Sorry man -- you've misunderstood my texts. What I've said all along is that I fully acknowledge the theoretical possibility of a creator (as do most atheists, whether or not you want to call them that). What I reject is the notion that there is any empirical evidence to support such a belief, including the cosmological arguments outlined in your original post.
Mags, you possess a truly remarkable ability to find something to agree with in just about everything you see. I think this is what makes you such a Blazers optimist, not to mention such an all-around good guy. It also, however, makes you really tough to argue with, because you tend to perceive the positions of others through an extremely "mags colored" lens. It seems, at times, like you heavily skim long explanations, latch on to the ONE phrase that supports (or seems to support) your position, and happily ignore everything else.
Well thanks for the compliment, but the real question was about believing in God being reasonable. And replying "I don't know" as some tell all on why cosmological argument is weak doesn't fly for me. In other words, I've always said all along that both sides require faith. Didn't you agree?
I'll give it another go. The scientific approach has the belief that if I boil water here and measure it at 212 degrees and you boil water there and it's also 212 degrees, and many many many people measure it at 212, then we can all BELIEVE it boils at 212 degrees. But you are really stretching the meaning of BELIEF to one of FAITH which is not at all at play here. To your kind, FAITH means believe in something no matter that there's no empirical evidence, and no matter what evidence to the contrary. The babble even tells you to do so. That is not the same kind of faith as water boils at 212. Water boiling is an analogy. If you don't like it or get it, tough
Another strawman response... The difference is you have the empirical evidence to support your belief. You don't have evidence of singularity or what it consists of. So I give you an "a" for effort though
See, you're just wrong. There is evidence of a singularity. When you look at the stars, everything is moving away from everything else. Light and sound are waves. So when you hear that train whistle change in pitch as it goes by, the same effect changes the color of the light coming from the stars. That's actual evidence. Once you realize everything is moving away from everything else, you can use straightforward math to figure out "where were the stars yesterday?", then last week, then last year, then 100 years ago, then 1,000,000 years ago. Guess what? You figure out where they were 13.7B years ago and there's nothing possible but a singularity. NOTHING. We do have empirical evidence what the singularity consisted of, too. There's no "A" to be had. There's the truth and there's .... whatever.
Oh I agree with that. But of what is the question. I've already said I believe in the Big Bang, just that something created it
It all started with a bang, but the universe may not be expanding after all A theoretical physicist looks set to disrupt textbook concepts of cosmology, after producing a paper outlining his theory that the universe is not expanding after all. The most widely accepted theory of the universe centres on the notion that the world started with a big bang, and has been expanding ever since. But Christof Wetterich, a theoretical physicist at the university of Heidelberg, has produced a paper theorising that the universe is not expanding, but the mass of all of its particles are instead increasing. His theory could potentially help examine the more problematic aspects of the big bang theory, such as the ‘singularity’ present during the big bang. In his paper: A Universe Without Expansion, Wettrich discusses a cosmological model "where the universe shrinks rather than expands during the radiation and matter dominated periods". His paper was published on the arXiv preprint server. In his abstract, he writes: "Only dimensionless ratios as the distance between galaxies divided by the atom radius are observable. The cosmological increase of this ratio can also be attributed to shrinking atoms." In the 1920s, astronomers such as Georges Lemaitre and Edwin Hubble analysed the light emitted or absorbed by atoms, which appeared in a spectrum of characteristic colours, or frequencies. When matter moved away, they discovered that galaxies exhibited a shift to the red, lower frequency part of the spectrum. After observing that most galaxies exhibit a red shift that became greater for more distant galaxies, they theorised that the universe was expanding. However, Wetterich highlights that this light emitted by atoms is also determined by masses of the elementary particles, and in particular, their electrons. If the mass of an atom increases, it emits more energetic photons. If the particles were to become lighter, frequencies would become redshifted. Writing in Nature News, Jon Cartwright explains: “Because the speed of light is finite, when we look at distant galaxies we are looking backwards in time — seeing them as they would have been when they emitted the light that we observe. “If all masses were once lower, and had been constantly increasing, the colours of old galaxies would look redshifted in comparison to current frequencies, and the amount of redshift would be proportionate to their distances from Earth. “Thus, the redshift would make galaxies seem to be receding even if they were not.” For Wetterich, the universe still expands rapidly during a temporary period called inflation, but before this inflation, the big bang no longer contains a ‘singularity’ where the density of the universe would be infinite. Instead, Cartwright continues, “the big bang stretches out in the past over an essentially infinite period of time". “The current cosmos could be static or even beginning to contract,” he adds. Wetterich’s paper has not yet been peer reviewed but has been received with both interest and scepticism by other cosmologists in the field. “I think it’s fascinating to explore this alternative representation,” Hongsheng Zhao, a cosmologist at the University of St Andrews told Nature News. “His treatment seems rigorous enough to be entertained.” However, Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada told the journal he "remained to be convinced about the advantage, or novelty, of this picture." Unfortunately, the plausibility of this concept is currently impossible to test, but Wetterich argues it could be a useful concept to use when considering different cosmological models. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...e-may-not-be-expanding-after-all-8759893.html
This doesn't seem like it would work. If all mass was increasing, it would collapse on itself when it was near other mass, the force of gravity would increase.
I'm open to alternate theories. However, the red shift is not the only evidence of a big bang. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...-speeding-up-and-proves-Einsteins-theory.html Hubble telescope shows Universe expansion is speeding up and proves Einstein's theory The expansion of the Universe is speeding up – proving once again that Einstein's theory of relativity is correct - according to astronomers who studied hundreds of thousands of galaxies. In the biggest survey ever conducted using the Hubble Space telescope, 446,000 galaxies were studied to see how matter was distributed throughout the universe and how quickly it had expanded. And the astronomers found that the universe was growing faster and faster with time, as predicted by Einstein in his theory of general relativity.
My theory is that in the beginning there was only one thing, a "god" that consisted of all matter. Being incredibly lonely and with no one to talk to, this "god" killed itself, thus spreading matter out and thus creating the universe.
