For better and for worse, these are heady times in cosmology. Over the past two decades, astronomers have pinned down the age of the universe quite precisely (13.72 billion years), confirmed its geometry as perfectly flat through exquisite maps of the Big Bang's faint afterglow, and found that its expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down. Three researchers shared the physics Nobel Prize for the latter discovery just last month.
Yet, embarrassingly, cosmologists have also come to realize that everything we see – the myriad celestial bodies that our telescopes reveal – constitutes a tiny sliver of what makes up the cosmic pie. Mysterious "dark matter," undetected except through its gravitational tug on galaxies, count for much more. The rest, a whopping 73 per cent, is in the even more bizarre form of "dark energy," the dominance of which dictates a dismal long-term future for the universe.
In A Universe From Nothing, Lawrence Krauss, celebrated physicist, speaker and author, tackles all that plus a whole lot else. In fewer than 200 pages, he delivers a spirited, fast-paced romp through modern cosmology and its strong underpinnings in astronomical observations and particle physics theory.
Other popular science books have covered many of the same topics, but Krauss's slim volume is bolder in its premise and more ambitious in its scope than most. He makes a persuasive case that the ultimate question of cosmic origin – how something, namely the universe, could arise from nothing – belongs in the realm of science rather than theology or philosophy. What's more, he goes on to argue, our current understanding makes it quite plausible that the universe indeed emerged from quantum nothingness, thus dispensing with any need for divine intervention. There is free lunch after all.
The book traces its own beginnings to a lecture that Krauss delivered in 2009. The video of the lecture has netted nearly a million views online, becoming something of a YouTube hit (though not compared to a clip of a piano playing cat, with 23 million views). So it is not surprising that the book at times has the tone of a lecture: You can almost hear the author's gleeful voice and picture a wry smile. Some sentences run long: I counted one at 107 words. Exclamation marks are sprinkled liberally. There are delightful historical anecdotes and humorous commentary. My favorite story is about the amateur astronomer who persuaded Einstein to publish "the results of a little calculation" on how gravity could act as a lens, the basis of techniques now used by researchers to weigh distant galaxy clusters and to find planets around other stars.
The author does not shy away from tackling complex physical concepts, and often finds clever ways to illustrate them. Even if you don't feel fully conversant with eternal inflation (of the cosmological, not economic, variety) or false vacuum energy by the end, you will almost certainly be rewarded with interesting insights, and a sense of awe, if you persist. Krauss explains how scientists know what they claim to know, for example, laying out the multiple, compelling lines of evidence for a hot Big Bang. He is careful to delineate what is well supported by experiments or observations and what is at the more speculative end of the scientific discussion.
A Universe From Nothing is not always an easy read – unless you are a science buff familiar with some of the lingo and the ideas – but it is surely a very rewarding one to plow through. The many fans of Krauss will devour it, and rejoice. Others, picking up a cosmology book for the first time, perhaps after watching Big Bang Theory or curious about what's new in astronomy, would find it demanding, but also mind-blowing. Those who feel the need to invoke a supernatural cause for the origin of the universe may – should? – find it disturbing.
"Changing by what we mean by things is called learning. It doesn't happen in theology but it does happen in scholarship."
48 comments:
Bob Thiel's presentations, falsely so called, are childish, shallow and embarrassing. The man can't even read with conviction, his female presenter can't even pronounce papyrus and Bob must be too lazy to edit or correct it.
It doesn't matter what the Bible can be made to say about modern science. The authors had no clue of the world, solar system, galaxy and Universe they lived in. They had no clue about the actual age of not only the Universe but themselves as an evolved species. The only science they understood is summed up in "poof", and it was so. The gaps in our current understanding is always filled in with "God did it" until the gap gets filled in with understanding and God has to shrink yet again.
The reason not many wise, not many noble and the weak of the world are "called" is because the information presented to them by the church only appeals to that type of thinking and those unwilling or unable to think critically. The need for a literal interpretation of the Bible to be true is so great, it gets them stuck in ignorance, mythologies and the Bronze Age making the Bible mean what it never meant or the authors infallibly intelligent beyond their times, when they were actually superstitious and a product of the scientific ignorance of their own times.
Apologetics, aptly named, then becomes the art of hoping what they believe is true based on absolutely no evidence that it is true (Hebrews 11:1) Commonly known as "where's your faith?
Thomas Huxley said what most will not do as it is too frightening and threatening to the need for cherished beliefs without good evidence...
“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley - Volume 1
While Knauss wants to move it all into the realm of science, there is a purely philosophical issue that may impede him. It is the difference between evidence and speculation. This is a common fault among those who want to demonstrate how it all happened without God. Daniel Dennett comes to mind.
Oddly, these are the materialist debaters that are constantly wrapping themselves in the mantle of science and asserting that science is on their side and not on the risible other side. Yet in their speculation is a denial of the Scientific Method.
Knauss' solution for how the universe originated from nothing is akin to Hawking's idea that as long as there is gravity, anything can happen. And someone might rightly ask him, "Where do you get the gravity?" Then there is the follow-on problem of how gravity by itself makes something. The Scientific Method seems to have been traded for facile speculation.
So Knauss gives us a vast speculation, conveyed by the Globe and Mail and in the spirit of Daniel Dennett: "What's more, he goes on to argue, our current understanding makes it quite plausible that the universe indeed emerged from quantum nothingness, thus dispensing with any need for divine intervention." All kinds of speculation is "plausible." But its plausibility does not transmute it into evidence.
"... our current understanding..." Of what? Well quantum mechanics of course. Quantum mechanics has the reputation of being spooky. So it has become a large grody spitoon for the collection of all kinds of expectorated speculation. But as with Hawking's omnipotent gravity, we must ask "Where did quantum mechanics come from?"
I think first Mr. Knauss should work on the problem of Dark Matter - something that has physical properties but no known material presence. At least a dimension of this is rooted in something to which the Scientific Method may be applied. Once he has this in pocket and learned to distinguish between speculation and scientific discovery, he can graduate to things that are more challenging.
The fact that his book bears the imprimatur of Richard Dawkins, who primitively believes that god is a demiurge, like an Armstrongite, makes the book suspect.
Dennis-
Is there such a thing as free will?
If there is not, and the universe is a "closed system" then everything is simply determinism that was preprogrammed at the "Big Bang" , including me writing this post!
Free will "seems" to be self evident, but I cannot prove it "scientifically". To me it seems that inspiration, creativity, epiphany and the like , come from an "ether" that is not part of the current dimension.
I believe in the Big Bang, and much of cosmology, but the question of Free Will is a difficult one, and one not well answered in science.
From the "Scientific American" Nov. 2015
South African physicist George Ellis. When I interviewed Ellis last year, I asked him if Krauss’s book answers the question posed by its subtitle. Ellis responded
Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.
And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions. It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy.
According to the wikipedia article, the Big Bang does not attempt to explain how the universe came into being. It assumes energy, time, space as well as the violation of some of the laws of physics such as the speed of light. It is not the only model that fits many of the observations, with some astrophysicists believing that other models offer a better explanation.
Again, it does not offer an explanation of the origin of the singularity or the laws of physics and chemistry.
As some of these people say to us, as they bring us puerile and inferior philosophies, “My, you are certainly not very open-minded! Don’t you think you should spend your valuable time investigating this or that off-beat conspiracy theory? Remember, you just can’t trust the mainstream!”
Seriously, Bob Thiel is a perfect example of why stuff time and date-stamped for the ‘50s remains small. A junior high school student knows better!
BB
NEO said:
"
The fact that his book bears the imprimatur of Richard Dawkins, who primitively believes that god is a demiurge, like an Armstrongite, makes the book suspect. "
You totally trashed your own contribution to the discussion with this conclusion. Books and ideas aren't suspect for such ridiculous reasons. Where did you get the idea that Dawkins believes god is a demiurge, "like an Armstrongite"? Dawkins is an atheist who feels being agnostic is a cop out.
“More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
(Here Dawkins is saying "the God of the Old Testament" as in, the Old Testament portrays this kind of a god. He is not indicating he believes in it. )
“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”
― Richard Dawkins
Hey NEO
Richard Dawkins does not hate God. He is an atheist and as such does not believe in him/her and therefore does not have any feelings towards God one way or the other.
"Does Richard dawkins hate god? http://www.answers.com/Q/Why_does_richard_dawkins_not_believe_in_god
Richard Dawkins does not hate God. He is an atheist and as such does not believe in him/her and therefore does not have any feelings towards God one way or the other. Dawkins book "The God Delusion" is not against God but against the concept of organised religion, particularly the concept of an 'Abrahamic personal God.' Richard Dawkins doesn't waste his time with God or Zeus."
Richard Dawkins is not an atheist. By his own testimony, he is an agnostic. He knows he cannot disprove the existence of God.
Books and ideas ARE "suspect for such ridiculous reasons" if the ridiculous reasons directly go to and support the main themes of the book or idea.
So here is the issue. Dawkins attacks the nonsense, as he perceives or mis-perceives it, of religion (just as one can attack the nonsense of anything, including science) and he also attacks a concept of god. But he never defines what he means by "god." He just roils around in the Bible and generates tendentious viewpoints. When you review the snippets he writes about god, it is clear that his target is a demiurge. This is also what the Armstrongites believe in - a demiurge. Not the same demiurge that Dawkins believes in but the same class of being.
This is why Knauss starts with quantum mechanics already in existence - because he is thinking at the demiurge level and not at the divine level (Creatio ex Nihilo). Knauss does recognize a common deficiency among materialists - he recognizes that someone needs to explain how Nothing was replaced by Something. But to explain this, he starts with Something already in existence and ornaments this with speculation - like Daniel Dennett and his fairy story about how the human mind came into existence.
It doesn't work. It never will.
My reason for posting Dr. Krause's book on "A Universe From Nothing" is to contrast the discipline of the scientific method with Bob Thiel's embarrassingly simplistic and emotional based need to believe cartoon. What on earth the man was thinking or is thinking to produce such drivel is beyond me and can only appeal to the most insecure and unintelligent folk alive on the planet.
It doesn't matter if one adopts Dr. Krause's views or perspectives. But science does address these questions head on and I am sure sometime in the future a good explanation of how everything came from "nothing", which may not be what we think it is to begin with, will be self evident with no need to introduce the concept of "God did it".
I personally side with the research of science and men like Krause and a host of other fine scientists, male and female, along with Dawkins observations about religion, which are my own as well. But the point of the presenting the posting is to show Bob, who lurks, just how childish and inane his views and cartoons are compared to reality
Demiurge? What is a Demiurge? It is a being the creates things inside an already packaged reality-existence-universe (made by someone else?). The being does not create ex nihilo. He/she fabricates from existing materials using existing princples.
A demiurge occupies a different place in logical argumentation than god. Wikipedia gives a pretty good rendition of a demiurge. (And this is what Dawkins, Armstrongites and many ex-Armstrongites believe god is.)
Watch Knauss invoke a demiurge, in one short statement, instead of God and, hence, create a paradox:
"What's more, he goes on to argue, our current understanding makes it quite plausible that the universe indeed emerged from quantum nothingness, thus dispensing with any need for divine intervention." (The word "indeed" is apparently added to lend gravity to something that is nevertheless a speculation.)
Knauss assumes something already exists, i.e., Quantum Mechanics and a very special type of "quantum nothingness" operated on by quantum mechanics. Then, paradoxically, after assuming something already exists, he says his assumption has swept away the need for divine intervention. Hence, he leaves the existence of quantum mechanics unaccounted for. For this reason he does not actually explain how Nothing was replaced by Something because he started with Something.
Knauss has set up an argument where he is not countering the existence of god (or shall we say making god needless) but countering the need for a demiurge. Because he has assumed Something, illicitly, he goes onto say that the "divine intervention" of the demiurge is not needed.
Neo, perhaps explain to Dr. Krause what you think Dr Krause is doing or believes and let me know how that goes.
That being said, the One True Prophet, Bob Thiel of the One True Church makes a fool of himself trying to explain what he knows nothing about save that his Bible tells him so. He really thinks the child's questions would stump men and women like Dr. Krause, Dr Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Green or Brian Cox. They would put him in his place so fast it would make his Urum and Thummin spin, or gyrate perhaps even while he was seated.. :)
"Watch Knauss invoke a demiurge, in one short statement, instead of God and, hence, create a paradox..."
Just for starters, it doesn't reflect well on your literacy or cognitive abilities if you can't even get his name right. His name is KRAUSS, not KNAUSS!
"Demiurge? What is a Demiurge? It is a being..."
I think most of us already know what a demiurge is, however...
BOOM! You just destroyed your whole argument right there. Do you SERIOUSLY think that Krauss or Dawkins believe that a BEING of any sort, slap any label you want on it, created the universe, or quantum mechanics, or anything else?
Go ahead, please give us a quote where Krauss or Dawkins invoke a BEING that creates.
I'll wait...
"...he goes onto say that the "divine intervention" of the demiurge is not needed. "
So you're saying he believes in something that isn't even needed? So, is he really invoking this demiurge, or are you just incapable of comprehending what you've been reading?
Krauss and Dawkins aside, the Nothing vs. Something debate is an problematic one. Is nothingness even a coherent, defined concept to debate in the first place? What is meant by it? Does it mean just the absence of our universe, or is it the absence of all universes? We don't know what might or might not exist outside the context of our universe. Is it the absence of all of that too? What right do you have to assume that would be the default state? Why wouldn't Somethingness be an equally good default state to assume? We certainly don't know that anything as astoundingly complex as conscious beings exist outside of our universe. The not-too-transparent fact of the existence of it is the only data we have about what might lie beyond it. I don't know why so many assume that the universe's existence necessarily points to beings existing outside of it, or necessarily points to anything as specific as identities for said beings. It is far more parsimonious, and therefore far more probable that if something does exist outside of it, that this something would be just another simple, naturalistic universe-creating process. If indeed such a process is even a necessary assumption.
Furthermore, you don't assume Nothingness anyway. You assume at least one creator being. By your own definition, that being would therefore have to be a demiurge too. You're starting with Something, and you don't account for it. I guess it's demiuges all the way down!
Ok, ok...we ain't gonna solve the mysteries of Cosmology today. But isn't this a tad better than Dr. Bobby No Bang's cartoon which no doubt will attract those with low self esteem and willing to be labeled as less than the sharpest pencils in the box?
Smile brethren!!!
Not many wise men now are called, Not many noble brethren;
Not many mighty, chosen ones, For you see your calling:
Sons of God, you are called, Not because of greatness;
Even the wisdom of mankind, Is to God but foolish.
God chose the foolish of the world; He chose the weak and base things;
He chose the things which are despised, That no flesh should glory.
Sons of God, you are called, Not because of greatness;
You who are called and now in Christ, Shall confound the mighty.
Even the foolishness of God, Wiser by far than man is;
Even the weakness of our God, Stronger far than man is;
Sons of God, you are called, Not because of greatness;
Let them who glory, boast in Christ, Not in their own greatness.
Blech......now I can't get that tune out of my head...
Krauss is a fool and so is Dennis. There are plenty of books by PhDs in physics that debunk all the fake physics that Krauss believes in, but neither Krauss or Dennis will ever read a single one of them.
What Krauss does is not science. It is wildly speculative metaphysics passed off as science. Anybody who does not know that is an INFANT when it comes to cosmology, and has clearly never investigated the matter from both sides. End of story.
How many people know that to believe in today's "quantum mechanics" you need to reject the law of cause and effect? No, they don't tell you that in any of the popular physics books, but every physicist knows it. All of modern cosmology collapses due to just this one error alone, and there are plenty of other mistakes as well.
"...the universe indeed emerged from quantum nothingness ..."
So, why isn't energy or matter emerging from nothingness all around us all the time?
The supposed big bang was a one-off event, which makes it unrepeatable and unverifiable, and therefore, unscientific.
"...the universe indeed emerged from quantum nothingness ..."
Even in quantum physics, energy, spatial separation, time spans, and momentum cannot come from nothing. Quantum physics basically states that their values are "variable" on the quantum scale, not that they can come from nothing. Further, the energy of the universe is much too large for the quantum scale to apply. The quantum scale applies to the energy an electron, not that of the whole universe.
Krauss is so obviously wrong on so many levels he is probably just a liar. Why he lies about that, I can only guess. Maybe to sell books. Sensational wacky ideas sell more books than level-headed ones.
All this proves is that if enough people from "respectable institutions" speak the same crap the peons will believe it, and think they are enlightened and intelligent when they are just gullible.
Can something come from nothing? When you attempt to divide by zero (nothing) you get a mathematically undefined "quantity". Actually, it's not a quantity at all, and it's not infinity either, as many people think. The math just does not apply. You can't carry out the operation of division by zero. Therefore Heisenberg's uncertainty relation breaks down, because one would have to divide Planck's constant by zero. The uncertainty relation cannot be applied when there is nothing. So quantum mechanics does not apply. The math just does not work and so Larry's god, theoretical physics, cannot make a prediction and has nothing to say about the matter. Sorry, Larry, you fail. Go back to elementary school and apologize to your grade six (or two?) teacher for skipping school the day she taught the rest of the class not to divide by zero.
"You assume at least one creator being."
Generally, believers don't seem to assume a creator. Those who believe just think it is the best explanation. So, it's a deduction, but one which still requires some faith, as does every other belief, including atheism, because in the end, anything can be questioned.
"... I am sure sometime in the future a good explanation ... "
Translation: there is no good explanation now, but Dennis has FAITH that some day they will come up with one.
Well, science has been looking for the answer since the Greeks. We are still waiting. There are some things science cannot answer and never will, which is why, like it or not, religion will never go away.
Ronda Vous:
I actually thought his name was Knauss. The n and r resemble each other closely in my font.
Krauss and Dawkins both believe that Theists, in particular, Christian Theists believe that a Being created the universe. In particular, they erroneously believe that Christians believe that a demiurge created the universe. The demiurge comes into the picture only as their characterization of what others believe. In fact, Christians do not believe in a demiurge as Dawkins and Krauss mistakenly believe.
That also addresses your statement "So you're saying he believes in something that isn't even needed?" You need to read this more carefully.
The Being that Christians believe created the Universe is not a demiurge. If you actually understood how a demiurge is defined you would understand this. And Nothingness can be defined philosophically. You instead are toying with various materialists definitions.
I am sorry you so badly misunderstood what I wrote.
Dawkins book "The God Delusion" is not against God but against the concept of
organised religion...
So why didn't he call it "The Organized Religion Delusion"?
According to current thinking, the laws of physics came into existence AFTER the big bang. So, quantum mechanics did not exist before the big bang, and so cannot be responsible for the big bang. So, Mr Krauss is wrong again.
Now, why is it that physicists claim the laws of physics came into existence AFTER the big bang? Because they know the big bang defies the laws of physics (e.g. such as the law of conservation of energy). If the laws of physics already existed, there would be no big bang, and they know it.
Can they actually prove that the laws of physics came into existence after the big bang? No. Can they explain how laws of physics can be spontaneously created or destroyed? No. It's just something they CLAIM so that they can make the big bang theory work. Simple as that.
Nobody has ever observed any law of physics come into or go out of existence. The idea that such a thing could happen is purely speculative, and is not science, and has no scientific basis. It is not testable since it has never been observed to happen, and nobody knows how to try it out in a test tube, laboratory, particle collider, or any such thing.
Claiming the laws of physics came into existence after the big bang is the ultimate excuse! It is the ultimate rationalization. It rejects all the laws of physics (the basis of all of science) and throws it in the garbage just so they can keep their FAITH in the big bang. Nothing could be more unscientific. Nothing.
The big bang is nonsense anyway. There are about 25 different explanations for the red shift. The expanding universe is only one of them. Why don't you hear about the others? Even Hubble wasn't convinced and tried to warn us. It fell on deaf ears.
How many people know that to believe in today's "quantum mechanics" you need to reject the law of cause and effect? No, they don't tell you that in any of the popular physics books, but every physicist knows it...
They know it at some level, though I wonder if they fully get it. They are all familiar with the terms in-determinism and a-causality. Do they get what that really means? Those terms mean just what they say, and at some level they all know it, though they seem to only half-believe it, because to fully believe it is nuts, so they rationalize by half-believing it.
Anon 6:49 So, why isn't energy or matter emerging from nothingness all around us all the time?
Yeah, and why isn't life & DNA emerging all the time on this 'Goldilocks' planet where conditions are now more favorable than hostile early earth, but what-do-ya-know, no more DNA/life in the last 3 billion years!
The way the popular media tells it, DNA is bound to be assembling itself throughout the universe, just like that! It's so easy: "all you need is pond scum and a little lightning", "it probably even occured on Mars", "in fact we found Mars life in a meteorite" - oops, that one was another Piltdown Meltdown.
"Neo, perhaps explain to Dr. Krause what you think Dr Krause is doing or believes and let me know how that goes," Dennis wrote.
I don't think what Krauss wrote is so abstruse that we cannot understand its fundamental error. There is a philosophical divide between evidence and speculation. Krauss is one of the many who seek to bridge the divide by projecting their personal authority and asserting speculation as fact. But authority does not transmute speculation into evidence. So I do not believe I have made a mistake about Mr. Krauss. I probably did make a mistake in responding to this smartass comment as if it were serious.
God may have chosen the weak during this epoch for his purposes. Dwarves instead of men or elves. And this fact was used by the Armstrongist ministry, who apparently excluded themselves from the weak, to justify despising the lay membership, oppressing them and using them as a resource for their own personal gain.
I think RCM's well known statement is canonical. He referred to church members as "the cream of the crud." A statement that reverberates through the Armstrongist fragments and to some extent in GCI. I have always wondered how RCM regarded himself.
"Changing by what we mean by things is called learning. It doesn't happen in theology but it does happen in scholarship."
Krauss' statement above is baloney. Science can be narrow minded and stubborn about accepted theories. Think of "Clovis First." And many Protestant denominations now accept evolution. I, too, align with scientific research which often puts me in the opposite camp from mighty speculators like Dawkins, Dennett and Krauss.
So Krauss' statement does not tell us anything about the real world. It only tells us where Krauss is on the political spectrum.
... men and women like Dr. Krause, Dr Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Green or Brian Cox.
Which ones of those mentioned are women? Larry? Neil? Brian? Or the other Brian?
Oh, I see. We have to be inclusive so we give credit to those who did nothing or next to nothing.
Anonymous said...May 18, 2018 at 9:09 PM
Claiming the laws of physics came into existence after the big bang is the ultimate excuse! It is the ultimate rationalization. It rejects all the laws of physics (the basis of all of science) and throws it in the garbage just so they can keep their FAITH in the big bang. Nothing could be more unscientific. Nothing.
You seem to spend a lot of time "proving" science is wrong about so many things perhaps you could study rather on how we can prove your "God" exists which would completely overpower the scientists and their "ideas"!!!
toby
NEO said ---The fact that his book bears the imprimatur of Richard Dawkins, who primitively believes that god is a demiurge, like an Armstrongite, makes the book suspect.
In COG teaching Jesus was the Demiurge, he created at the Father's behest.
Is this what you are refering to? Or what "GOD" do you think created the universe?
I'm inclined to Mr. Dawkins opinion, "If there is a god it's certainly not the God of the Hebrew Bible"
toby
i
Toby
Asking NEO or any other poster to jump and keep jumping through your esoteric loops is intellectually dishonest, and harassment as far as I'm concerned. It's a ploy taught by Alinskys 'Rules for radicals.' It's a favourite of Michael Moore. I recall him using it against Charlton Heston.
Right on 12:21! We’re here, and for the most part, it doesn’t matter how we got here, except to demonstrate that we could not possibly be here as a result of the teachings which were used to scam and manipulate us.
Right now, having worked very hard all week, my primary concerns are the huge burrito setting in front of me (I just doused it with Diablo sauce) and the ice cold 24 can of Budweiser I just took a swig from!
Thank God for the diversity that gives us such awesome foods! I think I still have a signed poster from Charlton Heston, i got to see his Corvette years ago, the one that he had had upgraded from a 427 to a 454.
BB
You seem to spend a lot of time "proving" science is wrong about so many things perhaps you could study rather on how we can prove your "God" exists which would completely overpower the scientists and their "ideas"!!!
Perhaps you are caught in the fallacy of the false dichotomy, i.e. forcing a choice between two options, when both options could be wrong. I don't think I said whether I even believe in God, or which God I might believe in. My main point is that, just as religion is full of error, so is a lot of "science", so we have to take both with a huge grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism. Both are a long way from having the answers and neither side will ever get there until they realize that first.
You don't need a mexican to make mexican food. Anybody can follow a recipe. Diversity is useless, or actually, destructive.
Selling out your race for Mexican food is like selling your birthright for a bowl of red soup.
Man, you are really missing out, Bubba! I enjoyed hearing the Mexican ladies at the restaurant speak Spanish, and loved their smiles. Really sent my day in a positive direction.
BB
According to Krauss, if God is not needed, then God does not exist.
Well, I say, what do I need Krauss for? Nothing! Stephen Hawking said it all already! So Krauss does not exist! Dennis just made him up.
I don’t sell out, I share. And, I relish the power that I have over you to really piss you off in reminding you that I was married into the Mexican community, and really got to imbibe of the culture. In the early stages of recovery from Armstrongism, friends from different cultures are very important. They don’t see you as being weird or a pariah like people from your own race do.
Besides, if you need a birthright to have a sense of value as a human being, what good are you in the first place? That’s like Dave Pack, where he’s got to trace his ancestry through kingly, priestly lines to establish credibility. My work every day for my customers establishes mine.
Mark Armstrong, Steve Bannon, and President Trump can’t rob me of the ways in which I’ve been enriched by multi-culturalism. So glad I got to live during the best era of history!
BB
Hey, I was just thinking. If everyone ate Mexican food, you wouldn’t have to do the Rye Krisp and Matzo thingie if you happened to keep a certain Old Covenant festival. Tortillas taste so much better! Flan is also a delicious desert, and isn’t puffed.
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Ha! True. Its corn based instead of wheat, so if you go for a preColumbian diet, you've got it made!
The bandwagon fallacy applies to those who think that something is true because most scientists believe it. There are often other scientists, lesser known, with different views.
The typical cosmologist does not have time to investigate all 25 possible explanations for the red shift, so he just "goes with the flow" and hopes that the majority opinion is correct.
This kind of thing happens a lot. Nobody really seems to know how much of what scientists think is true is really accurate. In fact, it might be unknowable, since there seems to be no objective process for finding out.
"The bandwagon fallacy applies to those who think that something is true because most scientists believe it. There are often other scientists, lesser known, with different views."
Here's one:
http://geraldschroeder.com/wordpress/?page_id=211
Could you enumerate all 25 possible explanations for us here? Unlike the scientists, we seem to have all manner of time here, and I for one find this fascinating. If you know more than the basic Doppler theory, by all means, please share! There’s also blue.
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