Thank you pea. Are you flirting with me? 8) I sure hope so, I like that. I haven't been entirely gone, I've been lurking around here more or less constantly, but I've also been extremely busy in real life and there weren't any threads I felt moved to contribute to, until I saw this one this morning.
Here's another thought that I like. Why is the universe as big and old as it is? It has to be in order for us to be here to see it. The best evidence suggests it's about 13.7 billion* years since the Big Bang, the sun's about 5 billion years old, and should be good for about another 5 billion before it bloats up into a red giant and wipes out the inner planets. And what does that say about design and a designer? That his/her/its planning horizons, at least as far as life on this planet's concerned, don't extend beyond 10 billion years.
I digress. The Big Bang produced mostly hydrogen, with a little helium and possibly traces of some of the lighter elements like lithium. We are made of some much heavier stuff than that, and the only place it could have come from after the Big Bang is the nuclear reactions in the interiors of stars. We couldn't exist until at least one generation of large stars had formed, burned up their fuel, and exploded, scattering heavy elements among the interstellar dust clouds.
So how does that make you feel, knowing that the atoms you're made of came from inside exploded stars?
*for the Europeans among us, that's billion in the North American usage, a thousand million, not a million million.
Here's another thought that I like. Why is the universe as big and old as it is? It has to be in order for us to be here to see it. The best evidence suggests it's about 13.7 billion* years since the Big Bang, the sun's about 5 billion years old, and should be good for about another 5 billion before it bloats up into a red giant and wipes out the inner planets. And what does that say about design and a designer? That his/her/its planning horizons, at least as far as life on this planet's concerned, don't extend beyond 10 billion years.
I digress. The Big Bang produced mostly hydrogen, with a little helium and possibly traces of some of the lighter elements like lithium. We are made of some much heavier stuff than that, and the only place it could have come from after the Big Bang is the nuclear reactions in the interiors of stars. We couldn't exist until at least one generation of large stars had formed, burned up their fuel, and exploded, scattering heavy elements among the interstellar dust clouds.
So how does that make you feel, knowing that the atoms you're made of came from inside exploded stars?
*for the Europeans among us, that's billion in the North American usage, a thousand million, not a million million.