Question:
Atheist Answer
Let's go through this very carefully.
- We have about 8,000 years of recorded human history. Humans are the only creatures who have ever deliberately recorded it. All time before that is referred to as PREhistory for a reason; the universe pre-dates recorded history. By about 15 billion years.
- The Big Bang was a sudden expansion of matter. It did not create any heat, because all heat was contained within it; it merely dispersed heat like it did matter. It did not necessarily create anything, since nothing stops the matter from having existed before the Bang. It did not destroy anything either, because there was probably nothing outside the Bang that it could destroy. Comparing the Big Bang to an explosive detonation is a gross oversimplification.
- Present-day black holes do contain vast amounts of matter compressed to a single point, or singularity. It happens when the gravity of an object is great enough to overcome the magnetic fields keeping the atoms apart. Current physics do allow for this.
- Even if time as we know it resulted from the Big Bang, it's not necessarily all the time there's ever been. What if another system of time and space existed, and the Big Bang spawned from this? Perhaps another universe?
An atheist doesn't know how the heck the Big Bang happened, because we haven't found enough evidence to make any theory remotely certain. I'm comfortable with that. If I adopted one hypothesis as the truth now, I'd have to fault every other theory out there without any support at all.
Finally, don't take offence but to assert beyond doubt that a God is responsible for something merely because of the absence of known alternatives is the very model of an argument from ignorance.
I won't cover abiogenesis (the origin of life) here, because neither has MrPeters.
- SmartLX
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abiogenesis | Big Bang | creationism | Origins | young earth creationism
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Fri, 2008-02-15 17:27
Your question begs the question. Science is not a set of beliefs. It is not a faith-based (or faith-biased) inquiry.
Xianity, from the beginning, has been a religion given to "trust" (pistis=faith) and hope. That is, xianity is a swamp of wishful thinking, which will never be drained. It's too comfortable to hoping frogs. Haven't you ever read Kierkagaard? And, his "leap of faith."
In practice, what does science have to say about arrogant fundies:
With respect to science vs. western bible-based monotheism, the relationship is vastly asymmetrical in favor of science. Science is the arbiter of which statements about the world, empirical statements, are or are not “known” -- that is, are given the always provisional metalinguistic accolade, ‘is true.’
Such statements are ‘methodologically fit’ according to the relevant testing procedures within science itself. This is the meaning of ‘the scientific revolution’ -- in whom is power vested?, who shall decide what is true?, and by what criteria?
Neither ‘ethical fitness’ as in Heraclitus and his Stoic followers, nor ‘theological fitness’ as in Plato and his xian followers, is any longer considered a viable principle for assessing the truth of an empirical statement.
Methodologically, whenever so-called "sacred" writings make claims about the natural world, they are subject to exactly the same forces of potential refutation as any other empirical claim. There is no "executive privilege" for god.
In honour of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (2009), let’s say loudly that Evolutionary Biology has proven (far beyond a reasonable doubt) that the ID myth of animal and human creation is false. More importantly, Darwin solved the puzzle (for all species) : how can order arise from randomness.
Let's get the bottom line very, very clear:
Since evolution through natural selection is empirically true, then the genesis myth is empirically false. Period.
Biblical literalism is false. Period.
There are no innocent "believers in" intelligent design any longer. They died before 1901.
All subsequent IDers know this. Consequently, they lie as a matter of “principle”.
bipolar2
© 2008
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