps that really do remove all of the air), I could then say that there is zero energy in that box. But due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this is not possible. Even when you empty a space of all of its light, matter, and everything else, you can never say there is no "energy" there. What this means is there is always some uncertainty in the amount of the energy in the box, even if it is completely "empty". This is what physicists call "zero-point energy" and it's a real, measured phenomenon. It has been confirmed to exist through something called the Casimir effect.

In this vacuum, it is theorized that so-called "virtual particles" can materialize and dematerialize at random, if the energy gets high enough (because of the uncertainty principle we cannot tell when this happens, but the particles can be detected by the effect they have, see the Casimir effect). These particles do not violate the conservation law, as they are just manifestations of this zero-point energy (it wouldn't make sense to have energy without some particle associated with it).

So, something really can come from nothing. It is happening right now in the tiny vacuums inside all the atoms in your body.

2) The Universe could be finite in time but unbound: We tend to think of time as linear, there is a past, present, and future, and they come in an order. But in all actuality time could actually really be more like a circle: finite but unbound. A circle has only so much circumference, but it has no "beginning" or "end" points, like a line. Our psychological idea of a "future" and a "past" doesn't have to correlate with an actual physical sense of "past" and "future". The only way "past" and "future" make sense in physics is in terms of entropy, which is a measure of disorder in the universe, to put it simply. Think about it, if you were locked in a room, suddenly unable to tell what "way" time was flowing, how could you tell? You might burn a match, or drop a glass on the floor. You would know that if time were running "forwards", the match would burn, not unburn. The glass would break, and not unbreak. This is because the burnt match and broken glass are higher in entropy than unbroken glass and unburnt matches. The universe as a whole reflects this. If it continues to stay in one place forever, eventually all the stars will burn out, and all the planets will fly off, the stars holding them in their orbits having died off into clouds of gas.

The Big Bang represents a moment of zero entropy. All the energy in the Universe was concentrated into a single point. To say what happened "before" is to imply that there was a prior state of lower entropy, which makes no physical sense. It's like asking what's north of the north pole.

3) Even if we don't know right now, that doesn't make the problem "unknowable" or imply that "God did it". I am not a chemist. While I could spend several years learning to be one, right now I don't think the best chemistry in the world could make me understand how quantum chemistry works. And yet I know that the chemicals DuPont invents every day were invented by someone, and they work according to understandable laws of nature. I am pretty confident that God himself is not personally directing chemical research at DuPont. In other words, just because I, or we, do not understand something does not mean that a God is required to explain it. Thousands of years ago lightning was the handiwork of a God, now we know that they are electrical impulses generated by cloud movements and other natural forces, not an angry sky-god. Two hundred years from now, or perhaps never, we may know (or not) exactly what the answer to your question. But to say that because we don't know, god did it is not a sound argument, it's an argument from ignorance.
 
#785
#785
BeecherVol said:
Not all of them.
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The vast majority of them. And even if all of them were Creationists, the evidence trumps an individual's personal opinions anyway. Consensus is only a valid argument if it can be trusted that the consensus is based on evidence. In the case of evolution, there is no sane reason to think it isn't. I have explained several pieces of evidence to you and I am confident you are able to understand them. I haven't taken a single college-level biology class and I understand them. If there were a single scientist who could prove that evolution was false he would win a Nobel Prize for overturning one of the most successful and accurate theories in the history of science. But instead they seem to feel more compelled to talk to the local church.
 
#786
#786
IPorange said:
"In the beginning..." Isn't that on page one?
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I guess page one is as far as you got? :)

God is eternal... He exists outside of time... and we know this is possible through science.

Colossians 1:16-17 - "all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist." (this would include the creation of time, which most scientists agree would have needed to be created at the time of the Big Bang)

Revelation 1:8 - “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
 
#787
#787
IBlvNTmWrk said:
I guess page one is as far as you got? :)

God is eternal... He exists outside of time... and we know this is possible through science.

Colossians 1:16-17 - "all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist." (this would include the creation of time, which most scientists agree would have needed to be created at the time of the Big Bang)

Revelation 1:8 - “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
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But the act of creation is itself an event. And there is no reason why (see my post above) we need a god to explain how the Universe "began".
 
#788
#788
Snakes on a Wii said:
The vast majority of them. And even if all of them were Creationists, the evidence trumps an individual's personal opinions anyway. Consensus is only a valid argument if it can be trusted that the consensus is based on evidence. In the case of evolution, there is no sane reason to think it isn't. I have explained several pieces of evidence to you and I am confident you are able to understand them. I haven't taken a single college-level biology class and I understand them. If there were a single scientist who could prove that evolution was false he would win a Nobel Prize for overturning one of the most successful and accurate theories in the history of science. But instead they seem to feel more compelled to talk to the local church.
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Why do scientist disagree?
 
#789
#789
Snakes on a Wii said:
But the act of creation is itself an event. And there is no reason why (see my post above) we need a god to explain how the Universe "began".
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I can't speak for others, but I do not NEED a god to explain how the universe began. It is far down the list of things I sometimes wonder about. I do, however, choose to believe in Jesus as my Savior and Jesus said that God created all things... I'll take His word for it.

On the other hand, you must agree that so far science has only provided theories (at best) as to how the universe began... and some of them are contradictory.
 
#790
#790
IBlvNTmWrk said:
I can't speak for others, but I do not NEED a god to explain how the universe began. It is far down the list of things I sometimes wonder about. I do, however, choose to believe in Jesus as my Savior and Jesus said that God created all things... I'll take His word for it.

On the other hand, you must agree that so far science has only provided theories (at best) as to how the universe began... and some of them are contradictory.
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Yes, but isn't god "just a theory" as well? On top of that, god is an untestable one. We have no way of knowing whether or not it's true. On the other hand, scientific theories are testable.
 
#791
#791
Snakes on a Wii said:
Yes, but isn't god "just a theory" as well? On top of that, god is an untestable one. We have no way of knowing whether or not it's true. On the other hand, scientific theories are testable.
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In "theory", as you put it.

If God was, what many believe he is, why would a believer in him, feel the need to test him?
 
#792
#792
Some things can not be explained by science. Many that do not believe in God, have stated this, on this board. I totally agree, science will never be without its follies, and changes.

As a believer in Christ, I accept this. Because I will never totally understand everything, and Im not required to.
 
#793
#793
Snakes on a Wii said:
I'm no archaeologist, but perhaps they carved them out of some granite deposit the site is sitting on?
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Many were moved hundreds of miles.

IPorange said:
You are thinking of time linearly. Current theories suggest it isn't. There is no "beginning" or end, but rather a cyclical booming and busting. We're in a booming phase.
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Or a busting cycle, the jury is still out.

IPorange said:
All scientific opinions.
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How about this scientific opinion?
 
#794
#794
jamesd1628 said:
There is a lot of interesting evidence out there for such a theory. OE, you ever read any of the many books discussing a variety of ancient anomalies, such as the Antikythera mechanism? Pretty fascinating stuff.
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Heck yeah brother, I have no doubt that our earth is cyclical and there are other earth's around the galaxy.

The question is...... why?
 
#797
#797
OrangeEmpire said:
That is the best answer I can come up with. :)
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You know how you answer a unique question?

Unique upon it.

Hitchhikers-Guide.jpg
 
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