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God and heaven and hell in the After Life: if it turns to be true of false?
- Thread starter Smart_Guy
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Thief
Rogue Theologian
It all started (began) somewhere at some place at some time....so to speak.
I prefer to say Spirit first.
Substance is dead material and cannot beget the living.
If you insist then your chemistry is all that matters....and that's too bad.
Chemistry is finite and terminal.
The grave awaits.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
Use terms as you please then.....how about....In the beginning.....
and the term....void....is soooooooooo important.
Aupmanyav
Be your own guru
Nothing is dead, nothing can die in this world. Atoms keep on whirring.
Till one of these things happens. Ultimate fate of the universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Thief
Rogue Theologian
Blastcat
Active Member
I wasn't trying to be exhaustive. I was merely presenting the rather obvious fact that there are, as you say, almost infinite possibilities available when we speculate. I presented one that just popped into my head, trivially, in order to demonstrate that some other possibility can be also true.
I love to be corrected, but my intention wasn't to present any fact or present my scenario as the only other alternative possibility. That wasn't my intent. I only intended to show ONE such alternate possibility. Of course, I realize that there are almost infinite possibilities.
And I agree that the Christian account has to be considered along with all of those... and as you say, we end up with an almost infinitely small chance that the Christian account is true.
So, to me, choosing one possible after-life scenario over another is completely unjustified, because the chances of being correct is vanishingly small in any case, as you quite rightly stated. So, although I agree that any answer to the question would be totally subjective, it would also be almost certainly wrong. It's a set up for being wrong, just like the "have you stopped beating your wife" is a set up for being wrong.
To me, the whole question is fallacious.
Thanks for your consideration.
This is Pascal's Wager.
Blastcat
Active Member
Huh?.. er... As an atheist, I would have to question the possibility of any god. And since no god is proven to my satisfaction, the belief might as well BE about something that is, truly, impossible, in the sense that it can't be demonstrated as at LEAST 51% probable.
But everything is at LEAST in some sense possible to SOME degree, even if that possibility is vanishingly small, almost infinitely small, it still is a possibility.. Santa, Jehovah, Vishnu, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.. everything is possible. Doesn't say much at all for any of these proposed beings.
Mere possibility means nothing in my book. That only rules out something like a "married bachelor" or any other logical contradiction. We would assume that nobody is going to believe in some logical contradiction. THAT would be impossible, but anything else we can dream up? All possible. Probable? Not at all.. Possibility does NOT imply probability.
What does it matter if something is possible only to a percentage of .000000000000000001?.. I'd call that pretty impossible in a practical sense. I wouldn't hold my breath hoping and wishing in it, that's for sure. But I'm an atheist. My use of statiscical analysis is different from the theist's use.
My feelings about it have nothing to do with my reasoning. IF you DO find some of my thinking clouded over by emotions, please point that out for me. That wouldn't be relevant to my ideas.
I don't "respect" feelings. I ACCEPT them. We all have them If you tell me you are sad about something, I don't think that's worthy of respect, you didn't achieve anything by being sad, you didn't choose anything by being sad. You are sad about something? Fine. That's your emotional state. You can have it. I won't applaud or denigrate you for it. I reserve "respect" for something that I hold in high regard. Emotions are pretty low on that scale. Everybody and his dog has emotions..
Because we are much much more than our feelings. Happy or sad, mad or glad, isn't really very important. I am sure that some evil monster on death row is sad about being put to death for some horrendous crime. Yes, and so? We expect that. What matters to me more is a higher level of being than merely "emoting" about something.
I strive for higher than emotions, emotions are base line events. We can't help having them, they feel nice and sometimes, they don't feel so nice, but they are physical reactions, and not something to aspire to, quite frankly. It's way too easy for people to drown themselves in a lukewarm sea of sentiments. What the world really needs is more reason. There is a serious lack of reason.. and too much respect for emotions.
I have emotions, I can't get away from having them..I should not be congratulated for having them. It was never my choice to begin with. I was born that way. It's like my chest hair. Big deal. I have chest hairs. And.. ?
I have to agree with you there.. I love being able to listen to as many ideas as possible just in case my own are wrong. And that MEANS I need to be able to listen to those I disagree with the most.
I'm afraid I'm going to seriously offend someone.. like it's inevitable... So it's nice to see that at least in this case, I haven't. So thanks.
Welcome aboard, my friend
That's very nice of you to say. Thank you again.
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It is? Hmm, I think I'll look up who that is sometime.
Huh?.. er... As an atheist, I would have to question the possibility of any god. And since no god is proven to my satisfaction, the belief might as well BE about something that is, truly, impossible, in the sense that it can't be demonstrated as at LEAST 51% probable.
But everything is at LEAST in some sense possible to SOME degree, even if that possibility is vanishingly small, almost infinitely small, it still is a possibility.. Santa, Jehovah, Vishnu, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.. everything is possible. Doesn't say much at all for any of these proposed beings.
Mere possibility means nothing in my book. That only rules out something like a "married bachelor" or any other logical contradiction. We would assume that nobody is going to believe in some logical contradiction. THAT would be impossible, but anything else we can dream up? All possible. Probable? Not at all.. Possibility does NOT imply probability.
What does it matter if something is possible only to a percentage of .000000000000000001?.. I'd call that pretty impossible in a practical sense. I wouldn't hold my breath hoping and wishing in it, that's for sure. But I'm an atheist. My use of statiscical analysis is different from the theist's use.
My feelings about it have nothing to do with my reasoning. IF you DO find some of my thinking clouded over by emotions, please point that out for me. That wouldn't be relevant to my ideas.
I don't "respect" feelings. I ACCEPT them. We all have them If you tell me you are sad about something, I don't think that's worthy of respect, you didn't achieve anything by being sad, you didn't choose anything by being sad. You are sad about something? Fine. That's your emotional state. You can have it. I won't applaud or denigrate you for it. I reserve "respect" for something that I hold in high regard. Emotions are pretty low on that scale. Everybody and his dog has emotions..
Because we are much much more than our feelings. Happy or sad, mad or glad, isn't really very important. I am sure that some evil monster on death row is sad about being put to death for some horrendous crime. Yes, and so? We expect that. What matters to me more is a higher level of being than merely "emoting" about something.
I strive for higher than emotions, emotions are base line events. We can't help having them, they feel nice and sometimes, they don't feel so nice, but they are physical reactions, and not something to aspire to, quite frankly. It's way too easy for people to drown themselves in a lukewarm sea of sentiments. What the world really needs is more reason. There is a serious lack of reason.. and too much respect for emotions.
I have emotions, I can't get away from having them..I should not be congratulated for having them. It was never my choice to begin with. I was born that way. It's like my chest hair. Big deal. I have chest hairs. And.. ?
I have to agree with you there.. I love being able to listen to as many ideas as possible just in case my own are wrong. And that MEANS I need to be able to listen to those I disagree with the most.
I'm afraid I'm going to seriously offend someone.. like it's inevitable... So it's nice to see that at least in this case, I haven't. So thanks.
That's very nice of you to say. Thank you again.
Wait, there is a possibility the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real?!?!?
I mean... yes, I understand. Thank you for sharing your views and opinion
Christ's Prophet
Member
My Response,
There are some things that you need to consider when studying the Heaven and Hell issue..
- Over the last 100 years or so, the resuscitation techniques have improved out of sight. So therefore more than ever before, we have the testimonies of people who have died and have either gone to Heaven or Hell, before being brought back to life. You only have to go to YouTube to examine the testimonies of such people.
- Then you could look at what Christ says about the subject in the Bible. It is a reality shock to understand that people’s testimonies and what Christ says are completely in harmony one with another.
- Look at the world around you. There are the marvels of creation to stand in awe of. Even the human body is a balance of design and it therefore gives testimony of the Designer.
- It then follows that we must pay heed to the Designer of the universe who is Jesus Christ, and to what He says. He is the final Judge of what soul goes where after death. He is the One who provides the criteria for salvation.
- It is good that you are looking into such a question, because it is the most important question that you can ever ask. Where am I going to spend eternity? Get it wrong and the consequences will be catastrophic.
Christ’s prophet, certainty for eternity
Blastcat
Active Member
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- They only CLAIM to have gone to heaven and hell.. let's not get carried away here. A lot of claims are made. And that proves what exactly?
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- That isn't really surprising, believing Christians report what is said in the BIBLE.. wow.. what a strange coincidence.!
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- I call this the "argument from everything proves my point". I've seen this a lot in this forum. But, oddly, I look at the world around me, and it doesn't prove your point. Imagine that! No, I don't "see" design in nature. I see patterns that form naturally, but not a MIND thinking up the design of snowflakes, clouds, sand dunes, waves, river courses, or anything that can be more accurately be described as PHYSICS. We have physics, remember physics? Isaak Newton thought physics was a good idea. ..RIGHT?
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- How does it follow? YOU have a belief where you must pay heed to a god.. but others don't have to assume your designer god is real. SORRY.. and then it "FOLLOWS" that everything else you happen to believe in is ALSO true? I'd like to see how that follows, actually.
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- Pascal's Wager is really hip and cool in this forum, isn't it? As long as you can threaten us will hell and eternal torture, yeah, sure, your heaven seems nicer.. IN COMPARISON only.
- Oh, I hate this formatting thing with the numbering, if you can somehow explain how to SHUT THAT OFF, id be grateful.
shawn001
Well-Known Member
"
The Big Bang – Common Misconceptions
This is in no way a comprehensive list, nor is it meant to present allthe evidence supporting the Big Bang, but instead, only to hit the highlights.
1) The Big Bang was an explosion
This seems to be a really big one. I’ve been told that I contradict myself because I point out that the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion so I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about. The term “Big Bang” was originally given to the theory (originally called “primeval atom”) by Fred Hoyle on a radio program in which he was mocking the theory. However, the misnomer stuck and has been causing confusion ever since.
Let’s first look at what the Big Bang theory really states: “Our universe began in a hot dense state which began, and still is expanding. In this initial event, all the matter in our universe was created with approximately 80% hydrogen and 20% helium.”
That’s my personal paraphrase, but after reviewing a great number of sources, it seems to be the most comprehensive one I can come up with. So let’s analyze it. You’ll notice that nowhere do we find the word “explosion.” Instead we find the term “expansion.”
The frequent picture people seem to have is matter flying outwards from a single point (like an explosion). However, the matter is all actually standing still while space itself expands dragging the matter with it.
The general analogy for this is having a series of paperclips on a rubber band. As the rubber band is stretched, the paperclips appear to move away from one another even though they are in fact holding still with regard to the rubber band. Similarly, galaxies hold still more or less (there are small movements due to gravitational interactions) while they are carried by the expanding universe.
So again, there was no “explosion” but instead, an expansion which is carrying all the rest of the universe away from us.
2) The Big Bang theory doesn’t explain what caused it
This is another big one I see a lot. If the Big Bang was the beginning, then what could have caused the Big Bang? You’ll notice my paraphrase above didn’t include anything about this. Pretty big hole eh?
Not really. The Big Bang theory doesn’t say anything about what caused it because, well, it doesn’t need to. Theories don’t try to explain everything, just what evidence is available and pertinent. Asking the Big Bang (and Evolution) to do more than this is a double standard. After all, the theory of Gravity doesn’t explain where mass came from. The Germ theory of disease transmission doesn’t explain where germs came from. Electro-magnetic theories don’t explain where charge comes from. Atomic theory doesn’t state where atoms come from.
So while it might seem like a piece of the puzzle is missing, as far as this single theory is concerned, it’s not really important. The origin of all these other pieces requires separate theories, with their own evidence, which are being worked on, but often times, are still in their infancy (ie, brane theory to explain the precursors to the Big Bang, Abiogenesis to explain the first life…)
Additionally, the Big Bang doesn’t go all the way back because it really can’t. As I pointed out earlier, when you start going back to far, things become fuzzy. The physical laws we’re all familiar with start to break down under such high energy densities. Really weird stuff starts to happen, like different fundamental forces ceasing to exist and merging with one another.
Thanks to work in particle accelerators, which can recreate such high energy densities for brief fractions of a second, we’re starting to get a feel for how physical laws operate under these conditions, and thus, are slowly working our way backwards. But there comes a point where we just don’t have a good enough handle on things to be able to say how things work back to pretty early (10-35 seconds), but things were happening so fast and furiously, there’s still a long ways to go before we can uncover what happened to cause the whole mess.
Perhaps as better particle accelerators come on line, we’ll be able to work back even further, but this will require new theories about how matter and energy behave when shoved that close together, including a theory which has proved difficult for nearly a century, describing how gravity fits in with the other three fundamental forces into something known as the Grand Unified Theory (GUT).
3) There’s no evidence for the Big Bang
Sadly, yes, I have actually seen this one fairly often. I have no idea where people get the idea that scientists make things up without having good evidence behind it (oh wait… we’re out to disprove God because all scientists hate God or some crap like that).
The Big Bang theory does have a good amount of evidence behind it. So we’ll take a look at the three biggies.
a) Cosmological Redshift: As I explained in my earlier post, we can use spectroscopy to determine the rate at which galaxies are moving away from us. Additionally, since it takes light time to travel, the further away we look, the further back in time we are looking.
What we find, is that all galaxies in the universe are moving away from us. The further they are, the faster they’re moving away. So if we play the whole thing in reverse, all the galaxies will come back together at a single point in time. This point in time is what we call the Big Bang.
b) The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): Figuring that if you played everything back in time like this that all that energy would be crammed into a smaller space, that means the temperature would go up. And also since galaxies couldn’t have formed yet, we’d expect a gaseous sort of universe early on. As I discussed earlier, hot dense gasses emit photons at a peak wavelength corresponding to their temperature. Unfortunately, since things were so dense, photons couldn’t get very far.
However, with the available information, astronomers were able to determine at what density and time, photons would finally be able to get far enough that we could observe them. This is called the “surface of last scattering” and has a very specific temperature. So we should be able to look for photons with energy (wavelength) corresponding to that temperature.
But due to redshift, they will appear at a different wavelength. This radiation should appear from every direction. This was a prediction made by the Big Bang theory that was later confirmed by Penzias and Wilson who stumbled on it accidentally!
No other theory of the universe has ever been able to make such a profound prediction to the degree of accuracy the Big Bang did in this instance. Making such amazing predictions is one of the highlights of a good theory. None before or since have ever been able to pull off such a feat.
But the successes of the CMB prediction don’t stop there. Another important piece of the puzzle lies in that the CMB couldn’t be completely even. If it were, then galaxies couldn’t form since there would be no “seeds” with higher mass and thus a stronger gravitational pull to form around.
Thus, the Big Bang theory had to predict that the CMB would not be completely homogeneous. It should have some variations to it, and those variations would have to be of a specific size in order to get the universe we see today.
Early results for the Big Bang didn’t look too good for this prediction and threatened to sink the whole ship. However, the devices used were not actually sensitive enough to pick up these minute variations. But recently, with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), these perturbations have been discovered precisely as predicted.
Score two strong predictions for the Big Bang. Zero for any others.
c) Distribution of Elements: With the conceptual framework intact thanks to the first point, it was also possible to calculate how much of each element should be formed in the initial event. It should be obvious that, given a bunch of protons, electrons, and neutrons, hydrogen should be the easiest to form. Indeed, stick a proton and an electron in a room together and they’ll automatically hook up due to their magnetic attractions.
Additionally, with such high energies, it would be possible to fuse some of this hydrogen into helium and even a little bit of heavier elements. Since astronomers had a good handle on the energies, it was possible to calculate how much of each there should be. If that number didn’t match up with observations, the Big Bang theory would be shot.
Fortunately, the predictions do match up pretty closely. I stated a value earlier of 80% hydrogen, 20% helium, and neglected the rest since it would be statistically insignificant. In the universe today, we observe 75% hydrogen, 24% helium, and 1% everything else. This discrepancy is easily accounted for by nearly 14 billion years of stars cooking hydrogen into helium and other heavier elements.
So there’s three major pieces of evidence for the Big Bang, any one of which, if it had turned out any other way, would completely discredit the theory. Fortunately for the Big Bang, it has passed all of those tests, and not a single other theory has yet been able to adequately explain such things, or many anywhere near as profound of predictions (or any successful predictions for that matter). This is why the Big Bang stands alone as the premiere theory in cosmology today.
4) The Big Bang doesn’t leave room for God
This isn’t a scientific argument, but rather a philosophical one which is completely beside the point. However, since I see it used frequently, I’ll go ahead and address it.
The Big Bang, like all science, doesn’t have any implications either for or against God. What it may do, it place constraints on how God did things and these may run contrary to scripture. However, there’s two important questions here:
First off, is the scripture right in the first place? And, second, assuming it is, are you interpreting it correctly?
The first one is really beside the point given that it would be folly to approach such a topic, but the second is worth addressing. Many Christians have absolutely no problem interpreting scripture in a manner that’s completely compatible with scientific observations like the Big Bang and Evolution. In regards to the Big Bang, many people choose to interpret the “7 days” as a rather metaphorical statement in which days are better understood as “phases” and could have, in reality, been billions of years. Such people also note that Genesis’ account (roughly) follows the order in which science says things happened (although the order does differ on some points).
I think it’s also important to note that the Catholic Church has affirmed the Big Bang and finds no problem reconciling the theological and scientific perspectives on this point. Both Pope John Paul II and the Vatican’s official astronomer, George Coyne, have given strong support for the Big Bang theory. Additionally, the theory itself was originated by a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître.
So we see, the Big Bang can fit well with scripture so long as one is willing to look at things from the right point of view.
Angry Astronomer: The Big Bang – Common Misconceptions
Aupmanyav
Be your own guru
Thanks @ Shawn001, you have explained it nicely.
And heaven is not a very large place. Only a small percentage of those who profess faith are going to qualify. Jesus said only one out of a thousand. I think Quran also indicates a similar percentage. The rest are headed for eternal hell along with the unbelievers. At least we unbelievers know our fate clearly.
There is nobody in heaven at the moment other than the father and the Son or Allah. The day of judgment is not yet there. The gates of heaven will open only then. At the moment heaven is a totally unoccupied five-star hotel. Why do people not understand this? They have to wait in their graves to be raised.
And heaven is not a very large place. Only a small percentage of those who profess faith are going to qualify. Jesus said only one out of a thousand. I think Quran also indicates a similar percentage. The rest are headed for eternal hell along with the unbelievers. At least we unbelievers know our fate clearly.
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Aupmanyav
Be your own guru
I mean if only one thing exists in the universe, then it is at least 13.75 billion year old as is going to be around for many more billion years; so what is death?
Thief
Rogue Theologian
I mean if only one thing exists in the universe, then it is at least 13.75 billion year old as is going to be around for many more billion years; so what is death?
Transformation.
The body will produce a unique spirit on each occasion.
You could almost be literal about it....
The body is a clay vessel with something living inside of it.
The clay will dry out and break.
You then stand up.....in spirit.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
I believe the judgment day is at hand.....on a personal level.
You die...and heaven comes to see what stands up.
They will let you follow....or leave you where you fell.
You realize this is indeed a debate area?