Who is this cat and is it even possible for him to prove this? I plan on going so does anyone have any good questions I can ask him? Anyone have any infromation on this guy in general? Thanks in advance.
I seriously doubt he can “prove” his assertions. Just as the Big Bang is a theory so to must his be unless he has a time machine to go back and show us (and even then it would probably still be a theory). His theory will then have to make predictions that can be verified. If it makes more accurate predictions or better yet predicts something new to look for and we find it then it may supplant the Big Bang. In the meantime the Big Bang has some pretty strong evidence to support it. Anyone who can topple the Big Bang from its perch will doubtless have a Nobel Prize in his/her future.
I have a Creationist co-worker who states that, though the universe is only a few thousand years old, God created a few billion years worth of “the past” in the beginning in order for physical laws to work.
“What’s the purpose of that” sez I.
“He’s GOD, man, He don’t need to explain Himself to us!”
:dubious:
I’m Old-Earth, not Young-Earth, Creationist, but a common analogy is “God creates an adult man yesterday. Today he is one day old. However to us he would appear twenty-plus years old. In the same way, God created an Universe with an appearance of age that was necessary to provide all we needed. Thus, stars which are now millions of light-years away had their starlight sped millions of times past light-speed so we would get light from them, etc.”
I don’t buy it, but there is a logical consistency.
The Speaker in the OP may be able to logically argue that a orderly, life-sustaining Cosmos emerging randomly from a primal atomic reaction is questionable, but he can’t prove it didn’t happen, nor can anyone prove it did. Heck, there are naturalistic scientists who doubt the Big Bang was the origin of everything.
As an OEC, I have no problem believing in a BB Origin. In fact, a lot of theists jumped on BB theory as it does posit an actual origin for the Universe.
You’re all wrong!
God created the Universe last Thursday.
Being omnipotent, he planted all the necessary evidence (fossils, stars, memories etc) for us to find.
And because there is all this consistent evidence for the Big Bang and evolution, it proves that God exists and is all-powerful!!!.
His subject is the big bang and he still appears to mention evolution. The two are unrelated, so I’d say there’s a good chance he’s a YEC and little chance he’s worth listening to, much less a chance he can prove what he says. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s such a thing as evolutionary cosmology; I have no idea what that would mean.
Everytime I hear someone pull that one out, I ask him, “So God lied to us? The loving God that died for us deliberatly created a universe that is a complete lie? Why should I believe anything else He says to me?”
None of them ever manage to answer that.
I’d suggest perusing Jackson’s website to get an idea of what to expect.
For starters, his “Answers to readers” page has a couple of ones covering cosmology.
This just looks like a piss-poor dependence on the usual suspects when it comes to finding dissenters from mainstream cosmology.
They may indeed be the “true heroes” of creationism, but both Barry Setterfield and Russell Humphreys have a track record of publishing rubbish. As usual, there’s lots more at the Talk.Origins Archive.
If anyone really wants to know the truth about the universe, here it is:
I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows…for sure. Big bang, creationist, evolutionary…they all have an equal probability of being correct. To believe one over the other is the wrong way to think about that kind of thing. Admit we don’t know and move on. Maybe someday, by throwing away all preconcieved notions about the way things really are, we will stumble upon the answer. But we don’t have it now.
Well, your first statement is true; no cosmological origin has been definitively proven.
Your second sentence is simply your opinion, and doesn’t qualify as “truth.”
Whoisfoo, let us know how the presentation goes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bongmaster
If anyone really wants to know the truth about the universe, here it is:
I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows…for sure. Big bang, creationist, evolutionary…they all have an equal probability of being correct.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Sengkelat
Well, your first statement is true; no cosmological origin has been definitively proven.
Your second sentence is simply your opinion, and doesn’t qualify as “truth.”
Whoisfoo, let us know how the presentation goes.
[QUOTE/]
Well, not exactly right. As to the first question. I can say that Bigfoot exists even though it hasn’t been proven. If they find one eventually, I was right wasn’t I.
Regarding the second question and probability. If I say Bigfoot exists, and lets just say he secretly does, then someone who says he doesn’t has zero chance of being right.
Any way, on to the matter at hand. So what’s the percentage of agnostics/atheists in the population? 2%?
Is all the hooplah really meant to convert us? Methinks they’re trying to convince themselves.
I know they weren’t questions, they were statements :smack: Whew it’s late…
That’s a rather simple-minded way of looking at the universe. Just ignore it and hope the answer falls into our laps? I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
The Big Bang theory has evidence, while the creationist theory does not. I wouldn’t say they have an equal probability of being correct. The Big Bang theory of course could turn out to be wrong, but it fits the current evidence and observations best so logically most “believe” it to be true, if you can even call it a belief.
A big misconception about science is that it claims to have all the answers. It doesn’t. It only claims to be looking for them. Creationists don’t look for answers, they make them up.
That’s totally wrong.
How do we give up and move on and find the answer in the future at the same time? You’re not a big believer in work or progress, I take it. 
The problem here is that you might be expecting this part of the claim:
To be honest, when in all probability what is going to happen is that you go there, sit down, they shut the doors and you have to listen to a two-hour sermon that starts off all about this or that perceived ‘rpoblem’ with some aspect of mainstream science, but veers rapidly toward God’s Plan For Mankind and how You Must Accept Jesus.
By all means attend; it’s bound to be interesting - from the POV of psychology, if nothing else - but don’t expect it to live up to or even honour the claims made in the advertisement.
In fact, I really think you should go, then report back to us; I want to know what he has to say.
The reason that the discovery of cosmic background radiation by Penzias and Wilson was a big deal was that it had been predicted by Big Bang theorist. The reason the lumps were important was that they had been predicted by the inflation model. Creationism predicts things also - they’ve all turned out not to have happened. So stating that they are all equally probable displays an appalling ignorance of the subject.
Of course they are not proven - even mentioning proof also indicates a lack of knowledge of how science works.
If anything, Bongmasters’ statement was a factual one. How is that being simple-minded? Because he doesn’t pull excuses out of his ass and try to enforce them on everyone? He should be commended.
I myself would believe the Bing Bang over creationism any day. But if the Big Bang theory really had any hard evidence, it wouldn’t be a theory anymore.
I asked my YEC brother that very question during one of our many debates on the subject. He accused me of creating a strawman. :rolleyes:
Does it? The only ‘predictions’ I’ve seen made by creationists are actually assertions that creationism predicted something that we already know - any fool can predict the past.
It is simple minded because the set of possibilities Bongmaster mentioned are not equally probable. The only data that Hoyle’s Steady State theory has to support it are also supportive of the Big Bang. (Everyone seems to forget that Steady State was the reigning model until the 3K microwave background was discovered.) Creationism is only supported if you adopt the view that God made everything look like a Big Bang happened. I find it odd that creationist seem to reject the Big Bang, since it does allow for a Creator and an initial instant in time.
You don’t seem to understand the scientific use of the word “theory”. A theory is a predictive interpretation of facts. No number of supportive facts can ever make a theory into something else, it will always be a theory. We have Newton’s theory of gravitation. Every one of us fully expects the earth to remain in its orbit and that when we drop something it will accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared, ignoring air resistence. But those aren’t facts, they’re theoretical predictions.
The Big Bang theory does have many facts supporting it, but it will never not “be a theory anymore”. It was a prediction of the Big Bang theory that galaxies are receding from each other. That the galaxies are receding from each other is now a fact. Hoyle’s Steady State theory has been massaged to live with that fact, but it didn’t predict it, and few are convinced by the massaging.