Big Bang and God

[unicorn]

Recently had a discussion with a non-believer (atheist). When he pointed out the Big Bang as "proof" for no God, I had the pleasure of pointing out to him that the Big Bang supports the idea of creationism. He was quite shocked. I thought it was funny and pure logic! What do you guys think?

Some cool articles:

http://www.big-bang-theory.com/

http://www.newcreationism.org/CreationArticle20.html

http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9404/bigbang.html

http://www.reasons.org/resources/fff/20 ... e_big_bang

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcrai ... eplyg.html

[Cathar1950]

micatala wrote:

If one accepts the BB, one is, in my view, concluding that the literal six-day creation model is false. This does not mean one is obliged to accept that all other parts of the Bible or CHristianity are false.

Even a broken clock, provided it has both hands, is right twice a day.
But if they say it is all true then they would be wrong. Not everyone thinks that way. Jews have accepted the limits of the Torah of thousands of years they have the oral traditions. Christians might end up with a problem if there is no fall then Jesus in Paul's eyes would be a mistake as would most of Christianity.
McCulloch wrote:

This is why, when religionists find out that something is wrong it is then transformed into an allegory. As science progresses, religious faith retreats into their non-falsifiable allegorical fortresses.

Allegory is fine so are metaphors but they should not be dogma. It most certainly is not science even if science uses both.

[juliod]

This is assuming an 'absolutist' viewpoint that I don't accept as being inherent in religious faith. You seem to be saying that if any one part of a religious doctrine is wrong, then the whole thing is wrong. I don't accept this. To me, it is like saying if one aspect of the theory of evolution is wrong, then the whole thing is wrong. This is a viewpoint that many creationists take and that I reject.

But where does religious knowledge come from? Uniformly, religions claim it comes from a superbeing. Usually an infallible one. It's "special" knowledge that exists in a different conceptual framework. Without this, there is no reason to "believe" a religion.

If you accept that the bible is just a bronze-age myth then I think you are an atheist.

DanZ

[micatala]

Quote micatala:
This is assuming an 'absolutist' viewpoint that I don't accept as being inherent in religious faith. You seem to be saying that if any one part of a religious doctrine is wrong, then the whole thing is wrong. I don't accept this. To me, it is like saying if one aspect of the theory of evolution is wrong, then the whole thing is wrong. This is a viewpoint that many creationists take and that I reject.

But where does religious knowledge come from? Uniformly, religions claim it comes from a superbeing. Usually an infallible one. It's "special" knowledge that exists in a different conceptual framework. Without this, there is no reason to "believe" a religion.

I would agree that religious knowledge comes from God, but also is a product of our own spiritual and intellectual nature. Many who believe describe faith as a journey and the journey is in part a learning experience. We are finite beings, and so will never (in my view) attain complete understanding either as individuals or as groups of individuals. (I think this is true not only with respect to religion, but also science). Even if one postulates that God is infallible, this does not mean that our understanding of 'what God says' is ever going to be compete or infallible. The fact that we do not attain 'infallible' knowledge of God or from God does not, in my view, mean there is no reason to believe.

Reasons to believe are many and varied. A few examples, in my view:
1. A belief that there is more to being human than can be explained by science or rationalism.
2. A belief that humans have a spiritual or moral nature that is not solely a part of the 'material' world.
3. A judgment, based on observation and life experience, that life is 'better' for those that accept God than those that don't, or even that it is better for 'me' if I believe in God (even while accepting that this may not be true for others).
4. A belief that the universe must have an 'ultimate cause.' This belief does not necessarily have to be attached to any particular explanations of how this cause operated, what the cause actually 'did', etc.

If you accept that the bible is just a bronze-age myth then I think you are an atheist.

I believe that the BIble is divinely inspired, but not necessarily infallible. Some parts might be described as 'myth,' but I don't think it is fair to say it all is. Parts of the Bible can be considered a record of peoples or individuals on their 'faith journeys,' and as such, is instructive for those of us who are on our own faith journeys.

[Jose]

Reasons to believe are many and varied. A few examples, in my view:
1. A belief that there is more to being human than can be explained by science or rationalism.
2. A belief that humans have a spiritual or moral nature that is not solely a part of the 'material' world.
3. A judgment, based on observation and life experience, that life is 'better' for those that accept God than those that don't, or even that it is better for 'me' if I believe in God (even while accepting that this may not be true for others).
4. A belief that the universe must have an 'ultimate cause.' This belief does not necessarily have to be attached to any particular explanations of how this cause operated, what the cause actually 'did', etc.

Well reasoned. I would hope that most theists would agree with you. I do, too.

I note that none of these fundamental reasons exclude any particular scientific conclusions. As we have implied before, science is methodologically unable to address "ultimate causes," or whether one feels that one's life is "better" or "worse," or whether being human and having human emotions and morals requires more than natural causes. We might (especially if we want to relate this to the thread topic) say that the BB also has nothing to say with respect to god.

The BB is entirely, and no more than, inference from the data that god has seen fit to admit into our universe. It is counterintuitive that a god would create a universe that leaves no evidence of his actions, but who are we to speculate on the motives of a god? I would think that the god described in the bible would be very interested in having mere mortals recognize that he, and he alone, is the creator. I would think he would be rather unwilling to hide his tracks the way he has done with biology and geology. But what I think is immaterial. All I can do is look at the clues he left us in his creation, and derive those inferences that best explain the observations.

The BB is less certain than biological evolution, since the data seem to drive us to a phenomenon for which we have no parallels in the current universe. Consequently, there is little to study as a "model system" that can shed light on the basic principles. "Model systems" have been tremendously useful in biology, but only because of the inescapable evolutionary similarities among different species. With the BB, there is ohly one, and it happened long ago. This makes it exceptionally hard to study.

But, you know, failure to understand a process does not compel us to conclude that the process is "proof of god." It merely compels us to conclude that we don't understand it.

Nor, of course, does understanding compel us to conclude that a process "proves" that god does not exist. It may compel us to conclude that god's word is cryptic, and that the holy books are deeper than they seem when we read "bible bedtime stories." This should not surprise us, since we all recognize that mere humans cannot fathom the mind of god, and that god works in mysterious ways. Since we don't understand his ways, why not consider that they may include things like big bangs, evolution, and stories that have a clear "surface" for people of 2000 years ago, but also have a very deep metaphorical meaning for our current generation, which is much more scientifically advanced?

[bernee51]

Reasons to believe are many and varied.

But are they all based on the same thing?

This is off topic from this thread so I have addressed this question in the Perennial Philosophy thread.

Parts of the Bible can be considered a record of peoples or individuals on their 'faith journeys,' and as such, is instructive for those of us who are on our own faith journeys.

I would agree, instructive yes. But many claim it to be proscriptive.

[juliod]

I just don't get these wifty-wafty weak-theist arguments. Why believe in a superbeing when you:

a) Have no evidence that the being exists; and

2) Reject the only reason you have for believing, the literal truth of your primary religious documents.

At the very least you have to agree that "god" is very different from the being described in Genesis 1 and 2 (and the other creation stories of other religions).

Then we will agree: if "god" exists, he/she/it is not any of the beings described by the existing earth religions.

It's important at this point to remember that "god" is not the name of god, but rather a near synonym of "superbeing". In judaism and christianity the name of "god" is YHWH. The question is, does god have a proper name, and is it YHWH? The bible tells specific stories about YHWH with specific deeds, motives, and consequences. If you believe that these stories are not true, that is one way of saying that the biblical YHWH is not in fact "god".

If you only believe in god in a general sense, and cannot confidently make detailed statements about "god" (such as name, actions, events, etc) then you are really an agnostic.

DanZ

[Bart007]

I had the pleasure of pointing out to him that the Big Bang supports the idea of creationism.

The problem is (or rather, one problem is) that the Big Bang theory was not the result of any religious doctrine or theological hypothesis. It came about as an explanation of the red-shift of galaxies. So any "creator" of the Big Bang cannot be any of the "gods" that have been described by earthy religions. In other words, if you accept the reality of the BB, then any religion that did not countenance the BB from the beginning is false.

DanZ

Greetings to all.

I am a Christian and a creationist. though I used to be an evolutionist

Yes, if the Big Bang (including the Ad Hoc inflationary theory) be true, then it, along with the facts that the universe started out in an extremely low entropic state and has an extraordinarily large information content, provides evidence for an eternal intelligent Creator God because the Big Bang is an effect and is in need of a cause, a first cause must be eternal, and that cause must be intelligent to provide the extraordinarily high information content. Not to mention he inspired the Bible and sent His son to "save us" from death, transform us to do the good that He created us to do, and bring us into eternal life.

Many scientists, at least initially, found the Big Bang Theory repulsive because it made the universe an effect and opened the door for God to come back into science. Science is supposed to provide atheists and materialist with a satisfactory world-view and therefore found the Big Bang Theory to be repugnant. One such atheist scientist was famed brilliant astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, he offered an eternal “Steady State Universe Theory” as a competitor to the Big Bang Theory.

That said, I agree with you Juliod: "that the Big Bang theory was not the result of any religious doctrine or theological hypothesis." The Bible is neither the inspiration for the Big Bang Theory, nor has anything to say about it. The Bible does say that God stretches out the universe like a curtain, indicating an expanding universe, but this one sentence hardly constitutes a scientific treatise on cosmogony. The Bible also states the universe had a beginning, as God Created it "In the beginning ..." As far as I can see, the Bible has nothing to say concerning the Big Bang Theory.

[Cathar1950]

I am not sure how much of religion is revealed. It may be more inherited.
Just because they belive it was revealed does not mean it was. Most who belive inherited it including the belief that it was revealed.
The bible would only be false to someone who thinks it is perfect. Perfect is reserved for God. Of course that is a whole different debate.

[Nyril]

has an extraordinarily large information content

What's information? Could you quantify this for me? Because I see this word used a lot, but I can't seem to make it mean anything useful to me.

provides evidence for an eternal intelligent Creator God because the Big Bang is an effect and is in need of a cause, a first cause must be eternal, and that cause must be intelligent to provide the extraordinarily high information content.

Okay, but what caused your creator god? Certainly by your argument god would have -far- more information content then even a trillion of our universes. Secondly, since I can guess the answer, why are you okay with god "just existing" but not the universe?

[Cathar1950]

I put this in another post but I feel it is relevent for some reason so I am repeating it.
Heartshorne in Beyond Humanism wrote:
Quote:

The more the rational elements of culture, that is science and critical meatphysics, advance, the less need or excuse there will be, it seems to me, for authoritative revelation as a rival or supplement to knowledge. We need inspiration as well as proof; but infallible inspiration seems a meaningless idea. Even if God dictated the Bible, it would be of no help until he taught us how to traslate it into modern language and thought and life, and if we were taught to do this infallibly, we should aquire a degree of insight clearly incompatable with human limitations.
Popular Fundamentalism is either a negative evil, a callowness of culture which should be kindly assisted to cure itself; or a positive evil, an unloving and therefore unchristian dogmatism which is to be greeted, like every other form of arrogant power, with indignation and ridicule. An infallible dogma or book or church is a boast or a bludgeon, not a call to comradship in human strength or human modesty and repentance.

This would be true for all bible believers or those who claim scripture alone or faith alone. Any one who says that others are not true Christians because of others dogma that differs from their own is arrogant. My personal feeling is that what became of Christianity is a mystery religion invented by Paul with Gospels that followed. But this does not exclude it from the possibility of spiritual growth which all humans have in common. By spiritual growth I mean the integration of human potential and ideals. It is a struggle for our growth and it seems that Paul turned it into a magic trick.