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How old is the universe?

logician

Well-Known Member
I think the best you're going to get out of any Christian organization is "guided evolution" or "intelligent design", which, of course, both are absurd.
 

LittleNipper

Well-Known Member
I think the best you're going to get out of any Christian organization is "guided evolution" or "intelligent design", which, of course, both are absurd.


What is absurd is that structure, arrangement and conformaty can find its origin from chaos, confusion, and disarray... Add to this extreem heat, pressure and a massive explosion.
 

themadhair

Well-Known Member
What is absurd is that structure, arrangement and conformaty can find its origin from chaos, confusion, and disarray... Add to this extreem heat, pressure and a massive explosion.
Why is that when I let go of an apple it always falls towards the earth? Might it have something to do with the fact that it's path isn't determined by chance but by gravity?

Why is that the matter we see around us appears so un-random? Could it be the fact that it isn't determined by chance but by chemistry?
 

OmarKhayyam

Well-Known Member
What is absurd is that structure, arrangement and conformaty can find its origin from chaos, confusion, and disarray... Add to this extreem heat, pressure and a massive explosion.

This is the intuitive argument for some uncaused cause. Even arguendo granting full weight to this speculation it does nothing to establish anything about this "cause" its motivations, its interest in its creation or even that is still around.

And it most certainly does nothing to establish a garden an apple and a talking snake. In short it proves nothing about any god yet invented.
 

ragordon168

Active Member
i think that the creation stories have to be treated as that, a story. In the same way JRR Tolkien's "Silmarillion" gives a creation myth for middle earth (read it its a great book ;))

the best theists (is that the right term not really sure) can do is argue that 'god' started off everything and has hung around keeping an eye on us ever since.

creation stories have existed throughout human history, when that belief system is abbandoned their creation story is considered to be a myth. like the viking belief system - quite a set of sagas if you look through it - now only considered a story on par with JRRT's stories from middle earth.

how long before cristian or other religions have the 'facts' of creation relegated to myth and fantasy?
 

ragordon168

Active Member
18 years and two months next friday :D

i always remember my RE teacher saying that it is impossible to definitively know if anything outside of your own conciousness is real or not. so from my perspective the universe was born the same time as me
 
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ThereIsNoSpoon

Active Member
18 years and two months next friday :D

i always remember my RE teacher saying that it is impossible to definitively know if anything outside of your own conciousness is real or not. so by that logic the universe was born when i was.

I think you made some small mistakes here. rethink the "so by that logic" statement.
 

ManTimeForgot

Temporally Challenged
Guided evolution and intelligent design are just as plausible as any other theory about how the cosmos functions once you get passed the idea that these concepts apply to a "God." In short anything which exists and can act is an ET. If ET were guiding evolution, then we would have no clue it was happening. It would appear normal to us as that is all we have ever known and can experience. The same with intelligent design. How can anyone claim to know how the universe came into being? I am not talking about what happens beyond the point where we have actual evidence; I am talking about prior to when we can "see."

The universe could be 30 trillion years old and we would have no idea. The BBT is our best guess, but even that is holey enough to preclude it being very close to what actually happened. As we gather more evidence and gain more understanding of the deeper workings of the cosmos we will be able to construct a far more accurate model than the current BBT. Until then any notion of how old the universe is is only slightly better than rank speculation.

MTF
 

themadhair

Well-Known Member
Guided evolution and intelligent design are just as plausible as any other theory about how the cosmos functions once you get passed the idea that these concepts apply to a "God."
Without evidence they clearly aren’t. Big bang is considered above steady state due to evidence. General relativity is considered above Newtonian gravity due to evidence.

Science is considered above “magic man did it” because no one has produced not only no evidence, but not even a theoretically testable mechanism. You could just say the Abolonian faeries did it and science would consider it on equal footing with god – because both have no freaking evidence.
 

ManTimeForgot

Temporally Challenged
Without evidence they clearly aren’t. Big bang is considered above steady state due to evidence. General relativity is considered above Newtonian gravity due to evidence.

Science is considered above “magic man did it” because no one has produced not only no evidence, but not even a theoretically testable mechanism. You could just say the Abolonian faeries did it and science would consider it on equal footing with god – because both have no freaking evidence.


And exactly how does Big bang undermine guided evolution or intelligent design? *Poof* I am now suddenly a cosmic level pan-dimensionally aware being existing in 16 different dimensions; I have been "alive" for 100 billion of earth years and saw to the manipulation of the Big Bang such that the constants in the universe were guaranteed to promote life. *Unpoof*

Yeah, sure anything could be said to do anything else, but we have a feature of our universe which intuitively seems to require something else. And if BBT really gets you going perhaps you can solve the problem of Quasar Light in deep space not showing any evidence of Time Dilation... BBT, Steady State, Partial Steady State, Tired Light, etc All of these theories have their problems by our current understandings of the universe and physics. So for those of us interested in probing for truth we do not let something go without critical analysis and alternative proposition just because it happens to be Science's current best guess. BBT isn't even on the same level as Evolution. The "evidence" which lead to BBT's eventual acceptance was postulated first by people who were not themselves Big Bang theorists. And the amount we know about the universe (both in extent and in function) and the cosmos in general (interaction between dimensions and possibly alternate universes) basically means that our assessments of how the universe began (assuming it even had a beginning) is like a fish speculating on how the ocean got there.

MTF
 

ragordon168

Active Member
And exactly how does Big bang undermine guided evolution or intelligent design? *Poof* I am now suddenly a cosmic level pan-dimensionally aware being existing in 16 different dimensions; I have been "alive" for 100 billion of earth years and saw to the manipulation of the Big Bang such that the constants in the universe were guaranteed to promote life. *Unpoof*

unless we can prove how the big bang started and not just how it happened then ID can always exist as science cant disprove that something didn't flick the switch and watch universe experiment 1.0 start rolling.
 

ThereIsNoSpoon

Active Member
well if solipsism is true then the statement is fine
not quite
If solipsism is the notion that your mind is all that exists THEN it would be fine.
If you define solipsism similarly to his statement stating that you can't know what is outside of your mind then the statement is false.
 

themadhair

Well-Known Member
And exactly how does Big bang undermine guided evolution or intelligent design?
What does big bang theory, a part of cosmological physics, have to do with evolutionary theory, a central component of modern biology?????

Make up any shoite you want. Without evidence it will be promptly ignored. You have already had your arse handed to you on the evolutionary theory front (the evidence available in Darwin’s time was sufficient to do just that). Intelligent design has no evidence whatsoever and it isn’t a testable idea so science, quite rightly, dismisses it outright.
*Poof* I am now suddenly a cosmic level pan-dimensionally aware being existing in 16 different dimensions; I have been "alive" for 100 billion of earth years and saw to the manipulation of the Big Bang such that the constants in the universe were guaranteed to promote life. *Unpoof*
You make up shoite all you like. Without any evidence I, and science, will dismiss it. When you suggest an idea that has no evidence to differentiate itself from “the faeries did it” then you have no argument.
All of these theories have their problems by our current understandings of the universe and physics.
And until your totally made-up shoite is demonstrated and until you produce evidence for it then I will continue to call you made-up shoite for the made-up shoite that it is. Your made-up shoite does not explain anything, it offers to means of being tested, it offers no predictive power, it offers nothing whatsoever to furthering the knowledge of mankind.
The "evidence" which lead to BBT's eventual acceptance was postulated first by people who were not themselves Big Bang theorists.
If only you understood half the stuff you attempt to talk about. General relativity, one of the most well supported theories in all of physics, directly predicts a dynamic universe. So when Edwin Hubble provided the observational proof of an expanding universe it pretty much set the course of research onto discovering big bang theory. When you consider the predictions made from big bang cosmology that have been verified by COBE and WMAP it become astounding to me that people too buried in their religion to look at the world for what it is deny this stuff.

People who use the fruits of science, such as the internet and computers, to peddle their ignorance in a pathetic attempt to tirade against that same science are not deserving of debate – they deserve to be ridiculed for their ignorance and their attempts to pee in the fountain of knowledge.
 
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