Needing Help to Disprove an Atheist Claim about the Big Bang

  • Thread starter Thread starter JordanAccount
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Do you mean cyclic? I don’t see how that changes the argument. There is still some thing which we may regard as the entire physical reality. All physical causes are contained within it. Did something cause it? I say yes, God created the entire physical reality from nothing. I gather that you see “Did something cause it?” as an ill-posed question, because the only reality is the physical.
 
Last edited:
Beryllos said:
And I am not being sarcastic. Hawking was a genius. I’m a scientist, I read the book, and I think it’s a fascinating science book. The Grand Design pretends to disprove God and/or contradict faith in the Creator, but really just doesn’t.
Click to expand...
That’s because faith in God isn’t born out of science, or reason, or logic, it’s born out of biases, and biases are incredibly difficult things to dislodge, because they’re self-reinforcing. You can’t force someone to see, that which their biases won’t let them see.
 
Beryllos said:
Do you mean cyclic? I don’t see how that changes the argument. There is still some thing which we may regard as the entire physical reality. All physical causes are contained within it. Did something cause it? I say yes, God created the entire physical reality from nothing. I gather that you see “Did something cause it?” as an ill-posed question, because the only reality is the physical.
Click to expand...
Yeah. I remember when I was a kid and interested in cosmology and the Steady State theory was being replaced (or actually had been replaced) by the Big Bang. Which was actually a term I think proposed by Hoyle as a sarcastic name for what he thought was a bad idea ('Gee, so it all started with a ‘big bang, eh?’).

But the Steady State made sense to me. And I only found out yesterday that Penrose felt the same way (great minds!). That is, that a ‘begining’ made no sense. And so he started slapping chalked equations on his blackboard and eventually came up with his cyclical proposal. And that works for me.

But look, are we ever going to know? Certainly not in my lifetime. So I go with what feels right. And does that exclude God? No, of course not. But it pushes back at all those who try to box God into a scientific explanation. ‘This is the way He did it!’ Yeah? And if that is proven wrong? It’s God of the gaps redux.
 
Freddy said:
And I only found out yesterday that Penrose felt the same way (great minds!).
Click to expand...
Penrose is a genius that let it get to his head and now resorts to misrepresenting data in sensational headlines to get noticed. Science moved on to inflation without him and the others that simply couldn’t accept a finite universe. I almost find it sad. Nobel Prize winner who is on bad terms with many because of an unwillingness to let go of debunked ideas.
 
Last edited:
Capta(name removed by moderator)rudeman said:
40.png
Freddy:
And I only found out yesterday that Penrose felt the same way (great minds!).
Click to expand...
Penrose is a genius that let it get to his head and now resorts to misrepresenting data in sensational headlines to get noticed. Science moved on to inflation without him and the others that simply couldn’t accept a finite universe. I almost find it sad. Nobel Prize winner who is on bad terms with many because of an unwillingness to let go of debunked ideas.
Click to expand...
He includes inflation in his proposals. Why do you think it’s sad? I don’t claim that what he says is true. I simply don’t know enough about it. I simply say that one shouldn’t dismiss out of hand something that someone that smart says.
 
Casting down imaginations / pride / vanities / erroneous assumptions / proud presumptions is part of the spiritual battle of ideas. Superverse and multiverse are some common examples of these imaginary ideas presented as alternatives to bowing before the true God who sent Jesus Christ into this world. Jesus was the “real ideal”.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
Obviously this just kicks the can down the road … where did the original universe come from? “Nothing can’t create anything.” But, they will claim that a force arose out of nothing if given enough time. Huh? In any case, a force isn’t “nothing,” it’s a force.

Some say gravity created the universe. But again, gravity is not “nothing,” it’s something - it’s a force. And a force can only act upon matter, so the notion of a force existing upon matter before matter existed is impossible.
 
Freddy said:
I simply say that one shouldn’t dismiss out of hand something that someone that smart says.
Click to expand...
Jesus Christ was pretty smart. The Apostles Peter and Paul and James John were pretty smart. You would do well to consider more what they say. :-).

Jesus turned water into wine and made it look and taste like well-aged wine. If He did it once, He could have done it other times.
 
JordanAccount said:
How would I disprove this claim?
Click to expand...
The onus is on him to prove it. He can’t, because there’s no evidence for it.

And even if he could prove it, it still wouldn’t demonstrate that God doesn’t exist.
 
Last edited:
Any debate on this matter needs to be on a philosophical level, not a scientific one. This is not an anti-science stance, but about the epistemological and metaphysical principles we’ve judged to be true (and ones that would need to be true if the method and observations of science are to be held as really informative). If you’re not prepared for that level of discussion, suffice it to say that as theists we’re committed to the view that reality is intelligible and explicable at all levels, and we reject the notion that there are ontological brute facts (things that exist without reason or explanation, things that are essentially special pleading exemptions from causality and other principles).

You can be a theist and not be committed to an intelligible and explicable reality from top to bottom, but it that’s the case. you’d be saying that there is no argument for God and that belief in God can only be by faith alone. That would be fideism. So trying to demonstrate God would be futile.
 
Last edited:
Freddy said:
A regression suggests a return. If time restarts at every Big Bang then you don’t go backwards.
Click to expand...
I was talking about a regression of questions: where did this universe come from? A superverse. Where did the superverse come from? A super-duperverse. Where did the super-duperverse come from? A superduper-superverse.

And so on.

In other words, the superverse is just a setting-aside of the answer to the question.
 
Freddy said:
No, not an infinite universe. A self generating universe. The end of this one is identical to the begining of the next. Rinse and repeat.
Click to expand...
That is a convenient… shall we say ad hoc… “explanation” that merely asserts what is to be taken as sufficient without anything like sufficiency.

Scientifically speaking that would be like me proposing that this cup merely keeps itself in existence by continually regenerating itself. Hardly explains anything.

With regards to the universe, it is pretty clear that every constituent in the universe is contingent. And just as every red brick in a red brick wall explains the redness of the wall, so the contingent nature of the universe in its entirety means the universe is contingent.

You cannot just go positing, merely for the sake of explaining away the question of origins that the entirely contingent workings simply and for no reason merely regenerate.

The difference between your argument and that of the first cause is that logically speaking the principal of sufficient reason is founded in the logic of sufficiency of explanations if we are to approach the issue reasonably.

What you are proposing is that things that can be imagined are as probable, just because they can be imagined, as causal frameworks that are grounded in the requirement for a full and sufficient explanation.
 
JordanAccount said:
Big Bang was just an event that happened in an infinite universe
Click to expand...
How can he/she believe that the universe is infinite? We are told by scientists that matter is finite, the sun will cease to give out light, the universe will cease to expand and come to a grinding halt, after which time will cease to exist. Nothing infinite about that.
 
Freddy said:
He includes inflation in his proposals. Why do you think it’s sad?
Click to expand...
I find it sad because he constantly tries to shoehorn in inflation and the theories of a finite universe that match data to his own theory, which does not. There is no evidence of a cyclical universe pattern. All signs point to this being the only one. But he gave Newsweek a headline and made a lot of people think the Big Bang was wrong when, in fact, he’s the fringe without evidence and Inflation is still the best. He can’t accept that steady state was wrong and is on a crusade against truth to get science as a whole to accept an idea that was left behind long ago.
Freddy said:
I simply say that one shouldn’t dismiss out of hand something that someone that smart says.
Click to expand...
Neither do I, which is why I didn’t. I researched a bit myself and basically found that all his new claims are pretty much meaningless and no different from current inflation theory, with the adding of undetectable cycles to the time before our universe.
 
I’m not a physicist, and I have this question—

Is an infinitely old universe even possible? I mean, wouldn’t the disorder of the universe just keep increasing until we only had elemental particles?
 
The oscillating universe model presupposes that the universe is closed and gravitationally bound, such that it will inevitably collapse on itself. That is not only not in evidence, but the evidence favors the position that the universe will not collapse.
 
Infinite in spatial extent. Truth is, we don’t know, but a Euclidean or hyperbolic geometry is expected to be infinite in spatial extent. The geometry of the universe could, however, be a 3-torus, which is Euclidean and smooth but closed, and a Euclidean or hyperbolic geometry could have an edge at a finite distance, but there’s no evidence of that and scientists are biased against it because it would introduce boundary conditions that they consider arbitrary.
 
Make clear that by “matter” we here refer to all the constituents of the universe: matter, radiation, spacetime, and the laws of physics themselves. The atheists have a tendency to smuggle in raw materials in the form of spacetime vacuum conditions, which the Big Bang model posits are themselves the result of the Big Bang.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top