Creation vs. Atheism

@Jzyehoshua

"Then where did the molecules needed for the Big Bang come from?"

By molecules you probably mean the matter/energy required for the Big Bang, cause no molecules existed in the early times, only subatomic particles. The answer is simply we don't know. As I already said, matter and energy must have already existed in some form in order for the Big Bang to have occurred but our tools for understanding nature break down before the Big Bang. And no, that doesn't mean "God", it means that our understanding is not enough and perhaps it'll never be to answer all of our questions. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us, but we try our best to understabd it anyway.

When one looks upon a great mystery such as "what was there before the Big Bang" and says "there must have been some sort of creator", he automatically assmumes the nature of the answer and takes pride in having explained the orogin of everything. Then stops the quest for answers thinking he already knows the truth is God. Science doesn't do that. It doesn't take pride in finding the ultimate truth cause we know that's not something realistic to achieve. Science is humble and honest enough to admit that we don't know and that's the very force driving it forward, constantly improving its current models as new information comes along, all in search of the actual truth, not the easiest explanation.

"Furthermore, why is it assumed that the Big Bang model is correct in the first place? How does one arrive at the conclusions that it occurred without assuming that the universe occurred through purely naturalistic processes? What evidence clearly indicates the Big Bang ever occurred to the exclusion of all other possibilities?"

I'll give you the short version of the story. Here's more observational evidence and in more detail if you want to read more about it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Observational_evidence

There is a lot of evidence supporting the Big Bang but the most prominent one is the prediction of cosmic microwave backround radiation a few decades before it was actually observed.

Up until the 1920's people believed the universe was static and eternal. But then everything changed when observations from the Hubble telescope showed us that distant galaxies were moving away from us. If you're curious about how we can tell this, it's from a phenomenon called "redshifting". When an object is moving away from us, the electromagnetic waves it emits are streched by its velocity and hence their wave length increases making the light color change towards the "red" end of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's similar to how the Doppler effect works on sound waves changing the pitch of moving objects like sirenes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift

From the observations, comparing how redshifted each galaxy was, it was clear that the further an object was, the faster its apparent recession velocity was. Objects were also moving away from each other following the same rule, not only away from us. This led scientists to conclude that the universe is in fact not static, but constantly expanding. Running time backwards, the further back we go, the smaller the universe gets and the denser and hotter the conditions inside it get.

When the Big Bag model was constructed, describing this expansion of the universe, experts said that there should be some light left over from that early initial state of the universe, like the one we see from the far away galaxies, but much older. Some ancient electromagnetic waves from the universe was in that extremely hot and dense phase and it should be detectable uniformly in all directions. But nothing was found and the theory didn't get much support.

As it turns out, the light form that early universe had been travelling for so long that its wavelength had been stretched (redshifted) by the expansion, way past the visible light range and gone way down to the microwave spectrum. Our equipment was not strong enough yet to detect such weak electromagnetic signals. It took us until the 60's to finally be able to detect it for the first time and it actually happened by accident by two random guys. Now we can clearly detect it in all directions as expected years before its discovery. That is one of many reasons that the Big Bang model became the widely accepted one.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background

The model fits all our observations and explains the phenomena we encounter through them, and all that was constructed years before we could actually view the evidence through telescopes. Does that mean it's perfect? No. It's just the best model of the universe we can create with our current understanding and it will be adapted and improved as we learn more about the world. Cause that's what science does, it embraces new information and constantly evolves, it doesn't cling to the explanation that seems more convenient to believe.

It really saddens me that despite all this amazing effort put by brilliant people, despite centuries of learning, observing and improving in order to be able to create a model that describes how our universe evolved over billions of years.... some people still choose the explanations humans had thousands of years ago, back when our understanding of the world was less than 1% of what it is now, undermining all the remarkable descoveries humanity has made since then.

"As I already said, matter and energy must have already existed in some form in order for the Big Bang to have occurred but our tools for understanding nature break down before the Big Bang."

You have to be careful when referring to a time *before* the big bang, because the big bang is the origin of our universe's spacetime. Generally, time before the big bang makes as much sense as a place outside the universe. However, there are cyclical universe models (e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology) which do allow for a 'time before the big bang' to be meaningfully spoken about, but when talking about the more mainstream theories you should avoid saying "time before the big bang".

The big bang was also the origin of all the mass/energy in the universe. Creationists use this is evidence that the big bang is false because supposedly "you can't get something for nothing" - a position which always strikes me as strange because God is of course the ultimate free lunch. But anyway the premise is entirely false as you can get something from nothing and the universe does it all the time with virtual particles which pop in and out of existence everywhere in space (virtual particles account for 95% of the mass of the proton).

Virtual particles are constrained by the uncertainty principle to exist for a fleetingly small period of time, while the universe is slightly more permanent. But there is also a strong argument to be made that the universe is an extremely spread out form of nothing. In physics things cancel out all the time (e.g. two opposing forces), and due to time-symmetry the opposite also happens - things which have cancelled out spread out again. It could be that the positive energy balance of all the universe's mass/energy is exactly cancelled out by the negative energy of gravity (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe)

People should remember that the universe behaves in ways that aren't always intuitive. Just in our experience you can't get something from nothing, that doesn't mean getting something from nothing is against physical law. According to our experience, things can't be in two places at once - yet fundamental particles can. And according to our experience, space and time don't contract for objects moving at high relative speeds to us, and yet approaching the speed of light, they do.

Human experience is not a reliable guide for determining physical law.

@Tmb86
Isn't the conformal cyclic cosmology just basically a reworking of previous cyclical cosmology models like Cosmic Hesitation that have since been discredited?

books.google.com/books?id=gSZbDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT65&lpg=PT65

books.google.com/books?id=UJRbBcF6YsMC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54

And virtual particles do not actually materialize from nothing; rather they originate from other particles.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-virtual-particles-rea/

"Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there."

@havfanridindis
Yet isn't science somewhat prideful in its insistence that only naturalistic solutions are possible for the universe's beginning? Is there any point at which science will fail to find a naturalistic explanation for dark matter that it will consider the possibility of another dimension, and/or God's existence?

I am aware of cosmic microwave background radiation, indeed Hugh Ross mentions it as evidence for a beginning that disproves cyclical models. While it is a strong evidence for a beginning to the universe, doesn't that, as pointed out by Ross, only increase the likelihood of a Creator? After all, if a beginning is necessitated, doesn't that only further necessitate explaining where the particles to cause that beginning occurred?

I am aware of redshifting and the doppler effect, it's taught to all university students taking astronomy and even gets taught in classes on biology. Per the Wikipedia page you gave me on evidence for the Big Bang, it also mentions problems related to the Big Bang, some of which I already mentioned (e.g. matter-antimatter asymmetry):

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Problems_and_related_issues_in_physics

The trouble with the redshifting equations is that they rely on assumption of constants, and since 1998's discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating, I question whether that assumption is correct. Per the Wikipedia page you just cited:

"The theory requires the relation v=HD to hold at all times, where D is the comoving distance, v is the recessional velocity, and v, H, and D vary as the universe expands (hence we write H_ to denote the present-day Hubble 'constant')."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Hubble's_law_and_the_expansion_of_space

However, since the universe expansion rate is unexplainably accelerating, how can one be sure what the age of the universe was based on redshift? In other words, one must not only take into account how fast light is traveling to us, but how fast the universe is expanding, or how fast everything is moving apart. To quote NASA:

"Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it."

science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

@Jzyehoshua

Science doesn't claim that only naturalistic solutions are possible. But if something hasn't been proven to be impossible, it doesn't mean it's possible. In fact, everything we can observe, measure and test, all of our expereiences ever, happen in the natural world, so we have no reason to think that there's something beyond that. If there's a phenomenon we can't yet explain, it probably just means that we don't have sufficient information. If ever the supernatural could be demostrated to be possible (which I don't see how), then we could construct models that explain phenomena using supernatural solutions and test those models to see how well they fit our observations and data. But for now, we don't even know if those solutions are possible, let alone probable explanations.

"While it is a strong evidence for a beginning to the universe, doesn't that, as pointed out by Ross, only increase the likelihood of a Creator? After all, if a beginning is necessitated, doesn't that only further necessitate explaining where the particles to cause that beginning occurred? "

This ties in well with what I said earlier. You can't put a supernatural solution on the table like it's a legit scientific hypothesis. It's abstract, unfalsifiable and completely untestable. So no, that doesn't increase the likelihood of a creator cause you can't really measure the likelihood of something you haven't demostrated to be possible in the first place.

But yes, as you said, an explanation is required, how did those initial particles occurre? why?What caused reality to be like that? Was it always like that? and many more great mysteries. Every period in human history has had those types of questions. Some, we were able to answer, some we are working on right now and some maybe we'll never know. But at no point does our insufficient knowledge about something justify explaining it by supernatural means and especially by invoking God, a "solution" purposely defined in such a way that it can conveniently explain every question we ever had (cause he's omnipotent). That is the same "God of the gaps" logic that led our ancestors to worhip the Sun and moon as deities.

As for your questions about the Big Bang model, I can't answer all of them as I'm no expert, I just look up stuff cause I'm interested. But I do trust the work of people who have dedicated years of their lives into it and the fact that results of such models are independently varifiable by different scientists all around the world and have stood the test of time. But of course, as you mentioned, there are problems and mysteries yet to be answered. The model is not perfect. It's the best we have right now and it will keep adapting and improving.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that both the distances and time equations used to determine how far away stars are and how the universe is rely on calculations that are based on the speed of light in a vacuum. Trouble is, outer space is NOT a true vacuum. There are still some hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, and if there was dark matter everywhere (especially if it and dark energy make up 95% of what's in the universe, as hypothesized), that might change the speed of light traveling through the universe (since there would basically be more 'stuff' it would have to travel through) - meaning that all equations determining distance to stars and thus age of the universe would be off exponentially.

So the dark matter/dark energy debate caused by the accelerated expansion rate of the universe is a serious one. Perhaps at some point, one of these expeditions to Mars could flash a light signal back to an Earth satellite, with calibration on both ends through atomic clocks, to determine whether the speed of light is indeed being affected in any way while traveling through space. After all, attempting to measure the speed of light in vacuum-simulation experiments on Earth won't accurately gauge the conditions in space because of A) the occasional hydrogen atoms, and B) the possible existence of dark matter.

@Jzyehoshua

Actually, you don't need the speed of light for many distances in the universe. We can find the distance to close stars by measuring their parralax shift compared to the distant background, using the two opposite points of earth's orbit to get the two angles required, and then applying some trigonometry. Then, after studying and categorising the colser stars, we can use them as standard candles to get the distances to very distant stars, by comparing their brightness to the close ones that are of the same type. The speed of light won't affect the distances that we'll find, it will only affect how much time has passed since those object were that distance away from us.

I happened to know this one, but I'm sure at least some of your concerns have actual answers which I'm not familiar with yet. I'm not studying astronomy or physics or anything. But you should search more and ask experts before you say we can't get the age of the universe and things like that, because the 13,8 billion years is a consensus of scientists all around the world.

@havfanridindis

"But if something hasn't been proven to be impossible, it doesn't mean it's possible."

If something hasn't been proven impossible, then by definition it can be possible; what is debatable is whether it's probable. Probability can be established by circumstantial evidence.

There are things that can be established. Per post 245 it can be established through manuscript evidence that the Old Testament is 99.5% consistent with the Dead Sea Scrolls from 2,000 years ago and "Most of these discrepancies are made up of simple deletions of words, or misspellings, not whole-sale textual changes." The Bible's extremely reliable preservation can be established through manuscript evidence. Such remarkable preservation is far and away better than anything seen in the entirety of the archaeological record, and indeed is suggestive of divine preservation.

http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/06/25/Responding-to-a-Skeptic.aspx

biblestrength.com/Manuscript_Evidence_for_the_Bible

As I pointed out earlier (post 318), the Bible's accuracy in relating matters of science can be established, including cases where it was right thousands of years before modern science on controversial subjects (e.g. the fountains of the deep, expansion of the universe, and state of early man).

Per post 245, the Bible's accuracy in matters of archaeology continues to be impeccable, with Biblical form critics proven wrong again and again. The Soleb Inscription, Merneptah Stele, Amarna Tablets, Ebla Tablets, Law Codes of Ur-Nammu, Eshnunna, and Hammurabi, Ark Tablets, Execration Texts, Shiphrah Slave List, and numerous other discoveries have refuted claims by critics that the Bible was wrong in its historical claims.

biblestrength.com/Archaeological_Evidence_for_the_Bible

There is a remarkable level of design in nature, as I pointed out in post 312. "How, for example, can evolution explain moths with pictures of spiders on their wings, like the Lygodium Spider Moth? Did the moth gradually evolve one leg of the spider on its wings, then another leg, etc. over millions of years? It makes no sense from an evolutionist perspective. Or what about the Macrocilix Maia Moth, which has a picture of two maggots eating bird poop on its wings? Flower mantises perfectly imitate flowers, e.g. hymenopus coronatus. And what of macropina macrostoma, a fish with a fluid-filled transparent head with 360-degree rotating eyeballs? How do creatures like these gradually evolve over time?

Then there is the matter of instinct. Some creatures can migrate thousands of miles like the Swallowtail Butterfly to set locations (as the Swallowtails do) without ever being taught how or where to go. That degree of innate instinct suggests a level of spirit separate from purely biological processes. For a Creationist, this makes perfect sense, since the Bible says the spirits of animals return back to the Earth, unlike those of humans which ascend (Ecclesiastes 3:21)."

Existence of the supernatural has been documented, as I pointed out in post 251. First of all, Friedrich Nietzsche's remarkable prophecy 50 years before World War II warning that the Jews would be persecuted by Nazi Germany, and that the European Union needed to take action to stop inhumane scientific experiments on them, is very difficult to explain from a naturalistic perspective.

biblestrength.com/Scientific_Evidence#Modern_Evidence_for_Prophecy

Even recently there was the case of a church fire which left Bibles and crosses miraculously unscathed:

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bibles-crosses-unscathed-devastating-west-virginia-church-fire-n979361

Per post 251, there are messianic prophecies recognized as messianic by Judaism, and which can be shown from the Dead Sea Scrolls to have definitely existed before the time of Christ. The Daniel 9:25-27 prophecy of the 70 weeks clearly shows that Christ should have arrived around 31-32 A.D. This is a clear case of mathematics used centuries before Jesus predicting his arrival with remarkable precision.

Per posts 228, 250, 254, and 256 a younger age to life on Earth can be established through human population growth rates, microevolutionary rates, dinosaur soft tissue, and the faint young sun paradox. The existence of spiral galaxies, in particular, is a serious problem for claims of an old universe; while it may not allow for an age of thousands of years, neither does it allow for the billions claimed either.

creation.com/early-galaxies-don-t-fit

That modern science and Creationism are not in contrast to scientific thought is evident, as I pointed out in posts 229 and 313, from the fact that many of modern science's founders were Christians or even Creationists; e.g. Matthew Maury, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, William Buckland, Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler. The founders of modern democracy and religious freedom were Christian Creationists, see William Penn and Roger Williams. Even more secular founders such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson was likely Jewish) acknowledged the existence of God as the giver of inalienable rights in their legislation (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Declaration of Independence).

As I mentioned in post 337, Darwin's co-discoverer Alfred Russell Wallace beat Darwin to the punch and by sending his research to Darwin caused Darwin to hurry his own research into print to get the credit. Wallace as co-discoverer of evolution acknowledged the existence of a Creator and a spiritual dimension to human beings.

Reasoning on ethics and whether a universal law defining right and wrong exists, as well as justice, can establish the likelihood of a Creator. As I pointed out in post 337, "Since there is not justice in this life, for justice to ultimately be done, there must be a final Judgment after this life where the good are rewarded and the evil punished. Society is not the determiner of right and wrong or Nazi Germany did nothing wrong. There is right and wrong, there will be a final Judgment, and justice will be done. To believe in morality is to believe in God, a final Judgment, and a life after this."

And finally, the accelerating expansion of the universe is completely in contrast to all Big Bang predictions, and shows that an unknown force is interacting with the universe; per post 340.

history.nasa.gov/SP-466/ch22.htm

Now, do any of these cases, by themselves, definitively establish God's existence beyond all shadow of a doubt? No, they do not. But they are circumstantial evidence that, taken as a whole, increase the likelihood or probability of God's existence.

@Tmb86

"the big bang is the origin of our universe's spacetime" , "The big bang was also the origin of all the mass/energy in the universe."

Once again, a very common misconception, the Big Bang as the origin of everything. The Big Bang isn't the origin of something. It doesn't describe a creation, it describes an expansion.

"Generally, time before the big bang makes as much sense as a place outside the universe." The fact that it doesn't make sense to us or the fact that our current knowledge is insufficient to describe what reality was like before the Big Bang, doesn't mean that time didn't exist. It just means we don't know and we shouldn't pretend to know what there was before that moment or if we can even call it "before".

"But anyway the premise is entirely false as you can get something from nothing and the universe does it all the time with virtual particles which pop in and out of existence everywhere in space"

Ok, I'll have to get a bit philosophical on you. There's a difference between the definition of "nothing" physicists use and the one that creationists use which causes a lot of confusion in debates. Virtual particles don't pop in existance from truly nothing. In order for particles to appear, there must be empty space, a quantum vaccuum and some astronomically tiny amount of time for them to appear. This vaccuum is what you call "nothing".

I am an atheist, but when I talk about "nothing" in this context, I mean the philosophical definition of "nothing". Absolute absence of anything imaginable or unimaginable including spacetime. If there was trully nothing at all, there would be no vaccuum, no space for any particle to fit inside it and no time for any event to occur at all. We can't even begin to comprehend what "nothing" means. The moment we try to visualize it in our heads, it becomes something, a thought. We can't know if true "nothingness" is a possible state of reality, let alone know if something can come from nothing.

So in essence, the virtual particles answer some of our questions about origin but the really big questions remain, such as "why is there something instead of nothing?". Trying to answer such inherently incomprehensible questions about existance with our scientific knowledge, will only boost religious people's egos, making them think they know something science doesn't, when in reality all their claims are completely unsubstantiated. The truly honest thing to do sometimes is have the humility to simply say "I don't know"

@Jzyehoshua

"If something hasn't been proven impossible, then by definition it can be possible; what is debatable is whether it's probable."

This is just flat out 100% wrong. When something hasn't been proven impossible it means we don't know with certainty. It might be impossible but we haven't been able to prove that it is. It might be possible, but we haven't proved that either and as I said there's no good reason to think that it is possible.

The reasons you provide include handwritten documents passed down from generation to generation, vulnerable to all kinds of misinformation and manipulation by fallible and selfish human beings looking out for their own personal gain.

There have been so many human interactions and so much time elapsed since then that there is bound to be some cases where ancient texts coincide in what they're saying and even some cases were ancient humans were correct about things we discovered years later. All you do is cherry pick the very few that are in favor of your position and ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence against it.

You say it coincides with some ancient dead sea scrolls. You forget that it contradicts 4000 other religions which exist today and all of them think they know the true word of God. If that's not the definition of insanity, I don't know what is.

You say it coincides with scientific discoveries like the expansion of the universe. First give me the verses so I can see how you interpreted them in a way that fits today's discoveries. And then remember all the things that have been shown to be false like the age of the earth and the universe, the origin of humans, the flood, the fact that demons don't cause diseases but microorganisms do, the fact that a blood ritual with dead birds isn't the actual cure for Leprosy, the realization that having rules about how to properly enforce slavery such as those in "Exodus 21"probably isn't that moral and also stoning your unruly children to death and sacking cities of believers of other Gods isn't that moral either. You'd think God would know these things.... There are actually many many more examples, but these are off the top of my head.

You say some prophesies came true. Again, authors can present things in any way they like once they know what happened. And even if some coincidences did occur, you once again ignore all the prophesies that didn't come true.

You say there's incredible design in nature and you point out some examples and again you ignore all the examples showing how it's all done by natural processes, like the evolution of a land animal into the modern whale causing it to have warm blood, placentas, leg and finger bones unlike other fish that didn't come from land animals. Many bones are useless in many animals but they were once useful many generations ago. This is nature doing its best to adapt. A divine being would have made them perfect right away. No tiral and error, no struggle to adapt, no mutations, no birth defects, no useless parts of the body, no need for more than 99% of all the spieces that ever lived to have gone extinct and have only left fossils behind. You must also be unuware of how natural selection works cause it describes those amazing complex mechanisms you mentioned without a need for intelligent design.

If you think ignorance of bilology and documents of the supernatural written by biased, fallible, supersticious people come even close to qualifying as evidence that forces beyond the laws of nature are at work, then there's little hope that this discussion will yield anything productive and good for you or put you in any thoughts. Supernatural claims are made all the time even nowadays, let alone back in those days.