Science

i don't think you can save searches.

my sense is that "before time" doesn't make sense as a question -- "before" is a temporal qualifier but the stipulation is that there's no time.

 

Absolutely untrue. When the followers of Jesus were presented with new evidence - e.g., he was the Son of God, they left Judaism and founded Christianity. Same for Islam. Now I will certainly grant you that the changes in religion has fewer major changes than science, but it does change nonetheless.

And the fact that they are still theories after many years just proves my point. We have no concrete proof, yet still accept them on their face - even when confronted with contradictory evidence that we can't explain. Again, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this at all, but to pretend that there is no faith in the system involved is a bit disingenuous.

Sure they have, and yes, people totally jumped ship.

I disagree. Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean that it does not exist. Did gravity exist before we had the ability to measure it?

I don't think so. In fact, if you believe the Bible, Jesus will one day return and everyone will see for their own eyes that He exists and then will be faced with a choice. But as we have seen in many cases, the Bible is not neccessarily meant to be taken 100% literally. How He reveals himself may well be through some sort of science.

But that is not what I am saying, which of course you know. I am saying that the 2 are similar because each requires a certain amount of faith to fill in some of the holes of what cannot be explained, not because people argue over them.

 

Crap - I searched on evolution in R&S - we have had some discussions about this and similar topics before. Most were pretty respectful and I learned things from them.

No, not before time, but before the bang. What caused the Big Bang? What existed before it?

 

We all know the answer is currently "I don't know." But that does not give you the ability to insert some answer that makes you feel good and still maintain your credibility. Anything you "believe" needs to backed by evidence or your opinion is worthless.

 

you're missing a fundamental difference here. yes, some people believed one thing, but there were still jews. there are still jews today. how many scientists believe the earth is flat? how many believe that fire rises because it's trying to get back to the sky and rocks fall because they're trying to get back to the earth? once science adequately explains something, you don't have many people who disregard the new science and stick with the old. nasa doesn't plot missions to other planets using an abacus, a copernican orrery, and no clue about physics.

quite simply, old science is invalidated by new science. are old religions invalidated by new ones?

but you're still missing the point. i don't put faith in a particular theory, i put faith in the roll that science plays in understanding the things we can understand. i don't know what happened before the big bang. i don't know what's going on at the edge of the universe. honestly, those things don't really mean that much to me. sure, they're interesting questions, but in my view they're so beyond the human scale that they are too abstract to fully consider.

believing christianity or judeism or islam or jehovas witnesses or whatever is like picking a theory and sticking with it no matter what. that's unlike science.

sure, except for those who didn't.

so is gravity proof of god?

let's say there is some "god force" that exists that we can't measure. then we have some amazing breakthru and suddenly find there's this underlying force everywhere in the universe. unless the force is arrayed in big bold letters "yo, this is god" it would simply be interpreted as just another cosmic force -- like gravity or magnatism.

i kind of addressed this with the above.

if you go back and read your post to me, you stated that they are the same and that people argue about them with the same fervor. if that wasn't a particularly strong argument, you shouldn't have made it.

 

but isn't the theory that time and space were both created from the big bang?

i think the question, tho, is a bit unfair cuz nobody really claims to know exactly what came before the big bang -- at least, not with any real certainty.

and not to be obnoxious, but it's like a tribal shaman watching an operation to transplant an organ. the surgeon explains what he's doing every step of the way, how the anesthesia knocks the person out, how the lost blood is replaced by carefully screened donations and matched to the blood type of the patient; he explains how the immune system functions and the requirement of the patient to take specially created medication to avoid rejecting the new organ as a foreign body; he gives the shaman a tour of the internal organs explaining in detail each organ's function.

as the doctor prepares to sew up the patient, the shaman points to the apendix and says "what's that thing do?" and the doctor says "we're not really sure". the shaman replies "aha! so your 'medicine' is no different than my potion making and chanting."

the doctor later has his license revoked for having a filthy shaman in the operating room. true story.

 

God exists as long as one person believes in him. It's kinda like getting kids to clap when Tinkerbell dies during Peter Pan.

 

Tinkerbell dies?

 

When was this?