I have been thinking about this lately, and I would like some opinions on it:
I am a firm believer of the big bang theory, and in fact read as much about such subjects as I can find.
I also am agnostic (or as I like to refer to it, a non-practicing agnostic, meaning I don’t know if there is a God or not, and to be honest I don’t care)
However, the one reason that I do not believe in God is because I cannot reconsile what I know about religon and what I know about the universe as a whole. Most religons seem kind of Sci-Fi like. During my meditations on this fact, I have come to think that the “Big Bang” theory, and other theories as well, do not neccassarily preclude a “God” like figure. We have all had that philisophical moment in college, or for some in high school, where we thought, “What if the entire universe is no more than a speck on someone’s shoulder”, or some other such thought.
What I am saying is, just becuase the universe as we know it started from a tiny spec of nothing, the blew up in the mother of all explosions and then there was light… does this mean that “God” in the traiditional sense cannot logically exist? I don’t think so, if the universe did start as some spec of nothing, what was going on with the spec of nothing before it blew up? How long had it existed? Hundreds of billions of years potentially. Did anyone or anything have control over it? Maybe there is something or someone out there that had a part in the creation of the universe.
If this is true, then this is a fairly major epiphone for me, as the main reason I am not religious is because I didn’t think that religion and science mixed, and science always sounded more logical to me.
Depends on your religion, I suppose. I believe in God and have no problems with any science I’ve come across. Obviously if you belonged to a religion that believed in the absolute literal truth of the bible, for instance, there would be some conflict.
Off topic: Have you read “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene? It’s an excellent read if you’re interested in the structure of the Universe.
If the Big Bang is correct it does not dissprove God.
If you believe in God it tells us some things about how God created the Universe.
If you believe in the absolute truth of the Genisis story then it tells you the story is wrong (believing that the sun is the center of the solar system also proves Genisis wrong).
If you don’t believe in God it gives hints as to how the Universe could come into being without the requirement for a creating being.
Cheers, Bippy
It’s alwas possible to posit God as “first cause”–if you believe the theory of the Big Bang, then you can logically believe that it was God’s will that the Big Bang happen as it did. For any naturalistic theory explaining why the Big Bang happened, you can always prepend “God made it so.” There’s an infinite regression of causes that can always accept a God at the beginning uttering the logos “make it so, number one.”
“And God said, ‘Let there be Light!’ And there was Light.”
A pretty decent, if poetical, decription of the Big Bang. (Hayden’s Creation puts this same description into music quite nicely – gloriously, in fact).
There’s still plenty of room for a deity in the theory.
Defintely not. The Catholic Church (and indeed most Christian churches - US fundamentalists excepted) accept the Big Bang as fact. It seems silly to expect that God would use preternatrual methods to bring the universe to it’s current state when there are perectly good naturalistic methods avaidable to him (plus we of course have the evidence that the universe did evolve via these naturalistic methods).
If your literalist then the Bigh Bang is bad news, but otherwise just because it doesn’t involve some sort of hocus pocus doesn’t preclude it from being a creation method open to God.
[quote]
There’s an infinite regression of causes that can always accept a God at the beginning uttering the logos “make it so, number one.”
Statements like this are the primary reason that I have always had such a problem with religon. It is too easy to always say the same thing “Becuase God made it that way”. It reminds me of what I used to say to my little brother, who, when he was younger would asked hundreds of inane questions a day (later diagnosed with ADHD). After a while we (meaning my other broghters and my sister) would always say, “Anytime you have a question, if we don’t have an answer for you, it is because magic did it (i.e., “Why is the sky blue”? “Magic”, “Why is dirt brown”? “Magic”, “Why do farts stink”? “Magic”).”
I know that at some point, you have to switch from logic to faith in order to subscribe to any given religon. It is this switch that I have the most problems with. How can I turn off my brain so that I do not constantly question every aspect of it?
Well, you don’t have to. Keep on questioning and see what you can find out. I suppose I find the same difficulty with atheism…“Why does anything exist at all?” “It just does.” No reason, it’s all a huge waste of time where nothing means anything since it will all disappear in the heat death or big crunch and might as well have never existed at all. I find that kind of answer very unsatifactory. I have no conflict with science which just says “We don’t know and perhaps never will.” Fair enough; I never expected science to be able to answer everything.
(I don’t normally get involved in religious debates on this board because they usually get pretty stupid and I can’t be bothered with them, but this one is pretty good so far.)
I guess it also depends on how you define “God”. There is the meddlesome, judgemental god of the christian world. And at the other end of the spectrum is a force, if you will, that created the universe and walked away. In a sense, I suppose you could consider the Big Bang itself, as god.
When looking at traditional religion (christian religion mostly), I don’t see how the two concepts can be reconciled, but there are many who do.
The traditional concept is self-contradictory. Other concepts are not, and they are not necessarily ruled out by the Big Bang (assuming it actually happened).
Thanks dylan… I thought this would be a very good forum for this type of discussion as well.
speaking on what kalhoun said, I have often thought that there very well may be a “God” of some type, just not the same thing that christians or jews or buddhist for that matter. maybe the truth is something else entirely, maybe something that our minds cannot even comprehend.
there does seem to be a need in the human mind (at least the minds of most) to be able to express there soul in some manner (i.e., having faith in a deity), and since it occoures with such frequency, it may be that it was hard wired by something or someone. but on the other hand, if it was, then why did that entity not give us more information?
it is all very confusing and frustrating at times.
No reason why the Big Bang cosmology and the poetic description of Creation in Genesis 1 cannot coexist – one tells How and the other Why, in a nutshell. Also, it’s important to me that the overwhelming majority of what existed in the early stages of the Big Bang was photons – at 6x10[sup]12[/sup]degrees, electrons and nucleons cannot exist, only high-energy photons.
If you assume that Genesis 1 is a literalistic account, then no, God did not create the universe in six days around 4004 BC. But that assumption suggests that the Israelites had no concept of what a story is. YMMV of course. But one does not disprove the other, any more than “the theory of optical scattering of light” disproves “the sky is blue” – it explains how it happens that we see it as blue.
Einstein would have disagreed with your “hundreds of billions years” idea. Time is a dimension. Time started when the universe was created. As stated in the Bible:
Genesis 1
1 In the beginning (time) God created the heaven and the earth (the other three dimensions we are aware of).
Then you will be very interested to learn about Dr. Hugh Ross. Here is his excellent site:
He is an astrophysicist. Years ago he attempted to disprove all religions by studying their holy books and finding scientific errors. He went through all the major religions in a few days each, IIRC, saving the Bible as the last one he would check for errors. After two years of research into the scientific and historical statements in the Bible he realized that the Bible could only be inspired by God because there are no errors and the scientific knowledge in the Bible was far beyond the knowledge of the civilizations at the times and places the different books of the Bible were written.
Did he become a Christian right away as a result of his epiphany? No. He resisted God because, as he put it, his will got in the way. That is a problem for many of us. Our will.
poly, while i understand what you are saying, it doesn’t really go any further into the discussion. we are still coming to the same brick wall where there is a point when you have to say “Well because God made it that way”
My hope for this thread, is that we can find a way to reconsile these two concepts without having to rely on the statement above. I know logically we can only go so far, without having to PROVE the existence of God, but you get my point
and Gom my problem with your statement is that you have to start with SOMETHING since you cannot create matter from nothing. The “Speck of nothing” would have had to come into existence at some point
an i am not sure on your Dr. recomendation. I can think of several things in the bible that I would say are scientifically imposible (walk through the middle of the Reed Sea anyone?) Even the biggest thing about christianity (Jesus’ resurection) seems on the surface to be scientifcally imposible.
Mega-sorry to be off-topic, but even if your perceptual revelation is valid, you might wish to consider it an epiphany, instead of a guitar manufacturer.
If one wants to believe in an all powerful God, why not imagine he created the world yesterday, but just made it in a way so that it appears to have resulted from a big bang?
You may wish to do some thinking of the attributes vaious “Gods” might possess. For example, you realize that you can conceive of and believe in a God who lit the fuse setting off the big bang and afterwards basically kicked back, adopting a Reagan-esque “hands off” approach. Versus a hands-on kinda God who listens to and responds to intercessory prayer. Or the countless other imaginable (and unimaginable) manifestations of supreme beings.
I’m still trying to figure out where the turtles come in.
Well, that’s the essential problem with any “God of the gaps” argument–if everytime a suitable naturalistic explanation comes up, you accept it while prefacing it with “God made it so”, then you just keep sticking God where the unexplained stuff is, and God becomes synonymous with “stuff we haven’t figured out yet”, a mere placeholder. You can have faith in the placeholder, but it seems a weak comparison to someone with a strong faith in an active deity.
It’s not impossible, logically or practically, to believe in God and the Big Bang both, but accepting naturalistic explanations does challenge one’s view of God’s place in the scheme of things.
