Origin of Universe: God <vs> Big Bang/Non-God theories

[Dexter Sinister]

I'm hopeful that our brains will have evolved to the point of being able to understand within perhaps another 100 or 200 years.

C'mon, you know perfectly well evolution doesn't happen that fast. That's only 4 to 8 generations, and we're no smarter now than we were 4 to 8 generations ago. We know a lot more, but we're no smarter. Homo sapiens is no smarter now than it was 50,000 years ago.

 

[darkbeaver]

:wave:

 

[darkbeaver]

C'mon, you know perfectly well evolution doesn't happen that fast. That's only 4 to 8 generations, and we're no smarter now than we were 4 to 8 generations ago. We know a lot more, but we're no smarter. Homo sapiens is no smarter now than it was 50,000 years ago.

That's pretty old hardware Dexter. Can we continue to run the new software on it? When does the information explosion start to hurt? Or has it already become difficult to advance much beyond this point? Certainly science by itself could continue to advance, but we all got to eat at the same time, and science dosn't exist in a bottle.Lieexpsrs got high hopes for the brain and conquest of the universe
with it, but that's a streatch when we ain't even intelligent enough to fix the fish situation.:wave:

 

[karrie]

Lieexpsrs got high hopes for the brain and conquest of the universe
with it, but that's a streatch when we ain't even intelligent enough to fix the fish situation.:wave:

Well, at least when we all die from the effects on the environment, we'll know a tiny bit more about how we got here!

 

[Dexter Sinister]

That's pretty old hardware Dexter. Can we continue to run the new software on it?

Hardware and software haven't changed. It's the contents of the database that's changed. ;-)

 

[L Gilbert]

I'm completely finished with you now Jillbear. Just wanted to give you a taste of your own medicine. Get the sound card fixed Jill so you won't have to keep making a fool of yourself.

;-)

And as a matter of fact, I am finished with this thread until something worthwhile comes up to comment on. At least a week I suspect!

Just can't quit trolling, can you, lieexpresser?

 

[L Gilbert]

The problem with that is, how many oscillations will occur? Infinity? Why shouldn't it be infinity? And yet, I don't think it can be infinity, for the same reason that I outlined in my previous post in this thread.

That's why someone popped up with the corollary to the hypothesis that says it may be that the oscillations are dying much like a pendulum eventually comes to a point of rest.
I find it incredible to think that at one time there was nothing: no matter, no energy, etc. and that something was born of nothing in order to start creating other things from nothing. If people prefer to think that there's some kind of supreme entity that can do that sort of thing, it's fine. But I think it's simply a delusion.

 

[karrie]

Just can't quit trolling, can you, lieexpresser?

I can't believe how many people either use someone's name, or misuse it, when trying to stir up animosity on a site. I was quite disgusted by the 'Jillbear'. Even though it's how I'd pronounce it, lol. I've gotten into the habit of never using someone's name unless it's in a positive post, and rarely will I use someone's name unless they give me permission. I know a lot of the proper names for people on here, but unless they tell me 'you can call me ___', I just don't.

 

[L Gilbert]

I thought matter could be created or destroyed by changing of state with energy. Fission destroys matter. The end result is less matter with energy making up the difference. Energy equals mass times speed of light squared. The total entrophy cannot be changed. The sum total of energy and matter may be mixed in any combination but the total sum remains the same. We have dark matter and dark energy to explain differences in what should be the summ total of existance in the universe.

Wrong. Energy and matter can swap but neither can be destroyed or created. Nothing comes of nothing, and something always comes from something.

 

[L Gilbert]

There was matter before the Universe was created.

According to scientists, all the matter that exists in the Universe today was, before the Big Bang, all contained in a tiny space much smaller than the diameter of an atom. For reasons unknown, this then exploded and expanded to create the Universe. The Universe didn't expand into empty space as you would expect because there was no empty space until the Universe was created (NOTHING, not even empty space, existed before the Big Bang, except all the crunched up material that expanded to form the Universe). Instead it expanded into ? creating empty space as it went along.

All this means that all the matter that makes up yourself was once contained in a tiny microscopic dot that also contained the matter that makes a star billions of light years away, and all the matter that makes up a stranger walking down the street. EVERYTHING you see in the Universe was crunched together in this miniscule space (which sounds too hard to believe)

Evidence for the Big bang comes from the fact that all the galaxis are rushing away from each other from a central point, as though they all had the same origin in a certain point of space. A bit like debris exploding outwards from an exploding bomb. There's also evidence from a map of some sort of background radiation in space that was produced by NASA a few years ago. Some scientists believe that eventually they will all stop moving outwards and start to move back inwards, towards the centre again, and all gather together, squeezed (amazingly) into a miniscule space smaller than an atom. This is what they call the Big Crunch. Then ANOTHER Big Bang will happen and the whole process will start all over again.

That's one hypothesis.

 

[L Gilbert]

Oh Dexter! Is it a sin for a scientist to go beyond science?

Nope, but it is pretty much an agreement that magic and science don't play well together. Kinda like mixing creationism and science in one classroom. One is based on fact, the other on wishful thinking.

Is science a sect in which you lose credibility if you have any form of mystical or religious view of the world?

Nope, again.

Did Teilhard de Chardin commit a mistake in sharing his mystical thoughts with the world?

I think that would be up to him to decide.

It seems to me if Davies is respected as a scientist, he can only contribute to the world by giving us his mystical insights.

Unrelated to scientific research, sure.

Intelligent people should be able to draw the line between his hard science and his own personal way of understanding it all.

Yup. Enstein had his views but they were separate from his research.

By many of your posts, you seem to think there is only crap coming out of mysticism... But at this point, when discussing such subjects as the origin of the universe, what is the difference between mysticism and philosophy?

Mysticism is a philosophy.

Mysticism:
a religion based on mystical communion with an ultimate reality
obscure or irrational thought
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Philosophy:
doctrine: a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school
the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics
any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation; "self-indulgence was his only philosophy"; "my father's philosophy of child-rearing was to let mother do it"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Mysticism is hardly based on solid or accurate evidence.

 

[L Gilbert]

Mysticism will never find the origin of the universe, it's by its nature untestable and unprovable, but science might.

Yup. In fact, the etymology of "mysticism" is Greek, meaning "something hidden". So, once investigated and the light of day turned on it, it disappears into mythicism. (Scuse my play on words, but I couldn't help it. The devil made me do it.)

 

[L Gilbert]

Dark Matter
A super-dense substance used as a space ship fuel. Each pound of which weights over ten thousand pounds. It was mined in large amounts on the planet Vergon 6 until the whole planet was hollowed and on the verge of imploding in [1ACV04].

Also, the feces of a species called the Nibblonians.


Hope that helps!

rofl
Good one, Karrie.

 

[L Gilbert]

You'll just have to take my silly nature into account and go a little easy on me. lol.

I don't know about the rest of these bozos, but this bozo loves it that you are who you are.

 

[karrie]

I don't know about the rest of these bozos, but this bozo loves it that you are who you are.

heeheehee, glad you liked it Gilbert. Nice to know I'm not one of the only ones who thought it was funny. have a good night!

 

[L Gilbert]

Linearity in print and thought has made language unable to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, except as pathology. Now this invisible world is returning to the language through people like us with one foot in each world. The human mind is haunted both by the many presences sensed within the self and by a confused sense of self. Wherever we turn in the world of nature and the psyche, we encounter life, animation, and a willingness to communicate that confounds the fragile pyramid of boundary consciousness and human values that have emerged over historical time through the suppression of our intuitions.
I've taken the position that these entities we encounter are nonphysical and somehow autonomous. Ralph, as I understand him, accepts this view but anchors it into the Neoplatonic trinity of body, soul, and spirit. From this point of view, these entities are inhabitants of the spiritual domain of the logos. They are the logos become self-reflecting and articulate. Rupert correctly points out that it's in the realm of dreams that we most commonly encounter entities, and he further suggests that behind these entities is the controlling agency of the world soul. His notion is that the world soul actually communicates to human beings through the production of forms that we interpret as the denizens of an otherwise invisible and mythological world.
Our collective conclusion seems to be that nature, both in whole and in many parts, is magically self-reflecting and aware. Encountered in its most rarified expression, the world speaks to us, and we, as scientific rationalists are confounded. Nevertheless, it is for us to mold our models and theories to the world as it presents itself in immediate experience, not as we would have it in some grand and sterile abstraction. The elves and gnomes are there to remind us that, in the matter of understanding the self, we have yet to leave the playpen in the nursery of ontology.
Terence Mckenna

That was a bit interesting, Thanks, Beav.

 

[L Gilbert]

Terence McKenna? Wasn't he the drug-addled 1960s loon who formulated the "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution on the basis of no evidence whatsoever? (Yes, alas, I'm old enough to remember it.) I don't see any reason to take a mind like that seriously. I don't believe anybody in science does.

I liked the entertainment value myself.

 

[Cobalt_Kid]

Not that I'm an expert but string theory is starting to give hints of how our universe might have come into being. There might not be one but many different universes that we can't detect. Two or more of these universes interacting could cause an effect that would be identical to the big bang.

Seeing as how it's not possible to detect other universes at this time, this is more philosophy than science but it offers some interesting alternatives to traditional ways of looking at the universe.

 

[L Gilbert]

I'll admit i havent had time to read most of the posts in this thread, but i'd like to add something anyway. please forgive me if i missed anything which results in this post meaning less or looking dumb:

I read somewhere a seemingly silly phrase, but which sums up the greatest problem with the big bang theory in easy words:

"in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded"

To me this is why I can't totally latch onto the big bang theory. It shows the logical difficulty with a big bang, in that an explosion doesnt usually come from nowhere.............

Yeah. That's my problem, too. I would even prefer to think that there were two or more unbelievably massive objects that met at one time and shattered each other.

 

[L Gilbert]

Well, obviously there was some kind of creation, or we wouldn't be here discussing it.

Yeah, most of it was created between homosapiens ears.

What's at issue is whether there was any role for the supernatural in it, and pretty much every post in here amounts to either "yes, because..." or "no, because..." Big Bang cosmology can take us back to some tiny fraction of a second (10 to the -42 of a second, if my memory is correct) after the bang itself, and before that we don't know what was happening, we don't understand it, our theories break down. But to invoke the supernatural at that point is to quit. Saying "god did it" is just another way to say we don't know, we don't understand it.

...... and refuses to investigate any farther. Exactly.

It answers everything and illuminates nothing, which is why science has no use for that hypothesis. It may be correct that some deity did it (though I strongly doubt that and there's no good evidence for it), but that isn't good enough. Science wants to know what he did and how he did it.

Or she. Or it.

All of the "yes, because..." answers are just admissions of ignorance phrased a little more indirectly than just "I don't know." I see expressions of incredulity, statements of incomprehension, and wishful thinking, none of which offer any support at all for the supernatural hypothesis. Being unable to grasp how it all could have come about without a supernatural agency is a failure of the imagination, not support for the supernatural. Don't feel bad though, the scientific imagination too has failed so far on this one, but science assumes that won't always be so. The supernatural hypothesis assumes it *will* always be so, it's beyond our comprehension, which makes further investigation pointless, and the hypothesis itself a dead end.

Quite.