Big Bang Myth

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Catholic geocentrists seem to have a lot of problems with the theory of gravitation and general relativity.
 
itinerant1 said:
Here is an excerpt from an old Watch Tower Society publication. The older publications especially are notorious for their mixture of hubris and utter nonsense:"
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There’s a guy named Victor Warkulwicz who has written some young erth stuff: The Doctrines of Genesis 1-11: A Compendium and Defense of Traditional Catholic Theology on Origins. I haven’t seen it, but I wonder what he says about gravity and plate tectonics. I haven’t yet found it in a library; my university library hasn’t purchased it.
 
StAnastasia said:
No major petroleum discoveries have been made in the last thirty years. While it is true that we are not running out of oil, we are approaching the end of oil that is affordable to most people. As human population grows – and particularly in places where the demand from private automobile use grows – the cost of petroleum will skyrocket. Will gasoline be cease to be affordable at $10 per gallon, or $20, or $50?
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Not quite true that no major finds. The estimated reserves in the western Gulf have increased 10 fold in the past few years. The yield of natural from shale deposit, such as those of the Barnet shale here in the DFW area are enormous. In fact, the restrictions made upon exploration by the Obama administration arises from the fear, I think, that if it were to be allowed the production would be so high that there would be no hope of persuading the public that we should change our lifestyle. The Obama administration is, I think it obvious, in favor of managed decline for the United States. The great problem of this European approach is, however, that it is one that kills nations. Germany, for instance, will cease to exist by the end of this century. There will be no Germans left, because Germans they do not reproduce. in the year 2100, there may be German speaking people living in the land but they will not be ethnic Germans, and their culture will be radically different.
 
RobbyS said:
Not quite true that no major finds. The estimated reserves in the western Gulf have increased 10 fold in the past few years. The yield of natural from shale deposit, such as those of the Barnet shale here in the DFW area are enormous. In fact, the restrictions made upon exploration by the Obama administration arises from the fear, I think, that if it were to be allowed the production would be so high that there would be no hope of persuading the public that we should change our lifestyle. The Obama administration is, I think it obvious, in favor of managed decline for the United States. The great problem of this European approach is, however, that it is one that kills nations. Germany, for instance, will cease to exist by the end of this century. There will be no Germans left, because Germans they do not reproduce. in the year 2100, there may be German speaking people living in the land but they will not be ethnic Germans, and their culture will be radically different.
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By major, I mean no finds that guarantee our being able to slake the oil thirst of the developed work int the foreseeable future. Remember, we live on a finite planet, and oil is an artifact of geological and biological history.
 
StAnastasia said:
There’s a guy named Victor Warkulwicz who has written some young erth stuff: The Doctrines of Genesis 1-11: A Compendium and Defense of Traditional Catholic Theology on Origins. I haven’t seen it, but I wonder what he says about gravity and plate tectonics. I haven’t yet found it in a library; my university library hasn’t purchased it.
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One can only wonder what Warkulwicz says, or wonder at the fact he can say what he does. In any case, “young earth” was never a Church doctrine, but an interpretation based on a now defunct hermeneutic, defunct ever since the Biblical sciences have made significant advancements and the natural sciences prove the Earth is very old.

St. Augustine formulated the precept that since salvation history tends toward a new earth, whatever it contains about this physical world is not necessarily a revealed truth. Therefore if any biblical statement about the physical world is found in conflict with what reason has established, it should be reinterpreted accordingly. (Fr. Jaki)

Unfortunately, Augustine did not always follow his own precept and fell back into the existing tradition of concordism and literalism. (Concordism attempts to find corresponding scientific explanations, according to the science of the day, for the details in Genesis 1.)

After Augustine’s time, countless biblical exegetes and theologians subsequently adopted a blind literalism even when they had a better hermeneutics available to them. If only, they had followed Augustine’s precept, how different matter would have turned out.

I am mentioning all of this for the benefit of the YECs in this thread.
 
RobbyS said:
In fact, the restrictions made upon exploration by the Obama administration arises from the fear, I think, that if it were to be allowed the production would be so high that there would be no hope of persuading the public that we should change our lifestyle. The Obama administration is, I think it obvious, in favor of managed decline for the United States.
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I can only wonder what is the Obama Administration’s real policy, or even if it has a consistent attitude in this matter. From the outset, Obama has seriously considered off-shore drilling. This would make the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil sources, but would do nothing toward U.S. reduction in oil consumption.
 
StAnastasia said:
The stuff on this website is utter nonsense, incoherent gibberish.
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is this really so or is it as astronomer David Darling warns “dont let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one.They have not got a clue either - despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of convincing themselves and others that this is not really a problem.But there is a very real problem in explaining how it got started in the first place.You cannot fudge this by appealing to quantum mechanics.Either there is nothing to begin with,in which case there is no quantum vacuum,no pregeometric dust,no time in which anything can happen,no physical laws that can effect a change from nothingness into somethingness,or there is something,in which case that needs explaining”[CSM pamphlet 317] - more later - meanwhile consult the experts and specialists - twinc
 
itinerant1 said:
This would make the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil sources, but would do nothing toward U.S. reduction in oil consumption.
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It might temporarily make us less dependent on foreign oil sources. But with our enormous fleet of gas-guzzling SUVs, and our humongous suburban commutes, any supplies of offshore oil would not last more than a year or two at our current rate of use.
 
itinerant1 said:
Good link. It looks like that if we have to mine our own, the costs of products using local rare earth metals will soar for awhile to cover the initial mining costs, or to make mining profitable. This will give China a even greater edge in world market.
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Hey, it’s a whole lot better than “wiped out.”

BTW - isn’t this thread about the Big Bang Myth?
 
“Aquinas would have no difficulty accepting Big Bang cosmology, even with its recent variations, while also affirming the doctrine of creation out of nothing. He would, of course, distinguish between advances in cosmology and the philosophical and theological reflections on these advances.”

See Aquinas and the Big Bang
 
StAnastasia said:
No major petroleum discoveries have been made in the last thirty years. While it is true that we are not running out of oil, we are approaching the end of oil that is affordable to most people. As human population grows – and particularly in places where the demand from private automobile use grows – the cost of petroleum will skyrocket. Will gasoline be cease to be affordable at $10 per gallon, or $20, or $50?
Click to expand...
No doubt that there will have to be a redistribution of available resources. I do not understand why Congress does so little to subsidize bus companies. Once upon a time, one could ride a Greyhound almost anywhere. Now they are inaccessible to many people, simply because the stations are in the seediest parts of town. One time my daughter took a bus and it arrived at the station in the middle of the night, to find that it was locked.
 
Itinerant1:

I think I am on the same page with you most of the time, but I don’t understand why you don’t consider the Big Bang evidence for the very Catholic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. With the distinction you make between scientific theory of creation and theological theory, are you saying that theological creation is more comprehensive because it includes more than the creation of the cosmos, that it is more than the Big Bang? If that is your reasoning I agree. However, since God created us with the gift of reason we are meant to apply it in seeking His truth. I contend that the most effective use of reason in understanding the nature of reality has been the development and application of science. I believe that eventually when science uncovers the implicate truth of reality, it will find God. And waiting there to greet the men and women that are the unbelieving, materialistic part of that scientific endeavor will be the countless men and women that have gotten there in the most direct route, through faith.

I believe that God initiated creation with the big bang with a mechanism still hidden from modern science. The reason that the implicate truth of reality stays hidden from modern science is its adherence to a philosophical principle defined by what is called logical positivism whose base tenets that apply to science are:
  1. Rejection of the idea that reality has some purpose;
  2. Rejection of any attempt to explain natural phenomena by attributing to it an essence or a secret cause of things;
  3. Rejection as meaningless any explanation not verifiable through the senses;
  4. Advocates the study of constant relationship among things without delving into the underlying causes.
The first three are an outright rejection of God and the fourth says don’t even bother to look for Him. Science’s adherence to this philosophical approach in effect divides our approach to the nature of knowledge into two views: the explicate and the implicate. These are terms used by the physicist David Bohm to explain some of the so-called quantum weirdness. The explicate view is the one that science describes and we experience directly through our senses. Its elements are space, time, matter, and energy. The implicate view is of a deeper level of reality, the ground of reality, at which the elements are space, form, change, and order. God created a reality constructed of forms that change and interact in an orderly manner. The forms (in space) created at the implicate level are manifested as matter at the explicate level; change at the implicate level is manifested as time at the explicate level; change in forms and space at the implicate level are manifested as radiant and ponderable energy at the explicate level.

When you say that creation occurred prior to the Big Bang, I agree. Certainly, God created the singularity from nothing “before” the big bang then created the mechanism that caused the universe to form; this two step sequence - creation of the singularity and an orderly change of forms – is manifested at the explicate level as the Big Bang. God created the singularity from nothing. It seems to me that the singularity of science and the “nothing” of God had to be the same thing. There is a simple way to understand how the seed of the universe was “nothing” at the implicate level and a singularity at the explicate level.

Continued—
 
continuation-
What could have possibly existed before the Big Bang beside God? Nothing that we know of, but surely it must have had a spatial characteristic, i.e., no matter, energy, time, the appearance of emptiness, etc. Whatever it is, it still exists beyond our finite universe, therefore I refer to that which existed prior to the singularity as the before/beyond. I call the substance of the before/beyond, infinite nothingness. I get in trouble with the “pure existence” and “absolute being” gang for referring to the substance of God as infinite nothingness. But it is all a matter of definition. I chose “infinite nothingness” because it is what I imagine the before/beyond to be physically, i.e., it has dimensionality (infinity) and substance (nothingness). The nothingness that I refer to is the mind of god; it is immaterial and immutable, pure existence, absolute being, beyond comprehension, but certainly space-like in being.

Space is the key to the connection between the implicate level (God) and the explicate level (Science). Mathematics, the science of space, began along two paths: counting (numbers) and geometry. It more or less proceeded along dual paths until Descartes developed analytical geometry and merged numbers and geometry. The basic assumption being: Every point in space can be represented by a set of numbers and every set of numbers corresponds to a point in space. The first part is always true, but the second part is an assumption about physical space (that which defines the dimensions of the universe); it assumes that physical space is continuous. It doesn’t have to be; physical space can be discrete. In terms of numbers, discrete space is defined by rational numbers; continuous space is defined by real numbers (rational + irrational numbers). I believe that it is this duality of space at the ground of reality, that allows the physical to commingle with the spiritual at the explicate level of reality.

The discrete space that defines the dimensions of the universe originated with the big bang. God created the singularity from 10e+137 discrete points (my calculation). This many discrete points - since points have zero dimension - can be squeezed into a volume as small as you care to make it and yet be viewed essentially as “nothing”. This is what I believe the nature of the singularity to be, namely the “nothing” from which God constructed the universe with a mechanism that is manifested as the Big Bang. This represents a simple “physical” explanation of the very Catholic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo that also does not contradict science.

The bottom line: Catholics – indeed all theists - should embrace the big bang theory not as a myth but as an explanation of the mechanism that created the universe. And I have no argument with your distinction between science and theology in regard to the Big Bang. As you imply (I think) the Big Bang only explains creation from the organization of the singularity to the formation of stars, the formation of stars and all else along the path of creation requires many other scientific theories to get us to where we are. I believe God needs only a single coherent and comprehensive mechanism to do the entire job. That I refer to as the “holonomic mechanism”.

Have a Happy Easter
Yppop
 
itinerant1 said:
I can only wonder what is the Obama Administration’s real policy, or even if it has a consistent attitude in this matter. From the outset, Obama has seriously considered off-shore drilling. This would make the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil sources, but would do nothing toward U.S. reduction in oil consumption.
Click to expand...
The only consistency is his efforts to limit exploration. Salazar just shut off explorations onshore, Obama has basically repealed Bush’s directive to expend off-shore drilling but allowing exceptions, such as the one’s he has just stipulated. Now he may go the same route as the European states, which is to allow drilling to pay for the social welfare schemes he is in favor of, or as, he has said, to “bridge” the transition to new energy sources. But in the last case, I ask, such as what? Nothing short of nuclear fusion. The environmentalists have a horror of the nuclear fusion and their control his party.
 
itinerant1 said:
One can only wonder what Warkulwicz says, or wonder at the fact he can say what he does. In any case, “young earth” was never a Church doctrine, but an interpretation based on a now defunct hermeneutic, defunct ever since the Biblical sciences have made significant advancements and the natural sciences prove the Earth is very old.

St. Augustine formulated the precept that since salvation history tends toward a new earth, whatever it contains about this physical world is not necessarily a revealed truth. Therefore if any biblical statement about the physical world is found in conflict with what reason has established, it should be reinterpreted accordingly. (Fr. Jaki)

Unfortunately, Augustine did not always follow his own precept and fell back into the existing tradition of concordism and literalism. (Concordism attempts to find corresponding scientific explanations, according to the science of the day, for the details in Genesis 1.)

After Augustine’s time, countless biblical exegetes and theologians subsequently adopted a blind literalism even when they had a better hermeneutics available to them. If only, they had followed Augustine’s precept, how different matter would have turned out.

I am mentioning all of this for the benefit of the YECs in this thread.
Click to expand...
what are you talking about - as regards different matter “those who took college courses in physics hardly more than a single generation ago learnt of matter which has since disappeared from scientific reckoning,but where it has disappeared what scientist clearly knows.One of the greatest theoretical achievements of science in this century has been the dematerialization of matter - belief in matter,in short,is belief in a gross but mesmeric illusion”[Dr.Paul Brunton] - so now what is all this science about matter,anti matter and CDM etc - more later - btw the YECs I know are not in need of your benefits,thank you very much - btw Augustine was not infallible and so those who exhort us to support his views on science might be rather more impartial,and remind us he also wrote the following “But as to the fable that there are antipodes,that is to say,men on the opposite side of the earth,where the sun rises whilst it sets to us,men who walk with their feet opposite to ours,that is on no ground credible” This view, he claimed, was condemned by reason and Scripture ![Daylight No.6] - more later - twinc
 
yppop said:
As you imply (I think) the Big Bang only explains creation from the organization of the singularity to the formation of stars, the formation of stars and all else along the path of creation requires many other scientific theories to get us to where we are. I believe God needs only a single coherent and comprehensive mechanism to do the entire job. That I refer to as the “holonomic mechanism”.
Have a Happy Easter
Yppop
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Ypopp, I’m not sure of your dividing line at the formation of stars. Why are stars significant? Why not nebulae? Why not the separation of the fundamental forces? Why not galaxy formation, and planetary formation?
 
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