Does the Big Bang Suggest a Creator God?

[Fomalhaut]

Formalhaut
Science will never be able to answer that question because the Big Bang produced time itself. There was no “before” before the Big Bang!

Again, as I said, the theory itself doesn’t say anything about the creation of the universe. It’s hard to believe but it is true. It just says that it was very dense and very hot at some point. It doesn’t say that time didn’t exist before, or that all matter was ejected from a single point. Imagine a cone. Cut off the very tip. Now what you have is an almost perfect cone, except that the tip isn’t a single point, it’s more of a flat surface. If you look at the general shape of the cone, you can think “Yeah, it was probably a perfect cone before”, but YOU CANNOT BE SURE. Maybe it was a hourglass shape with a non-punctual junction and you just got that one half. Because you miss the tip, there’s no way to know how the shape you have actually began.

However, science may one day be able to probe beyond that very hot and dense step. People are already imagining ways to do that: in case of a Big Bounce (there was a universe before ours that contracted and bounced to expand again as our universe) some scientists wants to detect gravitationnal waves occuring at the end of the “previous universe” when the last quasars were colliding. If we detect this, that would be an evidence for another universe before ours. It is not eternally out of reach for science. It was for a long time because light cannot cross this barrier and we rely on light only to study the universe. Gravitationnal waves are a fascinating way to overcome this, and we probably on the merge to master their detection.

 

[HouseUponRock]

Best inform the Vatican immediately

Because the Vatican has no issue with science, or the fact of evolution, so long as it’s accepted at some point in the history of man, God infused one man and one woman with a soul, thus making them fully human, and we are all descended from this pair.

Sarah x

I am sedavacantist.

 

[Fomalhaut]

I am sedavacantist.

Pius XII argued that there was no conflict between the concept of evolution and the catholic faith. In 1952. 10 years before Vatican II.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Best inform the Vatican immediately

Because the Vatican has no issue with science, or the fact of evolution, so long as it’s accepted at some point in the history of man, God infused one man and one woman with a soul, thus making them fully human, and we are all descended from this pair.

Sarah x

Don’t worry Sara, House is wrong. You are right. However the Church does condemn Masonic societies. Catholics may not join.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

You’re being kind of rude. Putting a smiley face at the end doesn’t change that. What does not seeing convincing evidence of God have to do with pipe dreams? You guys are the ones who believe God loves you and have hope that there is eternal bliss when you die. Seems like you are the ones with the pipe dreams.

Well if you don’t believe God is sentient I’ll have to take your word on that, but the words you just used to describe Him indicate sentience to me. Love? Desire? Director? Intellect? That doesn’t indicate sentience to you? Not to mention you refer to God as Him, Father, Son, etc. If you didn’t see God as sentient wouldn’t you just refer to Him as “it”?

Hmm I don’t know how you got fear from my post, or that I thought the idea of God was bad or repugnant. I just don’t believe. Intellect in particular just does not work for me. What, it’s like magical thoughts floating around in the air without a brain making those thoughts? How could something invisible be capable of loving, creating matter, communicating with humans, and all that stuff?
I’d be interested in hearing you elaborate on what exactly you believe, if you could dumb it down a bit for me and explain how something invisible and non-sentient can have attributes such as those you mention. I mean I know you can’t literally explain how, but can you acknowledge that it is reasonable for me to believe that you believe in a sentient being bc of those attributes, and explain why I’m wrong?

And there^ you have a reason for atheists to be on this forum - not to spread their idealogy or stir up trouble, but to learn about others’ beliefs.

Sorry to have upset you. Go back over the last few years in this formu and you will see what I mean. I agree not all non-believers fall into those categories - just that many here do and the media is full of " hostile " athiest activist. I’m afraid they give all athiests a very bad name, same as radical Islamists give all Islam a bad name.

Sounds like you really don’t know much about the Christian God. A good place to start is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. See here : vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

You will not agree with it but it will tell you what we believe. It is all based on Divine Revelation, not on philosophy per se.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Formalhaut

Again, as I said, the theory itself doesn’t say anything about the creation of the universe. It’s hard to believe but it is true. It just says that it was very dense and very hot at some point. It doesn’t say that time didn’t exist before, or that all matter was ejected from a single point.

The Big Bang theory gives the age of the universe as roughly 14 billion years, give or take a few hundred million. There is no scientific way to ascertain that a universe existed before this moment of the Bang. I’m afraid all explanations to that effect are pure conjecture and rely on wishful thinking of atheists and agnostics like yourself.Whereas in most things scientific you demand proof, in this case you are satisfied to have no proof whatever, with the usual caveat that someday science will discover a truth about some thing or event that preceded the Bang.

The Thing has already been discovered and known for thousands of years … God.

“Let there be light.” Genesis 1

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Where is it defined?

If it is defined by the catholic church, then we can no longer use the big bang to show that God exists. Rather, we are using the existence of God and the authority of the church to discredit the zero-energy universe theory, and our “uncaused cause” proof for God goes out the window. If it is to remain valid, then the theory is going to have to be attacked without appealing to divine revelation.

" All that exists outside God was, in its whole substance, produced out of nothing by God. ( De Fide, Vatican 1, also in Dogmas of the Catholic Church by Ott) Also in the Catechism, if you look.

That is pretty clear. God even created the conditions which would make the so called " Zero-energy universe " theory possible if indeed it is anything more than a dream. Nothing has ever existed or will exist outside God’s creative act.

You have the shoe on the wrong foot, it is all these wild eyed scientists and their acolytes in the media and academia that are using wild pseudo scientific extrapolations to attempt to discredit the teachings of the Church.

So if Dawkins says Venus is made out of green cheese are you going to believe him ?
You know some of these scientists are just plain irresponsible. These " theories " they have are based on nothing, absolutely nothing. They are nothing but pipe dreams, nightmares actually. It’s all nothing but very elaborate mental " doodling. "

And say they do make the claim that they can actually prove it. How many people, even in the scientific community would be able to verify their claims or even follos the proofs. I know I wouldn’t and neither would 99% of mankind. In that case, are we supposed to place our faith in something we can’t understand and don’t even know if they understand. How would we ever know that we weren’t being duped? No thanks. To me, these guys are nothing but over paid and rather stuffy, prigish windbags.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

You could claim that the zero-energy universe theory is invalid because it violates divine revelation (it doesn’t), but then that means that you have to believe in the authority of divine revelation for some other reason besides the big bang. You can’t use the big bang to support the authority of divine revelation if you are using divine revelation to support the big bang.(Which divine revelation says nothing about anyway)

Sorry, that doesn’t compute. How can a pipe dream be contrary to Divine Revelation. To believe it is true would be contrary to Divine Revelation and also to Church Dogama and her teaching on creation in general. I don’t use the big bang to support Church teaching. It is just a theory and one that is not actually needed to prove the existence of God, something of His nature, and a lot about His Governance and Provedence. ST. Thomas gave more than five proofs for the existenc of god and all the rest, on the assumption ( for the sake of argument ) that the universe was eternal. Are you aware of that?

Have you read your Catechism?

 

[Linusthe2nd]

not sentient? sentience is the quality of having consciousness and perception. Doesn’t God have those qualities?

I am really disappointed in you. Even some of our atheist friends know better than that.

How could a Pure Spirit like God or an Angel or a separated soul be sentient, they have no bodies, thus no sensory perceptors. And by the way all intelligent beings have consciousness. You really do need to read your catechism before you go unloading all that nonesense. And it wouldn’t hurt to start reading St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. Might be a little tough for you but if you can keep up with all the pseudo science drivel, you should be able to plow through Part 1 a good ways.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Formalhaut

Again, as I said, the theory itself doesn’t say anything about the creation of the universe. It’s hard to believe but it is true. It just says that it was very dense and very hot at some point. It doesn’t say that time didn’t exist before, or that all matter was ejected from a single point.

The Big Bang theory gives the age of the universe as roughly 14 billion years, give or take a few hundred million. There is no scientific way to ascertain that a universe existed before this moment of the Bang. I’m afraid all explanations to that effect are pure conjecture and rely on wishful thinking of atheists and agnostics like yourself.Whereas in most things scientific you demand proof, in this case you are satisfied to have no proof whatever, with the usual caveat that someday science will discover a truth about some thing or event that preceded the Bang.

The Thing has already been discovered and known for thousands of years … God.

“Let there be light.” Genesis 1

“The age of the universe” is a misuse of language (I’m not sure this is a real expression in the english language :s). People say it all the time because it is shorter than “the period of time between us and that very dense state”. But ultimately science doesn’t pretend to say how much time passed since the very creation of time and space.

I think you don’t understand what I am trying to say. I agree to say science, for now, can’t say what was before that very dense state. But it’s not reasonable to say it certainly will never be able to. You can imagine the kind of progress I mentionned on gravitationnal waves. Yes for now all the hypothesis on the pre Big Bang (again, that doesn’t mean before the creation of the universe, but beyond that so called “Planck barrier”, that very hot instant beyond which no light reaches us) are just hypothesis and can’t provide any evidence. That was the case for the theory of the relativity in its time. In 1916, there was NO evidence for matter bending spacetime. It wasn’t a scientific theory at the time, it was pretty math. One day someone said: “hey, we could actually observe starlight being deflected by the sun during an eclipse” and the moment someone said that, it became a scientific theory because it became testable. The experience was a sucess and relativity was confirmed as an efficient model for gravity.

What I’m trying to say is that if there is no evidence or potential experiment to test a claim, it cannot be considered science. So you can’t say science is yacking about before the Big Bang without evidence, because it simply isn’t science.

I am an agnostic because I don’t require everything to have an explanation. Science can’t explain something ? Ok, maybe it can’t be explained through rational thinking and is actually a divine phenomenon. But maybe not. I don’t know, so I just wait. I understand people trying to push weaknesses in scientific theories as evidences for God, it’s a natural behaviour. But the thing is that science progress and may fill those gaps. It did numerous times before.

When Newton was wondering “why do apples fall toward the earth ?”, you could answer by “Because God wants to”. Okay, fair enough, I can’t prove you wrong, how could I ? I can’t put god in a test tube to see if it exists, both His existence and non-existence are unprovable. So, you just answered Newton’s question with an irrefutable proposition, everything’s settled, we can go home. Do you see the problem ? Yes maybe God wants apples to fall, but how does he do that ? Newton decided to dig and tried to understand the world. And he discovered that the force that maintain your feet on the earth is exactly the same that cause the planets to move like clock’s hands around the sun. Which I think is wonderfully beautiful, people could even claim such an arrangement is an evidence for God.

You shouldn’t try to criticize science with religion. It’s just not the same thing. Science ain’t superior to religion, religion ain’t superior to science. Science: “How ?” religion: "Why ?"Science is on a quest to understand the world, not to debunk religion.

One last thing: science is not about truth. Science is about models. Nothing is wrong or true in science, to take a very extreme example, if I want to be 100% self-consistent, I can’t say “I am sure the Earth is round”. Because ultimately that’s a model built with all the evidence we have it is a sphere. Maybe one day a guy will come along with a new model saying the Earth is actually a pyramid, and he will explain EVERYTHING that make us think the Earth is round through smart work-arounds, like optical illusions with atmosphere layers. We wouldn’t be able to tell him is wrong, just that his model is a bit overcomplicated.

 

[HouseUponRock]

Pius XII argued that there was no conflict between the concept of evolution and the catholic faith. In 1952. 10 years before Vatican II.

Pius XII NEVER endorsed evolution. He said it might be a possibility if there is scientific evidence in future, but he was still a creationist. And as of right now, the “evidence” is the same as was during Pius XII’s pontificate. For example, is it a heresy to picture God? Of course it is. Is it a heresy to say we will find out when we get to Heaven? No. This is analogous to how I see what Pius XII really meant. And Humani Generis is a fallible document that I have no obligation to submit to anyways, even though I definitely submit to it, great encyclical that condemns modernism.

 

[atheistgirl]

I am sedavacantist.

Eastern Catholics are not in communion with Rome?

You think the Papal Chair is vacant and is currently occupied by an imposter?

Sarah x

 

[HouseUponRock]

Eastern Catholics are not in communion with Rome?

You think the Papal Chair is vacant and is currently occupied by an imposter?

Sarah x

No, only minority of both Latin rite and Byzantine rite Catholics are sedevacantists. I believe the Chair of Peter is vacant.

“Rome will lose the faith, and become the seat of the Antichrist.” Our Lady of La Salette

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Formalhaut

What I’m trying to say is that if there is no evidence or potential experiment to test a claim, it cannot be considered science. So you can’t say science is yacking about before the Big Bang without evidence, because it simply isn’t science.

I’m not the one who said there was something before the Big Bang. You are. There was no “before.” Nor is there any experiment that can be done, as you say, to determine whether there was or there wasn’t. The only scientific experiment that could be conducted would be to go back in time to a moment before the Bang. This is clearly impossible.

 

[mab23]

No, only minority of both Latin rite and Byzantine rite Catholics are sedevacantists. I believe the Chair of Peter is vacant.

“Rome will lose the faith, and become the seat of the Antichrist.” Our Lady of La Salette

I pray for you

 

[Fomalhaut]

Formalhaut

What I’m trying to say is that if there is no evidence or potential experiment to test a claim, it cannot be considered science. So you can’t say science is yacking about before the Big Bang without evidence, because it simply isn’t science.

I’m not the one who said there was something before the Big Bang. You are. There was no “before.” Nor is there any experiment that can be done, as you say, to determine whether there was or there wasn’t. The only scientific experiment that could be conducted would be to go back in time to a moment before the Bang. This is clearly impossible.

I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.

1 - What scientist call “The Big Bang” is not an explosion from a single point that created time and space.

2- It just states that at some point, 14 billion years ago, the universe was very dense and very hot. It is not punctual, it has a dimension. It then expanded and got colder to arrive to our current universe.

3- You can imagine stuff happening before that instant. That doesn’t violate the Big Bang theory since you left its area of expertise: science cannot evaluate the validity of your claim. For example, you can imagine that the universe indeed originally came from a single point. A lot of people do, but that is not part of the Big Bang theory. If you believe the universe came from a single point and expanded, there is a period of time between the very creation of the universe and this hot, dense point at which science is valid.

4- The reason we cannot probe beyond that point (which is actually not the same as the Planck Barrier, I was mistaken, sorry) is because this point in time is the instant the universe stopped being opaque, and so that is the oldest light we can observe.

5- If we find something that wasn’t blocked before this dense point, we can probe what happened before. We mainly rely on light for now, but as I said, gravitationnal waves are a good candidate.

Here is an attempt at a timeline.

x - - - - - - - - - X---------------------
|…|…|_Big Bang ! After that, we can observe what happened
|…|
|…|___Light cannot reach us, maybe gravitationnal waves can. Stuff probably
|…happens, for example the universe getting from infinitely hot (singularity) to
|…what we observe at the Big Bang
|
|__Potential singularity: the universe may have been created from it, no one can know for sure

 

[Fomalhaut]

Sorry for the double post but I must correct myself and I can’t edit my post anymore. It’s been a while since my cosmology courses and I apologize.

-The instant where the universe ceased to be opaque is not called itself the Big Bang. This term designates the whole theory and no particular moment.

-This instant where we can see the first lights is called Recombination and is thought to happen at “t+380 000yr” This again is an misuse of language. It doesn’t mean “380 000 yr after the singularity” but “380 000yr after the singularity if there had been one”. It’s a subtle but capital precision. It just means that to talk about steps in the evolution of the universe, it is easier to imagine there was an actual beginning and talk about time spent after that, but it doesn’t states its existence. You don’t need the singularity: you can talk in temperature instead of age: the so called “t+380 000yr” becomes “T=50 000K”. Most cosmologists don’t talk about age, but about redshift, more precise but far more complex concept.

• You can read a lot about what happens before this instant where we can see the first light. For example, nucleosynthesis happen at a time we can’t observe. However, our theories of nucleosynthesis are quite coherent, simple, and perfectly match the observations. Observations of the OUTCOME of nucleosynthesis. Since it happens before recombination, we can only base our theories on what was the result. This is an indirect evidence but still a pretty strong evidence: if it walks like a duck, etc… But it’s true, you can’t make prediction because you already observed all that there is to observe. So very technically speaking, it’s not science.

I am really sorry if I bored you to death with all that physics. It may be too much for people not used to talk about these issues. But I feel it is important to know and understand a theory to criticize it.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

“The age of the universe” is a misuse of language (I’m not sure this is a real expression in the english language :s). People say it all the time because it is shorter than “the period of time between us and that very dense state”. But ultimately science doesn’t pretend to say how much time passed since the very creation of time and space.

I think you don’t understand what I am trying to say. I agree to say science, for now, can’t say what was before that very dense state. But it’s not reasonable to say it certainly will never be able to. You can imagine the kind of progress I mentionned on gravitationnal waves. Yes for now all the hypothesis on the pre Big Bang (again, that doesn’t mean before the creation of the universe, but beyond that so called “Planck barrier”, that very hot instant beyond which no light reaches us) are just hypothesis and can’t provide any evidence. That was the case for the theory of the relativity in its time. In 1916, there was NO evidence for matter bending spacetime. It wasn’t a scientific theory at the time, it was pretty math. One day someone said: “hey, we could actually observe starlight being deflected by the sun during an eclipse” and the moment someone said that, it became a scientific theory because it became testable. The experience was a sucess and relativity was confirmed as an efficient model for gravity.

What I’m trying to say is that if there is no evidence or potential experiment to test a claim, it cannot be considered science. So you can’t say science is yacking about before the Big Bang without evidence, because it simply isn’t science.

I am an agnostic because I don’t require everything to have an explanation. Science can’t explain something ? Ok, maybe it can’t be explained through rational thinking and is actually a divine phenomenon. But maybe not. I don’t know, so I just wait. I understand people trying to push weaknesses in scientific theories as evidences for God, it’s a natural behaviour. But the thing is that science progress and may fill those gaps. It did numerous times before.

What we are complaing about is the wild eyed absudities proclaimed by Hawkins and the current Pied Piepers on the " Atheist of the Month " bandwagon speech and media appearance circuit. These men may be brilliant but they are quite insane and their wild eyed claims prove it, so does such wild enthusiasim on behalf of pipe dreams and " science fiction. "

It is absolutely astonishing how they can absolutely reject the employment of philosophical reasoning to prove the existence of God as unreasonable and also accuse those who place this belief on the solid ground of Divine Revelation as credulous. And at the same time claim their own unreasonable as Most Reasonable. Such hypocracy just boggles the mind.

And even if they could prove their claims, how many people could actually follow their arguments, the math and physics and proofs involved? Certainly not me nor 99.9999%
of the people living at any one time. So then most people would have to accept it on an act of Faith and its acceptance would have to be enforced by the Dogmatic decrees of the State/Scientific dictatorship and anyone who disagreed would be punished in various ways which, while perhaps not violent, are quite effective - like denying one teaching credentials or tenure or access to professional positions or certifing them as enemies of the State or terriorists ( much like they are doing now to conservative Christians in the US., like they did in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia or even now in China).

One last thing: science is not about truth. Science is about models. Nothing is wrong or true in science, to take a very extreme example, if I want to be 100% self-consistent, I can’t say “I am sure the Earth is round”. Because ultimately that’s a model built with all the evidence we have it is a sphere. Maybe one day a guy will come along with a new model saying the Earth is actually a pyramid, and he will explain EVERYTHING that make us think the Earth is round through smart work-arounds, like optical illusions with atmosphere layers. We wouldn’t be able to tell him is wrong, just that his model is a bit overcomplicated.

Perhaps you are an innocent scientific observer, I hope so. But you cannot deny what has been going on in certain " scientific " and the media and in academia. There is plenty of evidence that there has been outright discrimination against those with Christian beliefs, keeping them from Phd programs, denying them teaching positions or tenure or in other professional areas. It is going on !!!

I personally find your take quite refreshing. If only all your scientific friends were equally fair. You must understand that Christianity has been under assault, publically, and vociferously since the Age of Enlightment and this assault is, at this time, at fever pitch in the media , government, academia. You can see it all over this forum and in others, you can see it in blogs and chat rooms eveywhere. Christians don’t demand anything but the same rights as anyone else, the right to live their faith freely and on an equal footing with anyone else and to have the right to express their beliefs in the public square without discrimination. That right is denied us throughout most of the world and is severly threatend even in the U.S.A.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Foramlhaut

But maybe not. I don’t know, so I just wait. I understand people trying to push weaknesses in scientific theories as evidences for God, it’s a natural behaviour. But the thing is that science progress and may fill those gaps. It did numerous times before.

Sometimes it even catches up with the theologians!

Genesis, 1000 B.C. : “Let there be light.”

Carl Sagan 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.”

As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out:

“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.”

 

[samiam1611]

Your view seems to be that consciousness is caused by physical events. That view may or may not be true, but it is certainly no more or less absurd then the Catholic view that physical events are caused by one particular consciousness. The immaterial mind and the material body are two completely distinct aspects of our reality, and a cause in one creating an effect in the other seems absurd. And yet they do interact! So the question then becomes: which is the cause, and which the effect? The naturalist claims one answer, and the theist claims the other.

You understand my view correctly. And your answer is a fresh take on it for me. Good stuff!

How could a Pure Spirit like God or an Angel or a separated soul be sentient, they have no bodies, thus no sensory perceptors. And by the way all intelligent beings have consciousness.

I meant sentient like consciousness not like ouch that’s hot or yuck that tastes bad kind of senses. A sentient Being as opposed to a force of nature. Besides, wouldn’t you say something like “God hears my prayers” ? How can you deny that you believe in a sentient God if you say something like that?

The God of Christianity is not " sentient. "

Catholics: Do you agree or disagree with Linus? ^