[QUOTE=Malienation]
Let’s follow this to it’s obvious conclusion. Since all hypotheses are equally valid, education is pointless.
[/QUOTE]
Education is still good, as long as equal time is given to the everything-in-your-house-replaced-with-an-exact-copy-last-night theory. Teach the controversy!
[QUOTE=Bob55]
Clearly my point has been missed on a lot of you - I’m not starting a debate about creation vs. evolution, and as I said as a scientist I personally believe that the earth is very old, as is humanity. BUT my point is that to make fun of people who believe something different based on faith is amusing to me, since it cannot be proved either way.
[/QUOTE]
Depends on your definition of “prove”. Strictly speaking, you really can’t prove anything, as other posters have pointed out. But that narrow a definition of “prove” is completely useless.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
I can prove these things because they are here and now, provable as we speak. We can go out and prove the earth is round, or prove the center is liquid. TIME is not a factor here.
[/QUOTE]
But who made this rule that TIME is the determining factor in whether something is really provable or not? You “prove” that the Earth is round because you see it or that the “proof” impacts your senses in some other way, but why does that constitute a proof? If one can argue that perhaps God created the Earth 10,000 years ago complete with such things as to make it appear to humans older, one could equally argue that God created the Earth flat with such things as to make it appear to human eyes and senses as round. Both contentions are equally unprovable, so why is it that you choose to agree with one but not the other?
[QUOTE=Bob55]
As for fundamentalist Christians believing the Bible - why is this such a contested issue? So they believe something you don’t why must people go out of their way (on either side) to try to fight the other side on it. The earth was created, or it existed forever, who cares? While you can prove WWI, you can’t prove earth’s coming into existence either way because no one was there.
[/QUOTE]
But again, why does “someone was there” constitute the dividing line between the provable and the unprovable? God certainly could have planted the memories of WWI into all those people. Prove that he didn’t
[QUOTE=Bob55]
As for the Universe being created…well I beg you to offer a better explanation. To my knowledge nothing can come from nothing.
[/QUOTE]
Then your knowledge is just limited. And, of course, the classic response to that is: Then how did God (something) come from nothing? It’s turtles all the way down . . .
[QUOTE=Bob55]
Your line about God creating the earth last Thursday and ending it tomorrow - that’s exactly my point. Prove that it’s not true, or is true. You can’t, nor can anyone else, so fighting about it and mocking those who don’t agree with you is pointless.
[/QUOTE]
Except that by any reasonable and rational defintion of “prove”, we certainly can prove that the Earth was not created last Thursday (e.g. I was here last Wednesday, therefore the Earth existed prior to last Thursday), and so those who ernestly believe that the Earth was created last Thursday are wrong and deserve to be mocked.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
No, you can’t prove someone didn’t come into your house and replace everything with a perfect copy. That is my point. So why try to argue it? And why does it bug you so much that someone else believes the earth was created 10,000 years ago?
[/QUOTE]
Because that person is wrong, period. Look, you can’t have it both ways, you can’t just decide on some arbitrary dividing line between what is provable and what isn’t. If I can’t prove that it’s false that someone came into my house and replaced everything with a copy, then I can prove NOTHING false and any conversation about proving anything is pointless. But if you accept that by a reasonable and rational definition of “proof” I can prove it false that everything in my house is a copy, then I can also prove it false that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
One of the things we fail to do in schools is discuss epistemological and philosophical underpinnings for what we teach about science. This leads to a number of scientists in this country who fall into the philosophical trap of accepting theories as truth without realizing they are “believers” in so doing. I, personally, consider it most likely that the current theories about the age of the universe and the origin of mankind are close to correct explanations of actuality. However, I try never to lose sight of the fact that I cannot “know” the answer. It is this simple point the OP is making, and it hardly deserves the invective directed at it.
[/QUOTE]
You are mistaking what sounds like “belief” for what is actually provisional acceptance of a theory. Good scientists will drop a theory like a hot potato when there is enough evidence against it so that it is falsified. Now, what counts as enough evidence varies from person to person and often depends on how much someone has invested in a theory. But there is less belief going on here than you might think. And, as a field, there is even less for science as a whole than for individual, often old, scientists.
The OPs training is lacking if he thinks we actually “know” anything - and he is insulting other scientists if he thinks they are deficient.
But provisional acceptance is a lot different than belief despite the evidence, which is what NECs believe. There is a big difference between accepting a theory because there is a lot of evidence for and little or none against, and believing in something while making up explanations for the massive amounts of evidence against. Scorn for the latter position is perfectly justified, IMO.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
I can prove these things because they are here and now, provable as we speak. We can go out and prove the earth is round, or prove the center is liquid. TIME is not a factor here.
[/quote]
No, as for the core of the Earth, you can say the best explanation for the various readings we get is a liquid core. For the age of the Earth, we can say the best explanation for the distribution of isotopes, for geological structures, for the genome we see, is a > 10,000 year old earth. We see all these things today, just as we see the readings we get from instruments on the surface. There is not a lot of difference. Perhaps in your work you are too used to looking at things directly.
No one claims to be able to prove anything, that’s for math. What is the most probable explanation for what we see?
If you have kids, and see them near a broken lamp, are you going to accept the explanation that an alien flew into the house and broke it as opposed to them doing it? You can’t prove it either way, after all.
Never took much statistics, did you? 
Hee, hee!
Discussing this topic is a wonderful way to waste some time.
Now, I recognize that Bob55 was just being provocative, but when you getcherself a real, live creationist to jaw with, the results can be, well … surreal.
A few years back, we had a flap here in Colorado when a middle school student challenged the educational film his class was shown, on the grounds that it presented evolution (abiogenesis, actually) as “fact.” The school board held a hearing and, as you’d expect, both sides showed up. Conservative Christian columnist Ellen Makkai wrote that she’d attended the event, and approached one of the evolution proponents afterward.
“I challenged him to give me one fact that definitively proved evolution, and he was stumped.”
Stumped, I guess, because it’s so hard to answer while pulling your jaw all the way back up from the floor.
To put things into perspective, this was the same Ellen Makkai who wrote that Harry Potter was in league with Beelzebub, and earnestly
[quoted High Priest Egan of The First Church of Satan in Salem, MA]
(Creators.com - Creators Syndicate) in support.
Her source for that quote was the Onion.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Because those people want to teach that notion in public schools funded by tax money as a scientifically-proven hypothesis with the same weight and meaning as secular science. That’s why it matters hugely. Beliefs are not the same as science. Scientists do not make of error of belief when they put forth their best understanding of the workings of the universe, large or small, present or past. Belief in that sense is not at all the same thing as belief in a religious sense.
And DSYoungEsq, it gives me a large-sized pain when people who should know better knowingly use the word “know” as if it had one and only one exact definition even in casual conversation. You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You know you’re wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Given your approach to the income tax question recently dealt with, I’ll simply ignore your commentary. You simply dismiss without much thought anyone whose opinions disagree with yours; they are crackpots. :rolleyes:
As for the rest of those who have posted:
To “know” is to either have direct cognition of something (personal experience with it), or to be aware of the truth or falsity of something (I know that, given certain definitions, 2 million + 2 million = 4 million without ever having experienced that), or to be “certain” of a thing. Of certain things science investigates, I can “know” about them, because I experience them directly (I see the discs of the planets in my own telescope), or I am aware of the truth of them (very few things in this category, because most things science investigates are not concepts with true v. false aspects), or I am certain of them, because I accept the assertion by someone else that they have experienced them (I “know” the Earth is a sphere, accepting as true the pictures and accounts taken by astronauts, or by sattelites and published by the scientists reviewing the data received from those sattelites).
It is this last category that usually is the broadest, and which can cause problems. I have the ability to experience so little in my life, if my own cognition was the limit of my knowledge, I would be a very uninformed person. But, to accept the experience of others as knowledge, I have to have a high confidence level in their reported experiences. I tend to believe that what Charles Darwin wrote in his journal about the Galapagos Islands he truly experienced, so I can accept his statements with a high degree of certainty.
If I am investigating what is currently going on in the world, I can accept (or not, as I choose) the experiences of scientists working in places I am not. Thus, I can accept the assertion of a biologist that a certain plant I’ll never see looks a certain way, can be classified a certain way, etc.
If I am trying to make sense of what has happened in the past, my certainty gets less and less as my confidence in the reporters of experiences recedes. I take what Galileo said he experienced with only a few grains of salt; I take what Herodotus said about the world at his time with several grains of salt.
No one I have talked to, nor read the writings of, claims to have been present at the creation of the Earth. So, my own cognition fails me, there is no “truth” or “false” answer, because one cannot falsify the various explanations, and there is no one else’s experiences available to make me “certain.”
In the place of “knowledge,” I am forced to substitute deduction. I look at what available evidence there is on the subject, and I offer hypotheses about how the evidence came to be. Those are tested against the available evidence; if they are not shown by the evidence to be unlikely to be true, I may take as a theory of value that the hypothesis is accurate. I can, thus, take the evidence produced by various methods used to date rocks and theorize with some confidence that it is a likely explanation that the rocks are a billion or more years old. But I cannot “know” it to be true.
If it is your personal philosophy to eschew reliance upon untested assertions which can only be accepted upon faith to explain things like existence, then by all means, do not ascribe to religious descriptions of creation, or existence of Heaven, or anything else. If you prefer to accept as “true” the current theories of the majority of scientists regarding such things as creation of the universe, then please go ahead (but keep in mind those assertions change regularly, so how “true” can they really be?). If you do, at least have the intellectual honesty to understand that you have accepted what cannot be proven on the basis of your faith in the ability of science to explain things; in short, you “believe” them to be true.
If so, your belief is not inherently better than anyone else’s. Nor are you more “right.”
[QUOTE=Chronos]
OK, point made that you can’t prove the age of the Earth, or, indeed, anything.
So what?
I can’t prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow. I know that I can’t prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow. I don’t care that I can’t prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow. If I could prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow, what difference would it make from the current situation, where I can only be pretty darned sure?
[/QUOTE]
No, but you can assert with a great degree of confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, that absent some unknown factor it WILL rise tomorrow. You can do so because we all collectively observe the same phenomena: past risings of the sun, pictures from space that confirm the current theories about what circles what, etc.
What you simply cannot do is state with any degree of certainty that the sun existed 5 billion years ago. Instead, you can state that the evidence seems to indicate that it did, and, absent some explanation that makes more sense to you, you will consider it highly likely that it did. I presume that, as a true scientist, you do not “believe” that it existed then, but simply take it as a given unless and until something better comes along.
Anyone who wants to teach children that the creation of the universe, or the origin of man, happened any specific way as the right answer are wrong, regardless of which side of the question they sit on.
Now, if you wish to teach to children that the evidence seems to indicate the following, that we cannot actually know, and the individual is free to make up their own minds about what to believe, then you have my blessing. And trust me that this does not mean I support the concept of teaching “creationism,” the teaching of any particular belief structure as “science” is wrong per se. My objection is with scientists and others who wish to impose their own beliefs as knowledge.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
You are mistaking what sounds like “belief” for what is actually provisional acceptance of a theory. Good scientists will drop a theory like a hot potato when there is enough evidence against it so that it is falsified. Now, what counts as enough evidence varies from person to person and often depends on how much someone has invested in a theory. But there is less belief going on here than you might think. And, as a field, there is even less for science as a whole than for individual, often old, scientists.
The OPs training is lacking if he thinks we actually “know” anything - and he is insulting other scientists if he thinks they are deficient.
But provisional acceptance is a lot different than belief despite the evidence, which is what NECs believe. There is a big difference between accepting a theory because there is a lot of evidence for and little or none against, and believing in something while making up explanations for the massive amounts of evidence against. Scorn for the latter position is perfectly justified, IMO.
[/QUOTE]
No, sir I am not making that mistake. I am pointing out that plenty of scientists “believe” things to be true simply because they appear to be true because of the result of scientific investigations. That is, they take them to be TRUE, not good approximations, not accepted provisionally. They want evolution to be taught as a FACT, which it most certainly is not.
Lest you think I am wrong in this, read what the more liberal schoolbooks addressing the issue actually say. Rarely is the issue of “provisional acceptance” given anything other than quick lip service, if it is mentioned at all. Kids are simply taught that there were dinosaurs, there were trilobites, there were giant sloths, etc. And any time anyone attempts to interfere with this type of teaching, these scientists get all upset at the thought that their beliefs aren’t accepted as factually true.
Folks, you cannot disprove a belief. So why bother? Why disparage what might, after all, be true? That is all the OP said. The considerable invective and outrage spawned by that statement is testimony to the fact that the outlook of many on the subject is skewed. Given the way that “Creationists” behave and argue, I can certainly understand this, but the true response to the OP should have been, “Yeah, so?”
This is a tiresomely pedantic and sophmoric argument. There is overwhelming evidence and facts that point to the earth being more than 10,000 years old. There are varval deposits, seafloor spreading with the direction of earth’s magnetic field recorded as the basalt cooled, the radioisotope evidence you alluded to, erosion of exposed rocks, and on and on. Almost everything we know about physics and chemistry would have to be overturned to allow for a young earth. You say that the fact that no one was alive means that we can not say with certainty what happened. But no one has lived in the future, yet we are confident to state what will happen to a rock when we drop it or to a bullet when we fire it. You accept a round earth because we have testimony of people who have been to space. Would you not have believed the earth was round prior to the 1960s?
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
They want evolution to be taught as a FACT, which it most certainly is not.
[/QUOTE]
Yes it is. People alive today have seen it occur. You could yourself if you were so inclined. You can even make it occur in front of your very eyes. That makes it more of a fact than, eg, the US Civil War or the Roman Empire, even according to the “only a fact if someone alive now sees it happen” school.
I have no problem being tolerant of the religious beliefs of others, and I think it’s a perception of intolerance that has the OP all tongue-clucking. Exapno’s post #16 neatly explains why tolerance should never be allowed to gradually slide into a whimpering abandonment of reason in the name of being polite.
And I did study statistics.
Recommended reading: Isaac Asimov’s The Relativity of Wrong
In exactly the same way, I can assert with a great degree of confidence that the Sun existed billions of years ago, that absent some unknown factor it DID exist billions of years ago. I can do so because we all collectively observe the same phenomena: isotope ratios of U238 to its daughter nuclei, spectroscopic lines of hydrogen, helium, and other elements in the Sun’s light, etc. The only difference between the two situations is that there isn’t any religious sect which teaches that the Sun won’t rise tomorrow.
Oh, and I just noticed these two quotes from Bob55:
So you can prove WWI, but you can’t prove the world existed a week ago? Forget science; this would make for some very interesting history classes.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
Your line about God creating the earth last Thursday and ending it tomorrow - that’s exactly my point. Prove that it’s not true, or is true. You can’t, nor can anyone else, so fighting about it and mocking those who don’t agree with you is pointless.
[/quote]
By your reasoning, we can’t prove slavery or segregation ever existed in the US, or that the Holocaust occurred. So of course it is pointless to object when people assert that they never occurred, nor to dispute with them.
[QUOTE=DanBlather]
This is a tiresomely pedantic and sophomoric argument.
[/QUOTE]
I concur. In addition, it (the argument) could have been applied to pretty much any of Cecil’s columns, as well as any Staff Report. Why did this become an issue with this one?
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
Given your approach to the income tax question recently dealt with, I’ll simply ignore your commentary. You simply dismiss without much thought anyone whose opinions disagree with yours; they are crackpots. :rolleyes:
[/quote]
And yet, upon examination, he did indeed post an OP pointing to a video whose every notion was indeed crackpot.
Look especially at the comments that col_10022 made:
This is what crackpot means and does. This is why exploding crackpot notions is so important. This goes to the very heart of what it means to “know” something.
The rest of your post was a farrago of various philosophical positions argued endlessly over centuries. In particular, your support for personal experience is odd, since personal experience makes for a very poor measure of “knowing,” as so much modern science reveals. It is this very tension of what science proves as against what common sense suggests that lies at the base of Creationism and other crackpot hatreds of what science is.
Your exposition about knowing and knowledge is similarly misguided, a collection of odd personal beliefs that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scientific method and how the conclusions that scientists draw from their research are presented.
Neither your philosophy nor your science has a sound intellectual foundation. Come to think of it, neither does your characterization of my posts.
The earth does move. Dinosaurs did exist. I know this, and so do you. Why are you pretending otherwise?
I can’t add much to the points already made by Exapno Mapcase, dropzone, Chronos, DanBlather, Colibri, and others, but permit me to make the following analogy:
While it is impossible to know (or in the Heinlein parlance, “to grok”) the exact nature of anything outside of or previous to your personal experience, the scientific view is to tend toward the explaination that requires the fewest leaps in logic. The scientific method tends to validate theories with what a lawyer would call a “preponderance of evidence”, with scientific laws like those in the name of Newton or Maxwell achieving the “beyond a reasonable doubt” category. This is based on the fact that events and actions in the natural world can be predicted by said theories to an acceptible degree of precision; for instance, when we operate an internal combustion engine, we anticipate that the enthalpy and entropy will be such and such as predicted by the thermodynamic and mechanical laws that oversee the Otto cycle for gasoline engines. That they do–with a consistancy that allows us to get to work every day–permits great confidence in the reliability of these laws in predicting other, someone similar phenomena. When we have a broad array of laws and theories which interact without conflict, we feel confident that we have an understanding of the operation of the natural world in at least this level of discrimination.
This differs from belief, in the religious or spiritual sense, in that we have constant and physically verifiable reinforcement in our theories. Religious faith, on the other hand, demands accordance with things that cannot be seen or measured, and indeed is often predicated on blind acceptance that some “man behind the curtain” has orchestrated events such that a particular outcome has occured. That this is “verified” ad hoc (“I prayed, and my son survived his drunk driving accident so that he can serve the Blah-Blah Ministries of Faith and Hypocracy”) is an example of a statistical and logical falacy rather than proof in any scientific view.
In short, scientific theories predict things that happen, and then tests said theories against observation and experience; faith gives after-the-fact explaination for actions and expects one to accept this as Truth based on one’s personal affectation for revelations and/or lack of education in combinatorics and probability.
As for a God that fakes all of the dinosaur fossils and geology to make you think that the world is billions of years old when it’s really just 6006 years; seriously, doesn’t this dude have better things to do? I mean, if he was trying to win an election or making some kind of fable, perhaps it would make some kind of sense, but to do it all just out of some sense of bloody-mindedness or infantile amusement just doesn’t strike me as all that wise or benevolent. This guy needs to get a real hobby, or at least go out and shoot a few hoops. I’ve got enough problems in my life without having to figure out what’s real, what’s fabricated, and what George Lucas did to alter reality again. Han shot first, man, and no amount of editing and bad CGI is going to change that.
Stranger
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
No, sir I am not making that mistake. I am pointing out that plenty of scientists “believe” things to be true simply because they appear to be true because of the result of scientific investigations. That is, they take them to be TRUE, not good approximations, not accepted provisionally. They want evolution to be taught as a FACT, which it most certainly is not.
Lest you think I am wrong in this, read what the more liberal schoolbooks addressing the issue actually say. Rarely is the issue of “provisional acceptance” given anything other than quick lip service, if it is mentioned at all. Kids are simply taught that there were dinosaurs, there were trilobites, there were giant sloths, etc. And any time anyone attempts to interfere with this type of teaching, these scientists get all upset at the thought that their beliefs aren’t accepted as factually true.
[/quote]
I was on the textbook evaluation committee for my district, and for HS biology books, given very little time, I read the evolution sections of five. All but one was excellent - and that was for the continuation school. The OP was talking about scientists, not textbooks. If you are arguing that texts are over-simplified, I can only agree with you - my wife writes some, and has a terrible time fitting the material into the allotted space, let alone going over the niceties.
As mentioned evolution - in the sense of speciation, has been directly observed, and is a fact. The evolution of the flu virus is an observed fact. The exact details of the evolution of any existing species are of course not known.
I haven’t seen anyone go on about teaching this sort of evolution as a fact. As the best known explanation, by far, yes. That creationism and ID do not have anywhere near the explanatory power, have been falsified and are now distorted into unfalsifiability, yes.
My objection to the OP is that he sets up a strawman view of what scientists believe, and claims things are considered facts which are not.
It would be wonderful if what is meant by a theory would be taught in high school science, especially in the context of why one should accept evolution over creationism. Will never happen, alas.
BTW, I suspect you disparage what might be true - unless you treat email from those nice Nigerian generals with respect. Creationism is about as likely to be true as those emails.
The OP knows that, happily, but he should have a bit more respect for his colleagues.
There is no such thing as direct contemporaneous observation; it doesn’t matter whether you’re observing at a galaxy ten billion light years distant or the fossil remains of an organism, or an apple on the table in front of you - you are reliant upon inference for all observations and all observations are retrospective. The difference is only in the degree.
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
Wow. Such invective resulting from a simple statement of truth.
[/QUOTE]
Truth? Truth? What’s that? How do you “know” that it’s “truth”? You’re contradicting yourself left and right. Wasn’t it you who wrote something about “fall[ing] into the philosophical trap of accepting theories as truth without realizing they are “believers” in so doing”? (And what kind of “scientist” doesn’t understand the word “theory”?)
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
The OP makes a simple, undisputable [sic] statement: You cannot “know” the actual origin of the Earth and of humanity. … You cannot “know” because neither you, nor any reliable witness were there at the point it occurred.
[/QUOTE]
Indisputable? You throw around words you don’t truly understand such as “epistemology” and then claim that knowledge is impossible unless something is directly witnessed at the exact time it occurs?? What’s so magical about observing something at the time it happens that translates such observations into “knowledge”, while secondary or indirect observation absolutely prevents knowledge? Isn’t direct observation exactly as potentially epistemologically flawed and untrustworthy as any other type of observation or experience? If you accept the one, on precisely what philosophical, epistemological basis do you deny the other?
You are at the very least declaring that knowledge is possible only for the scientist who observes something personally and directly at the exact time it occurs but that when he/she writes up a scientific report, the report no longer can be considered to contain any knowledge since anyone reading the report didn’t experience the event personally, directly, and at the exact time the event occurred. Hell, you’re even implying that the original scientist’s memory isn’t enough to justify his own claim of knowledge since the event in question occurred in the past!!
Either all synthetic knowledge is impossible or some synthetic knowledge is acquirable. If the latter, then science is the best known way to acquire justified, true belief, and neither science nor empiricism in general requires direct, first-hand experience at the time an event occurs, no does it give such experience any unique epistemological status.
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
One wonders sometimes if the posters on this board really can handle the “Straight Dope.” :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
One wonders sometimes if posters who claim to be scientists are deserving of the name. :dubious:
[QUOTE=Bob55]
Ph.D., Molecular Cell Biology. I’d say that qualifies as being a “scientist”.
[/QUOTE]
Rubbish. Since when? Duane Gish has a science doctorate, as does Kent Hovind (Dr. Dino), but neither of them are what any intellectually honest person could legitimately call a “scientist”.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
BUT my point is that to make fun of people who believe something different based on faith is amusing to me, since it cannot be proved either way.
[/QUOTE]
You’re so right! We shouldn’t make fun of people who believe on faith that black people are fundamentally and implicitly inferior (such as many Jews, Christians, and Mormons, both historically and currently) because it cannot be proved either way. And we shouldn’t make fun of people who believe on faith that Jews and homosexuals are fundamentally and implicitly inferior (such as many Nazis and Christians) for the same reason. Why, they should be applauded instead!
[QUOTE=Bob55]
I can prove these things because they are here and now, provable as we speak. We can go out and prove the earth is round, or prove the center is liquid. TIME is not a factor here.
[/QUOTE]
See my previous post. What’s so epistemologically magical about time that allows ostensibly “contemporaneous” knowledge but eliminates all possibility of knowledge of the past?
[QUOTE=Bob55]
As for fundamentalist Christians believing the Bible - why is this such a contested issue? So they believe something you don’t why must people go out of their way (on either side) to try to fight the other side on it.
[/QUOTE]
Yep! See my comments above about not making fun of Nazis. Fighting them in WWII was silly. Why did we go out of our way for that? Who cared what they believed? After all, it was based on faith.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
As for the Universe being created…well I beg you to offer a better explanation. To my knowledge nothing can come from nothing.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly! That’s why God couldn’t have come from nothing. If you’re willing to believe that God came from nothing, you have no basis whatsoever for denying that the Universe could just as easily have come from nothing.
[QUOTE=Bob55]
Prove that it’s not true, or is true. You can’t, nor can anyone else, so fighting about it and mocking those who don’t agree with you is pointless.
[/QUOTE]
Who can defend even the indefensible better than Bob?