Mike, what do you care what we believe. If it is all fantasy as you assume, why get in a snit?

We will know for sure at the time of death.

Mike:
The Scripture belongs to the church and it can only be understood and correctly interpreted within the community of right faith. For those outside the church the Scripture seems to be an array of disconnected passages and stories or a “ridiculous self-contradictory book” as you say.

On Holy Scripture by Elder Cleopa

Holy Scripture, according to the Fathers, is bone and no one will venture with teeth fit for milk to break the strong bones of Holy Scripture – for those teeth will be crushed.

So, Mike try to improve yourself because

A man, as well as a people, has value to the degree to which he has understood the Gospel and can follow the teaching of Christ. – scholar Simion Mehedinti

Magic sky-daddy did it. Out of all the possible reasons for something to happen, that is the exact answer we should use at all times. Never mind there are probably thousands of reasonable explanations.

In short, look it up. This argument of “where did that come from?” “well where did that come from?” and so on and so on is like a 3 year old asking “why” over and over again. To jump to the conclusion that anything is magic is idiotic and stops the progress of human knowledge. There are reasons. Figure them out. And quit believing in that that ridiculous self-contradictory book!

Graham:

Of course slinging mud at Galileo isn’t going to make it stick, and the Pope eventually acknowledged the church’s error in 1979. This is no atheist myth.

The Pope eventually have to acknowledge many more church’s “errors”. Read errors committed by the RCC’s leadership. Usually, the ordinary faithful had no clue about what was being done on their “behalf”. Galileo’s fate was not so terrible at all.

Then the enraged papists used a second weapon to teach the monks a lesson. You wonder what weapon they used?! They used fire, the stake. Dying at a stake has always been a good instrument for the pope to achieve his goals. How many people died at a stake? Christ’s “representative” on earth, always used fire for those who did not obey or worship him. The fire to burn! According to their testimony: “If you do not wish to share the same faith with us, then die!”

Galileo was right about heliocentrism, but we know that only in retrospect because of evidence that emerged after Galileo’s death.

The evidence for the billions and millions year evolution also emerged much later … . Isn’t that interesting?

Of course slinging mud at Galileo isn’t going to make it stick, and the Pope eventually acknowledged the church’s error in 1979. This is no atheist myth.

Galileo:1, Dinesh:0.

Nick, with respect I think for Orthodox Chrisitians who are also scientists, and I know many and count myself among them at the fringes anyhow, ‘real science’ is in no way a belief system. That about which experiment is silent is at best a scientific speculation. Those who make inferences about science and operate as if experiment proves their attitude about the current state of theory and its implicaitons operate in the realm of belief or faith, mostly I suppose in the completeness of the theories as they understand them and their applicability.

Anyhow, real science, real scientists all agree science has nothing to say worth betting who gets the last cup out of the coffee pot on if experiment is silent on the subject. The only faith those (we) scientists have is that experiments conducted the same way in all respects will deliver the same results over time. If the results differ it is because there is something different in the way or context in which the experiment was done. That’s the only real faith a scientist has, that the future must needs be like the past all other things remaining constant. I like to think that’s the actual message of the story about God’s promise and the flood. Not that no more natural disasters of epic proportions will come, but that there will be no fussing physics, you can rely on honest experiment.

Honest repeatable experiements lead to confirming or denying parts of theories, leading to improved theories, which must to be called ‘improved’ make predictions which then are tested with further experiment as the means become available. Repeat and the thing is pure joy really, hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it. Mostly high frustration and tedium of course, but there are moments that redeem, oh yes.

My own favored subject is math. Do yourself a favor some day and read ‘Fermat’s Enigma’. Amazing what the one mind is yet required to do.

Nick, no he didn’t but neither do we know how thermodyanmics plays out in a setting where relativistic speeds and time bending gravity effects both exist at the same moment in a context of nuclear fusion. Maybe quantum effects are magnified.

The main point is there will always be a new theory that explains the previously unexplained thing, experiment will move on and something will bug the Nick’s and Eliots of the world showing what the theory says can’t happen. Time passes, tools improve, a new theory happens. Repeat.

With every cycle, more and more about what affects us is known, locked down, and if not tamed at least dimensioned and located.

However through it all, standing the tests of time, are repeatable experiments. The same experiments that gave insights and results 100 years ago if repeated today will give the same results.

Nobody here I think give that fact its due value. We debate shortcomings in our theories as if they were as important as what would happen if the same experiment done the same way gave different results.

I agree. We are in the scientific minority. But, it is the only theory that makes sense of the current mess in science. It is the only way that science will ever achieve a Unified Field Theory. Too bad they can’t see it because of their Newtonian/Einstienan prejudice. Speaking of the predominance of electromagentism, which was first proposed by Velikovsky and which Einstein continuously rejected and continued a vigorous correspondence debate with him, Einstein was found dead in his bed with Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Coillision” open and lying on his chest and some of his marginal notes indicated that he was having second thoughts. Too bad for science that he did not live a year or two longer.

If we are indeed looking to increase our “knowledge” of the universe we should forget all the talk about gravity.
All we know is that something which we call “gravity” supposedly works, but we don’t how. At the macroscopic level, the force of gravity between to objects is proportional the product of the masses of the two objects and inversely proportional to square of the distance between the objects. We don’t know what “causes” gravity at a microscopic level (Newton himself admitted this). Newton measured the force of gravity and put it into a mathematical formula but he did not explain the nature of gravity. BTW, there is a striking similarity between the electric and gravitational force formulas. Many theories rely on the existence of a Higgs boson and it is expected to be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.

More focus on electromagnetic forces won’t necessarily lead the scientific community to utter chaos. It would be a step towards true science, very likely compatible with the Biblical truth. That is the problem!

Time was created by the big bang Time dictates causation, without time, cause and effect are non existant. Therefore the universe was a spontaneous action. Care to argue that?

It’s statements like this that make me believe that atheism requires a blind faith.

In terms of the history of ideas, the notion of linear time predates the theory of the big bang. The comprehension of time as a linear, as a created entity, drew from Genesis, the book of creation of the Hebrews, and then retrofitted into the theory of the big bang millennia later.

If the term “big bang” is used here as metaphor, as a literary device to describe a creative explosion of an ordered natural world, well, it works but you are left with the problem of explaining where the directing logic came from. With no greater architect in the picture, the only solution is that the logic emerges from the matter itself.

So, yes, you are correct: the notion of linear time is a necessary philosophical precondition for natural and human progress (causation as you call it) to occur. But by ignoring real human history, you wrest the notion out of its proper historical context (Genesis, probably compiled around 800 BC or so) and place it not at the beginning of creation as your narrative suggests, but in the late 19th century when the Darwinian narrative first found favor and when philosophical materialism (the “logic” – logos – is grounded in matter rather than language and speech) first arose.

So what you are presenting here is not science. It is not even philosophy. It is a creation story*. As I said at the outset, it takes a boatload of faith to believe that time sprang from matter.

*In historical terms, the notion of linear time is drawn from Genesis and retrofitted into the theory of the Big Bang several millennia later. The fact that you turn around and project the recontextualization (the “retrofit”) back to the beginning of time and creation is why your theory really functions as a narrative – a creation story – rather than science.

Man cannot live by science alone. Narrative is the ground of knowledge (God spoke the world into existence) and every theory of origins will follow this model (call it an incontrovertible brute fact even though many people remain blind to it). If the model breaks down, it means that we have either descended into superstition or embraced the primordial chaos (nihilism) in which case culture is lost anyway.

Ryan: Gravity does play a role here. The primordial atom (plasma to be more correct) is of infinite mass according to Einstein and therefore of infinite gravity. It does play a disctinct and unexplainable situtation role in the Big Bang. If you are talking about the sun, there is NO scientist that would attribute the coronal heating to electromagnatic forces. But, they are the only ones that make sense. However, that would disrupt and throughly call into question all celestial mechanics and lead to utter chaos in the sientific community.

All this talk about the outward pressure generated by the fusion of hydrogen counteracting the force of gravity is nonsense. A ball of plasma held together by gravity? What effect does gravity have on small-mass or no-mass particles? Gravity is playing a minor role because it competes with the much stronger electromagnetic interaction.

Where did the primordial mass come from. Tell me that.

Science is a belief with out attempting to explain contradictions. Only hope that one day they may be explained.