Stephen Hawkings says that God didn't create the universe

Started by Chevalier des Poissons, September 02, 2010, 11:49:35 PM

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MagicalPen

I find it interesting when people of the 'God created the Universe' thought can't wrap their minds around the 'Big Bang Theory'. I think it also has to do with the human mindset....

So, as I like to put it, why can't the Universe just have 'been there', existing? The Big Bang being the beginning of the universe. If God created the universe, who created God? If he can just 'exist', with no 'creation', why can't the Universe have existed in much the same manner?

The human mindset likes things organized. There is a beginning (birth), middle (living life), and end (death) to people and to most things in the world. We see this process everyday. We apply this structure to everything, which is why we have a hard time processing what happens after death, since something 'must' happen. Life after Death has been a common theme through out world religions - various forms of the afterlife etc, none of which can be ascertained as truth/fact. Science is very much the anti-Religion, as it explains the reason why things happen.

I am not quite sure man has the capability of wrapping his mind around how the Universe was created, or what (if anything) happens once you die. Technology has allowed man to answer some questions, but I don't think every question will be able to be answered by science or technology, which is why people rely on Faith and Religion. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, of course, but I think I side with Hawking on this matter - that God did not create the universe.

My On and Offs
When the Ink Runs Dry

Looking/Available for New Games

Serephino

The heart vs. brain analogy is a good one.  My heart says God had something to do with it.  My brain isn't sure what to think.  I will admit that my knowledge of Physics is limited.  I could have taken it my Senior year, but took Human Anatomy instead.  I've already stated my issues with it.  Everything has to come from somewhere; even God.  I have theories about where God came from.  The Big Bang Theory just goes against everything else I've learned as scientific fact.   

Of course, one could always educate me.  I've always loved learning.  Typing it out here would be a waste of time.  If you use 'formal' language I won't remember any of it.  However, if anyone has any videos they could direct me to...  I'm an auditory learner.   

Ironwolf85

ahahahah...
just had the image of a couple of angels looking up, counting down "watch this... 3.... he's gonna do it" "2.... seriously?" "shhhhh 1...." they put on sunglasses.
"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
there is a bright flash, they look at each other
"that was a big bang...."

cartoon images aside, Hawkens supposes that according to his calculations there needen't have been a creator's hand in the creation of the universe.
I don't think it's a "math says god doesn't exist" thing, but a theory in and of itself, one that cannot be proven, nor disproven, but both sides will line up and yell about it because he is a well known scientist.
Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, love...
debate any other aspect of my faith these are the heavenly virtues. this flawed mortal is going to try to adhere to them.

Culture: the ability to carve an intricate and beautiful bowl from the skull of a fallen enemy.
Civilization: the ability to put that psycho in prision for killing people.

MasterMischief

Quote from: ”Ironwolf85”Science and Faith are not enemies, they are parts of us.
kind of a Brain VS Heart debate to use an analogy

I have a bit of a problem with this.

25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. 27 And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Now let me preface this by saying I do not see anyone here professing this.  My cube neighbor at work does.  In fact, he sent me a link to a presentation he gave at his church where he speaks to this.  As I understand it, in his mind, Jesus is saying that he should be so far above anyone (or anything) that compared to your feelings of your father or mother or whomever, it would appear you hate them.

My issue is that I see such 'love' blinding you to information that may, discredit the very thing you love.  This kind of unyielding love is what many fear of militant Islam.  To see it preached by some Christians really scares me.

Emotions (the heart) are not bad, but I think they should be tempered by reason (the mind).

Ironwolf85

I agree with you there oh master of mischief.

Therein also like the difficulty, how do we know how much temperance is enough and how much is too much?
This is the battle that rages within all men, I did not intend it to be statement that they are always opposed, but that they are always in conflict, the heart struggling against it's bonds, and the mind struggling to restrain it's excessive emotions. if the balance turns to one extreme or another, one winds up with a person who is heartless or a fanatic.
finding that balance is one of the greatest struggles of mankind

oh gawd... I'm getting philosiphical again
Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, love...
debate any other aspect of my faith these are the heavenly virtues. this flawed mortal is going to try to adhere to them.

Culture: the ability to carve an intricate and beautiful bowl from the skull of a fallen enemy.
Civilization: the ability to put that psycho in prision for killing people.

MasterMischief

Personally, harming others is my imaginary line in the sand.  Whenever emotion or reason suggests I cross it, there better be a damn good reason.  And I admit even that is not a perfect solution.  I mean, what constitutes a 'damn good reason'?

Jude

Quote from: Serephino on September 05, 2010, 10:53:06 AM
The heart vs. brain analogy is a good one.  My heart says God had something to do with it.  My brain isn't sure what to think.  I will admit that my knowledge of Physics is limited.  I could have taken it my Senior year, but took Human Anatomy instead.  I've already stated my issues with it.  Everything has to come from somewhere; even God.  I have theories about where God came from.  The Big Bang Theory just goes against everything else I've learned as scientific fact.   

Of course, one could always educate me.  I've always loved learning.  Typing it out here would be a waste of time.  If you use 'formal' language I won't remember any of it.  However, if anyone has any videos they could direct me to...  I'm an auditory learner.   

This is my understanding of it (and I'm not a scientist, just a student of physics -- minor not major, and I read a lot of science journalism):

When you burn an object you are inciting a chemical reaction in which the molecules in the object move at an accelerated rate that are adjacent to the source of heat.  Eventually a chain reaction occurs as the molecular movement reaches a critical point and adjacent molecules made of the same matter begin to move at an increased rate as well, that's what happens when the object catches on fire.  Smoke is certainly part of what's being given off in the ensuing chemical reaction, but heat is being given off as well, and heat literally is energy.  If you were to collect the smoke and remains of the object you burned into a single unit of matter, then you could calculate the amount of heat given off:

Initial Matter (pre-burning) = Smoke Matter + Burnt Remains + Lost Matter Converted into energy.  If you solved the equation for the lost matter, you could then calculate how much energy was given off by using e=mc^2, where e is the energy given off, m is the lost matter, and c is the speed of light which is a constant (you would also have to rearrange it as e/c^2 = m).  Matter would only be conserved if the lost matter converted into energy was zero, which isn't really going to happen in any circumstance practically.  Anytime friction occurs, you lose energy.  When you destroy the bonds that hold solid matter together, energy is lost.

But this isn't a one-way street either.  Energy can actually be stored as matter, this is what photosynthesis does.  The sun's burning of gases gives off photons which are then absorbed by chlorophyll in plants.  The plants have the faculties to turn this absorbed energy in the form of light into the very matter that is developed as they expand and grow.  But there is a certain innate inefficiency to the process, and this is one way that entropy comes into account.  No conversion of energy into anything else is 100% efficient;  just as plants cannot harness every last drop of the energy given off by the burnt gases in the sun that crosses their path, no machine is capable of utilizing every speck of energy fed to it in order to do work.

All of this inefficiency working in tandem with the laws of thermodynamics and entropy means that as the universe ages, pure concentrated forms of energy are going to be harder and harder to find.  It's almost like the fossil fuel crisis on a grand scale.  Couple this with evidence that it's taking longer for us to send and receive flashes of light from distant galaxies, and scientists have surmised that the universe is expanding and galaxies are drifting further apart (though another alternative hypothesis has been proposed that the speed of light is not actually constant, and that space-time are changing, not the actual distances).

If you reverse the expansion and energy dispersion that seems to be occurring, the end result is a nearly infinitely dense, hot bundle of mass that was the beginning of the universe, which then exploded to form everything (the big bang).  Because space was essentially "empty" before the explosion (or really kind of nonexistent), when the explosion occurred there wasn't anything for the "fiery edges" to latch on to in order to be absorbed like when an explosion occurs on earth.

I'm really kind of fudging the explanation here, but more or less, the echoes of the explosion are still out there and observable, they're called the "cosmic microwave background radiation," and when you extrapolate backwards, it confirms the notion of an initial explosion (it would be like watching an explosion from several miles away and knowing it happened because the light reaches you; it's just that these echos are much older and we're watching from a different viewpoint).  These echoes of the big bang are the one thing that people who propose alternate theories to the big bang can't quite account for.  The problem is, a lot of our understanding of the cosmic microwave background radiation is based on the existence of dark matter.

Isaac Newton came up with relativity (the notion that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference), and as a consequences from this developed complicated theories about gravity.  These theories were eventually applied to large bodies very far away moving at high speeds (which is where relativity comes into account big time).  They didn't seem to describe physical phenomena right, that was when the idea of Dark Matter was proposed in order to account for the missing mass that would have to be there in order for the laws to hold.  Dark Matter is very difficult to detect because it doesn't interact with light the way matter does.  It's "there" but we don't know it's there, more or less.  This is where things get very shaky, because dark matter has basically been taken for granted as an assumption (though attempts at verifying its existence were made at the same time, so that's not really the right way of putting it), and it's supposed to be symmetric with normal matter, but by calculations the universe is about 80% dark, and 20% normal.

There have been a lot of attempts at experimentally verifying the existence of dark matter with mixed results.  It's still not 100%, and to a large degree a lot of the current popular cosmological model hinges on dark matter.  If dark matter doesn't exist, there's a gigantic hole in the theory of gravitation that we're using which largely leads to the conclusions of Big Bang model.

There are a number of alternative theories which explain away the necessity of the Big Bang and Dark Matter, but as of now they're not very competitive.  They simply aren't as likely because they don't explain as many phenomena as the Big Bang and Dark Matter do.  What proponents of science must realize is that all of the experiments and data we have collect in order to construct our theories could potentially only be one side of the coin.  As we discovered when the flaws in Newtonian Mechanics became apparent, new avenues of evidence and perspectives can be made available which fundamentally change the entire structure of our scientific understanding of physics.

We can never really know if we're seeing the whole picture or just paying attention to a set of special circumstances where the laws which we are observing are simply applicable to what we can see.  I guess that's why I feel so shaky about making propositions about the existence of everything based on science which is largely unsolved and not without its fundamental problems:  god is kind of the ultimate endgame of everything.  Until we can run a simulation of the universe's birth, death, revival, and processes without fault, I'm not willing to extrapolate anything solid about the very nature of existence from simple analysis of data.  It seems like something better left to philosophers and the religious.

EDIT:  The whole brain vs. heart thing is a fallacy of reification.  There is no heart in the sense that you're thinking.  The heart is an organ that pumps blood throughout your body to keep you living; it has nothing to do with your cognitive state.  This is more like the higher reasoning potential of your brain versus impulses and instinct.  Which isn't really anywhere near as favorable of a description of the "heart" side.

Science uses imagination, impulse, and creativity as well.  Formulating a hypothesis to test is an art in and of itself, based entirely on intuition.  You can't reject the value of following your instincts, it's just always a good idea to keep them in check with your higher reasoning too.  That's the secret to science's success.  And there's nothing stopping religion from following suit.  A little doubt is healthy.

Ironwolf85

mah then maybe my analogy sucked, but you all got what I meant by it.
not getting all poetic this time.
thanks for the info jude
Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, love...
debate any other aspect of my faith these are the heavenly virtues. this flawed mortal is going to try to adhere to them.

Culture: the ability to carve an intricate and beautiful bowl from the skull of a fallen enemy.
Civilization: the ability to put that psycho in prision for killing people.

Serephino

Quote from: Jude on September 05, 2010, 02:22:30 PM
This is my understanding of it (and I'm not a scientist, just a student of physics -- minor not major, and I read a lot of science journalism):

When you burn an object you are inciting a chemical reaction in which the molecules in the object move at an accelerated rate that are adjacent to the source of heat.  Eventually a chain reaction occurs as the molecular movement reaches a critical point and adjacent molecules made of the same matter begin to move at an increased rate as well, that's what happens when the object catches on fire.  Smoke is certainly part of what's being given off in the ensuing chemical reaction, but heat is being given off as well, and heat literally is energy.  If you were to collect the smoke and remains of the object you burned into a single unit of matter, then you could calculate the amount of heat given off:

Initial Matter (pre-burning) = Smoke Matter + Burnt Remains + Lost Matter Converted into energy.  If you solved the equation for the lost matter, you could then calculate how much energy was given off by using e=mc^2, where e is the energy given off, m is the lost matter, and c is the speed of light which is a constant (you would also have to rearrange it as e/c^2 = m).  Matter would only be conserved if the lost matter converted into energy was zero, which isn't really going to happen in any circumstance practically.  Anytime friction occurs, you lose energy.  When you destroy the bonds that hold solid matter together, energy is lost.

But this isn't a one-way street either.  Energy can actually be stored as matter, this is what photosynthesis does.  The sun's burning of gases gives off photons which are then absorbed by chlorophyll in plants.  The plants have the faculties to turn this absorbed energy in the form of light into the very matter that is developed as they expand and grow.  But there is a certain innate inefficiency to the process, and this is one way that entropy comes into account.  No conversion of energy into anything else is 100% efficient;  just as plants cannot harness every last drop of the energy given off by the burnt gases in the sun that crosses their path, no machine is capable of utilizing every speck of energy fed to it in order to do work.

All of this inefficiency working in tandem with the laws of thermodynamics and entropy means that as the universe ages, pure concentrated forms of energy are going to be harder and harder to find.  It's almost like the fossil fuel crisis on a grand scale.  Couple this with evidence that it's taking longer for us to send and receive flashes of light from distant galaxies, and scientists have surmised that the universe is expanding and galaxies are drifting further apart (though another alternative hypothesis has been proposed that the speed of light is not actually constant, and that space-time are changing, not the actual distances).

If you reverse the expansion and energy dispersion that seems to be occurring, the end result is a nearly infinitely dense, hot bundle of mass that was the beginning of the universe, which then exploded to form everything (the big bang).  Because space was essentially "empty" before the explosion (or really kind of nonexistent), when the explosion occurred there wasn't anything for the "fiery edges" to latch on to in order to be absorbed like when an explosion occurs on earth.

I'm really kind of fudging the explanation here, but more or less, the echoes of the explosion are still out there and observable, they're called the "cosmic microwave background radiation," and when you extrapolate backwards, it confirms the notion of an initial explosion (it would be like watching an explosion from several miles away and knowing it happened because the light reaches you; it's just that these echos are much older and we're watching from a different viewpoint).  These echoes of the big bang are the one thing that people who propose alternate theories to the big bang can't quite account for.  The problem is, a lot of our understanding of the cosmic microwave background radiation is based on the existence of dark matter.

Isaac Newton came up with relativity (the notion that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference), and as a consequences from this developed complicated theories about gravity.  These theories were eventually applied to large bodies very far away moving at high speeds (which is where relativity comes into account big time).  They didn't seem to describe physical phenomena right, that was when the idea of Dark Matter was proposed in order to account for the missing mass that would have to be there in order for the laws to hold.  Dark Matter is very difficult to detect because it doesn't interact with light the way matter does.  It's "there" but we don't know it's there, more or less.  This is where things get very shaky, because dark matter has basically been taken for granted as an assumption (though attempts at verifying its existence were made at the same time, so that's not really the right way of putting it), and it's supposed to be symmetric with normal matter, but by calculations the universe is about 80% dark, and 20% normal.

There have been a lot of attempts at experimentally verifying the existence of dark matter with mixed results.  It's still not 100%, and to a large degree a lot of the current popular cosmological model hinges on dark matter.  If dark matter doesn't exist, there's a gigantic hole in the theory of gravitation that we're using which largely leads to the conclusions of Big Bang model.

There are a number of alternative theories which explain away the necessity of the Big Bang and Dark Matter, but as of now they're not very competitive.  They simply aren't as likely because they don't explain as many phenomena as the Big Bang and Dark Matter do.  What proponents of science must realize is that all of the experiments and data we have collect in order to construct our theories could potentially only be one side of the coin.  As we discovered when the flaws in Newtonian Mechanics became apparent, new avenues of evidence and perspectives can be made available which fundamentally change the entire structure of our scientific understanding of physics.

We can never really know if we're seeing the whole picture or just paying attention to a set of special circumstances where the laws which we are observing are simply applicable to what we can see.  I guess that's why I feel so shaky about making propositions about the existence of everything based on science which is largely unsolved and not without its fundamental problems:  god is kind of the ultimate endgame of everything.  Until we can run a simulation of the universe's birth, death, revival, and processes without fault, I'm not willing to extrapolate anything solid about the very nature of existence from simple analysis of data.  It seems like something better left to philosophers and the religious.

EDIT:  The whole brain vs. heart thing is a fallacy of reification.  There is no heart in the sense that you're thinking.  The heart is an organ that pumps blood throughout your body to keep you living; it has nothing to do with your cognitive state.  This is more like the higher reasoning potential of your brain versus impulses and instinct.  Which isn't really anywhere near as favorable of a description of the "heart" side.

Science uses imagination, impulse, and creativity as well.  Formulating a hypothesis to test is an art in and of itself, based entirely on intuition.  You can't reject the value of following your instincts, it's just always a good idea to keep them in check with your higher reasoning too.  That's the secret to science's success.  And there's nothing stopping religion from following suit.  A little doubt is healthy.

I remember about half of that, which isn't bad considering I read it instead of listened to it.  I do have a few questions though. 

First of all, the whole microwave radiation thing....  Isn't that stuff given off by stars?  The ozone layer of the Earth filters out the radiation from our sun.  And there is a life cycle of stars, and the universe has existed for a really long time, so there have been probably hundreds of stars that have lived and died over the millenniums.  Therefore, couldn't all that extra radiation be from long dead stars? 

Also, if it's taking longer to send and receive light beams, couldn't whatever is sending and receiving have just moved without the universe expanding?  I mean it would be kind of hard to pinpoint exact locations wouldn't it?  The universe is so vast....  When I look up at the stars at night they all look the same distance away, but we know that they're not.  It's kind of mind boggling to think how big the universe actually is.     

Hemingway

If you're looking to learn, I think I'd recommend Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. You can find the entire thing on Youtube. It's 13 episodes, I think, and so worth it.

Vekseid

Quote from: Serephino on September 05, 2010, 06:44:08 PM

I remember about half of that, which isn't bad considering I read it instead of listened to it.  I do have a few questions though. 

First of all, the whole microwave radiation thing....  Isn't that stuff given off by stars?  The ozone layer of the Earth filters out the radiation from our sun.  And there is a life cycle of stars, and the universe has existed for a really long time, so there have been probably hundreds of stars that have lived and died over the millenniums.  Therefore, couldn't all that extra radiation be from long dead stars? 

Also, if it's taking longer to send and receive light beams, couldn't whatever is sending and receiving have just moved without the universe expanding?  I mean it would be kind of hard to pinpoint exact locations wouldn't it?  The universe is so vast....  When I look up at the stars at night they all look the same distance away, but we know that they're not.  It's kind of mind boggling to think how big the universe actually is.     


On average, every galaxy is flying away from every other galaxy at a rate of roughly 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec. The visible edge of the Universe appears to be receding from us at a speed very close to the speed of light, and is currently receding from us faster than the speed of light.

This is an average, the sort of thing you look at when you see galaxies hundreds of megaparsecs away - structures that are not gravitationally bound to each other. Superclusters and walls slow down the expansion of space around them immensely, but this does not change the large scale picture.

Now, you could attempt to explain this by declaring the Milky Way or something close to its velocity to be a fixed frame of reference, with everything else in the Universe receding away from it. Relativity explicitly states that a fixed frame is impossible in our Universe.

Please start a new thread for any further questions, though, rather than asking about them in this thread.

Thank you : )

Ironwolf85

you know what Vekseid...
this thread has become a more civil sort of debate, and it's interisting to read back.
I think we're all a little better for having learned stuff here.
wooooo self improvment
Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, love...
debate any other aspect of my faith these are the heavenly virtues. this flawed mortal is going to try to adhere to them.

Culture: the ability to carve an intricate and beautiful bowl from the skull of a fallen enemy.
Civilization: the ability to put that psycho in prision for killing people.

Vekseid

It's more that "Please explain Relativity" deserves its own thread, as does "Please explain the Big Bang" and so on.

Chevalier des Poissons

#88
Quote from: Vekseid on September 06, 2010, 12:29:34 AM
It's more that "Please explain Relativity" deserves its own thread, as does "Please explain the Big Bang" and so on.

I'm on it.
-I have Maro's heart, and I promise to take good care of it-

A & A

RubySlippers

Stephen Hawkings should keep his theological opinions to himself thank you very much. Let me ask since he made such a statement can he prove God DIDN'T create the universe or there is no God to me that is exactly what he ,as a scientist, is saying as a person of faith.

I don't have to prove my position its faith - God made it.

As for all this about natural law I do believe in natural law - God created it and can break it (miracles) as God wishes to do that.

Will

The title of this thread is terribly misleading.  As is the article it was started about. :P

Quote
"We don't need to evoke God to shine upon things and create the universe", adds.

Hawking did not say that God didn't create the universe.  He said that God wasn't necessary to understand the process. :P  Not all that surprising when you consider that he is a scientist, and therefore has a bit of a hard on for understanding things in precise, scientific terms.  I mean, just saying that God did it is the equivalent of outsourcing Hawking's job to heaven, no?
If you can heal the symptoms, but not affect the cause
It's like trying to heal a gunshot wound with gauze

One day, I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
- Jack Kerouac

Jude

Quote from: RubySlippers on September 06, 2010, 10:45:09 AM
Stephen Hawkings should keep his theological opinions to himself thank you very much. Let me ask since he made such a statement can he prove God DIDN'T create the universe or there is no God to me that is exactly what he ,as a scientist, is saying as a person of faith.

I don't have to prove my position its faith - God made it.

As for all this about natural law I do believe in natural law - God created it and can break it (miracles) as God wishes to do that.
Seems very contradictory to demand proof from other people for stated their opinion then turning around and stating your opinion every bit as strongly and saying you don't have to prove it.

Chevalier des Poissons

Quote from: Jude on September 06, 2010, 02:24:31 PM
Seems very contradictory to demand proof from other people for stated their opinion then turning around and stating your opinion every bit as strongly and saying you don't have to prove it.

Ditto.

What's wrong on Stephen Hawkings giving his theological opinions, btw?
-I have Maro's heart, and I promise to take good care of it-

A & A

Nyarly

Quote from: Chevalier des Poissons on September 06, 2010, 03:07:06 PM
Ditto.

What's wrong on Stephen Hawkings giving his theological opinions, btw?
It's not conform to Christianity, so it's bad. At least that's how I understood it.

Anyway, why do people feel he need to over-interpret quotes like that? As Will pointed out, it doesn't even go against Christian belief, at least I find it hard to believe that he meant it that way.

Ironwolf85

I agree with will actually. it's not even that harmful, but it's blown out of preportian because he's a popular scientist.
Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, love...
debate any other aspect of my faith these are the heavenly virtues. this flawed mortal is going to try to adhere to them.

Culture: the ability to carve an intricate and beautiful bowl from the skull of a fallen enemy.
Civilization: the ability to put that psycho in prision for killing people.

Will

Quote from: Ironwolf85 on September 06, 2010, 04:21:50 PM
I agree with will actually. it's not even that harmful, but it's blown out of preportian because he's a popular scientist.

Pretty much. :(  Science and journalism just don't mix, apparently.  Much less with religion tossed in there.
If you can heal the symptoms, but not affect the cause
It's like trying to heal a gunshot wound with gauze

One day, I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
- Jack Kerouac

MasterMischief

Journalism, and I am using that term loosely, does not mix with anything.  The entire point is to sell more sensationalism.  I see this as a huge problem and one I have no solution for.  No one wants to hear about the mundane.

Noelle

I would say the problem is more societal than an actual issue with journalism itself. If you have a society of anti-intellectuals or people who are just too lazy to do any actual research into the issue themselves, then you start to get watered-down, dumbed-down versions of the original because people just don't care to try and grasp concepts they don't already know about. They want to know the scandal instead of the substance. Journalism is a business like any other, and on one hand they're just meeting their demand, but on another, they're kind of like the enablers :(

Ironwolf85

well I'm about done with this thread, good for everyone though in keeping this civil.
Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, love...
debate any other aspect of my faith these are the heavenly virtues. this flawed mortal is going to try to adhere to them.

Culture: the ability to carve an intricate and beautiful bowl from the skull of a fallen enemy.
Civilization: the ability to put that psycho in prision for killing people.

finewine

#99
I see God as the author sitting at his desk with a story, it's beginning, middle and end, in mind and we are the story.
The author sits outside the story's universe and controls it's expansion to its conclusion.

A great author in writing the story will follow the rules set forth in the story's created universe, but he is separate from the effects of the story's universe and if he does choose to do so, he can step into the story as a character, part the red sea or flood the whole earth because he is the God he's created within the story's plot of redemption.

For all we know our lives are the writing of a love story by an author who has lost his beloved and wishes to have the beloved return.


The wonder of science will only ever explain the rules of our universe not the rules of the author's universe.
To bind a GOD to the rules of our universe denies his deity and dominion over his creation.

There is no conflict between science and faith.
Our logic is not capable at this time to understand beyond our universe to a universe and logic yet to be discovered because we have no reference to it nor full understanding of its mystery.
We should continue to ask questions for understanding of the mystery.

The heart of the religious/science battle is the authorship of the process of the beginning of time and space as we know it.
And if there truly is a God that has dominion over us, then we must also examine the truths of our relationship with that deity if we are to live a truly well examined life.

I submit that it is much easier to believe there is no god than to face the truth of the existence of God and his dominion over us.

Is God needed to explain the process of the beginning of time and space as we know it?
No.  Science can do that.

But I also submit that our story has an ending and perhaps it would be good if we could ask the author what that ending will be.
Because entropy and information must continually transform itself in our universe unless the author decides to close the book and write a sequel with a new heaven and new earth.

Heartsmiles,
FW

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"There is always some madness in love,
 but also some reason in madness...
That which is done out of love
takes place beyond good and evil."
 -Friedrich Nietzsche
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