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What Happens When You Die?
- Thread starter godnotgod
- Start date
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
Not really, because even if the big bang was the first event we have no idea what caused it, or even if there was a "cause" given that laws of cause and effect would not have existed prior to it.
The sensible view would be an agnostic one because we simply don't know, and we may never know. Saying "God did it" is wishful thinking, not a logical position.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
we were talking about whether the universe was created in specific creation event
All the empirical observational evidence we have points to the big bang (the term originally used to mock the idea), a specific literal creation of all space/time matter/energy as we can possibly ever know it- including all information needed to create galaxies, stars, planets, life, and ultimately self awareness.. how much more creationy can you get?!
If the word 'creation' is not considered appropriate for this event, I think that would suggest that it's the implications rather than the word itself that are disliked?
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
that's exactly what the atheists at the time said, science might have progressed much faster otherwise
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
The church's fixation on the earth as the centre of the universe suppressed early astronomy for a long period of time.
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
"Creation" implies a creator, that's the problem with the word. "Beginning" would be simpler, or at least a word that everyone could agree on....except those who theorise it wasn't the beginning...so maybe "event"...
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Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
'Nature is the executor of God's laws' Galileo
both were cases of scientific consensus v scientific method though...
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
OK, well you say tomato.... it was a very creative beginning process, we don't talk about the 'beginning' of the earth or a mountain range, any more than the 'beginning' of a car or building... but I take your point.
Labels aside, we have to account for the specific composition of that 'beginning' somehow.
If you see 'help' spelled in rocks on a deserted beach, do you presume the waves washed them up that way?
People in power don't like their view of reality threatened. I don't think this is entirely a religious thing.
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
I don't get the analogy, but yes, it's possible for waves to wash rocks up in recognisable patterns. I live by the sea and look at this kind of thing on a regular basis.
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
True. It shows how much power the church had back in those days.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
agree there, the church was the scientific authority- as well as the political and religious, with the best libraries, publishing, educated people and even the best observatories.. all just making new ideas more difficult to accept.. maybe we should have separation of science and state also?
I don't get the analogy, but yes, it's possible for waves to wash rocks up in recognisable patterns. I live by the sea and look at this kind of thing on a regular basis.
I hope you don't work for the coast guard!
I'm looking at the beach right now, I should probably take a walk before it gets covered with snow,.. then I'm outta here for a while
take care all, have a great you-know-what !
NulliuSINverba
Active Member
“The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all."
~ from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England (A Revised Translation With Introduction, Life, and Notes) By A. M. Sellar (George Bell & Sons, London, 1907)
Q. - Do you fret much over what happens before we're born?
godnotgod
Thou art That
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
godnotgod
Thou art That
I am neither theist nor atheist, but I do take issue with a 'creation', which leaves us with the age old problem of the origin of original material. The theists would have it that God created the world out of nothing at all. But the philosophers tell us only nothing can come from nothing, ie 'ex nihilo fit'. Now, cutting edge science (Lawrence Krauss) explains a 'universe from nothing'. But all of this assumes the world to be something real; something having material substance. But what if the 'material' stuff of the world is actually an illusion on a higher plane than your ordinary garden variety kind of illusion? In that case, it would solve two major problems: the origin of the original material from which the universe came, because there is none, and that there is nothing actually being 'created'. It is only a projection, a manifestation. So what is the nature of the 'material' universe then?: consciousness. Pure Consciousness.
The Big Bang was an event in consciousness, and consciousness is non-material, outside of time and space. IOW, it itself is No-thing-ness. Everything came out of Nothing.
The world, as we experience it, is a series of events in consciousness.
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Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
Thief
Rogue Theologian
And you believe the substance (or energy) would be 'self' starting?
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
Cosmologists are currently trying to work out what, if anything, there was prior to the big bang. The latest thinking seems to be that there was something "before".
Note that the whole principle of cause and effect was probably meaningless prior to the big bang anyway.
So we have currently have no idea. God is a possible explanation but a very crude one - there are all sorts of more interesting possibilities!
Thief
Rogue Theologian
I'm going to hold to science....nothing moves without 'something' to move it.
Energy and mass need a Motivation.
Spirit first.