There’s nothing necessarily wrong with saying “No one has ever adequately explained this to me, so I don’t know if I should believe it or not”. But that’s not really any reason why anyone else should have their knowledge or beliefs affected in any way–whether they’re astrophysicists, or guys with liberal arts degrees from a looong time ago who admit this stuff makes their heads hurt, but nonetheless have done a fair bit of reading for the layman over the years and even took a few college-level astronomy courses back in the day and like to think they’re not totally ignorant of the reasons why astronomers accept something called the “Big Bang”.
It always distills down to first cause. We actually know a lot about the universe by unfolding it and getting to its beginnings. We have ideas of how elements were formed and how the planets were . There is actually a lot we do know. We also know the universe exists. We also know there is no evidence to suggest a god exists.
And when priests can do something as simple as cure polio, we’ll start listening to their views on the origins of the universe.
Besides, HIV is actually more complicated in some ways than the early universe. Like I said, the early universe was all about particle physics; what was going on largely determined by basic physical laws. With HIV, you are talking about a very large number of complicated molecular machines ( which vary from one another ), which in turn are infecting an even more complicated molecular machine ( human cells ). And you are trying to do something very specific and subtle; get rid of or control HIV, without doing too much damage to the victim. It’s not like you can apply a straightforward basic physics solution like heating the patient to a few thousand degrees, which would be guaranteed to destroy HIV but be rather harsh on the patent as well.
Even if you break the ‘7 days’ down into the ~14 billion years that the universe is estimated to be, it doesn’t really make any sense. As others have said, the order is all wrong.
Which, of course, makes perfect sense, since it’s simply a story that people made up in an attempt to explain their origins. It’s not even a CHRISTIAN story, but comes from multiple much earlier sources.
It could…but you’d really need to twist and stretch things to make it fit. It’s fairly clear that the folks who wrote things like Genesis really DID think that everything had been created when and how they said. To be sure, there is metaphor there, and lots of figurative speech. But in the end it’s just a story they tried to use to explain what they were observing, but without real understanding of science, cosmology, geology, biology, etc etc etc.
Basically, if God DID write the Bible, why use figurative language? Why not tell the real story? Or at least enough of the story that primitive humans would understand? While primitive man wouldn’t get some of the more technical aspects, a God could have told a story of the creation of the Universe from a single point, of the majesty of time, and the expansion of the universe, of how life was brought to this earth from the cosmos, etc etc. Since that isn’t the story we have gotten (from ANY ancient peoples), one must surmise that an actual being who was there didn’t write it, and thus it was written by ignorant humans who were merely attempting to explain things in the best way they knew. Q.E.D.
No of which precludes gods or a God…it merely says that such beings didn’t write the creation accounts used in most major religions.
-XT
It’s kinda like if reality conflicts with your premises, you should check your premises. 
You are going to set off another anti-Rand thread with that kind of talk, John. 
-XT
There’s a lot that some really smart people have convinced themselves that they know. But when you get down to it that stuff is generally proved by mathematical elegance, as there is no method of empirical verification available.
As I said, I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying that I’m skeptical of the certainty everyone applies to it. Not to say I am unwilling to learn more, but I’d need a whole lot of basics under my belt beforehand.
**
Der Trihs** You make a good argument, but here’s the problem I have. Elements cohere in certain ways based upon their composition. To assume that all of the elements in the universe existed in some tiny supercharged space kind of presupposes some kind of distribution that allows for that. I can certainly see how given the attractive/repulsive properties of particles that if such a situation were occurring it would result in a big bang, but I am not sure that this ‘big lump of stuff’ explanation is adequate. I can accept that there was a big lump of stuff, but not the idea that this big lump of stuff is easier to understand or less complex than HIV. It’s more complex than HIV by definition as it was more matter by impossible to comprehend orders of magnitude. Basically, Big Bang theory strikes me as too pithy. Not that it’s essentially wrong, just that it seems like an oversimplification.
But as I said, I am not sure I buy into the idea that the universe ever began. And that’s really where my trouble is.
No one answered my question though. What came first? Light or Matter?
When you say it was a big lump of matter that seems consonant with the Genesis account.
All the Matter of the Universe was without form and void.
And God said ‘Let there be light’ and the universe exploded, and there was light.
I think essentially the problem when trying to redact our understanding of the bible is that we don’t think too much about the psychology of those early people. Now, this of course has the same problem of speculation about remote antiquity, but it’s not nearly as remote as billions of years ago. At the time Genesis was being read as a myth to the people, the human intellect was relatively unsophisticated. In the most sophisticated culture on Earth, in Egypt there was a very small educated class of priests and Pharaohs. And this was by and large the normal situation on Earth for many thousands of years. Now, when I say educated class, I am not saying they had some deep insight into the origins of the universe, though neither am I saying they didn’t. What I mean by educated is that they had critical thinking skills AT ALL. As in they understood dualities and could apply them critically. They dealt with the abstract. For the most part early man seems to have had little means to separate their imaginations from their external perceptions. Their Gods LITERALLY lived in their idols.
So I think it’s important when looking at the book of Genesis that you understand that this concept was pretty advanced by the standards of the day. It looks primitive NOW, but for most people who were barely more civilized than monkeys, it was pretty heavy stuff when they understood it at all. So Genesis shouldn’t be judged by the standards of modern cosmology. The appropriate standard is to judge it as part of our intellectual development, the nascent stages of staring at the stars and wondering about the universe. The very fact that they were questioning, is what has lead us to scientific understanding today.
If I was god I would’ve given a better blow by blow account maybe something like:
For the number of years of heaven and earth are beyond the count of sands on the ground.
Lo, into the darkness went my music and from nothing came everything. I breathed on the firmament and my breath forged stars. Burning brightest, these fleeting children died, birthing bright children and seeding the heavens. These children of my breath lit heaven until they too passed into darkness birthing the blazing hosts and wonders above you.
Amongst these children of my breath rose the Sun and Earth. The burning star and its rocky child. The Earth circling the bright fragment of my breath brought forth the moon through great pain. As the heat of birth passed and the Earth gathered unto itself the waters of heaven and rains fell upon the ground. - Book of Grey, Chp 1
Since no creation myth does a particularly good job of coming close the what we understand happened I’d prefer it if people read it as Polycarp does, if they must read anything into it in the first place.
Science offers very good explanations about the origins and creations of many ,many elements, creatures and cosmic objects. They have a track record of winnowing through the info and coming up with logical explanations. Religion does not. I don’t agree it was ever advanced at all. It was a magic and mystery conjured up to convince people they had answers, where they had none. They still don’t…
In the early stages of the universe we are speaking of there were no elements. Just elementary particles.
But HIV holds together; it has pattern and stability, it has components with functions and exists in a context even more complex than itself. The early universe didn’t have those; there was no complexity because nothing lasted. We don’t need to know the exact configuration of particles in the early universe to understand it, because neither the configuration nor the particles lasted from moment to moment.
To put it another way; just listing the types and energies of the elementary particles that a HIV virus is composed of won’t even tell you what it is, much less what it does. Because it has levels and types of complexity, of structure that simply couldn’t exist in the early universe. You can largely describe the early universe in such a way, because the sheer energies involved erased any higher levels of complexity beyond elementary particles and statistical mass distributions.
They came about pretty much at the same time, I suppose.
Not just matter; there wasn’t anything that we’d call solid or even gaseous matter at the beginning. Just fundamental particles. No real distinction between matter and energy at that point.
But they weren’t questioning; they were asserting. “This is how it happened; question and you are a heretic who will be killed” is not the attitude that led to science.
Except that science required that stage of advancement to get to the point we’re at. There is no intellectual merit in judging primitives by modern standards.
I dunno about inconsistent (after all, “God made everything” is about as consistent a statement as can be made) but the involvement of a diety or diety-equivalent in the early stages of abiogenesis or in the ongoing evolutionary process strikes me as an unneeded extra, in lieu of anything that can’t be explained by other means.
No, it didn’t. It required that such assertions be thrown out. Religious assertions are not a “stage of advancement” at all; they are an error and a hindrance to advancement. “We don’t know; let’s find out” is the attitude that leads eventually to science; not “God told me the Truth, and we’ll kill you if you disagree!”
Well the problem with that is it presupposes some sort of chaotic equilibrium that for some reason stopped being formless and void and suddenly started to cohere into a form.
Right, because the people were stupid. I’m not sure you can fathom how stupid those people were. Like imagine the stupidest person you can imagine, and then think that likely his level of knowledge and education is a few millenia more advanced than the people who wrote those accounts.
Ancient priesthoods values social order above questioning yes, but people WERE questioning, how do you think they got to the point where they wrote down the account?
You discount the idea that light/dark dualities had to be invented at some point. Somewhere along the way people or their progenitors had to understand the fundamental difference between day and night. It took a while after that to associate the day with the Sun and the night with the Moon.
Also, I think you overestimate the impulse not to question. Certainly there were areas where inquiry was forbidden but there were areas where it was ok. The difference between the sort of primitive antiquity and today is staggering. The difference lies within cognitive logic that you take so for granted that you aren’t even contemplating what a society where most people lacked the faculties could have been like. Also, your view of Genesis is skewed as Moses was a step up in regards to intellectual and social freedoms compared to what came before. The story really more adequately describes the origin of abstract thought, than it does any physical process.
Think of it as describing the mind.
In the beginning it was formless and void.
And God said let there be light, and there was light.
Basically the mind was blank, it didn’t think, it reacted. And then let there be light, and the light switched on.
Spoken like someone who takes literacy for granted.
You do of course realize that that particular passage is one of the most common pieces of literature used to teach people to read right? Or has that escaped you.
But of course science happened in spite of the ability to read, not because of it.
This fantasy you cling to where religion was this static thing for thousands of years that never changed until about 1500 AD is kind of precious.
Well, religion was constantly changing, to be sure, but are you suggesting it was constantly advancing? That suggests progress, but toward what?
By this logic, a 500-pound solid iron anvil is “more complex” than a Swiss watch.
One of the great quests of modern physics is to find some simple, basic, set of rules–a set of equations that would fit on a t-shirt, as it is often put–that explain how everything else naturally emerges from that. From the point of view of theoretical physicists, if your explanation is all fancy and complicated then you’re probably not done yet. It might be profoundly weird, but it should also be fundamentally simple.
Of course, you have emergent levels of complexity. So, roughly speaking, the fundamental rules of physics give you space and time and forces, and maybe somehow out of this you also get really basic sub-sub-atomic or sub-sub-sub-atomic particles (quarks and leptons, or the strings or whatever that make up quarks and leptons). The rules of sub-atomic physics give you fundamental particles (quarks and leptons make protons, neutrons, and electrons), which in turn form up into atoms. Atoms make molecules and chemicals. Chemicals at some point become living things, and eventually begin to be governed by natural selection. (Obviously there are still big gaps in all this.)
In one sense, living things are (from the point of view of modern science) completely bound by the “lower” or more basic levels of explanation. Living things are no longer considered to transcend physics or even chemistry–the idea of a “life force” isn’t generally accepted by either physicists or biologists anymore–but obey the laws of physics just as surely as a falling rock does, and in some sense can be totally explained in terms of the same rules that govern rocks and dirt. In another sense, though, living things have “emergent” properties that are totally different from those of rocks, i.e., adaptation to their environment through evolution by natural selection. (One could debate whether or not you could, in principle, “derive” butterflies and great white sharks from that hypothetical set of equations that fits on a t-shirt.)
So, our understanding of the origins of the Universe is undoubtedly still incomplete; but it’s not that our theories are too simple, it’s that they’re still too complicated.
That’s just gibberish. Are you claiming that some other random piece of literature couldn’t have been used? Assuming it really is used the way you claim. And of course science needed reading; not that religion has generally been very pro-literacy.
And yes, I know that many of the earliest forms of writing were religious. They were also not taught to the general public and badly made.
I never said it was static. But neither did it advance, save as forced to by society outside of religion. Religion by its nature is intellectually sterile. Being opposed to both facts and rationality it cannot advance on its own.
Of course; it cooled down as it expanded.
No; they were uneducated, not stupid. However; even some guy in the Stone Age should know that asserting something doesn’t make it so.
Greater literacy. A more numerate populace? A more stable populace that can advance architecture and geometry? Greater understanding of civic design. Improved jurisprudence. All of the items of culture.
The fact that civilization has trended toward becoming more advanced is obvious if you look at architecture. The Greeks were more advanced than the Sumerians, the Romans more than the Greeks, Medeival Europe and Arabia more than the Romans and so on from basic stonework to doric columns, to aquducts, to flying buttresses to Nimitz class aircraft carriers, Space Stations and half-mile tall skyscrapers.
You have to look at it through the lens of the stupid theory of history. For most of our history the vast majority of man was really really really really stupid. Almost exclusively history remembers the smart people. The prodigies, the geniuses, such as Homer or Achilles (if he was real) or Moses, or Cicero and Caesar. Nobody remembers Yob the tanner. Yob the tanner was really stupid, so you discouraged him from thinking for himself and just told him what to think. Besides, most people were so directly involved with basic survival that they didn’t really contemplate the origins of the universe very much, that was for the educated classes, the priests and nobility to think about. And by and large it was the priests and nobility that advanced learning and knowledge. The Jews who we associate that particular piece of literature to, rightly or not, have been pretty adept at voraciously consuming the learning of other societies and assimilating it into their own body of knowledge. To argue that the Jews were anti-learning, and anti-thinking is simply ahistorical.