My daughter and I caught this by accident last night. We hadn’t seen it advertised to come on, so we got lucky. Even if we had missed it, though, I’m sure it will be rerun.
Much of it was stuff that always gets discussed with these kinds of programs…Galileo reenactments and such. But some of the stuff was really fresh and interesting. My daughter and I had a few moments of looking at eachother with our mouths open, saying, “That was deeep.” But we are easily impressed with science stuff.
I noticed that Hawking is coming right out and saying that he doesn’t believe in god now. Seems like he was being a bit more vague about that before. Anyone else catch Curiosity on Discovery last night?
Didn’t see it Nzinga, but will look for it. Was it a history of man’s belief in God and godlike beings or more of a survey of religious and scientific arguments as they stand today?
I saw a little bit of David Gregory’s roundtable discussion of Curiosity last night but came in late so I’ll try and catch the entire piece later. Yes, it did look very good. I was intrigued by his panel, then listened long enough to know both of these were something I needed to see in their entirety.
There were the regular tales of religion vs. science in history…some of it sketchy…how accurate is that story about Pope John XXI being all anti-laws of science untill the law of gravity did him in with a collapsed roof?
But mostly it focused on the arguments as they stand today.
There were parts where they seemed to be glossing over the math a great deal. No way I can follow it properly, and they do admit that it will be difficult for those who aren’t mathy. They did a great job of summing it up with cool metaphores and such, but by that time, if you don’t know the math, you are basically trusting that it is as they say it is. I’m used to that though. I should have stayed in school if I didn’t want to trust the scientists.
I missed the round table afterward. I am sure I’ll catch it in a re-run.
In my neck of the woods, they had this show on 7 different stations, although admittedly all the stations are part of the same company.[ul]
[li]Discovery[/li][li]The Learning Channel[/li][li]Animal Planet (Really? I can’t even begin to imagine the rationale for that!)[/li][li]Science[/li][li]Green[/li][li]Investigation Discovery[/li]Discovery Fit & Health[/ul]It was very interesting, but I think I’ll need to watch it again. Luckily, I found it right at the beginning, so I recorded it and the following round table.
My take was this: The question they were asking was this: is a “God” needed to explain the universe? They did cover some of the history of the conflict between the church and science, then came to the present day. They then surveyed the different aspects of physics and cosmology (from atoms to galaxies and the universe, and from the Big Bang at the beginning to the end (?) of the universe) and asked “Is a ‘God’ needed to explain this?” At every step, the answer was “no, we don’t need the existence of a ‘God’ to explain this.” Natural laws explain this.
Seriously, though, one of the answers submitted was so sweet and pat that I just let it melt on my tongue like butter!: God didn’t create the universe because there was no ‘time’ for him to do so.…the beginning of the universe being the beginning of time.
Now I have heard this said dozens of times before, but never so flat out and bite sized. I can imagine that there are a ton of rebuttles for such a smug statement, but damned if me and my kid could think of one last night.
Yeah this is a cop out. If you argue that God cannot explain something because then you have to explain God, (which I agree with), you can’t then argue based on there bening no “time” before the universe. Both are equally begging the question.
Nope, not seeing that. Space-Time didn’t exist before the big bang. If theists want to describe what god did before the big bang, they are going to have to figure out a way to describe it to me that doesn’t involve the concept of ‘time’.
I have no clue how you figure that idea is comparable to one saying that you have to define god in order to discuss him. That actually seems like a really good point…the fact that one has to define god before you can use him to explain something. That point has nothing to do with the ‘time’ issue though.
ETA: I sheepishly admit that I don’t know my ass from my elbow in these matters. But the whole ‘no time before time existed’ thing seems simple enough for me to grasp.