Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Ahh so you are having trouble with the notion of miracles. What miracle would have to suspend the laws God created? And even if it did how does that change the facts of order in the universe?
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An Amusing Quote About the Origin of the Universe and the God of the Gaps
- Thread starter Magical Wand
- Start date
exchemist
Veteran Member
The Resurrection would be one, I imagine.
Magical Wand
Active Member
Like "Just Klaatu", in "The Day TheEarth Stood Still"?
Ohh, I haven't watched this movie yet.
I have to see it. Thanks for the recommendation. Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
So God breaks his own law by creating an exception... does that somehow do away with scientific laws?
Heyo
Veteran Member
Any miracle, by definition.
When scientists speak of an orderly universe they mean that the laws of nature are the same anywhere, anytime. When they can be bent or broken, science makes no sense.
And that conflict is fundamental, you can't have science with magic and you can't have theism without magic.
Magical Wand
Active Member
I feel like this is a bifurcation fallacy. The ekpyrotic model is a far-fetched model, but it is not the only model that allows the universe to have existed prior to the Big Bang. There are other scenarios much more modest and simpler that also allow a pre-big bang phase.
It certainly seems epistemically possible, but unless you present some justification for that, it is just that; a possibility.
You haven't demonstrated the "natural universe" began, though.
Oh, really? Do we?
The first question is outside the domain of science because it presupposes the universe came from nothing -- and since 'nothing' is the absence of a natural universe, there is nothing there for science to study. If the universe is past-eternal, however, it is not outside. Science can explain how the Big Bang, for example, took place from a prior physical state that extended beginninglessly into the past.
The second question is more fundamental than scientific questions. It is in the domain of philosophy (perhaps naturalistic/materialistic philosophy). One possible response is that the non-theistic explanation of the universe lies in its own necessity, i.e., it is impossible for it not to exist. So, while science hits a wall in the second case, materialistic philosophy can perfectly entertain potential responses. In which case, Holt's argument still stands.
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Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Science just studies what can be observed. If a supernatural event happened it can be observed. Unless you are dedicated to an unbroken line of random causation which atheists seem to like...
So, an event happened that can't be explained by normal laws. Do we just chuck all the rules or do we see it as evidence that we don't know everything yet?
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Call it what you will, it doesn't make science worthless, just incomplete.
exchemist
Veteran Member
That would indeed be so, if there were scientific (i.e. reproducible) evidence for these miraculous occurrences.
Heyo
Veteran Member
There are things we can't explain yet - which are not miracles and then there are things that defy the laws of nature. Theoretically anyway as there are no examples for the later and if science is right, there can't be any.
And that is a second fundamental difference between theists and scientist. When observing something as yet unexplained the theists says "goddidit", the scientist says "fascinating, we have to investigate to explain this" (and the Deist may say "if god did it, we have to find out how").
If Newton hadn't accepted the "goddidit" explanation, he might have come to the same conclusion as Laplace.
Hop_David
Member
Yet more examples of the invented histories Tyson uses to push his new atheist narrative.
At 20:56 Tyson says:
"even if you're as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops. It just stops! You're kind of no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain, and who says: "That's a really cool problem, I want to solve it!" They come in and solve it. But look at the time delay! This was a hundred year time delay! And the math that's in pertubation theory is like crumbs for Newton. He could come up with that! The guy invented calculus just on a dare, practically. When someone asked him: "What - you know, Ike, how come planets orbit in ellipses and not some other shape?" He couldn't answer that, he goes home for two months, comes back, out comes integral differential calculus, because he needed that answer that question. So this is the kind of mind we're dealing with with Newton: He could have gone there, but he didn't. He didn't. His religiosity stopped him."
Tyson is talking about how Newton invoked God as an explanation for the solar system's stability. But how 100 years later Laplace came up with a better n-body system model that explained the solar system's stability.
Tyson tells us Newton could have easily done Laplace's n-body work in an afternoon. But he didn't because he had God on the brain.
Tyson's claim is demonstrably false from the get go. Newton's religiosity did not stop him from working on n-body models. In fact Newton spent a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to model the 3-body system of the earth, moon and sun.
After Newton, Leonhard Euler took a crack at it. Many regard Euler as the greatest mathematician that ever lived. Laplace held that opinion.
After Euler, Joseph Lagrange tried. Perhaps some readers here have heard of the five Lagrange points. They should actually be called the Euler-Lagrange points. Euler discovered L1, L2 and L3. Lagrange discovered L4 and L5, the two Lagrange points that trail or lead the orbiting body by 60 degrees.
More than 100 years later Laplace did indeed build a better model. But he built on top of the efforts of Newton, Euler and Lagrange. To say that Newton could have easily done it in an afternoon is completely ridiculous.
And how about Tyson's story of Newton inventing calculus on a dare in two months? And explaining elliptical orbits while he was at it? Earlier in the video he tells us he did it all before he turned 26 (9:42 into the video).
It was in Principia that Newton explained how inverse square gravity causes elliptical orbits. And it was Edmund Halley's famous question that prompted Newton to write Principia. Tyson gets the question wrong. He gets Newton's answer wrong. And he gets the time frame wrong.
In 1684 Edmund Halley asked Newton what sort of orbits would planets follow if the sun's gravity fell off with inverse square of distance. Newton was in his early 40s at the time (I have no idea how Tyson got the notion this happened before Newton turned 26). Newton answered ellipses, that he had calculated it. 18 months later Newton sent Halley a rough draft of Principia.
It is thought that Newton worked on his fluxions in 1666. But it certainly wasn't Halley's "dare" that prompted Newton to think about calculus. Maybe it was Newton's older Cambridge colleague Isaac Barrow. Barrow, Fermat, Descartes, Gregory, Cavalieri had laid the foundations of modern calculus in the generation before Newton and Leibniz. Building calculus was the collaborative effort of many people over many years. Tyson tells us a single person invented it in two months.
Newton was a great genius. But to say he invented calculus and wrote Principia on a dare -- in two months -- before he turned 26! -- is wildly exaggerating his accomplishments. Which Tyson does to give credence to his claim that Newton could have developed Laplace's n-body models in an afternoon.
I believe all Tyson's rants against religion are based on invented history. False history which the New Atheists tend to accept without question. What happened to these platitudes about challenging claims to see if they are supported by evidence? Tyson demonstrates his following is just as credulous as anyone else. Like most people they are happy to swallow falsehoods if they seem to support their favorite beliefs.
Hop_David
Member
Orientalists have claimed that Ghazali's occasionalism is one of the notions that ended the Islamic Golden Age. (Occasionalism is a fancy word for the notion that God did it).
However the Asharite notion of Occasionalism had been around 100 years before Ghazali entered the stage. And Islamic innovation continued for nearly 300 years after Ghazali's death. Evidently occasionalism didn't do much innovation stifling during the Islamic Golden Age.
gnostic
The Lost One
I don’t know about your history, but I was brought up in environment, where most of the people I grew up were Christians, and for some times I was considering joining one of the churches, since I was 15, after my sister gave me my first Bible.
So I am quite familiar with the Bible, more so than with other religions and other scriptures. So for some times I was believer.
And during those times, when I did believe, I didn’t try to mix or didn’t try to compare religion with sciences.
Although, I was aware of dinosaurs and the Neanderthals, and I have heard of mutations (mostly from movies and tv series), I was never a biology student during high school and college days, and in biology I didn't go beyond Year 9 high school science. And when I went to study civil engineering in college during the mid-80s, I was more focused in applied physics, applied maths and tiny bit of chemistry that were essential for civil engineering.
My points in sharing history with you, I didn’t know anything about Charles Darwin, Evolution or Natural Selection, or anything else. And though I did hear of “survival of the fittest”, I seriously didn’t know what it mean. And though my high school science did include genetics, Evolution never came up, because it was just very basic genetics.
My points, my knowledge in biology was seriously limited, from 1981 (when I first became interested in the Bible) to 2003 (when I first joined a Internet forum). In fact, although I did know about creation from Genesis, I also never heard of Creationism, and didn’t know there were groups of people called “creationists”. I didn’t know there were argument between Creationism and Evolution.
Back then, before joining a forum, I didn’t know much about astronomy, astrophysics and modern cosmology, and I have never heard of the Big Bang. Although I was interested in hearing news of space missions, or seeing new images from the Hubble, i never took the times to actually learn about them.
But everything changed when I joined a forum in early 2003. I had joined forum for computer programmers and IT, because in 1999 I graduated in computer science (change in career, I started the course in 1995), the same year I created my website called Timeless Myths (in 1999).
Anyway this forum, has a section on Religion, and I noticed that members were arguing back and forth, about Evolution and Creationism. And I was clueless as to why the two sides were so fierce in their arguments.
Like I said I already knew about Genesis creation and flood, but I wasn’t aware about Creationism, but I was pretty much in the dark about evolutionary biology, so later during the year (2003), I borrowed my cousin’s old biology textbook, and read some chapters about evolution, particularly Natural Selection.
The more I learned, the more I felt that science were right about Evolution, and I began questioning Genesis.
I actually became more interested in physics and astronomy, and over the years that followed, I started reading areas in physics that I never learn in high school and colleges, like Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Nuclear Physics, as well as about the Big Bang.
Now, I am no biologist, nor am I qualified experts in physics and cosmology, but I have learned enough to know that creationists are wrong about so many things.
Plus, this is a public forums, not Peer Review organisation, but there are some members here, who are qualified in their respective fields in science, and they certainly know far more than me.
Anyway, I think that some theists, especially Young Earth creationists, are their own worse enemies, because they have put their respective religions and their bible under scrutiny, by trying to promote their beliefs in Genesis as “science”, with propaganda and misinformation not about sciences, but with their belief and their theism.
BTW, I have being agnostic since 2000, not because of Evolution vs Creationism, but because I began to question the Christian Messianic prophecies, starting with Matthew 1:22-23 in comparison with the original sign - Isaiah 7:14-17. My change in belief had nothing to do with Evolution or the Big Bang cosmology...but the creationist stance didn’t help their cause.
gnostic
The Lost One
Abiogenesis may be still hypothetical, but Evolution is not.
But even with Abiogenesis, it still relied on known knowledge of biochemistry, and the first step of understanding Abiogenesis, is how biological molecules - like amino acids and nucleic acids - first started before the origin of first life.
Some organic matters have been found in some meteorites, like the Murchison meteorite, particularly amino acids, which are the building blocks for proteins. And before first bacteria appeared during the Archaea Eon, the young Earth was bombarded by comets, meteorites and planetesimals, during Hadean Eon.
Organic molecules may have been introduced during the Late Heavy Bombardment, as late as 3.8 billion years ago. The earliest evidence of life is about 3.5 billion years ago.
Considering that Murchison meteorite do have a number of different organic compounds (including amino acids), so extraterrestrial origin isn’t so far-fetch.
But there are competing models of Abiogenesis, which life may have started in hydrothermal sea vents or even started in puddles or pond of water due to chemical reaction with then atmosphere, are also possible and even probable.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Off course it should be abandoned.
It is literally a practice of starting with the answer before asking the question, and it is primarily about the art to come up with questions framed in such a way to trick the audience into thinking that the assumed conclusion is the correct conclusion.
It's literally the practice of trying to paint the bullseye around the arrow.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
That would be the point where the only proper answer to any question would necessarily have to be "we don't know".
Anyone who proposes answer, by definition would have had to make it all up from thin air (or at least, that's the only thing we could rationally assume). And it would, by definition, be impossible to verify or test or evaluate in any valid way shape or form.
gnostic
The Lost One
To date, there have been no scientific “observations” of supernatural event.
Supernatural events have either been misunderstood, or the person being deluded, or (in the cases of religious narratives like Genesis creation or the gospels on Jesus’ resurrection or Lazarus brought back to life) “made up” or fabricated stories by authors.
You have to remember that the gospels were originally written, not only in Greek, not Eastern Aramaic dialect that Jesus supposedly preach, these gospels were written originally anonymously; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These names were applied to each respective gospels by the 2nd century church.
Plus, these gospels were not composed contemporary to Jesus’ ministry, like during Jesus’ active ministry, or 1 to 10 years later. Instead, the oldest gospel appeared to be the gospel of Mark, was written between 65 and 75 CE; that’s about 1.5 to 2 generations after Jesus’ supposed death and resurrection. The gospels of Matthew, Luke & John, about 2 to 3 generations later.
So none of these are eyewitnesses’ accounts, especially when we don’t know who actually wrote them.
Much of the gospels seemed to be fabricated by the authors, with no eyewitnesses. If there were at least one eyewitness’ account that were written shortly after the event, then it could and might verify the gospels’ claims of some supernatural events.
To give you an example of supernatural event, let take Jesus’ death as example. In Matthew 27:51-53, it recorded...
“Matthew 27:51-53” said:
...supposed “many saints” got out of their tombs and appeared to many people throughout Jerusalem, and yet not a single eyewitness that can collaborate gospel’s account of such miracles, a gospel that was written over 50 years after the supposed supernatural event.
You would expect “many” eyewitnesses to at least recorded these dead saints walking out of tombs, but no such accounts exist, except what this gospel recorded. You got total silence from 30s CE.
And none of the other gospels reported this same event about the risen saints.
But to bring us back to your original point “if supernatural event happened it can be observed”, that certainly isn’t the case with the example I provided.
And it get worse with Genesis, like the Creation or the Flood, in which supposedly was written by Moses, according to traditions. And yet, not a single surviving Late Bronze Age text existed hat recorded these events that supposedly took places a couple of thousand years before Moses. No Genesis exist until after the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE.
It looks like Genesis Creation and Flood were fabricated stories, recording events that took place that never happened. There are archaeological evidence that ancient Jericho (or more precisely Tell es Sultan), Damascus, Eridu, Ur and Nineveh, all Neolithic towns that predated Adam’s creation of about 4000 BCE.
And according to Genesis 10, Noah’s great grandson, Nimrod, supposedly built Nineveh and Ur (Erech in some translations), but the oldest settlements in Nineveh and Ur are respectively 6000 and 5000 BCE. Another city that Nimrod supposed built, Calch, which have been identified as Kalhu in Assyrian, was built much later than Nineveh, around 13th century BCE, during the reign of Shalmanesser I. Nimrod couldn’t have built both Nineveh and Calch/Kalhu unless Nimrod could “supernaturally” live for about 5000 years.
Hence, the Flood and the Table of Nations are just more fabricated stories.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Well that is your opinion.
The catch 22 of having a supernatural experience is that the non believer is always going to find a way to explain it away.
gnostic
The Lost One
And it your “opinion” that you believe what you believe that cannot be verified at all.
You are believing in things that are not reality.
So that’s a catch-22 too.
And here’s the thing, Wildswanderer, I actually used to believe in the Bible for 19 years - from the day I first read the Bible to the year 2000.
And it wasn’t sciences that made me first question the Bible validity. It was NT interpretation (Matthew 1:22-23) of Isaiah 7:14-17).
When I compared these two two passages more closely, I came to realisation that the gospel was cherry-picking to suit the Christian agenda. In another word, Matthew 1:22-23 is nothing more than a propaganda, and that’s not OT passages that gospel authors have misinterpreted.
Repeated misinterpreting by NT authors made me realize that the New Testament have nothing to do with with the truth. That’s why I became an agnostic at age 34.