Defending big bang

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Shaolen

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Im about to bring up the topic of big bang with a friend who is Baptist and I have the feeling that he’s one that takes genesis very literal. Anyone with ideas or experience with this?
 
Proceed with caution. If he believes in 6-day creation, what do you expect or hope to accomplish by bringing up the topic of the Big Bang? My experience tells me that you will not change his mind. It is virtually impossible.

So the question is what else would you like to accomplish? If you must bring up Big Bang, look for what you have in common, what beliefs you share. You both believe that there is one God who created everything. You both believe that creation is very good and full of many wonders. Perhaps you both believe that all of creation gives glory to God. What else?
 
This website has several excellent articles on understanding the biblical account of creation and how it can be reconciled with modern scientific notions.

aish.com/atr/Age_of_the_Universe.html

One thing that should get your friend thinking;

Ask him; How do we determine what a “day” consists of? Is it a full rotation of the earth around the sun? So how could a “day” be really a “day” as we understand it when the sun isn’t created until day 4?
 
Shaolen said:
Im about to bring up the topic of big bang with a friend who is Baptist and I have the feeling that he’s one that takes genesis very literal. Anyone with ideas or experience with this?
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Well I wouldn’t, There is nothing certain about it. You would do better to stick with the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. Why bring it up any way. No one has proved that the Genesis account is wrong. Let him be at rest in what he believes, there is nothing wrong with that. What makes you such an expert on the subject anyway?

Did you know that the Church has neither any Dogmatic teaching, nor any Ordinary teaching that tells us how we are to interpret Genisis? And it certainly has nothing to say about the Big Bang and what it may or may not imply? Nor does it have anything very definite to say about evolution, except the little it says in the Catechism. .

You better save you energy for the really big issues in life, like becoming a Saint! When you have done that, then you can remove the splinter of " ignorance " from the eye of your friend.

Linus2nd
 
I don’t know how your Baptist friend thinks, but I agree with others. It may turn out to be a futile discussion if he is a literalist about Genesis.

However, one point you could make and then drop the subject is that the Bible and the Big Bang are not really contradictions.

The atheist Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

Then from Genesis, 1200 B.C. : “In the beginning God said: ‘Let there be light.’”

As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out in God and the Astronomers.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
 
Another thing to consider is that what some people consider literalist is unchallenged. Like the Big Bang.

haltonarp.com/bio

I would first ask the other person where he heard, or how he knows, that certain things in the Bible are literal. My advice is just keep it friendly. Sometimes, we can’t just assume to know what someone else thinks and why.

Peace,
Ed
 
Shaolen said:
Im about to bring up the topic of big bang with a friend who is Baptist and I have the feeling that he’s one that takes genesis very literal. Anyone with ideas or experience with this?
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Save your breath; you are just going to frustrate yourself.
 
I guess to be more specific, he posted an add about a debate between bill Nye the science guy and some creationist. I asked him “what exactly are they debating” he answered “how the world was made.” some of the things I’d like to point out to him are that the big bang is actually a very strong theory for the existence for God. That the person who invented it was a catholic priest. There’s a very good chapter in Trent Horn’s book answering atheism about this. Also a lot on catholic answers radio they mention how genesis doesn’t appear to have been written in a literal sense. Can anyone expound on this?
 
If you tell a Baptist that a Catholic priest invented (or first theorized) the Big Bang, will that support your argument? I don’t know. He might think it is just another heresy.
 
Beryllos said:
If you tell a Baptist that a Catholic priest invented (or first theorized) the Big Bang, will that support your argument? I don’t know. He might think it is just another heresy.
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you do have a point there but id be trying to show that it was first theorized in the defense of God and not for disproving God.
 
Shaolen said:
Im about to bring up the topic of big bang with a friend who is Baptist and I have the feeling that he’s one that takes genesis very literal. Anyone with ideas or experience with this?
Click to expand...
I personally would not bother, unless you think there is some important outcome that is contingent on your friend accepting the Big Bang model of the Universe as true.
 
Science is now also questioning the big bang theory… now they say it is like the collision of a couple of dimensions similar to two sheets or blankets coming together at many points…

nobody knows, so its a useless exercise to argue either side… all we know is, God did it… how and when is anyones guess.
 
Shaolen said:
Im about to bring up the topic of big bang with a friend who is Baptist and I have the feeling that he’s one that takes genesis very literal. Anyone with ideas or experience with this?
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You said he “takes genesis very literal”.

Could you ask him about Jesus saying, “My Father has been busy, even until now” when it says in Genesis that "On the seventh day, God Blest, RESTED and made Holy?

Does he think that we are past the “seventh day” and God has gotten busy again even tho Jesus said, “even until now”, not that He took a break on the “seventh day” or does he think that we might not be to the “seventh day” yet and still in the “sixth day” or does he have some other explanation?
 
wcknight said:
Science is now also questioning the big bang theory… now they say it is like the collision of a couple of dimensions similar to two sheets or blankets coming together at many points…
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There is very little questioning of whether the Big Bang happened. That’s pretty much proven even more dramatically than the theory of evolution. We can still see and hear the effects of the Big Bang … the sound and the flying of the glaxies away from each other as you might see sparks flying away from each other in a fireworks explosion.

The only serious question that remains is how the Big Bang happened. That question is going to get a lot of theoretical questions, but none of them will be provable in an emprical way since all we can know about is what happened at the time of the Big Bang, not what produced the Big Bang itself.

Multiverse explanations go begging for proof, and there is none.
 
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