I’m starting to wonder if Kirk believes that HE is god. He certainly acts like it.
Generally I’m all for making fun of Kirk Cameron, but I’m wondering if he actually has a strong point.
According to Hawking’s and science’s viewpoint there is a point in time or space where there was no time or space or anything at all; no mass, no matter, nothing absolutely nothing at all. The big bang occurred from which everything else promulgated.
How is that different from "in the beginning there was darkness and the darkness was without form or void, and God moved across the face of the darkness and said “Let there be light.”
For something originally written several thousand years ago, that is eerily similar to the scientific explanation. That’s always bothered me.
Hawking says no God or anything is required to have created that Big bang, but waving off the question isn’t the same as answering it.
Both Hawking’s and Cameron’s claim have this unknowable unexplainable event indistinguishable from magic wherein the universe just suddenly appears out of nothing.
Hawking is engaging in a bit of vanity to claim that God wasn’t responsible for the event. He doesn’t really offer a better explanation. Further, 20 years ago he wrote “A Brief History of Time” wherein he discusses this fundamental problem and suggests that this is what separates science from theology and why they don’t conflict because science can’t answer these questions.
Kirk Cameron is an idiot and I’m a big fan of Hawking, but just saying…
Except for the part about God creating it.
Neither is making up deities with no evidence.
Occam’s Razor - “No God” is actually a better explanation than “God”.
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Both Hawking’s and Cameron’s claim have this unknowable unexplainable event indistinguishable from magic wherein the universe just suddenly appears out of nothing.
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I’m not an astrophysicist, but I don’t think any of them claim the universe suddenly appeared out of nothing or anything remotely like.
What do Cameronites answer when asked the very obvious question “If everything had to be created what created God?”
I think he is just implying that there is no need to put god in the theories, and there is an historical precedent for that.
“[No, Sire,] I had no need of that hypothesis”… Pierre Simon Laplace to Napoleon in the early 1800’s
And yet it doesn’t bother you that Genesis 2 explicitly contradicts Genesis 1? :dubious:
Wood:
None of that is really an answer. Kirk’s explanation offers an answer. Hawking’s does not. So, that’s one point for Kirk.
Further, Kirk’s explanation is actually pretty good. One strong definition of God is the creator of the universe. Another is that God is omnipotent. Creating a universe from nothing comes pretty close to passing my shit test for omnipotence (it’s a pretty good trick, you’ll admit.)
Hawking ignores a cause or a reason or an explanation for the Big Bang. I don’t think simply ignoring that huge question is either satisfactory, or good science or even good thinking.
Cameron addresses the question and calls the answer “God.”. Ignoring a question doesn’t get you any further, addressing it and defining it can get you further.
If you don’t like the word “God” you can call it Fred, or the prime mover or the first cause, but in any case you are looking at something that created the universe out of nothing. Since the universe contains all things and possibilities, whatever did it was for all intents and purposes omnipotent.
So, when science comes up with an explanation of the universe that doesn’t require an omnipotent creator to make the universe out of nothing, than it can tell Kirk Cameron to fuck off… But science equites an omnipotent creator, or there is no Big Bang.
Therefore Kirk Cameron has a point, QED.
Oh sure, multiple authors and such. I’m just saying that first bit seems to hold up.
Oh, that’s easy. God created himself. One of the many benefits of omnipotence.
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” Terry Pratchett.
That’s my personal favorite.
That’s a misapplication of the razor. The razor states that given two explanations, choose the simpler one.
Example:
My beer disappeared. Explanation 1 is God magically transported it to heaven. Explanation # 2 is somebody took my beer.
Explanation # is simpler no requires no magical entity and is therefore better.
In the case of Hawking versus Cameron, the problem is that the universe was created suddenly out of nothingness. Cameron says God did it. Hawking offers no answer. Occ.'s doesn’t apply. You need to choices to apply the razor, we only have one.
Yup I like that. Terry addresses the fundamental problem succinctly.
A receding point like many hairlines… 
Really, Kirk is not talking about a deistic God there. And
The Growing Pains must have hurt so much he just gave up.
GIGO:
I’ve read that before and it puzzles me. Hawking predicted virtual particles self creating and it was found to be true with the observation of Cherenkov energy. But the laws of physics are set shortly after the big bang, during inflation. There is no gravity before the big bang, right?
No, scientific thought doesn’t say that there was no time or space. It says we don’t know what there was before there was this particular cosmos/universe/reality.
It isn’t “ignoring” something if you don’t have any idea what the answer is.
How would we know that? We have no hypothesis for any of the conditions before the big bang.
Only a real dipshit would think, “Because God did it!” is a sensible answer.
As I’ve read about this, including Hawking’s explanations, there is no time and space before the big bang. Universal constants such as the speed of light, gravity, things like pi, space and time are defined shortly after thin Big Bang. The planck increments of time and space are also defined. They are a function of things that occurred during the big bang. There is no time and space before the big bang. There is no such thing as “before.” it’s a meaningless term.