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Science Vs. Religion; Self explanatory
Topic Started: Apr 30 2008, 11:05 PM (289 Views)
calvinist

i think in that sense, jesusfreak574 may have the right idea. I still don't think anyone has actually answered my question. I personally believe that science and religion can be merged. As stated by 574, where did all of this 'stuff' come from?? You go back a second, then another, then trillions of years ago. When was matter 'made'? Science says that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. So its alway been?? that doesn't make any sense and im not going to accept that. So yes, in that case, i can admit that i will give a more advanced, unseen, father-like figure the fact that he created the universe. But i also think that he waited. Maybe EARTH wasn't created in a week, but i will definitely say the universe was created in a GOD WEEK (different than an Earth week).
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d0nk3y
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And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. (I Kings 7, 23)


Merely watching Expelled's trailer, the ridiculousness emerges. I'll admit that I haven't seen it and thus far haven't given it a chance... but any movie that has to bribe or pay its audience to see it cannot be good. The makers (not really Ben Stein, he's pretty much just a narrator) are paying schools to get their kids to go to it.
Additionally, while scientists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers were lied to, so they would agree to an interview, PZ Myers was kicked out of the screening (though Dawkins was for some reason let through).
All that aside, I will not be paying to see it, though I will see if I can somehow find a way to see it soon... (attempts have been unsuccessful.)

Toward the validity of theoretical physics theories, it's not a bunch of people sitting around going, "I wonder if there could be a bunch of us somewhere else..." Many of the most brilliant minds are involved in their own way.. Take a look at wikipedia for the 'multiverse', 'm theory', 'string theory' and dabble around if you like. It is science because it can be falsified, and the predictions are made based on observation.

Leonard Susskind (Stanford professor) claims that some form of multiverse is unavoidable, given the current state of physics, and that observer effects are inevitable and have to be taken into account in other sciences...



And you can't quite say that science will never know where 'original' matter came from. Just that it doesn't have a conclusion now. We are finding that particles may pop into existence all the time, but generally they are almost instantly annihilated by their anti-particles. However, being as I'm not a theoretical physicist, and we are talking about plants right now in Science class, I don't know too much more.

The (weak) anthropic principle is not a philosophical musing, it's a piece of common sense often disregarded.



Creationists often use a Boeing 747 metaphor to describe the improbability of evolution. If that's the case (it isn't really..) then the probability of an omnipotent benevolent god coming to be from nothing would have to be more like an exact replication of the world, particle for particle. Far less probable than matter coming into existence, and then Einstein's equation E-mc2 taking effect. The mass would be some, the speed of light ^2 would be a huge number, and the amount of energy would be phenomenal...
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Goda
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Maybe its quite possible that things have existed forever. matter, time, energy, deity, but this Universe is fairly new?

off topic correction of tim :D. energy can be created, but it still has to fit within the law of conservation of matter and energy. nuclear :D
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d0nk3y
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The "creation" of the nuclear energy is just a conversion of mass to energy. ;)
ΔE = Δm.c²

The idea that the universe may have existed forever is a quite popular one. The "big bang" can be explained with a counterpart called the "big crunch". The universe might be a continual cycle of bang-crunch-bang-crunch, and each time it could even have different governing laws (or "fundamental forces").

According to calculations, had the universe been expanding at a slight fraction of it's speed less, it would have "crunched" 16 billion years ago, right after the "bang". (I can't remember the exact figures but it's in Hawking's Brief History of Time..) He also says that the question of a cycle of bang-crunch is of little importance because it would have no effect on us... :)
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jesusfreak574

First, if Expelled is to be discredited because it seems ridiculous, then the story of Dawkins and Myers should at least be questioned because it seems equally ridiculous. You said it yourself that only kicking out one of them doesn't make much sense.

Next, that comment about pi was very insightful. I'm glad someone mentioned it, because I hadn't known that. However, it is easily explained with a working knowledge of the Hebrew language, in which the Old Testament (including 1 Kings) was written. They have only a crude system of numbers, without any real digits places. There is no possible way to indicate fractions of pieces of a number. Hence, 3 was the closest value they could get for pi. Besides, the cubit was hardly an exact measurement anyway.

The Big Bang/Big Crunch theory cannot explain why the universe is accelerating in its expansion. It would seem that there is an outside force pulling everything away from itself, but any theory of a oscillating universe would indicate that the force of gravity should be enough to cause acceleration towards the center of the universe. What is that outside force?

Finally, we can boil the origin of the universe down to this: nothing was eternal, or something was eternal. Simply put, if there is no God, then nothing must be eternal, and then you have to explain where all this stuff came from. If there is something eternal, then it would have to be extremely powerful to create this stuff we see and live in. It seems slightly more plausible that some being created everything than everything came out of nothing. We wouldn't have to create God out of nothing if God was the eternal thing, hence avoiding the difficulty brought up by a previous poster.
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d0nk3y
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edit; fixed quote
Mark Mathis - producer
 
"You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more."


The only explanation of why Dawkins was let in (with Myers' family) is that they did not recognize him...






On to pi, I don't really see it as an argument for why the bible is 'wrong' or manmade... (and it's not an argument for its divinity either.. could God give them decimals?)






Part of what you are referring to might be because distant galaxies recede from us more quickly than nearby galaxies because the universe is expanding in all directions.
v = H*r
velocity = Hubble's constant * distance from Milky Way

However, you are right that it's not a Big Bang issue. Scientists are examining the validity of a cosmological constant (such as what Einstein proposed but rejected), and theories of dark energy such as "quintessence" and "phantom energy"...





Your final paragraph is simple fallacious. I don't believe you can just boil the universe down to that..
More importantly though, I think the real question is: "Who made God?"

A god that created the universe would need to be as complex or more complex than the universe it creates. An an assertion that god always existed is unsupported and unsupportable and there is no real reason for us to believe it. Also, to say the universe "began" to exist is arguable because time is a feature of the universe, and therefore the universe does not exist "in" time. It does not seem relevant whether the universe is 'eternal'. Is not the universe as necessary or eternal as a god..? I've many more questions but I'll keep them brief with a glance to the past, as they may easily be missed.......

Should some scientific evidence of a creator god arise, you would further need to prove that it supports your one true religion. God and science are not automatically exclusive, but for practicality, they are.
Edited by d0nk3y, May 8 2008, 02:02 AM.
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calvinist

um......really. This subject is getting way off topic. Donkey, you are using other people's opinions. I, unlike you, make my own assumptions on my own. I don't read books, I don't look stuff up, and I don't care what other people say or think to/about me. What I believe comes from my own observations. The topic is science vs. religion. What does pi have to do with anything?? It is a man-made ratio. MAN MADE. So are numbers. Mathematics is not science. I'm talking Physics. Light, sound, gravity, and the fact that when a sperm and egg come together that 99% of the time, the baby has 10 toes and 10 fingers. Things just happen?? The fact that some frogs in Africa, when one sex is more dominant than others, will change sexes to insure the survival of their species. The original topic being: Can they be linked? All religions have myths. Most of those myth's have something to do with the creation of Earth. Don't bring literature into this. Philosophy is felt from inside, it's not learned. So, here is the question again. Can Science and Religion be linked together to form the universe as we know it of today??
Edited by calvinist, May 11 2008, 09:38 PM.
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Goda
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yes, simply a deity using science in a way we cant imagine, in order to make a universe.
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jesusfreak574

You can apply the label fallacious to whatever you want, but that doesn't make it true. The fact remains that something must have existed for eternity. I see two possibilities. It can be nothing, or it can be God. At this point, I don't even care which god we're talking about. Either there was nothing, and then there was something, or there was god and then there was something. Regressing infinitely along a chain of causes will bring you to the beginning. There must be one, some uncaused cause that set everything off. We know the universe is not infinite, so is it God or is it nothing? I find it much more logical to claim that God produced the universe than did nothing.

Regardless, I love science, but it did not form the universe. God did. Science is merely a set of disciplines that explore the universe as it is today. Science teaches us how God orchestrated things to work and interact. Heck, I even think we can learn about God from science. For example, science teaches us that things behave predictably and in order. Perhaps it is this way because God approves of order?

Maybe this is more in line with what calvinist is looking for: I think we need a little more than science to create the universe, but science is very useful for discovering how the universe works/how it was created to work.
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Goda
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I know your reaction to this Tim is not going to be approving...

but what if the LAWS of the universe arn't things that God can surpass? I know you may think that its considering less of Him but I think otherwise. It makes Him more than a being that just says something and it happens. That doesn't make Him great in my eyes. Him having to put a lot of thought, and a lot of effort into creating a universe, all within the bounds of Laws, makes Him great. Because it was done for us, so why shouldn't we love, honor and worship Him for it? He did have to rest on the seventh "day", so one can either think He used up all His supernatural powers, or He spent a lot of time using His very very very (etc) high capacity brain making sure things fit together, and worked right, and then set things in motion by w/e means He chose with His very very very (etc) technology.
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