http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,717345

"Laws of physics"

The Laws of Physics caused the creation of the universe. Laws of physics did not "appear" as a result of what you call "dumb luck". They are universal constants. They always have been and always will be.

Has it ever occurred to you that, maybe, God created sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, oxygen, carbon and a few other elements, then dumped them on earth and then just ignored them? How is this any less likely than what you suggest? After all, is God limited to acting in the ways humans ascribe to him?

"Yes, science does have answers and it provides proofs for much that we seek to understand. That is how God intended it to be. He gave us a brain so that we could use it."

If God gave us science to understand what he did, then wouldn't it follow that science has the right answers? Or is God impotent or just trying to mislead us? If God gave us science, then why would he let science give us the wrong answers?

"Looking at the totality of life and its complex interdependence the statistical probability of which you speak would not only be highly improbable but also impossible. Stop and think, why do you not acknowledge the infinite?"

Now you're arguing statistics. In my way of thinking, the reference to statistical probabilities, explains what happened, rather then how it happened.

I accept the infinite, it just isn't the same infinite that you accept.

You mean, based on what you read, that God called himself "I AM" you believe that God exists? First, I have to ask you how you know what he meant? Or that what he said means the same thing that you think it did?

Break out Google and do a search on "I AM" Ascended Masters religions. Their entire belief system is based on the fact that God said "I AM." Although, they add quite a few people into the category of who "I AM" is. Maybe this is what God intended when he said, "I AM."

"discovery of dark matter"

How does God explain dark matter? I am assuming you believe that he created it. Why doesn't the Bible mention dark matter? Quantum Mechanics? Sub-atomic particles?

"but to deny the existence of God simply because you cannot conceive of such a being is itself interesting."

You refuse to accept that there is no God, simply because you cannot conceive of there not being a God. Your logic, what there is of it, is circular. Your examples explain nothing.

Other people have asked this question, but if you believe that God created the universe, who created God? It is a cop out to say that God has just existed infinitely. If he has existed infinitely, why did he wait to create the universe until he did? And why did he? Did he get bored or something? And why didn't he create it perfectly? Just to torture us?

"I am not offended by your comments I just find some of them unwarranted. I am willing to discuss why I believe and respond to "nickname" I am not interested in trading insults."

Have you been reading the Mormon playbook? They tend to try to end their arguments with ad hominem attacks, also.

As an aside, cwpenrose, I hate you. You post definitively proved to me there is no Santa Claus. There goes that Mac Pro I was going to ask for this Christmas.

I respect that you feel the way that you feel. Your entire argument seems to be based on the Bible. You assume that the Bible is correct in all that it says and your interpretation of it is correct. In a lot of ways, I would say that's pretty arrogant. At any rate, it isn't what everyone else believes. It is also pretty arrogant to believe that you have the corner on the only truth in the universe.

Science has not yet proven all things. Therefore a wizard did it.

That's really the argument in its entirety.

Now if only they could explain where the wizard came from...

He pulled himself outta his own ass.

Good post. Reminds me of the God of the Gaps; whatever scienve doesnt have an immediate clear answer to is automatically considered proof that God exists. Good thing that gap gets smaller every year. Already the religious are responding to legitamate questions with "It's true because! Just because!". They don't want the truth. They want warm fuzzies. They are afraid of the truth and deliberatly immerse themselves in denial and delusions. Like children afraid to open their closets. The religious hide undet their sheets and shut their eyes until morning. Or run to sleep in their parents bed rather tahan just getting up, flicking the lights on, and discovering and old sweater. The truth isnt scary and it wont change just by ignoring it. The sooner we embrace it, the sooner we can move on and enjoy life.

And here I am discussing this again xP

Very interesting threads. This is an issue I have explored a lot. Personally, I find it to be a stretch that you could base something as profound as a belief or nonbelief in God on something so remote as what happened at the beginning of time, which none of us were there to see. And here's another monkey wrench: why does written history only go back 5000 years or so, if humans have been here for several million years?

The historical guesstimate on when writing was invented is such, because that is the farthest back we can go and still find things that are written on. It doesn't mean that they didn't write before, it just means that they didn't write on material that would still be around today.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it still make a sound? If the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and no one was around to document this, does that mean that it isn't 4.6 billion years old?

Sorry, but that's such a silly question.

Another monkey wrench: how come microwave ovens have only been around for a few decades, if bible-god created us 6,000 years ago?

See how silly that sounds? But it's a perfectly good apologetic argument to show that flying spaghetti monster created us 300 years ago and created ancient writings to test our faith.

Not millions.

Kolobian is right. It's a silly question.

And why does agriculture only go back 10,000 years, and pottery only 20,000 years? Sounds like a progression of knowledge based technology.

And why is the iPhone less than 10 years old if we've been around for millions of years?

And if computers and softwares are so "intuitive" how come they didn't get invented before the wheel?

Because Steve Jobs wasn't born until, like what, 1950?

I rest in the probability of a paradigm shift.

could be fun :)
could answer many questions
or not

god said see matter unorganized.
If matter was unorganized and God is matter organized, who organized god.
Where did matter come from?
Maybe gods perfect answer to the question is I don't know and niether will you. However we are human and such an answer only drives us forward to find out. This makes us better than god, and from what I am told, a parent can hope that their child has more then they have.

I am an atheist, but I just wanted to tell you my thinking on this. Mormonism really clouded my view on how Christians view God. For a Christian, God is not physical, and as such does not need to be organized. Some on this board like to rail about anthropomorphic gods and how annoying they are. Early Christian philosophers thought the same thing and so the God that they created lost all of the attributes of a physical being. They created a dichotomy of a nonphysical all powerful "spirit" that still acted like a human, but their intent was remove all of the human characteristics. Perhaps if they had been allowed to start from scratch they would have succeeded but they were forced to create an amalgamation of the beliefs of those that they were trying to convert.

I went on a bit of a tangent, but to sum up, Christian God is not supposed to have needed to be created since Christian God isn't actually made up of anything.

Right, but the point of asking " who created your god " is to demonstrate the absurdity of the theist asserting that matter must have been 'created' when they already believe that there are things capable of 'always existing.'

So if a supernatural, spirit monkey who knows his own future and has magical powers is capable of always having existed, then the universe which is much less complex than that being can also always have existed without the necessity of a creator-god-monkey thing..

I understand, and agree, this was something that had been bugging me. I read these threads and to often the God that is referred to is some offshoot of Mormon God. Joesph Smith and his simplistic God theology would have been embarrassed in room with Augustine, or Aquinas, and we are only talking about one branch of Theism.

So you are saying god isn't made up or is he made up?

Which god are you referring to and how do you distinguish its gender?

I am saying that all gods are the result of some philosophical construct, some more flawed than others.

Aw Man! I always miss the beginning of these threads somehow.
Great posts in this thread BTW, I tip my hat to all of you!

I like to think that the universe has always existed. It's like a beating heart it expands for 20 billion years and then contracts for another 20. Then another 'big bang' repeat....

This was a popular hypothesis a while back, but for well over a decade science has shown little-to-no evidence of any contraction.

The assumption was that our momentum would slow over time, eventually stop, and then contract. But instead we've discovered that our speed is increasing faster and faster, rather than slowing.

So most scientists have concluded that the repetitive big bang is not an accurate view.

I don't know the science, but I think this still has validity if you frame it differently.

1) The "universe" is not everything that exists in our dimension of space-time. The "universe" is everything that exists from a certain black hole that exploded 10 or so billion years ago. However our instruments have no way of detecting anything outside of this "universe" - we have a hard enough time detecting stuff on the edge of the universe.

2) Black holes suck up more and more matter & energy. Eventually a black hole somehow hits critical mass and explodes. Or maybe two massive black holes collide and create an explosion.

While some people have postulated Black Holes as the origin of the big bang, most use a more vague term called "singularity"

Black holes have certain attributes, including spewing matter out in predictable ways.

Singularity just means that all matter was at a single point. Because it was so dense it was all contained in 1 small area, and then exploded due to instability.

...but I do not subscribe to singularity, because the math does not support it. Any point so dense that it is unstable enough to explode with that force could never exist (at least not according to any math we know). So basically the instant before it exploded it would have been just as unstable, and the instant before that. Anything that unstable never could have existed in the first place.

CAVEAT: we may discover more info about the singularity that would make it feasible. I am simply stating that right now it isn't a sound theory.

Well, I guess we'll see about whether or not there's a contraction in about 8 billion years. I'll bump this thread.

Now that's fascinating. Why would the universe be expanding at a faster rate now than it was earlier? Do scientists have any theories?

There are several, and most in the realm of String theory.

So 1 flavor of string theory proposes that we are a 3D bubble in an 11D arena. I think the argument for an 11D arena is a little silly, because it's based on the fact that the math for it is so beautifully stable (but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have base 10 math, and we are extrapolating from 2D, so 11D is the natural max before the math gets weird).

Anywho, basically it takes the big bang theory back 1 step, and says that the big bang was either the bubble closing, or matter exchanging from the 11D arena into our 3D bubble.

If you are familiar with "flat land" then there is an easy parallel.

Imagine a world of 2D beings than cannot perceive 3D. We can look down on them, and perceive them though.

Now wrap the 2D plane they know around a 3D basket ball. They still only perceive 2Ds, but wrapped around our 3D sphere.

If you were to pour syrup on the top of the ball, they would see matter appear out of no where, and disperse in a roughly circular manner. Even more strange, the syrup would start out slow, and then as if propelled by some unseen force (our 3D gravity) it would speed up until it eventually dissapeared (dripped off the bottom of the ball)

Our 3D space *could* be similar.
If our 3D "plane" were wrapped around a 4D "sphere" (or any higher dimension) when matter collided with our plane, we would see it appear out of no where, yet have a central point of origin. It would then speed up, propelled by some unseen 4D+ force (perhaps very similar to gravity).

Other theories include:
--when a bubble closes, you can see the oils on it swirl outward from where it closed, so the big bang could simply be where our bubble finished forming

--dark-matter/anti-matter in great quantities around the "edges" of the universe, which is attracting the matter outward. It then speeds up the closer it gets to this massive anti-matter/dark-matter

--the fabric of space (the basis for Einstien's relativity) curves around massive objects, which leads to gravity. So too could this fabric be curved in general, like the crown of a ball, causing objects to slowly slide away from the center and increase in speed

--etc... there are a lot of hypotheses about why this is happening. But it is nearly a universally accepted fact that the matter in the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate.

What if the universe is at the beginning of the big bang. The universe hasn't reached its max-expansion rate. Once it reaches its max speed it will start to slow, then come to a stop. Do we know what that max-speed is?

There are hypotheses about this as well.
Some do predict a slowing, but others predict a tear in matter.

Basically we would continue to speed up so quickly that the building blocks of matter tear apart (because one atom in a molecule is farther outward than another to it speeds up slightly faster than the atom closer to the center of the big bang, or the electron is farther away than the proton, so it too accelerates too fast for the proton)

But, many of these hypotheses are moot, because their time-span is longer than heat will exist in the universe, so entropy would have caused all stars, molten cores, etc... to freeze first.

Free matter starts to collect into a mass. This goes on for eons. Pretty soon the mass is so great that it starts to fall into its self. After a few more eons the mass becomes so great that it implodes upon its self turning it inside out. The big bang. Now matter is flung out ward in all directions. Some of it regroups into smaller masses creating suns and other large bodies. They speed off faster and faster from the center of the explosion. Eons still go by. Everything starts to slow as multitudes of smaller masses start to pull on each other. Soon some masses come to a stop while others continue to slow or excel. The ones that stop, the smaller masses, start to move toward larger masses as the gravity of the larger ones pulls on them. The smaller masses continue to grow. Some finally become big enough to overcome the gravity of the ones pulling on them. Still these masses continue to move towards other masses and continue to pull other masses into its self. At some point everything will be pulled to the largest mass, whichever that may be. As these masses join they begin to fall back onto its self until the big bang. Repeat. Also note that slowing only happens on the outward move. The return speeds up and only comes to a complete and sudden stop, no slowing, and as long as there is matter this could go on forever or until another universe meets up with us, but then again a universe is just more unorganized matter.

I've talked about this in length, so I will only point out the things I have not yet commented on.

Einsteins theory of relativity, that credits mass with the power of gravity, does not work over vast expanses of dissipated matter, meaning that according to that theory of gravity/mass there is no reason for the big bang to collapse and repeat.

That said, Einsteins theory is massively at odds with Quantum Mechanics (short version: Relativity describes super big things, quantum mechanics describes super small things, neither is very good at intermediate sizes).

While quantum mechanics does not explicitly provide any reason for a collapse and repeat of the big bang, it does allow for matter to mysteriously interact even though it is light years apart. If that "action" one day is linked to attraction or movement through the universe, there may be evidence that would support a collapse/repeat of the big bang.

But the fundamental problem is this: You heard about the collapse/repeat of the big bang at one point in your life, and you now look for evidence to support it. That is the antithesis of science.

The collapse/repeat was a mere hypothesis that has almost universally been abandoned in science because the evidence seems to point elsewhere.

While it is not 100% sure, looking for evidence to support a preconceived notion is the same problem theists fall into, and should be eschewed in science.

The mechanics of the creation of the universe does not preclude the existence of god, it only demonstrates that god isn't necessary.

I think it is Kolobian who continues to bring this up, but the real argument against god is that god's existence is immeasurably more complicated than the mechanics of the creation of the universe. Simply put, it is easier to figure it out without god than it is to figure it out with god.

We now can trace firmly back to a time when the only elements were hydrogen and helium with a trace of lithium, the most elementary of atoms. All heavier ones were created in the cores of exploding stars later on.

Probability is a strange thing. Given the time that has passed, a literally unimaginable interval, even the most improbable things will almost certainly happen, and did.

Complexity and organization happened spontaneously over billions of years no matter how counter intuitive this seems. IMHO, only a slight crack remains for a god, and that would be at the beginning if there was one, and "he or she" would be totally separate from us in space and time, not communicating with us in any way and thus unknowable. A deist god who's possible existence has no relevance.