Needing Help to Disprove an Atheist Claim about the Big Bang

[Freddy]

Freddy:

I simply say that one shouldn’t dismiss out of hand something that someone that smart says.

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. .

You mean what someone said he said. That’s more accurate.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

A regression suggests a return. If time restarts at every Big Bang then you don’t go backwards.

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.

I didn’t mention a ‘superverse’. This one was caused by the last one ad infinitum. And the next one will be caused by this one. Ad infinitum.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

My problem with that as a budding scientist is that there’s no way to detect such a thing with any certainty. It’s almost a cop-out to explain why the universe exists without a Creator, something I see as rather unscientific.

 

[Freddy]

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.

These aren’t the musing of some old codger. These are the suggestions (not even claims) by one of the brightest minds in theoretical and cosmological physics that a cyclical universe is one of the answers that needs examining. And there’s enough equations to back it up to fill a book. Well, half a book anyway (the other half is Penrose trying to dumb it all down for those of us who didn’t get past calculus).

 

[Freddy]

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.

Not oscillating. Cyclical. It’s almost the exact opposite. Penrose gives a brief description here:

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

These aren’t the musing of some old codger. These are the suggestions (not even claims) by one of the brightest minds in theoretical and cosmological physics that a cyclical universe is one of the answers that needs examining. And there’s enough equations to back it up to fill a book. Well, half a book anyway (the other half is Penrose trying to dumb it all down for those of us who didn’t get past calculus).

And Penrose has no evidence for his theory. All of it has been found to either not exist or be statistically insignificant, while the theory of inflation causing all the abnormalities in our universe has actually been observed to match with reality.

 

[Freddy]

The atheists have a tendency to smuggle in raw materials…

The atheists have a tendency? What nonsense. This isn’t some underhand means of disproving God. Whatever we discover about the universe has zero bearing on whether God exists or not.

 

[Apache78]

Best thing to do is pray for your friend. Dont engage in conversation that just goes round and round. Just keep believing in God. That is all that matters.

 

[Freddy]

My problem with that as a budding scientist is that there’s no way to detect such a thing with any certainty. It’s almost a cop-out to explain why the universe exists without a Creator, something I see as rather unscientific.

Why does everyone link this to some atheistic subterfuge to deny God? If the universe is cyclical then it doesn’t exclude God. Whichever way it came to be then you’ll know how He did it.

And there are means to detect a cyclical universe. With any certainty? Well, you’re talking science. There effectively is no 100% certainty of anything. The evidence will point to the veracity of a theory. It won’t prove it.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

Why does everyone link this to some atheistic subterfuge to deny God? If the universe is cyclical then it doesn’t exclude God. Whichever way it came to be then you’ll know how He did it.

An infinite regression doesn’t need a key to start up. It’s just how it’s always been.

And there are means to detect a cyclical universe.

Which have yet to produce any evidence. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I find it very odd that there has been no significant discovery of artifacts from before this universe. Penrose has been working on this theory for a very long time. The fact that inflationary theory of a ballooning before the big bang has had more confirmed observations than anything Penrose came up with says a lot to me.

If he was right, we should have found out by now. I just don’t think he’s able to find evidence for his theory.

Edit: I just read more about his theory. Unless the writers drastically misrepresented his claim, it legitimately just sounds crazy. I don’t see the logic behind it.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Why does everyone link this to some atheistic subterfuge to deny God? If the universe is cyclical then it doesn’t exclude God. Whichever way it came to be then you’ll know how He did it.

An infinite regression doesn’t need a key to start up. It’s just how it’s always been.

So you think that it would exclude God?

That is an exceptionally dangerous position to take. If you open your paper tomorrow and read that NASA has found evidence that supports Penrose’s proposals, where does that leave you?

 

[Juvenal]

So I have been trying to convince my friend about the existence of one God who created the universe and I brought up the Big Bang. My friend believes that the Big Bang was just an event that happened in an infinite universe that is above ours to create a universe 14 billion years ago. I tried to search up answers on how to deal with his claim as I have never encountered it before. How would I disprove this claim?

If you feel a need to counter an astrophysical claim, study astrophysics. But having read the creation stories in Genesis, I’d suggest you probably don’t want to go there. Before you can say it’s not really a firmament, your opponent is going to be asking you about those storehouses of hail in Job, and it’s bound to be all downhill from there.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

So you think that it would exclude God?

Yeah. I don’t see how the Catholic God could coexist with a universe that has no true beginning or end, just rebirth.

If you open your paper tomorrow and read that NASA has found evidence that supports Penrose’s proposals, where does that leave you?

Confounded as to how energy spread across an infinitely large universe made its way back to a single point, like Penrose proposes, and more than angry that reality has stopped making sense

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

So you think that it would exclude God?

Yeah. I don’t see how the Catholic God could coexist with a universe that has no true beginning or end, just rebirth.

If you open your paper tomorrow and read that NASA has found evidence that supports Penrose’s proposals, where does that leave you?

Confounded as to how energy spread across an infinitely large universe made its way back to a single point, like Penrose proposes, and more than angry that reality has stopped making sense

And someone who realises that their scientific beliefs has made it impossiboe to believe in God.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

And someone who realises that their scientific beliefs has made it impossiboe to believe in God.

I would just abandon science. My mind tells me Penrose has to be wrong. I don’t even see how the basis of his proposal could be correct, it makes absolutely no sense. Maybe I read a bad synopsis. But if it’s correct, I think he’s going senile.

Seriously.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

And someone who realises that their scientific beliefs has made it impossiboe to believe in God.

I would just abandon science.

And we’d shortly expect to see you over in one of the threads on evolution with those who have abandoned science because they also believe it denies God.

That’s a depressing thing to say.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

That’s a depressing thing to say.

Well, I suppose I wouldn’t abandon all science. I would have to believe that something has monkey-wrenched Astronomy.

Just think about it, though. If there’s an end result of creation that ends it and remakes it for a perpetual existence, why create a universe stuck in cycles of birth and rebirth forever? Why destroy all that exists, just for it to be made again? And, if I do believe that mankind is an inevitable consequence of the universe’s laws and that it was not by chance that we arose, Penrose’s proposal means that mankind comes to exist every single cycle because the laws of the universe don’t change. That also doesn’t square up with my understanding.

Luckily, I don’t think we’ll ever see that day come.

 

[Pattylt]

Even if Penrose is proven right, Gods revelation in the Bible is obviously talking about our universe only. We know our universe began no matter how it came about…uniquely or cyclicly. Would God have even bothered trying to tell us about a cyclic universe when those hearing the story didn’t even realize there was more to the universe than earth? No matter what begat what, God begat ours according to Genesis.

 

[mythbuster1]

Yes, they do. Trying to claim that gravity and the quantum fluctuations in the vacuum could create the universe, when the quantum fluctuations and curvature of the vacuum is itself part of the universe.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

Trying to claim that gravity and the quantum fluctuations in the vacuum could create the universe,

That stunt Hawking posed really ruined my view of a man I idolized for a very long time. No man is never wrong, but he seemed closest to it until he said that.