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Atheists, where did the universe come from?

Bob the Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
Sorry, I don't agree.
The Universe does not talk to anybody, but God conversed with many human being. Right, please?
Regards

Right? Well.... I have to ask: Why some people, and not everybody?

It's as if you had a School that Everyone must attend. But. The Teacher only-ever speaks to a very select few-- in fact? The Teacher never appears in Class at all! But, through some mysterious mechanism (that isn't the same for anyone), those Select Few claim to have Left The Class (without showing they actually did) and Spoke To Teacher (without anything to show for that, either).

Now. Is that even a LITTLE fair to the rest of the class?
 

shmogie

Well-Known Member
It
That's a very negative approach.
You could be correct but I doubt it... there are many things that people though science would never achieve....but science has proved them wrong.
it isn´t a negative approach, it is a logical one.

All of the math and the physical laws of the universe break down, in retrograde, a Planck time or so before the BB. So, science is blind and will remain so in determining what was at the time of the BB. That line of inquiry is dead.

The universe is expanding so fast that even at the speed of light, humans could never reach itś edge to determine what is outside it.

The Cern collider, made to try and simulate on a quantum scale, the BB, or at least components of it, can offer little in determining pre BB knowledge.

Faith is commendable, so faith in science is OK, but make no mistake, it is just faith.

You might find solace in startrek type solutions envisioned by Hollywood, but it isn;t real.

Bottom line, your faith is no more based upon scientific evidence than mine is
 

Bob the Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
"You have no way to know that. You have only those human beings' claim that God conversed with them."

Like Universe the Work of G-d points to Him so is Quran the Word of G-d points to Him.

Regards

So that's at least two separate and distinct gods, then? Because, in spite of the labels? The messages from either of those books are in direct conflict with the other-- and with other self-proclaimed "holy" books of Note.

Or else there is just one god, and he/she/it has a really nasty sense of humor*.




* considering all the conflict humans create against one another, over the question of what happens to humans when they are dead. It seems this question creates more dead than any other reason...
 

shmogie

Well-Known Member

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
Cool! Of course, since the experiment is using light? It's naturally limited to the speed at which light travels, and the rate of expansion of the universe.

In the past, I've read that the Universe was expanding, but slowing down, or remaining a steady rate. But in recent observations, it appears that the rate of expansion is speeding up. I wonder how that effects the experiment you referred to?

I think the angles will add up to 180 degrees no matter if the distance is static or increasing.
 

shmogie

Well-Known Member
The evidence that you don't, is here:-
So, this is false ? Really ? The steady state universe is rejected by those advocating the big bang, who reject the idea of a closed universe, who reject the idea of a multiverse, etc., etc.

Be they hypotheses or theories, science seems to have a variety of cosmological views re the universe
 

David T

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
We don't know - but scientists are working on where the universe came from.
To properly rephrase "we don't know where reality came from, but scientists are working on it".

I am not sure if the problem is with the audience, the scientists, or the whole group!
 

ratiocinator

Lightly seared on the reality grill.
So, this is false ? Really ? The steady state universe is rejected by those advocating the big bang, who reject the idea of a closed universe, who reject the idea of a multiverse, etc., etc.

Be they hypotheses or theories, science seems to have a variety of cosmological views re the universe

I suggest you read the links you were provided with about the technical meaning of the word 'theory'.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
Well, I'm actually just assuming it wouldn't say contradictory things to different people. Many versions of god are simply mutually exclusive; if one is true the others aren't.
If God is the "alpha and omega", as most religions proclaim, then I don't see how it could help but appear to be all things to all people. Just because you and I can't understand the totality of this doesn't make it unreasonable. Paradox/contradiction is caused by the limits of our cognition, not by the limits of reality,
 

ratiocinator

Lightly seared on the reality grill.
If God is the "alpha and omega", as most religions proclaim, then I don't see how it could help but appear to be all things to all people.

I do - by being self-consistent. The phrase "alpha and omega" is pretty meaningless.

Just because you and I can't understand the totality of this doesn't make it unreasonable.

Believing a blatant contradiction is unreasonable.

Paradox/contradiction is caused by the limits of our cognition, not by the limits of reality,

How do you know? How could anybody know?
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
MANY (most, I think) atheists see religion as an "enemy" ideology because they don't bother to try and understand why theists choose to conceptualize reality as they do.

In the West, theism is mostly Christianity, with a smattering of Judaism, Islam, Bahai, polytheism, etc.. thrown in. Christianity has always been the enemy of atheists, and advocates converting as many people as possible including atheists to Christianity.

It's not until a few decades ago that Christian atheophobia still successfully depicted atheists as the immoral enemies of a good god not fit to adopt, teach, coach, give expert testimony in court, or sit on juries. The reasons are not difficult to identify, and trace back to scripture that describes unbelievers in extremely negative language. Only recently have atheists in the West begun to transcend this bigotry.

Now you ask us to try to understand the theist - to see it from his perspective. I understand why people believe in gods. It's easy and comforting as many have indicated in this thread, Wasn't it you who said that there is a natural proclivity among people to opt for simple answers to unanswered and as yet unanswerable questions in order to deceive themselves into believing that they have greater control over their lives? Is this something to respect? What I respect is the person who rises from his knees to and takes his proper place in the universe as the bipedal ape with some but not all of the answers, who realizes that there may be no gods or anybody else watching over him from afar, that his existence might end with death, that the universe we who populate the surface of this planet may be all the life that there is for light years in every direction, insignificant everywhere but here on earth and even there, to all but a handful of people and animals that may love us, and that things cannot get better if we don't make them better.

Because as far as we know, that's how it is.

many people prefer to conceptualize the Great Unknown (God of the gaps) in terms of a personification. It helps them to feel that they have some sort of interactive control over it.

And some people prefer to call the unknown the unknown. I prefer discussions with the latter rather than hearing about the things people do to comfort themselves. As I indicated above, if we consider that there may be no god overseeing our lives, we can learn to live a more authentic existence rather easily, but apparently only if we begin doing so in the first half of life. There appears to be a window of opportunity here that eventually closes making the transition too costly in terms of shattering world views and social structures previously put into place to affirm and reinforce those beliefs. It's easier to do at 20 or 30 years of age than at 60 or 70.

Millions of people have visited Michelangelo's sculpture "Pieta" and would say that it "spoke to them". That it changed them emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. And yet there is no reason we should assume that the message they derived from it must be the same from one person to the next.

But it is reasonable to assume that the message came from the observer's own mind and not from the statue. If the statue were the source of the message, the reports would be similar, as when people report to us about a ball game they attended. Notwithstanding differences in the reports, the reports won't contradict one another in any meaningful way, and it will be apparent when facts are reported such that the witnesses are all describing the same game.

It's the variety of descriptions of gods, many if not most mutually exclusive, that lets us know that people are reporting their own psychological states and processes that they mistake for external reality.
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
God is not limited to time and space.

Anything that can be said to exist exists in time, which much exist independent of any deities and thus transcend them, Nothing can create time, even gods, since the act of creation implies the passage of time from a before state to an after state. To exist means to pass through time from prior moments to subsequent ones. This is also true not just about existing and creating, but also about thinking itself, which also spreads out over time connecting earlier moments to later ones.

Polymath made a similar comment about the word always also implying the passage of time

Yet the goat herds and scientists fundamentally agree

The goat herds, like all creation mythologists, got almost everything wrong except perhaps the part about our universe having a beginning. Like the Norse, Mesopotamian creation stories, the Native American creation stories, and all of the rest, the Genesis version makes no mention of the singularity, the expansion of the universe, the inflationary epoch, symmetry breaking, particle condensation, nucleosynthsis, the decoupling of matter and radiation, the hundreds of millions of years before the first starlight, the 9 billion year delay before the formation of the sun and earth, the moon creating impact event, the cooling of the earth with crust formation, etc..

being unambiguous has nothing to do with making you believe something.

If you want to convince me, you'll need to be clear and precise at a minimum. Having a compelling argument helps as well.

By definition God is the only being who never was created or born

Not by my definition.

What does one mean by the word "natural", please?

There are two predominant meanings. One means the opposite of supernatural, the other is the opposite of artificial.

The humans did not create the Universe, so it is most appropriate to use the expression "God did it".

Not to me. It is most appropriate to use the expression, "We don't know" to describe that which we don't know.

The simulation hypothesis should be taken very seriously

To what benefit? Even assuming that in some sense that you are correct, what value would that idea have?
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
The tactic of impeaching the knowledge of a correspondent to de facto impeach what he says won´t work.

It works with me. There are certain ideas that are litmus tests regarding a source's qualifications. If somebody wants to criticize evolutionary science for example, he at a minimum needs to know that a scientific theory is. If he tells me that evolution is only a theory, well, he just can't recover from that ever.

One theist was recently complaining about being criticized by another poster for misspelling so many words in his native language so badly. He didn't consider that relevant, but of course it is relevant. These aren't just typos - a finger hitting the wrong key. These errors tell me a lot about how little this person reads, and how little time he has spent with academic topics including science before attacking it. What insightful or erudite piece of writing has ever come in that form?

Faith is commendable

If by faith you mean unjustified belief, I disagree. What is commendable about believing without just cause? This is from Pat Condell:

"The truth is that faith is nothing more than the deliberate suspension of disbelief. It's an act of will. It's not a state of grace. It's a state of choice, because without evidence, you've got no reason to believe, apart from your willingness to believe. So why is that worthy of respect, any more than your willingness to poke yourself in the eye with a pencil?


"And why is faith considered some kind of virtue? Is it because it implies a certain depth of contemplation and insight? I don't think so. Faith, by definition, is unexamined. So in that sense it has to be among the shallowest of experiences. Yet, if it could, it would regulate every action, word and thought of every single person on this planet.
"

How can faith possibly be a path to truth when any idea or its mutually exclusive polar opposite can be supported equally by faith even though we know that at least one of those must be incorrect? Faith was not my path to atheism, but if it were, my atheism would be equally well (or poorly) founded as any theist's belief. How would you answer somebody who told you that there is no god, and that he knows this by faith?

How you know that eventually God won't be needed?
better to keep saying "I don't know"

We can revisit the topic if that is ever the case. The arc of history has uniformly been to replace gods with blind, natural processes. There is no indication that this will ever change. What do we need gods to explain that can't be due to natural processes like abiogenesis and cosmogenesis?

Do you celebrate Christmas or are you living in another world?

Another world.

We gather with others at Christmastime, but the event is no more a celebration of anything in particular than similar gatherings that occur for no other reason than to have a good time with others. My wife and I are presently planning such a party for next month. Is that a celebration?

"Celebrating" Christmas has the same meaning to us. There is no mention of Jesus, no mention of a virgin birth or of a god, no Magi or mangers, etc. The only indication that it is Christmastime is a Christmas tree and a house decorated with items like an animatronic Santa.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
I do - by being self-consistent. The phrase "alpha and omega" is pretty meaningless.

Believing a blatant contradiction is unreasonable.
To claim that humans are smart, and to claim that humans are stupid, simultaneously, would be a "blatantly contradictory" statement. And yet both are true, simultaneously. And neither claim is at all unreasonable.
How do you know? How could anybody know?
We know because we've managed to resolve some of the contradictions we've encountered in the past.
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
It

it isn´t a negative approach, it is a logical one.

All of the math and the physical laws of the universe break down, in retrograde, a Planck time or so before the BB. So, science is blind and will remain so in determining what was at the time of the BB. That line of inquiry is dead.

The universe is expanding so fast that even at the speed of light, humans could never reach itś edge to determine what is outside it.

The Cern collider, made to try and simulate on a quantum scale, the BB, or at least components of it, can offer little in determining pre BB knowledge.

Faith is commendable, so faith in science is OK, but make no mistake, it is just faith.

You might find solace in startrek type solutions envisioned by Hollywood, but it isn;t real.

Bottom line, your faith is no more based upon scientific evidence than mine is
Computers, mobile phones, airplanes, automobiles, medicines, engineering, space flight, etc., etc., didn't come from faith.
 

Salvador

RF's Swedenborgian
To what benefit? Even assuming that in some sense that you are correct, what value would that idea have?

Unfortunately, even if the simulation hypothesis were proven correct, this alone would fail to explain by whom we are simulated. ...:(

However, there'd be knowledge gained by us conscious beings if we were to realize whether or not any of us programmed characters were likely to get re-programmed into another simulation. Right?
 
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