No big bang...

And you know that based on ... ?
...currently the inability for man to create life from non-life, since we are allegedly the brightest bulb on the tree...and "host cells" implanted with genetic software do not count, since man didn't (and still can't) create the actual host cell shell used.

Kinda like man saying he can make a man from dirt, and God saying "um, make the dirt first, then you'll impress me".
 
... and meanwhile, what was absolutely certain a month ago is now rendered uncertain ... John Polkinghorne is one among not a few notable names who has abandoned his old position in the light of new understandings ...

Personally, I love it. The Cosmos? Bring it on!

Thomas
 
What was "absolutely certain" a month ago? :confused:
I was speaking somewhat poetically —

There was a series on TV in which the 'great minds' of the scientific community were interviewed. The general agreement was that anyone who makes any claim absolutely, does not understand science.

I spoke to a scientist recently, we had an hysterical conversation about cosmology, especially one in which he dared a class of kids to come up with a more bizarre theory of cosmology than those currently going the rounds ...

... He is not a believer, but when I suggested that anyone who declares absolutely that God does not exist, is intellectually dishonest, he was inclined to agree. One can say, 'I choose not to go there', but one cannot say 'there is no God' on the basis of our current scientific understanding.

Even Hawking's statement that soon we will be able to explain everything without the need to introduce God into the discussion does not stand as a proof of the non-existence of God.

Thomas
 
... He is not a believer, but when I suggested that anyone who declares absolutely that God does not exist, is intellectually dishonest, he was inclined to agree.
If anyone who declares absolutely that a good God does not exist, is intellectually dishonest, then similarly anyone who declares absolutely that an evil God does not exist, is intellectually dishonest.
 
If anyone who declares absolutely that a good God does not exist, is intellectually dishonest, then similarly anyone who declares absolutely that an evil God does not exist, is intellectually dishonest.
No, that's silly, as philosophically now, an 'evil god' is a contradiction in terms. We've progressed a long way ...

Thomas
 
No, that's silly, as philosophically now, an 'evil god' is a contradiction in terms. We've progressed a long way ...
Contradiction in terms only if you define God as good. Philosophically however, there is no reason why God can't be defined as evil.
 
Contradiction in terms only if you define God as good. Philosophically however, there is no reason why God can't be defined as evil.
Depends on who's philosophy. I don't know one.

Plato, Aristotle, the entire Western Philosophical Tradition ... all define God as good.

A quick definition:
Good is what God wills.
Ergo what God wills is good.

God cannot will evil, any more than God can create a round triangle.

Thomas
 
Depends on who's philosophy. I don't know one.

Plato, Aristotle, the entire Western Philosophical Tradition ... all define God as good.

A quick definition:
Good is what God wills.
Ergo what God wills is good.

God cannot will evil, any more than God can create a round triangle.

Thomas
So man defines God and decides what he can and cannot will.
 
There have now been several papers published that produce tentative evidence that the "Big Bang" was a local event. These range from large scale flows of matter to tiny perturbations in charged electrons in lensing events. There is no evidence suggesting that there was never any tumultuous event that occurred a little under 14 billion years ago. All observational data make this event as close to a certainty as it is reasonably possible to claim.

Those of a superstitious bent who find their belief challenged by scientific rigour and so respond with their "told you so" that validates and sanctions their own dismissal of base logic of course take pleasure in their misapprehension of how science works. They are so invested in their own concrete edifices of ill-logic they automatically presume that science is of the same robust and unchanging fabric as their chosen system of belief. It is laughable really. And of course their gaze is so transfixed on their own narcissistic need that explaining such simple logic is nigh impossible.

The evidence so far presented for the existence of matter prior to the Big Bang event may be tentative but it is compelling and rigorously obtained. There are now two detected Dark Flows that actually shatter the idea that the Big Bang was an expansion from nothing into nothing. It was in fact an expansion from a fixed point in an already extant universe. This throws back the age of the universe by an unknown and probably unknowable quantity and similarly expands its size. Yet to those that insist on clinging desperately to the ranting certainties of prehistoric beliefs that can logically only be called superstitions, we are still the creations of some avaricious being that wants to judge our individual actions like some repressed pervert. Go figure. Freud may have fallen out of fashion but it is high time parts of his work were revived and applied.

All this really demonstrates is that we have a multi-tiered society with some people keen to explain the universe we inhabit with observation and experiment, and others too lazy, stupid or brainwashed to walk the line of actually looking with their eyes open. And to say that nobody can disprove the existence of God is just playing with semantics. The statement has absolutely no weight outside of a crass and redundant philosophy of desperation.
 
From what I gather there's evidence for a big bang in the form of leftover background radiation, plus the fact that the universe is expanding.
Here's my theory- "God wote the 'creation/evolution program', then snapped his fingers to start it.
THAT was the big bang..;)
 
Depends on who's philosophy. I don't know one.

Plato, Aristotle, the entire Western Philosophical Tradition ... all define God as good.

A quick definition:
Good is what God wills.
Ergo what God wills is good.

God cannot will evil, any more than God can create a round triangle.

Thomas

This denies God's omnipotence, else declares him apathetic. Many bad things happen in the world that God theoretically can change but doesn't, what is the Christian explanation for this? If we posit that it is the work of the devil, but that God isn't apathetic, we accept the devil must be stronger than God, otherwise surely a good God would do something about it? We are thus accepting that God is not omnipotent, we accept that something created can overpower its creator.

In my view, it is merely our perceptions which create good and bad due to a limited understanding of reality. When something is destroyed, it merely opens the possibility for something new. In this light, even what we declare bad or unjust is actually truly beautiful as well.
 
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