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Are there varying degrees of Atheism
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realdanbreen wrote: »'Don't know' is fine with me. Its when 'dont know' becomes 'therefore no one else should believe' that I have a problem.
I have missed something, perhaps? Who has been telling you what to believe? You asked about alternative theories about the origin of the universe and expressed an interest in the subject; the matter has been discussed, possibilities offered and insights proffered, which you dismissed as nonsense - wasn't that the word? - and admitted you couldn't get far into it without falling asleep, presumably out of boredom.
You ask about the mysteries of the origins of the universe and then you're bored?
En route we've picked up one or two other questions, one of which I would definitely like to know more about (formally leaving the Catholic Church). Would you like to address any of them, or shall we return now to our scheduled programme?
Trivia: I'm reminded of a quote from a movie: "You're shown the mysteries of the universe and you're bored!" Name the move and actor for five points!
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Huntergonzo wrote: »Fair enough, there's plenty of ways to say it but absence is a better word than lack.
You're just unlucky that it was your post that I was reading when that thought crossed my mind it's a very common expression, and people use it out of habit, and I have done myself. But when you think about it, it's almost the same as 'lack of faith' which religionists use and defintely imply that such a person is deficient in some way. Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.
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Hotblack Desiato wrote: »You're just unlucky that it was your post that I was reading when that thought crossed my mind it's a very common expression, and people use it out of habit, and I have done myself. But when you think about it, it's almost the same as 'lack of faith' which religionists use and defintely imply that such a person is deficient in some way.
No harm done at all, I was just using the word lack sort of mindlessly, the word absent is definitely more appropriate.
ha ye I love when the religious accuse us atheists of being deficient in some way, so basically people who don't believe 100% in something which provides 0% evidence are the deficient ones, hilarious logic altogether.0 -
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realdanbreen wrote: »TBH I got as far as 'stelliferous' before I nodded off.
I have yet to meet anyone who can provide an explanation that doesn't get lost in completely meandering gobbledegook other than creation by a higher power .
OK, let's try this again, shall we?
The first thing we need to do is sort out the misunderstandings you have about what it is you're railing against. It is clear from this post of yours in AH:realdanbreen wrote: »Maybe its my fault and I am not keeping things simple enough for you but the fact is there is NO,ZILCH,ZERO, hard evidence to support the big bang theory despite billions having been spent on it.
that you don't understand the difference what the big bang theory is or the difference between cosmology and cosmogony.
OK, firstly a word about the word theory. I know that in everyday use the word theory is synonymous with the word guess or hunch or something that is generally unproven. However, that is not the sense in which this word is used in science. A theory is the highest level of confidence which science can attain. A theory is a hypothesis which has been demonstrated to be correct through evidence. A theory is, in simple terms, an idea which has been proven through testing.
Next, a quick synopsis of the big bang theory. The Big Bang describes a point in time roughly 13 billion years ago (13.798 +/- 0.037 billion to be precise), when the universe only existed as a point of energy of infinite density and zero size. It suddenly expanded and as it expanded and cooled, matter began to form and eventually formed all the stars and planets.
You see, before the start of the 20th century, the generally accepted view was that the universe was in a steady, unchanging state pervaded by a substance called the luminiferous aether. Then, early in the 20th century, two things happened which caused people to doubt the accepted view. One of these was Edwin Hubble's astronomical observations that distant galaxies were moving away from us. More importantly, though, he observed that the further away a galaxy was, the faster it seemed to be moving away.
The other was a model of the universe developed by Alexander Friedmann in 1922. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) which posited that the laws of physics should appear to be the same to all freely moving observers. Friedmann then constructed a model based on this assumption and another which stated that the universe should appear the same in all directions. With these two simple assumptions, Friedmann came up with a solution to Einstein's equations which showed that the universe was expanding.
Following on from these two initial advances, in 1927 a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaitre expanded on the ideas of Hubble and Friedmann and developed a model which traced Hubble's observations of diverging galaxies backwards in time. He argued that since everything was accelerating away from each other in the present, then in the past they must have been closer together. At some point in the past, therefore, everything in the universe must have occupied the same point in space and then expanded outward from that. This is the Big Bang theory.
Once the theory had been formulated it was confirmed by a number of experimental tests. One of these was Hubble's analysis of red shift patterns of distant galaxies in 1929. Another was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), a key prediction of the theory, in 1964.
The Big Bang theory is the most tested and the best supported theory in all of science. It has passed every test we've ever thrown at it.
The problem you have is that you're confusing the explanation for what caused the Big Bang with the Big Bang itself. We know that the universe expanded from an initial hot dense energy state in the Big Bang. What we don't know is what caused the big bang in the first place. And when I say we don't know, I mean we can't know, at least with our current level of technology. Nobody can possibly know what caused the big bang and so, it is silly to just posit an answer like "God did it" just because you'd like an answer. As Richard Feynman once said: "I think it's much more interesting not to know than to have answers which might be wrong."
Anyway, in the post I responded to previously, you asked for a plausible explanation of what could have caused the big bang. I gave you one. If you can't follow that either through ignorance or because you can't be ar$ed, well that's not really my fault.
Finally, if you want to present your evidence for God as the things science can't explain, remember that 200 years ago we couldn't explain things like retrograde orbits. But we can now. If your evidence for God is a list of all the things that science doesn't know then your evidence is going to keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Here's Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining it better than me:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HooeZrC76s0
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