GDR Posted May 30, 2007 Share Posted May 30, 2007 Nevertheless, Einstein was a reported 'theist' before he died. You still havn't told me where the dust came from Einstein always was a Theist but that was as far as it went. As for dust: The products of the Big Bang were hydrogen and helium and just a touch of lithium. These basic elements started clumping together into stars that have long since expired. Within these ancient clumps or stars the atomic nuclei of all of our elements were formed, including the elements that make up dust. (coles notes version) I've been told that I'm older than dust so I should know this stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Hawkeye Posted May 31, 2007 Share Posted May 31, 2007 Moon the Loon quote: “One of the basic faults, in my poor uneducated opinion, of theoretical science in regards The Big Bang Theory as we know it is its fixation with "Beginning". Conversely, the same can be said of Atheist and agnostic who are fixated on the Universe’s eternality (always existed) Moon the Loon Quote: “In my mind, like the measurement of time, there is no beginning.” Moon the Loon quote: “The term "beginning" is a man-made concept” One could argue it is a GOD-made concept ---- In the “beginning”, God created the Heavens and the Earth… Scientific evidence has accumulated to the extent that atheists are finding it difficult to deny that the Universe had a beginning. So they’ve been forced to attack the first premise of Kalam's argument that “whatever begins to exist has a cause.” It seems metaphysically necessary that anything which begins to exist has to have a cause that brings it into being. Things just don’t pop into existence, uncaused, out of nothing. Yet the atheist Quentin Smith on this topic, claimed that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing.” That sounds like a good conclusion to the Gettysburg Address of Atheism! It simply is amazing that anyone can think this is the most rational view. British Physicist Edmund Whittaker in his book, “ The Beginning and End of the World” said: “There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before and was suddenly galvanized into action. For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? When Albert Einstein developed his general Theory of Relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the Universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should be either exploding or imploding. Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre were able to develop models based on Einstein’s theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course this meant that if you went backward in time, the Universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn’t exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this The Big Bang. American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be, and that this a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us! Hubble’s astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaitre. (See above) Then in the 1940’s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the Universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the Universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the Universe’s background radiation --- it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and very dense state of the Universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model. “And if that is not enough to convince you, another main piece of evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements like carbon and iron are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernovae into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There’s no other explanation.” Cosmologist William Craig, PHD, THD So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Even atheist Kai Nielsen said, “Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang … and you ask me, “What made that bang?” And I reply, “Nothing, it just happened.” “You would not accept that.” Atheists have long maintained that the Universe doesn’t need a cause, because it’s eternal. How can they possibly maintain that the Universe can be eternal and uncaused, yet God cannot be timeless and uncaused?” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Hawkeye Posted May 31, 2007 Share Posted May 31, 2007 Look at it mathematically. Until Euclid (if I remember correctly) discovered negative numbers, the number 1 (not zero) was always the "beginning" of numbers. After all, how could there be less than 1 number of anything. "Nothing" was not a number until quite recently Early scholars used mathematical reasoning to demonstrate that it was impossible to have an infinite past. Their conclusion, therefore, was that the universe’s age must be finite --- that is it had a beginning. They pointed out that absurdities would result if you were to have an actually infinite number of things. Since an infinite past would involve an actually infinite number of events, then the past simply can’t be infinite. Cosmologist William L. Craig, PHD, THD with his scholarly depth has an uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts in accessible and yet technically accurate language. He gives a stunning illustration to clarify what Moon the Loon talks about (negative numbers) in an earlier post. “Let’s use an example using marbles, he said. “Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles left for myself.” “However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself, and you would have an infinity too. You’d have just as many as I would --- and, in fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided into odd and even! " "Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of marbles, but I would have only three marbles left.” “What these illustrations demonstrate is that the notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to contradictory results. In the first case in which I gave you all the marbles, infinity minus infinity = zero: in the second case in which I gave you all the odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity: and in the third case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number, but we have come up with non-identical results.” “For that reason, mathematicians are forbidden from doing subtraction and division in transfinite arithmetic, because this would lead to contradictions. Working within certain rules. Mathematicians can deal with infinite quantities and infinite numbers in the conceptual realm. However --- and here’s the point --- it’s not descriptive of what can happen in the real world.” “You couldn’t have an infinite number of events in the past because you would run into similar paradoxes. Substitute “past events” for “marbles”, and you can see the absurdities that would result. So the universe can’t have an infinite number of events in its past: it must have had a beginning.” “In fact, we can go further. Even if you could have an actual infinite number of things, you couldn’t form such a collection by adding one member after another. That’s because no matter how many you add, you can always add one more before you get to infinity. This is sometimes called the Impossibility of Traversing the Infinite.” “But if the past really were infinite, then that would mean we have managed to traverse an infinite past to arrive at today! It would be as if someone had managed to count down all of the negative numbers and to arrive at zero at the present moment. Such a task is intuitively nonsense. For that reason as well, we can conclude there must have been a beginning to the Universe.” Using "Moon the Loon's" own words: Mind-boggling!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DEFCON Posted May 31, 2007 Share Posted May 31, 2007 Great post's Hawkeye. A comment on your last remarks; “But if the past really were infinite, then that would mean we have managed to traverse an infinite past to arrive at today! It would be as if someone had managed to count down all of the negative numbers and to arrive at zero at the present moment. Such a task is intuitively nonsense. For that reason as well, we can conclude there must have been a beginning to the Universe.” In the first book of the Old Testament (Genesis) Abraham is speaking with God and asks him who he is. God provides a fairly wordy explanation in which he says "I always was and I will always be". Throughout man's reign he's always been able to fathom "I will always be" as a concept because the mind can visualize eternity / infinity going forward. On the other hand the phrase, "I always was" locks the human brain into a paradox of sorts. Our problem is that we require a starting point or a beginning from which our perspective of / on time can be employed in aid of the big picture. Enter modern physic's and the "continuum". The continuum can be represented in two dimensions as a circle or in the third sense, as a sphere. Either has no beginning or end. The physical universe we "see" today is thought to have begun with the Big Bang. The actual start? of the event itself only accounts for an instant in time. During this nano second our universe presented itself which necessarily required us to start our clocks. Perhaps our concept of time, infinity and the Big Bang can be represented by -1 + 1 = 0 = +1 + -1 where 0 is the moment of the BB or the beginning of our reality as suggested in the first three words of the Bible? Therefore the physical process may actually be a repeating theme and eternal in practice? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rattler Posted June 1, 2007 Share Posted June 1, 2007 Evolution or by divine design??? May 31, 2007 A Walk on the Trees Orangutans on two legs bolster the notion that walking first arose in trees Our two-legged life may have its roots in the trees. Researchers have witnessed wild orangutans standing straight-legged on slender branches as they grab for fruit, suggesting that bipedalism, or upright walking, may have arisen in the tree-dwelling ancestor of apes and humans and passed down to us—proving, if true, that the biped doesn't fall far from the tree. The evidence comes from a yearlong field study of Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia's Gunung Leuser National Park. Paleoanthropologist Susannah Thorpe of the University of Birmingham, England, spotted apes clambering on trees a total of 2,811 times, including numerous instances of bipedalism. In 75 percent of these cases the animals maintained balance with their hands, and over 90 percent of the time their legs were stiff, unlike the bent-knee, bent-hip shuffle of chimps and gorillas, which also stand upright in trees sometimes. Thorpe and her colleagues report in a paper published online today by Science that the orangutans reared up on two legs mostly as they reached for fruit while perching on one or more smaller branches totaling four or fewer centimeters in diameter. They speculate that straight legs help the apes balance on pliable branches, much the way gymnasts steady themselves on a trampoline. Researchers had previously taken bipedalism as distinctive of humans and their closest extinct relatives, together called hominins, speculating that early hominins adapted to two legs on African savannas some five million years ago, after descending from the trees and outgrowing a phase of knuckle walking similar to that of modern chimps and gorillas. "Most of us had assumed that the only place where it's sensible to be bipedal is on the ground," says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. A handful of fossil species dating from five million to 28 million years old, mostly before chimpanzees split from hominins, showed signs of upright posture and bipedalism, but "the evidence has been pretty flakey," Wood says. The orangutan finding, he says, suggests these fossils may indeed represent bipedal apes. Thorpe and company propose that bipedalism evolved to help such animals reach tasty fruit just out of reach, and as forest cover shrank, chimps took to shimmying and knuckle walking while hominins began stretching their legs on the ground. The researchers "present a plausible and elegant argument in favor of the emergence of bipedalism in an arboreal rather than terrestrial context," according to an accompanying commentary by researchers Paul O'Higgins and Sarah Elton, both of the Hull York Medical School in England. They say the discovery strengthens the case that differences in foot structure and limb proportion in early hominins reflect different paths from orangutanlike bipedalism. It "reopens the debate," they write, "about the origins of our own peculiar commitment to bipedal locomotion." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moon The Loon Posted June 1, 2007 Share Posted June 1, 2007 “But if the past really were infinite, then that would mean we have managed to traverse an infinite past to arrive at today! It would be as if someone had managed to count down all of the negative numbers and to arrive at zero at the present moment. Such a task is intuitively nonsense. For that reason as well, we can conclude there must have been a beginning to the Universe.” Poppy-cock! "We" have traversed virtually nothing. It is absurd to use the word "infinite" in an argument to prove a "beginning". Time is a man-made measurement. It is not a thing. "To countdown all of the negative numbers" is inconceivable in the context of infinity. Can't be done. Infinity can't be measured. It is immeasurable. One can look backwards or forwards using a form of measurement such as time but the concept of infinity contradicts any limits in either direction. The word "universe" is being used in this thread as a finite entity. Modern cosmology, as stated earlier, is moving rapidly in the direction of determining that our known "universe" may indeed be a finite thing - one of many, perhaps an infinite number of "universes" all interacting with each other in ways that have yet to be imagined. Trying to prove the existence of a deity using circular arguments (interesting as they might sound) is as ridiculous as determining the speed of a car by counting the blades of grass in a field. Those who try remind me of the witch doctor. Faith healing is still rampant in many parts of the third world. Anyone can quote theists and philosophers until the cows come home. Bottom line, it all comes down to faith. Faith. Why does anyone feel the need to "prove" faith by scientific means? You have it or you don't. Many do; many don't. Most have no idea why they have faith; a few think it through and use analogies of all kinds to convince others to have the same faith. Others treat it as a family matter - a very large like-minded family albeit. Modern religions take advantage of peoples' faith and are anachronisms. They had their time - to order and protect growing societies, to give a sense of purpose to the future and to control peoples' behaviour in this world using the threat of punishment in The Next. Round and round and round we go Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seeker Posted June 1, 2007 Share Posted June 1, 2007 Faith. Why does anyone feel the need to "prove" faith by scientific means? You have it or you don't. Many do; many don't. I think it's obvious that no one will be convinced to change their personal belief system based on a few quotes and arguments made here. What I find it interesting is to see the arguments people make to defend their beliefs. The reasons and justifications for the belief are more interesting than the belief itself. Hawkeye's post, "I believe in God because you can't transverse the infinite", is something I've never heard before and is very thought provoking. It doesn't change my mind but it sure is a unique argument. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IFG Posted June 1, 2007 Share Posted June 1, 2007 Thought provoking, Seeker? Maybe I miss something, but the musings of "Cosmologist William L. Craig, PHD, THD" strike me more as cleverness than insight, "uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts" or not. From my 'umble POV, Zeno's paradoxes dressed up in a cheap tuxedo Cheers, IFG Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seeker Posted June 1, 2007 Share Posted June 1, 2007 Thought provoking, Seeker? Maybe I miss something, but the musings of "Cosmologist William L. Craig, PHD, THD" strike me more as cleverness than insight, "uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts" or not. From my 'umble POV, Zeno's paradoxes dressed up in a cheap tuxedo Cheers, IFG "Zeno's Paradoxes"? I love this place! Thanks for the link. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handyman Posted June 4, 2007 Share Posted June 4, 2007 The trouble with Islam. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 The trouble with Islam. "... I don't want to be murdered by some hysterical, self righteous, carpet chewing, book burning, muppet with s#it for brains..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mo32a Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 Well here's something to gnaw on...a rather brave soul going public... One man's opinion... posted prior in this thread Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rattler Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 An example of how some apply their interpretation of their religion and how different our cultures are. BBC News Pakistanis executed for adultery A woman and three men were shot dead in a public execution in a Pakistani village after tribal elders found them guilty of adultery, officials said. The death sentences were ordered by a jirga (council) of elders in the Khyber agency area on the Afghan border. Sex outside marriage is a crime in Pakistan and tribal village councils often punish those involved with death. Last year, Pakistan's parliament approved a new bill amending Islamic laws on rape and adultery. The new law dropped the death penalty for people having sex outside marriage. 'Confessed' "We found a man and a woman in a compromising position along with another man who was drunk and had already committed adultery, and the owner of the house," Haji Jan Gul, a village resident, told the news agency Reuters. "All four confessed to adultery. We punished them according to our customs and traditions," he said. Reports said the executions were watched by some 600 people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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