Another good point Hansel… who is to say that God did not exist at one point in time but no longer does, or that God does take a Reagen-esque (thanks Dinsdale) approach… that would really put a crink in a lot of religons.
also, thanks for the correction dinsdale… it is a damn good thing i don’t get paid to spell for a living
Although I’m an atheist, I don’t think the Big Bang theory disqualifies the possibility of gods at all. There is all kinds of ways gods could fit into the Big Bang theory. Perhaps an intelligence older than our universe created it, and in it’s near omniscience arranged things at the time of the Big Bang so that the god in effect created the entire universe, by setting the conditions knowing they would unfold in a certain way. Or perhaps the creation of the universe itself was not due to a god, but the god came along later, or perhaps gods are simply beings that arose naturally long after the creation of the universe, but hundreds of millions of years before us…
In Hindu mythology, the Universe is regularly created and destroyed by God. So, this Big Bang could simply have been the destruction of the previous universe.
Why does that make it a waste of time? Just because we don’t go to our eternal reward after we die, does that mean our lives can’t be meaningful? I’m an atheist, and I find my life to be quite meaningful. I don’t really see what happens to the universe in a few trillion years to be very relevant. Fascinating? - yes. Relevant to my life right now? - no.
But does your personal dissatisfaction with the answer have any bearing on it’s truth or falsehood? IOW, does not liking an idea make it false?
Back to the OP, the Big Bang and God are not mutually exclusive. After all, if you believe God to exist outside of the laws of the universe, what’s to say He didn’t make the Big Bang happen? It’s as believable as any other claims about God. I’ve thought a lot about why I don’t believe in God, and I’ve come to the conclusion that God can’t be dis-proven, because the concept of God isn’t well enough defined. If you posit a thing that is immune to the methods we use to prove things in the physical universe, then you aren’t going to be able to disprove it. The only thing that makes sense to me is that there just isn’t any valid evidence of God. Sure, we can say the universe is just as we observe it to be, PLUS it was created by a supreme being, but that just adds a superfluous layer to the explanation that in my opinion is unwarranted. I know people are going to get pissed off if I mention Occam’s Razor, but that’s what it comes down to.
Occam’s Razor??
please explain
The singularity was not a speck of nothing. My understanding is that it consists of the entire mass of the universe condensed to a single point. “Everything” would be a more accurate description than “nothing”. And to try to expound on what GOM was explaining, there was no point in time before which the singularity or “speck”, if you will, existed, because time literally started at the Big Bang.
“Other things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the best.” It’s not a tautology, but an heuristic guiding naturalistic theorizing. If you can explain phenomenon X with explanation Y, or with explanation Z, and Y is a lot simpler and more straightforward than Z, then Y is probably the correct one.
In other words, if you believe the universe came about in its present form because of the Big Bang, then positing God as the cause of the Big Bang adds nothing to our understanding of the universe in its present form, and is probably wrong.
Science and Religion/philosophy are separate ‘magistras’ (sp?) as Gould said in his book “Rocks of Ages”.
The two concepts don’t have to intersect.
I understand what Occam’s Razor is, I don’t understand the arguement. I have often heard OR used as an arguement FOR religon, but your post uses it as an arguement AGAINST religion.
If I can explain the existence of the universe, and the conditions that were so exactly, perfectly, unalteringly correct for life to start with science, or I can just say God created it all, then religon is a much simpler way to explain it.
Thanks hansel. Here’s a link that explains it in a little more detail:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html
They give the definition as:
Pretty much the same as what hansel said.
I fear I’ve opened a can of worms, now.
I understand that time started with the big bang, because so did light (and in one sense, you can say without light there is no time), but that is only “time” as it has been labled by human minds. That does not mean that there is not a greater sense of time out there, that does not conform to what we traditionally think of as “time”.
IOW, since the Neanderthal’s had no since of time, or history, of future, did that mean it did not exist before someone put a definition to it? Of course not. So our version of time started with the big bang, but that doesn’t mean the only version of time did.
The concept of a singularity with the mass of the entire universe spontaneously generating and exploding is beyond anything I could ever understand outside of ‘God did it’. And that only works because the concept of a sentient being capable of spontaneously generating a singularity of infinite mass is outside my capacity of understanding. So my definition of God would be ‘that which I am incapable of understanding’. Therefore Big Bang = God. To me, at least.
Mega - have you ever tried to do any serious reading on these matters? If not, why? Just curious - how old are you, and what is your background?
These are just a few thoughts, as you could do the websearches for proper phrasing as well as I. Let’s see you do a little of the heavy lifting here.
The initial phrase of OR as hansel noted was other things being equal.
What type of universe do we exist in? One where things interact in predictable ways seemingly in accordance to certain laws? Or one where magical/supernatural things occur? If you accept the latter, then what can you possibly predict/explain? And what supernatural features can you rule out?
Also, consider the final part of hansel’s - what, if anything, does the insertion of God before the Big Bang add? And why any particular type of God?
I am 27, married, 3 kids, college grad, work for insurance co (no i do not sell insurance, i work in the administration side of insurance i.e., home office).
I have througout my life looked at several different sources for information on this. I have talked to at least 5 or 6 different ordained ministers. I did go to church for awhile and spoke to not only some of the elders of the church, but even to a group of longtime church goers in the form of something called “Trailblazers” which was some form of discussion group. I have read a lot of the Bible though I don’t claim I know it all, or remember it, or even that I understood it when I read it.
as far as the scientific facet, I feel I am fairly knowledgeable about that, for one who has never had training in it, and has done only casual research.
I claim to be agnostic, but I have at different times in my life felt the need for something a little more… it isn’t an easy thing to explain, but I am positive at least a few of you already know what I mean.
as far as this is concerned, i could play devils advocate here (what an ironic statement) and say that when you are talking about “God” or a similar deity, inserting him in before the big bang, or after, or during adds EVERYTHING. including, most importantly, our soul.
Whatever became of Hawking’s theory of the “beginning” in which he concluded, basically, that if he was correct, that there would be very little at all for God to do? Essentially, instead of a fine singular point, he derived a self-contained, curved off end that has no real “start” per se, and no real place for determining anything.
There have definately been changes to the vision of God as a Creator because of the Big Bang. Even the latest arguments about how “someone smart” must have set the “constants” of the universe are, regardless of their validity as arguments, quite telling in that they reduce God to a being that simply figures out the very few available possiblities. That takes quite a lot of the wind out of the idea of an all-powerful God simply creating willy-nilly according to its design. Again, it leaves very little at all for a god to do.
there are so many different theories on the origins of life (at least here or earth) that i don’t think i would ever be able to subscribe to the creationist idea that god created the hevens and the earth.
but that doesn’t mean that god may not exist in some other form, maybe someone (or something) that just has a 3rd party type relationship, where he doesn’t neccassarily have anything to do with us, more of just an observer, but then a) there would be no point in him even existing from a human perspective becuase it would not matter to us one way or another, and b) this kind of defeats the whole purpose of this discussion if god doesn’t care about humans, or about what happens to us. then the point to life would simply be to exist and to propagate our species. this seems a little lacking in the “fullfilling my soul” category.
so essentially, this leads me to think that if god is a proactive (or even reactive) god, then it is a worthy endeavor to try to find out more about it, but if god is a passive god, never to touch humanity in any way, even in the afterlife, then there is no reason to even discuss his existence because why does it matter?
Have you tried skiing?
Thanks for the info. Just didn’t want you to be the only one having fun asking all the questions.
I laud you for examining these issues, whatever conclusions you arrive at. These boards are a ton of fun - and can be quite informative - on many aspects of this type of question. And you may wish to do a search of some past threads which have gotten quite involved.
But you may also wish to look to some published material for more depth once you have narrowed down your questions. I seem to recall folks here having compiling reading lists as well. Something such as Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World might be a very accessible place to start.
Personally, as a non-scientist, getting too terribly deep into cosmology can be darned hard. I simply lack the necessary math and physics. So would you say that, in accepting scientific explanations and theories I do not fully understand, I am acting out of faith?
Today’s science clearly cannot explain EVERYTHING. However, simply because something is not known, does not mean that it is unknowable. Moreover, simply because current scientific knowledge cannot fully explain something, does not make a supernatural entity - let alone any particular supernatural entity - necessary.
Personally, it strikes me that to some extent a belief or disbelief in God depends on something in one’s personality.
I have gotten a ton of enjoyment out of reading science - as best I can get my meager lawyer’s mind around it. Whether reading about botany, entymology, evolution, or the stars, I am amazed at science’s phenomenal ability to explain so many things. And I know it is far beyond my ability to grasp even an infinitesimal portion of what clearly CAN BE and HAS BEEN explained by science. So again - personally - I find it preferable to glory in the many wondrous things that ARE known, instead of trying to identify and hypothesize about areas that are NOT.
Others might read the same materials as I and come to the inescapable conclusion that the known world is so wondrous and complex - there MUST be a supreme maker. Who is to say which of us is mistaken?
That’s not the case. Time itself is a property of the universe. Not just the human perception of time, but the actual existence of time itself. It exists within the universe.
We can’t rule out the possibility that time exists outside of our universe. There may be other universe(s) with their own time. But the evidence suggests that time does not transcend our universe, which is what you are suggesting.
I don’t think that’s true at all. You don’t have to wear a wristwatch to have a sense of time.
Have you read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time? If you’re serious about the subject, that’s as good a place as any to start.
Actually, Big Bang theory comes in part from the work of Abbe (Abbot) Georges Lemaitre’s work at keeping God in scientific cosmology. At the time, the more popular theory among cosmologists was “steady state”–there was no moment at which the universe was created. Abbe Lemaitre’s answer to this was “Cosmic Egg” theory, later named “Big Bang”.