I believe in the Big BANG

God spoke it


BANG , it happened

What year did man discover god anyway? Shouldn't we celebrate its centennial by sacrificing some muslim virgins or something?

Both.

This one always cracks me up.  The misspelling makes it even more precious.

Origins do if you take the fact that time is a property of this universe and doesn't necessarily  exist outside of it. Thus outside here there's no origin to speak off since that requires time. It just is.

St Augustine wrote about this a long time ago in his Confessions . I first encountered it in a book about Hyperspace and multiple dimensions where the physicist author mentioned Augustine.

The Big Bang created the Universe.

Someone else was too busy designing the gas ventricles for Hell.

It is the Christian belief that God wasn't created from anywhere. He's the eternal, self-existing being.

Interesting. They say that at ridiculously microscopic levels, the concepts of time and space become meaningless. Maybe God is down there somewhere between the individual threads of the fabric of space and time.

this thread

Still, the human mind isn't good at understanding situations where causality doesn't apply.





Gods or higher dimensions outside of spacetime.  Sure, they sound cool, but really, how many people can fully grasp those concepts?





Id say 99.9% of people can't, myself included.





 

Shhh...I want to see fatalerror's brain shift gears without the clutch.

God said 'BANG' , and then it was

If you can make up an criteria to exclude your God from measurement, why do you even use the word science?



 

Don't need the clutch, its an automatic.



Point is, anyone can propose all sorts of cool fantasies about what could be (gods, other dimensions, whatever).



So what?



 

If there are gods, where did they come from? Were they made out of nothing?

 

Agreed........we need a thread hijack.  

Hey now, I suck at spelling.



No need to bring out that card.



 

It's somewhat hard, yes, at first. First time I read that book on Hyperspace I got a migraine and couldn't sleep. But eventally it makes sense. It actually makes a lot of sense.

Eternity is a lot easier to grasp actually when you realize that time simply doesn't always apply to it. It isn't a massive amount of time, it just isn't time.

Just think on it a bit and check out Augustine's Confessions.

But yeah it is hard for people at first because we don't exist there. Just like explaining 3D to a flatlander, or folding up a hyper cube.

ETA: I really really recommend reading Augustine's Confessions. And City of God if you're inclined.

here's a fun article if you'd like a headache: http://www.ericrosenfield.com/time.html

Wait till the part where the past doesn't really exist and nether does the future.

ETA2: I guess since a nearly 2000 year old work isn't under a copyright, here's one translation of the relevant book 11: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug11.htm

How someone can just walk through this world and believe that all existence is just by chance blows my mind.

I'm mean, it's one thing to say that you can't be sure but to blindly say that there is zero chance that a higher being had a hand in it is just

Such statements coming from your crowd, especially from those who ought to know better, can be characterized in the manner stated.  I don't presume to speak for any individual GD posters, but certainly there are plenty of people who make arguments out of ignorance, and in many a subject GD has proven itself to be no exception, to include this subject.

The questions posed by yourself and other atheists were asked many centuries ago and thoroughly discussed and answered by Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophers alike (although the answers have not always been the same); even the Greeks (most notably Plato and Aristotle and their disciples) dealt with some of the aspects of the question, influencing the Christians and others later.  It's not a question which can be adequately answered in a forum post; it requires an essay, at least, to provide the slightest modicum of adequacy in response.

Obviously, the veracity of the Word in the scriptures is accepted on Faith.  Christian epistemology involves Divine Revelation as being a means by which Man acquires knowledge and when it comes to some truths, it is the only means Man has to acquire that knowledge because it is something beyond his basic capacity for reason and understanding and also beyond his powers of observation.  Arguments derived principally from scripture will always be rejected out of hand by those who reject them as having anything to do with the Truth (or who reject objective, absolute truth itself).  There will always be a gulf here.  Of course, theologians and philosophers have also approached this question from reason, supplemented by observation of the world, and, for example, have formulated logical proofs, such as the Proofs from Motion, Proof by Efficient Cause, the Proof by Necessary Being, the Proof from Degrees of Being, and the Proof from the Final Cause (using the proofs of St. Thomas Aquinas as the examples here).

One thing that seems to be accepted is the Aristotelian idea that infinite regression is impossible (hence the Proofs from Motion and by Efficient Cause).  At the same time we know from scripture that God is not a finite being in that he does not as an entity have a beginning or end; he is not bound by time because he is the one who created it; time is a concept tied to our physical universe, which is not infinite (something that not only comes from theology and philosophy, but also seems to be theorized by the physical sciences); if it were infinite, we would get back to the problems with the idea of infinite regression.  God reveals His essence most succinctly when he talks to Moses and reveals the name by which He is to be called: I AM WHO AM; that is, his essence is to exist, it is his act-of-being.  This acceptance of this truth, which comes not from reason or observation, but rather, from divine revelation, has considerable consequences with respect to your question, but it has its basis in Faith in the scriptures, which to an atheist is unacceptable as the basis for an answer.

Reason and Faith greatly intertwine for Christians with respect to this question and I'm not sure an adequate response for an atheist can be made on account of this fact.  I know it is beyond my ability to make such a response in such a limited format.  I certainly could post some of the logical proofs, if you like, and you can make of them what you will.

We don't know exactly... Therefore, everything in the Bible is true.

My take is this;

There are things we will never understand. We may get closer and discover tiny tidbits, but the universe, especially at quantum levels, is so mind-bogglingly strange, that it is just easier to chalk it up to divinity. Call it "God" or whatever you want, but it doesnt change the fact that the universe is the way it is.

The Universe recycles. There was no beginning, there is no end.

I'm at the point in my life where I don't give a fuck what anyone else believes, as long as:

1. You don't talk to me about it, uninvited.
2. You don't use your belief system as an excuse to shoot doctors or crash planes into buildings
3. You keep that stuff out of public schools unless it is in the context of a "history of western/eastern/north pole religions" class
4. You don't mix your belief system so much into politics that you're actively destroying civil equality of other people

Research the gap theory.

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [1:2] And the earth wasBECAME without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The hebrew word "hayah" was mistranslated was instead of what it really means, become/became. When the earth was created the angels shouted for joy, also God does not create things incomplete. The time between verse 1 and 2 could have been million, maybe billions of years before humans were created.

ETA: did God use the big bang to create the universe? I believe science reveals God, so if the science truly shows it was all started by a big bang, then yes I'd believe that God created some kind of universe seed that began it all.

I think you have figured it out.

This.

God through the Big Bang

Just depends on how big you think God is.  Whoever started this whole thing is big.

Get Both

I don't think anyone is saying either of those things.



 

Those of you that say you can't get something from nothing are suffering from a failure of the imagination. Do a search for Casimir Effect.
And then there's this. "Under the proper conditions, matter and energy can literally be made to materialize out of what we used to think of as nothing."
From "The Quantum Vacuum", by Luciano Boi.

So none of us are here?

mindblown.gif

Gee mr. scientist I never thought of that.

Hey guys which of these two unprovable options makes you feel better?

POLL INBOUND!

God is Science.

Lol, atheist scientists who's worldview is naturalism/materialism conclude from galaxies moving away from each other and background radiation that the conclusion is to hypothesize they all scrunched together into a nothingness that exploded...and that isn't saying anything about how or why the universe exists...wow.  It's really hard to have a logical conversation with the other side with reasoning like that.  Creation is creation, a house is created, a computer is created, a painting is created. The Big Bang idea is like seeing two cars driving away from each other on the highway and concluding that their journey began as an infinitely small point that exploded and developed into cars driving away from each other.  I wish that was hyperbole. A nothingness coming into existence and exploding and everything just happening is the antithesis of a creative process.  

What I have is revelation, truth revealed by the One who created and He didn't take one second, as He could have, and He didn't take billions of years, no, He revealed to man long ago that He took time to create, a short time but far longer than an infinite power required.   He, the Creator who's name is "I AM", He told us that He took 6 days to create and the order that He created in.  What a "day" is as period of time is the period that God took, that a day is then calculated according to our rotation reference to the sun means God set a solar day to the amount of time He took.  He created the day, He set the earth's day according to the period of time, and it was a creative act unlike the processes which govern Creation since then.  Our God's creative power is one of the primary things we give Him credit for, He is the Creator, He has power over His Creation, He raised His Son Jesus from the dead, and He will create a new heavens and earth.  This isn't knowledge your going to find via the process of hypothesis, observation, testing, repetition, and falsification, but then, neither is the "Big Bang".  Not that the the observational evidence doesn't defy naturalist interpretations and fit Creationist ones, and fit much better with the latter.  But ultimately, you have a philosophical starting point, you can follow atheist philosophy that goes against science and plane every day observation that show us blind chance processes aren't creative and spontaneous generation of life or matter doesn't happen.  Or, you can glory at this amazing world, far more amazing than any computer program or physics engine, and recognize it must have been created and seek the One who made you.  

The answer you'll find is far better.  There is hope, you can have hope that you're not space-dust and that 150 years from now you won't be an unconscious skeleton never to live again, but rather you can have life in Him who is life.

This.

Science is the discovery of Gods creation.

Do you even Sir Isaac Newton, Bro?

Do you even Darwin, Bro?



Yup!

Aliens entered our universe via a worm hole from a parallel universe and discovered an endless waste land. As they moved through the universe they discovered a little back water planet ie earth and it showed promise. So they sprinkled it with life and let it grow. They came back billions of years later only to discover a creature they called man was running amok, so they created the theory of God to control us and while hear they built the pyramids.
Bring it!

And the problem is, many people find these explanations lacking any practical significance beyond reinforcing the faith of the faithful.





No, this is something that scripture asserts. There is no reason to assume this maps to reality. No philosophical hypothetical that I have ever seen demonstrate it to be true, or likely true. "Hey, this is a cool, logically consistent idea"? Sure. That's what philosophy is about.  The problem comes with assuming this has anything to do with reality. As you rightly point out, this is where "faith" comes in, and "faith" is concept I completely reject as I find it useless.



Look at hard solipsism. You really cannot disprove it in any way. It could be true for all you or anyone else knows. For me, saying "I know its true based on faith" or "I know its not true based on faith" really is a meaningless statement. Having no way to say either way I file it under "cool idea", and move on with living my apparent life in the apparent universe using what appears to be an accurate way of determining what works and what doesn't: skepticism.



Not to mention science can and does describe entities or processes with these properties that do not require the complications placed on them by religions, philosophers, or theologians trying to prove some sort of higher consciousness.  Doesn't mean these entities are actually real, just that they can be conceptualized. Nor does this prove that higher consciousnesses are not possible, just that they are definitely not an absolute necessary to explain things.



What I find in these threads is typically not people trying to actually discuss these real philisophical questions, but rather "oh my god, how stupid can you be if you don't/do believe in gods? Clearly there are/are not gods!"



I can't help but react to these people, especially those who assert god is a clear an obvious fact, and anyone who doesn't see it is an idiot.



 

They're not even remotely mutually exclusive.