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WillieWonka
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“The creation of the universe was not a purely physical phenomenon. Whatever was there “before” the universe came into existence, was not the universe.”
If you do not know what was there “before” then how do you know the big bang proves god?
If you do not know what was there “before” then how do you know the big bang proves god?
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Cecilianus
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I never said that I do not know what was “before” the Big Bang. I said that whatsoever it was/is that was “before” the universe came into existence could not be the universe.
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Cecilianus
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Secondly, why are the atheists on this forum all using “god” without capitals? That changes the meaning of the term. I do not believe in a god (that is, a spiritual being - finite and personal, like a bigger version of me, or like an angel - which is associated with a natural phenomenon). I believe in God - the Holy Trinity, the Being Who by definition is Almighty and therefore infinite; uncaused and Absolute.
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Cecilianus
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I have a question for the three atheists on this forum.
Why are you trying to convert me to atheism?
Not that I am saying that this is a bad thing - truth is truth (though you have neither a mathematical proof nor empirical evidence for atheism, so I don’t see what reason you have to say that atheism is true).
How is my theism hurting you? How is my theism hurting me, and why should you care? Is there an atheist hell my non-existent soul will go to if I die persisting in my belief in God? Why would you waste your time trying to evangelize me, considering that - as I have made very clear, at least in other threads - that I have the highest respect, and I fully accept the authority and truth, of science. I plan to be a physicist when I finish my textbook-education.
Regarding the talk by Dr. Tyson (which I am 12 minutes into as I type this), I am very impressed with his sincerity and personality, but he is attacking a straw man (religion is not simply a “god of the gaps” explanation) and using inconclusive arguments. He has provided no deductive argument for atheism (so far), and even his interpretation of Ptolemy’s words at the beginning of the speech is wrong - he is interpreting Ptolemy’s words as a scientific statement and not as a poetic statement. I know that most scientists have trouble understanding poetry, but that is their problem and not that of poetry.
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rtibs
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Way to go Cecilianus! I need to see what our atheist friends have to say.
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Cecilianus
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After I finished Dr. Tyson’s talk, my opinion was the same. He didn’t prove his conclusion - that we (or at least scientists) shouldn’t believe in God, or even the premises he was trying to base that conclusion on (that God is only a “god of the gaps”). He did not address the glaring fact of the Roman Catholic Church, which with over a billion members is the world’s largest religion (and therefore should be the one most represented) and to which science is indebted for the discoveries of heliocentrism (Father Copernicus), genetics (Abbot Mendel), and the Big Bang theory (Abbe Lemaitre), all of which were discovered by priests - not to mention the contributions performed by thousands of other priest-scientists, none of whom were content with resting in a “god of the gaps”.
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murphjos
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The talk by Neil Degrasse Tyson was extremely engaging and entertaining. He posits that once great minds “give up” and turn to religion, scientific progress dies. I must agree with him in one sense. At this point in human progress; science and religion can not be used for the same purposes. Science can not direct out moral actions, nor tell why the universe is the way it is. Religion cannot explain what function my spleen performs, nor tell me where in the sky I can expect to observe Venus at 10PM on Thursday. One of the aspects of Catholic thought that that drew me back into communion with the Church is the idea of natural moral law. Rather than religion being where we turn after throwing in the intellectual towel, we use our scientific understanding of nature to inform our consciences. Not all religion is “theism of the gaps” and certainly not Catholicism. We are all blessed (to various degrees) with a curious intellect that hungers to know how things work. But we are also blessed with a conscience (intuitive knowledge of God’s will), divine revelation, and observed miracles (observations of supernatural events). The Church does not ask that we check our intellect or our empirical observations at the door, and that is one of the many things I love about Her. It was once summed up in 16 words (I hope someone can tell me by whom); “Science is the pursuit of the mind of God, religion is the pursuit of His will”
So…. Does the evidence in support of the big bang theory also help prove the existence of a creator-God? No way, but it sure is fascinating! I think it is fair to say that the only way to prove to a man that God exists is to kill the man, and he can’t report his observations back at any rate (and our God-given conscience would prevent us from doing it anyway) ,
So…. Does the evidence in support of the big bang theory also help prove the existence of a creator-God? No way, but it sure is fascinating! I think it is fair to say that the only way to prove to a man that God exists is to kill the man, and he can’t report his observations back at any rate (and our God-given conscience would prevent us from doing it anyway) ,
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WillieWonka
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OK. What was/is it?
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Cecilianus
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God. But it does not have to be God for my argument (that the situation “before” the creation of the physical universe is not the realm of science) to work.
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Cecilianus
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I agree completely - thanks for thinking it out (and typing it out) for me.
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j1akey
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Ok, grab a beer because it’s wall of text rant time.
Honestly, I really don’t care what diety or lack of that anyone believes in. My real issue is when said religion interferes with the progression and advancement of mankind. I came to this realization earlier in the year. It actually took quite a while for me to figure out just what exactly my beef with religion was and then it hit me. I will admit that watching that video helped me further organize my thoughts on the subject though. It wasn’t that people actually believed in some sort of diety. It’s that many of those people do their best to invalidate the progress we’ve made as a society to this point. The second we allow religious “theories” into the scientific arena, then we’ve failed in our quest for knowledge and further understanding of the universe around us.
Case in point…evolution. Over the past several decades there have been many efforts to try and teach creationism in schools as an alternate “scientific” theory. This is extremely dangerous. The creationist movement after failing to get it through the courts, most recently in Dover, changed tactics. Since the law shut them down they wanted to let the students decide and they’ve been arguing it ever since. Again, this is dangerous. If someone wants something validated as being a good scientific theory it has to get passed others in that field of science. I guess in this case it would fall under biology since there’s no scientific body that covers God. It was shot down immediately as being complete non-sense. So then what happens? They attack the scientists as being “unfair” and accused them of being afraid, unwilling to talk about it and then even go so far as to say that they know evolution is false but just won’t admit it.
This is nothing short of fear mongering and demonizing those that blocked them from getting creationism to be recognized as a valid scientific theory. Since that didn’t work then we come back to letting the student decide. So if some of the smartest people on the planet shoot you down the solution is to go for those that don’t even have a basic basic BASIC education yet and let THEM decide what’s valid or not, over what some of the smartest people on the planet have to say? I don’t freaking think so…
The vast majority of people that I know (some of them my very own family members) that believe in creationism over the hard evidence of evolution don’t even know the basics of biology and they won’t even go do the research on it. This is my biggest frustration. People argue against something they don’t even understand or even tried to understand. I have yet to meet a single proponent of creationsim that has ever tried to understand how evolution works.
If a creationist comes to me with evidence for their argument I immediately go out and try to find some way to verify what they’ve said. I’m neither a biologist or a religious person so many times I have to go out and look things up to see if it’s true or not. Every single time, IF they can even tell me where to look up their evidence (many times it’s just what they heard in church) I find that quotes/evidence have been cherry picked for half-truths, misinterpreted or twisted to fit their needs.
Now, alot of people might ask exactly why it’s dangerous to teach this sort of thing as scientific theory, what’s the harm right? Well first of all, the idea of creationism doesn’t do anything to advance the quality of life for anyone. When God is inserted into an unknown then people stop looking for the answer.
Creationists are quick to spit in the face of a evolution which is the first building block of biology. Biology has allowed we as a people to live longer, have clean water, grow more food to feed our population, create medicine to treat and cure disease, lower infant death rates and dramatically increase our lifespans just to name a few things that is the MOUNTAIN of achievements that we have made through the study biology and evolution. So now instead dieing at the ripe old age of 30 and spending our whole lives trying to gather enough food to survive the next winter, we can spend all our time bashing the VERY SAME THING that allows us to live our lives like we do. I’m not sure if this has just somehow escaped the religious community that believes in this sort of thing or if they’re purposely distributing misinformation for their own desires and goals. I’m inclined to think the latter.
If I’m working on a problem that could potentially change the world and after 10 years I say, well I can’t explain it, no one else can explain it, it must have been God. It’s an intellectual dead end. You learn absolutely nothing other than that God did it.
People also might say “Well, it’s only this one thing, why not let them have their way”? Once you open the gates for one piece of psuedo-science (and that’s exactly what it is) then you open the gates for everything like it. Science tries to find explanations for why things are the way they are. If that is put to a stop then our progress and advancement as a society comes to an end and someone else takes over.
The same thing can be applied to the big bang theory. All kinds of people say that we don’t know what happened before the big bang and therefore it absolutely must have been god. NO. That is not the answer. If someone wants to think that then fine but don’t teach/preach it as if it was somehow known and proven fact.
Religious belief CANNOT be allowed to pass as scientific knowledge. I don’t give a rats *** what religions it is whether it’s catholic, muslim, jew, whatever. If that happens then the machine of society stops. We didn’t get to where we are now by thinking that God created everything. If we encourage that kind of thinking then we as a society re-enter the dark ages. That scares the hell out of me.
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j1akey
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And that’s great, wonderful. What’s even more wonderful is that none of them invoked God to explain any of these things. They kept it seperate and that’s exactly the way it should be. As I tried to say in my previous wall of text, it’s not what someone believes that bothers me or probably most atheists even though I can’t speak for them, it’s that a good sized portion of these religious communities, regardless of what god they believe in try to reverse that sort of achievement, and it pisses me off.
Personally I think that those individuals are responsible for those sort of achievements rather than the church in general but that isn’t really the purpose of what I’m trying to get across here, had to say it anyway.
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WillieWonka
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How do you know it was/is god?
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wbarquez
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Why is it that scientists try to look for empirical proof of God as if God could be proved the way we prove that carbon dioxide is made up of carbon and oxygen? Could the existence of God be verified in a laboratory or observatory? If God were observable through empirical methods then He would not be God, would He? I hope scientists, like Dawkins, should stick to their areas of competence and leave the the problem on the existence of God to the philosophers and the theologians.
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j1akey
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Again, scientists don’t try to look for evidence of God. That includes Dawkins. Scientists look for ways to explain our reality and that’s it.
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wbarquez
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If God’s existence could be proved through a microscope or a telescope then God would be a physical entity, like an atom. In which case, John 1:1 should read “In the beginning was the Atom, and the Atom was with God, and the Atom was God.”
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wbarquez
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Good! But I hope that you do not make conclusions with certainity that there no such a thing as God simply because you cannot prove his exsitence in your notion of reality. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It does not follow that something does not exist simply because you did not see or know that it exists. That’s common sense.
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j1akey
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Well personally I find no reason to believe in any god but that doesn’t mean I’m going to tell people what they can or can’t believe. I do happen to disagree with religion in general on many a topic and think it’s myth and superstition but that’s me.
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murphjos
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The Church teaches no such thing.Ok, grab a beer because it’s wall of text rant time.
…Blah blah blah …
Religious belief CANNOT be allowed to pass as scientific knowledge. I don’t give a rats *** what religions it is whether it’s catholic, muslim, jew, whatever. If that happens then the machine of society stops. We didn’t get to where we are now by thinking that God created everything. If we encourage that kind of thinking then we as a society re-enter the dark ages. That scares the hell out of me.
We BELIEVE in one God, the creator of heaven and earth…
We proclaim the MYSTERY of faith.
We are comforted by the peace of God SURPASSES ALL UNDERSTANDING
The only time you will find the Catholic Church standing in the way of scientific “progress” is when such progress is at the expense of justice or human dignity.
That does not explain why why you and the other atheists insist on arguing your positions here. Are there not better uses of your time (especially considering you are only expecting 75-90 years from birth before you cease to exist). I believe that your conversion would be greatly pleasing God (whom I serve). That is why I am posting. If you change the mind of every single person who reads your post you will still be dead within a century and mankind’s course will not have budged.
The only rational explanation I have is that you are seeking the truth and are drawn here to be converted. You are a hungry man in the company of those full of the perfect food… and you are trying to convince them that they have been satisfied by sand and brine.
P.S. All of western thought was preserved by The Church during the dark ages you so fear she will return us to…
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