The Big Bang: Why is it still being taught?

[Ziggy Stardust]

I agree.

Genesis is a poetical, allegorical creation myth, and not to be confused with a scientific description at all. Even an inaccurate scientific description.

They belong in different categories, imo.

Indeed. The Bible has something that Science will never have. Great intrinsic historic value. It's one of the most important and precious pieces of literature ever written.

And if you put the Bible in it's historical settings, some parts of it show the authors to have rather intelligent views, and were in fact practising Science when they were struggling, as we still are, to explain their surroundings.

But when people are parading it around as describing historical fact they yank it out of the category where it shines, and put it into one were it falls flat on it's face.

It's a shame really.

 

[ChiefDesigner]

Because

1.) If the universe was created by the Big Bang, one would expect cosmic background radiation to behave as a black body radiating at 2.73 Kelvin.

2.) Cosmic background radiation behaves as a black body radiating at 2.73 Kelvin.

3.) The error bars on that graph are smaller than the thickness of the line.

4.) Science -- it works.

 

[Borachio]

Trouble is, though, science is hard.

 

[Kyriakos]

Trouble is, though, science is hard.

Science works/plays hard.

 

[Berzerker]

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." (Genesis 1:2-3) - sounds like the big bang to me

how did earth submerged by water precede the big bang?

how did God define "Light"? Day... and God separated the light from the dark (night). Day and Night are phenomenon resulting from this world spinning near the sun.

"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters" (6). " And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good." (9-10) Sounds like high school science talking about how the planets were formed.

a firmament (Heaven) amidst the waters, a hammered bracelet amidst the planets to mark the spot where God separated Heaven from Earth.

plate tectonics produced continents and seas from what was a water covered world

 

[Souron]

This begs the question of how we define evidence. What's been rendered understood to science is still but a fraction of human knowledge, so from the get go we learn to trust our abilities to understand things non-scientifically. It's not at all unreasonable.

I'm not saying theists are stupid, just that trusting those "abilities" is not the rational approach. There's a better way to study nature.

 

[Tahuti]

I'm not saying theists are stupid, just that trusting those "abilities" is not the rational approach. There's a better way to study nature.

The problem is that you cannot utilise scientific knowledge where there is none. You have to rely on shortcuts in your daily life to get around lack of knowledge until science can fill up that void. Which may be never by the way.

 

[Arrow Gamer]

God is beyond the understanding of science, and indeed that of man. True believers take him on faith, and Jesus knows that you just do not have that specialness that sets believers apart from nonbelievers.

Through prayer and love, perhaps you can come to know God and his love. I shall pray for your soul, and I hope that you can join the loving embrace of God.

 

[Souron]

If there is something you don't understand, you don't invent an elaborate explanation of how it might be. You identify exactly what phenomena is not understood, maybe give it a name, then accept that as unknown. Then, totally optionally, you can study more nature to try to understand better.

Another thing you do is challenge your own biases. The ideas of theism and mind-body dualism (the idea of a septate soul) are ideas that as humans we have a natural bias to accept, sort of like Newtonian Physics come more naturally then Relativity. So we should hold these ideas to extra scrutiny.

 

[illram]

Scientific thought and spiritual practice are not mutually exclusive. You can have both in your life.

The problem is when people start to do unscience-y things and call them science in a bad faith attempt to crowd out scientific theories with religious dogma.

And the next layer down (up?) is those who actively promote these agendas for ulterior motives, e.g. mega churches making tons of money or pushing religious indoctrination to foment distrust of environmental policies (which are pushed by scientists! *shudder*)

 

[Tani Coyote]

Simple logic, really.

If the universe is expanding, every object within it is moving outward along with any other directions it's traveling in. Now, basic inertia tells us that something clearly happened to make these objects move. Rewinding every object's trajectory backwards in theory leads to a central point (the universe doesn't have a center technically, but the principle is the same), which would have been the Big Bang, a huge amount of super-compressed matter that rapidly began to expand outward.

Now, how that matter and such got there, or what made it expand, I don't know (though I believe in God, I don't presume to know exactly how all creation went down). But I think the Big Bang is in and of itself a solid theory that runs on fairly basic logic.

Especially given I think the Big Bang is fully consistent with any possible deity.

 

[Souron]

God is beyond the understanding of science, and indeed that of man. True believers take him on faith, and Jesus knows that you just do not have that specialness that sets believers apart from nonbelievers.

Through prayer and love, perhaps you can come to know God and his love. I shall pray for your soul, and I hope that you can join the loving embrace of God.

I doubt anything is beyond formal description. While there are concepts that are hard to form intuition about, a complete description is still possible. If something were indescribable, I'd question how could it be said to be part of a world where everything else isn't.

Knowledge requires justification. To believe something without justification, is like buying a lottery ticket when you're feeling lucky: you're confident you'll win, but no one would say that your optimism qualifies as knowledge. If you seek knowledge of the world, it is not enough to take anything on faith.

 

[Souron]

Scientific thought and spiritual practice are not mutually exclusive. You can have both in your life.

For a given definition of "spiritual practice", sure. But the study of nature is within the domain of science, so any time "spiritual practice" makes claims about the natural world, there is a competing epistemological approach that upon analysis appears superior.

 

[illram]

For a given definition of "spiritual practice", sure. But the study of nature is within the domain of science, so any time "spiritual practice" makes claims about the natural world, there is a competing epistemological approach that upon analysis appears superior.

I think we agree?

The problem is when people start to do unscience-y things and call them science in a bad faith attempt to crowd out scientific theories with religious dogma.

I just be talkin more simpler like.

 

[Souron]

My objection is against all claims about nature, not just those that are called "science".

But yes, I agree if you agree.

 

[Hygro]

I'm not saying theists are stupid, just that trusting those "abilities" is not the rational approach. There's a better way to study nature.

What I'm saying is that it is rational, or rather, that it can be. But if your religion is scientifically demonstrably false your religion sucks. A good religion helps us understand that which needs non-literal thinking to be understood, which involves any directed projection into the unknown or unknowable-but-still-resourceful.

But yes, otherwise, I agree.

Spoiler :

And what's the point really- Christianity can be perfectly scientifically compatible when done the right way so why not be a better Christian by being a good scientist? I think fundamentalism, modern fundamentalism being a modern reconstruction of religion despite what they'll have you believe, gets off on requiring its members to believe more and more fake stuff to prove their devotion to the group-identity.

 

[History_Buff]

God is beyond the understanding of science, and indeed that of man.

Said the book that teaches you about said God.

 

[Hygro]

Said the book that teaches you about said God.

God should always be placed just on the other side of divide of knowable, but placed right where we can discover more stuff to know (i.e. pushing that definition of God away), but in a way that only greater validates the more distilled yet sophisticated understanding. At the very least to drive humanity toward its starfaring pacifist future.

 

[timtofly]

Yes, I am reasonably sure that we have the majority of the information already to explain the psychological urge to believe in a god.

Is there a difference between knowing and believing science?

Indeed. The Bible has something that Science will never have. Great intrinsic historic value. It's one of the most important and precious pieces of literature ever written.

And if you put the Bible in it's historical settings, some parts of it show the authors to have rather intelligent views, and were in fact practising Science when they were struggling, as we still are, to explain their surroundings.

But when people are parading it around as describing historical fact they yank it out of the category where it shines, and put it into one were it falls flat on it's face.

It's a shame really.

What is the difference between inferring current observations to the past and inferring past things in a current way?

It would seem to me that people reject the past if it does not fit. Some people accept the past even if it does not fit in the present, and in the face of being ridiculed for it.

I would agree with those who separate the science from faith, but I do not hold them mutually exclusive. There is nothing in the Bible that states the earth was literally created 6000 years ago. That is a belief.

I would have to agree that if God does not step back in and explain himself in a literal way soon.... but then maybe he does.

 

[Hygro]

But the Bible does measure in days and years and you can trace that back a few thousand years to creation.