(joke warning) Science has proven males have both a female and male chromosone so I guess gay marriage has to be legalized.



Lighten up. "Hug it out bitch" (lol, The Office (american) is so fricken funny.)



Had a lot to say but just screw it, Ill let it mellow out a bit.

Sorry, haven't been on the forum for a while.



Point 1.
Whether or not the Big Bang is possible, you are still left with the concept of irrational, finite matter extending backwards for an infinite periond of time with no beginning. No possible purely scientific solution can get around that question. To me an infinite being existing eternally seems more logical than finite matter existing eternally. While matter is never destroyed in nature, only transformed to energy and back, it is never created from nothing either.

Futher, the overall trend is one of entropy and energy decay. That the Big Bang itself does not make sense with our current understanding of physics (although there is debate on that) makes things tougher for the eternal matter side of the debate. I welcome futher exploration of how things work and continually read about new developments. I believe at some point we always will come to a step of faith, but I also believe that needs to be an informed, rational faith.

Point 2. It seems logical that an intelligent being who created the universe would communicate with intelligent beings within that universe, but I'll grant that is simply looking for the most likely path. Why would such a being create a universe in the first place? Perhaps such a being would be so difficult for us to understand that we never really would understand a communication from it if there was one. Generally, men believe in a god that greatly resembles man, while any possible reality of such a being would by neccesity be incompletely comprehensible.

You bring up some very valid points here as well and there are entire books written on each of them. Ultimately, it still makes the most sense that a being capable of creating the universe ex nihilo would also be capable of communicating with beings in that universe. Why it would care to is another question. That it would bother not only to communicate but to intentionally deceive when those creatures would be plenty confused with no communication seems to me silly.

Knowledge of intelligent creatures inhabiting the universe does not require omniscience. Finding any specific group of intelligent creatures within in the universe would requite a degree of perception but one I find it unlikely a being capable of creaing the universe would not posess. Note that it does not require omnipotence to create the universe, only eternality and a great deal of potence.

That any communications would be misunderstood or at best only partially understood seems very likely. Any truth that did come through would have to be due to very careful efforts on the part of the far greater being (I think we can agree that any being capable of intentionally creating the universe would have far more than human intelligence).

Point 3.
Regarding ethics, whatever the source there needs to be some foundation. Even from an atheistic humanistic perspective we would have to say that ethical values are good if they promote the survival and continued deveopment and improvement of the species and bad if they do not. From any deistic perspective they by necessity are grounded in something other than man. Whatever your theology (which includes atheism), moral relativism is still a very poor way of thinking of things. Ethics can be judged on the results they create for those who hold them and others around them.

I don't believe a Prime Mover can be scientifically proven to a "beyond reasonable doubt" standard, but I still believe the "preponderance of the evidence" standard points that direction. Whether or not it would be good to hold to the ethics and beliefs of such a being or what those ethics would be is a secondary, but still very important question.

The big bang does a very good job of explaining what happened from just after the start onwards. Where it runs into problems is in the very beginning.

Your hypothesis is that the universe from nothing simply came into existence with nothing causing it and nothing pre-existing it?

To me that seems less logical than either the eternal matter in a universe cycle or the Prime Mover hypothetheses. My mind suggests that everything has a cause and the only way I can find out of that is a Prime Mover.

None of the three can be scientifically proven. Even if we could prove that the Big Bang was a re-expansion after the previous universe was done collapsing we're still left with the question of where that one came from. Your answer that it spontaneously came to be is simply avoiding the question.

No. I was just refuting your claim that our universe couldn't have come to be by itself and something from outside had to create it. I know, it doesn't seem to make sense at all, but still it might be the most reasonable assumption like I explained in earlier posts. One more thing though: if we assume we could somehow look at our universe from "outside", it would actually seem to always be there as a four or higher dimensional object of sorts, the space-time. It still is possible you are right about the prime mover but my point is it's just a wild guess, and in no way better than any of the other ideas that don't include a god, and actually raises more problems than solves.

You assume the stance that nothing happens without a reason and everything that exists had to come from somewhere. If this was true, then sure, big bang had to be caused by something. There seem to be three plausible causes: 1) God / Prime Mover / whatever you wanna call it, 2) cyclic universes or 3) some event in some other universe. The problem is, none of these make one bit more sense than the singularity just being there and every one of these models has some serious problems, while the singularity from nowhere -idea is perfectly consistent with all of our (non-religious) knowledge.

Problems with the prime mover include: what or who is he / she / it? Where did he come from or who created him? Where did he find a suitable spot of ENDLESS NOTHINGNESS to place our universe in? How could he have existed without the universe existing? If he did, he is not in any way bound by physics and natural phenomena in our universe, and moves freely in time. So does he have his own time, separate from ours, or does he live in some kind of place where nothing ever happens or changes? If he is affected by time, it logically follows he had to be created by something too. If he isn't, it follows that whenever in his timelessness he "looks" at where our universe is, he actually sees something in there, our universe at a time zero or over! So he actually didn't even have to create it!

Cyclic universe runs into problems with laws of thermodynamics (the entropy one). In addition, there aren't many other ideas for a cyclic universe than a big-bang-big-cruch-cycle, and it seems that big crunch is not going to happen in our universe. It seems it's rather going to be a "Big Rip". How could this lead to a singularity emerging again? I haven't heard of any idea about that, though I don't know enough to say it's not possible. I love the idea of a cyclic universe but I'm afraid that's not the way it is.

The third possibility seems the most plausible to me, that new universes have always been popping up triggered by some event in some other universe. This could be for example a computer simulation where we will some day create a computer simulated universe, inside a computer simulation inside a... I suppose it's just about as likely and weird as our universe being the only one popping out from somewhere, because a chain of events extending infinetely both ways makes about as much sense as one just starting from somewhere.


Intuitive, not logical. You do realize your mind might be biased on this, as is everyone's? Of course it seems intuitively obvious to us that everything has a cause, but it has no relevance at all.

Nick Bostrom!