Attention Atheists: How Was The Earth Created?

[Care4all]

Because that's not what the Bible says.

really? how do you figure such?

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

where in the Bible does it say He did not?

It says all animals and creatures were created out of the dust of the earth...there is nothing that leaves out Dinosaurs, why would they be left out? They are NOT left out of the Bible, they are included with all animals and creatures in the Genesis story of creation?

the only thing that is not understood is the term ''day'' that is used in the Bible, and there is an out for that in the Bible that teaches us that TIME in God's time, is not the same as what we see as time in a day....it says something like a day in god's time could be a thousand years to us....this is metaphor on how we can not comprehend the Time that God lives in...which can be accepted, even in scientific terms.....where time is not time alone, but SPACE/TIME...

care

 

[froggy]

Because that's not what the Bible says.

really? how do you figure such?

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

genesis 1;1 in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth. how do you know if the dinosaurs wasn't one of his first projects. see how theories work.

 

[edthecynic]

Can someone simply explain to me what science's theory is on how and why the big bang happened in the first place or exactly what happened in the big bang....? What went bang? I realize there was really no bang as far as noise is concerned but what went bang as far as the explosion and spreading out of the universe and why or how galaxies formed within the universe? Can anyone explain how our galaxy came to be different than others... where in our galaxy there is planet earth which can support life and so far no others seem to do such?

Can you please explain to me scientifically, how life began on Earth...what happened? What happened here that could not and did not happen to other planets that made Earth different and capable of creating life and evolving life vs the other planets?

Did we always have our 24 hour days?

Did we always have our tilt angle? If it was changed, how?

Did we always have our moon to shine at night and it's gravitational pull on our tides?

Have we always been this distance from the sun?

Have all the planets in our galaxy always been positioned as they are, to our sun?

What is gravity?

and I could ask a thousand other questions too! But if anyone knowledgeable in Science explain some of the things I asked above I would appreciate it.

Care

I'll try to answer your questions but some are too complex for a forum like this.

It was all the energy in the universe that went "bang."
Our galaxy is not different from ALL other galaxies.
It is highly improbable that our planet is the only one that can support life in some form.
We did not always have 24 hour days. Even now each day gets longer by one thousandth of a second.
We did not always have a Moon.
Our distance from the Sun is always changing, as are the other planets.
Gravity is the attraction of one mass for another.

 

[Coloradomtnman]

really? how do you figure such?

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

genesis 1;1 in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth. how do you know if the dinosaurs wasn't one of his first projects. see how theories work.

Um. No. Theories don't work based on an omission of evidence or lack of evidence, but on its abundance. You find somewhere in the Bible that it tells of Dinosaurs, there's a bit of evidence, and then go from there. You don't come up with a theory which states, "The Bible doesn't mention Dinosaurs, so Dinosaurs were one of his first projects." That is a hypothesis. It doesn't become theory until you can obtain enough evidence to logically connect the ideas contained within the hypothesis to eachother and the with physical evidence.

There are many books about science and the scientific method. You might be interested in them. Try Amazon.com.

 

[edthecynic]

Because that's not what the Bible says.

really? how do you figure such?

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

Job 40:15-24

"15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."
​

 

[Care4all]

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

genesis 1;1 in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth. how do you know if the dinosaurs wasn't one of his first projects. see how theories work.

Um. No. Theories don't work based on an omission of evidence or lack of evidence, but on its abundance. You find somewhere in the Bible that it tells of Dinosaurs, there's a bit of evidence, and then go from there. You don't come up with a theory which states, "The Bible doesn't mention Dinosaurs, so Dinosaurs were one of his first projects." That is a hypothesis. It doesn't become theory until you can obtain enough evidence to logically connect the ideas contained within the hypothesis to eachother and the with physical evidence.

There are many books about science and the scientific method. You might be interested in them. Try Amazon.com.

God DID NOT mention every animal or creature created in genesis? He said it was up to man to name them...and we are STILL naming them today...

Do you think he did name them all in the Bible for some reason?

i don't understand your point at all on this one colorado?

 

[Coloradomtnman]

where in the Bible does it say He did not?

It says all animals and creatures were created out of the dust of the earth...there is nothing that leaves out Dinosaurs, why would they be left out? They are NOT left out of the Bible, they are included with all animals and creatures in the Genesis story of creation?

the only thing that is not understood is the term ''day'' that is used in the Bible, and there is an out for that in the Bible that teaches us that TIME in God's time, is not the same as what we see as time in a day....it says something like a day in god's time could be a thousand years to us....this is metaphor on how we can not comprehend the Time that God lives in...which can be accepted, even in scientific terms.....where time is not time alone, but SPACE/TIME...

care

I bolded where you wrote what I think is a very weak link in your chain of ideas. First of all, that's exactly what it seems like to me: an out. Secondly, using the Bible as evidence to support the Bible is circular logic: "The Bible is true because The Bible says it is."

I can understand the importance of using methaphors to convey ideas. However, why would the use of a metaphor in any way enhance the understanding of time? Why wouldn't the Bible instead say, "In the first 15 billion years God created the Universe, the stars, the sun, the planets, and the Earth and its moon. In the next 3.9 billions years God created all life on the Earth and developed it from tiny organism to giant lizards. Then God wiped the Earth clean of most life and began to create the plants and animals as we know them now. In the last million years he created human beings." And why, if there is so much evidence of interspecies evolution, and its makes such logical sense, could God not have used evolution as his tool and the Bible could say, "God developed human beings over the course of 3 billion years from a tiny organism to a fully developed person." Instead of God created Adam from dust and Eve from Adam's rib?

If you argue that people during the era of the Bible's writing wouldn't understand such language and ideas, that's also weak. God should be the greatest writer that ever lived! The book should be understandable even to the most illiterate people. If you say, the authors who were inspired by God to write the Bible didn't understand God's sense of time, that seems like side-stepping. If God inspired them, and gave them knowledge, why wouldn't they have understood Him? He's GOD, for God's sake!

 

[Coloradomtnman]

"15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."
​

Pretty vague, isn't it?

 

[Coloradomtnman]

God DID NOT mention every animal or creature created in genesis? He said it was up to man to name them...and we are STILL naming them today...

Do you think he did name them all in the Bible for some reason?

i don't understand your point at all on this one colorado?

He mentioned some of them. He tells us of just about everyone who begat just about everyone else. Biblical omission does not support scientific ideas very well, Care.

 

[edthecynic]

"15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."
​

Pretty vague, isn't it?

Well, the word "dinosaur" had not been coined yet, so what were you expecting? It clearly describes an animal much larger than an elephant. Elephants have a snake like tail and behemoth has a tail like a cedar tree. What animal do you think is being described?

 

[Coloradomtnman]

"15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."
​

Pretty vague, isn't it?

Well, the word "dinosaur" had not been coined yet, so what were you expecting? It clearly describes an animal much larger than an elephant. Elephants have a snake like tail and behemoth has a tail like a cedar tree. What animal do you think is being described?

I don't know. Some mythical creature? A giant sloth? It doesn't say that behemoth is larger than an elephant. It doesn't really describe the animal a whole lot. And, was there only 1 dinosaur or one type of dinosaur?

 

[froggy]

if you knew for sure god was real what kind of life would you live?

 

[Care4all]

God DID NOT mention every animal or creature created in genesis? He said it was up to man to name them...and we are STILL naming them today...

Do you think he did name them all in the Bible for some reason?

i don't understand your point at all on this one colorado?

He mentioned some of them. He tells us of just about everyone who begat just about everyone else. Biblical omission does not support scientific ideas very well, Care.

They don't discredit them either, which they could have.... only in your own head,, can you make such an illogical conclusion actually...and I ain't trying to be mean but why on earth would the bible have pages and pages and pages and pages times a thousand of every name of every creature that ever lived on earth? Why would you even THINK such? So over all, this one of your beefs, is downright silly imho and if i were you, I'd drop it!

I think many, and I mean many of your posts that have questioned various things have been very legitimate and worthy of contemplation and an answer in return and have shown you such respect previously...but this one kiddo, with all my love.... It just doesn't cut mustard, imho!

Care

 

[Care4all]

if you knew for sure god was real what kind of life would you live?

I dunno, perhaps the same life he is living now?

I'm not so certain believing in God changes ones life that drastically...

i have more 'comfort' in being a Christian, my faith gets me through the good and bad times, and my own failures and sins perhaps too...with some comfort after the period of totally bashing myself for my own mistakes....

but i think, if i were an atheist today i would be the same, fairly good person i am today...

i see no difference in my atheist friends vs believing in God friends in their relationship with humanity and themselves....they are all good people, with the same strengths and weaknesses.

 

[gcomeau]

just get to the bottom line....does anything in the current scientific understanding of how the universe and earth were formed definitively rule out that it was created by something

That's why being agnostic is really the only logical position to have. In science, in general, nothing is ruled out, and the search continues. With religion, their truth has already been established, and the search for anything is over. So to be afflicted with religion is to have a closed mind, where usually evolution doesn't even exist, and nothing ever changes.

Ok, I'm going to go off tangent here for a second because you just tripped one of my largest pet peeves. The blatant misapplication of the word "agnostic".

Agnosticism is NOT an alternative position to atheism or theism. If someone asks you if you're an atheist or a theist and you answer "neither, I'm an agnostic" you just made exactly as much sense as if you said "neither, I'm a ballerina".

Somehow, in recent history, people have started using the term "agnostic" as if it means some kind of shoulder shrugging neutral middle ground between atheism and theism where atheism is "There is no god", theism is "there is a god", and agnosticism is "Ummm, I don't know".

That's ridiculous.

Because atheism is "I don't believe there is a god. And theism is "I believe there is a god". And the middle ground between THOSE? That's "I have no idea what the content of my own damn thoughts are". That's not a philosophical position, that's a psychologically worrying condition. If there is ANYTHING you should know, it's what your own thoughts are. If you don't know that, you know nothing.

Agnosticism is NOT "I don't know if god exists". It's "I believe you CANNOT know whether or not God exists." Which says absolutely not one single thing about whether you believe god exists or not. You can believe god does exist but also believe the nature of god renders it impossible to ever prove or disprove that definitively. In which case, you are an agnostic AND a theist. Or you can not believe god exists and also believe that the manner in which god is defined by believers makes it impossible to ever prove or disprove that definitively, which makes you an agnostic AND an atheist.

But you either do, or do not believe god exists. Which means whether you're an agnostic or not, you are also either atheist or theist,. There is no third option to those two. That is a binary solution set.

Ok, all done ranting about what words mean...

Can someone simply explain to me what science's theory is on how and why the big bang happened in the first place or exactly what happened in the big bang....? What went bang?

It's been years since I read any cosmology papers so my knowledge on this is probably outdated, but the last I saw I think there was a bit of an argument going on between Andrei Linde and Paul Steinhardt over whether brane cosmology models or inflationary models better explained the available evidence. I'd have to do some reading to get caught up on the current status of that but if I had to place a bet I'd say it was "still arguing while waiting on more data to show which of them is closer to being right".

Someone unfamiliar with the subject might have read that as "omg! scientists have no idea what happened!" They have a really, really good idea what happened back to about 14.5 billion years ago. They're just arguing over the explanation of the next bit back now.

Explaining that part in detail would be... involved. And probably better left to someone whose field this is so it doesn't get completely messed up, but I could take a little time over the next few days and see if I could get at least a little caught up if nobody else here knows the subject matter any better. It is interesting stuff so honestly now that I've started talking about it I'm a little curious what the latest developments are.

I realize there was really no bang as far as noise is concerned but what went bang as far as the explosion and spreading out of the universe and why or how galaxies formed within the universe?

"Space" went bang. Like, as in the actual dimensions of length, width, height... I appreciate that's kind of hard to visualize.

As for why? Well, if Steinhardt was right it was the collision of two 3-dimensional membranes moving in a fourth dimension (not time, the math behind M-theory holds there are 11 physical dimensions... and isn't that just the most a helpful explanation ever, right?). The matter came from massive kinetic energy release of the collision being converted into quarks and photons and the non uniformity of the distribution of matter is because of quantum effects on the flatness of the membranes at collision.

If Linde was right the "bang" was caused by something to do with the effect of a massive singularity that I really don't understand well enough to even try to explain honestly...

And of course, whether either or neither of those is the correct explanation once they do settle on one it'll just move the questions back a level. What caused the 'membrane' movements that caused them to collide? How did the great big singularity form in the first place? Etc...

Which means we're going to be having fun figuring this stuff out for a really, really long time.

Can anyone explain how our galaxy came to be different than others... where in our galaxy there is planet earth which can support life and so far no others seem to do such?

Well, every galaxy is different from every other one if we're just talking size, shape, density, etc... I'd find it shocking if they weren't really. If every galaxy was a perfect duplicate of every other one I'd find that really, really weird. As for why, there's a little bit on that above.

As for earth, there is very little doubt that as far as being life supporting it is certainly not unique in the universe. We've just barely begun gaining the imaging capabilities to detect extra-solar planets, and mostly we only have the sensitivity to see really, really big ones. Way larger than earth. We don't see any other earths because, well, we couldn't even if they were there. Saying the earth is the only life supporting planet in the galaxy because we don't see any other ones is like saying you're the only person in the entire world because you're blindfolded and don;' see any other people around you.

But we're slowly getting that blindfold out of the way, are starting to find other planets now, and we're getting able to "see" progressively smaller ones, and the results so far tell us there are a LOT of them out there. Like, a mind beggaring number. Thinking not a single other one in the entire universe ever developed an atmosphere and composition that allowed organic chemistry to do it's thing and create biological molecules and 'life' is simply not suggested by the available data.

Can you please explain to me scientifically, how life began on Earth...what happened? What happened here that could not and did not happen to other planets that made Earth different and capable of creating life and evolving life vs the other planets?

Well, keeping in mind the "other planets" we're talking about are an astoundingly tiny sample from our immediate neighborhood, what makes earth different is a couple things. Proximity from the sun is one big one, gives us a favorable temperature for these kinds of chemical processes to occur. Size is another. It's big enough to support sufficient gravity to trap an atmosphere, not so gigantic that it would crush any emerging life forms before they even got started.

As for how it happened, this is kind of old but remains a very good general summary of basic abiogenetic principles, and also explains some of the silliness in statistical arguments often used to claim the emergence of life is "statistically impossible" which you'll see creationists throwing around once in a while:

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations

Did we always have our 24 hour days?

No. Used to be shorter, getting longer. About 4.5 billion years ago when the planet first formed I think the length of the day was like... 6 hours. Gravitational braking is slowing the earth's rotation very, very gradually. Right now the length of the day is increasing at about 0.002 seconds per century.

Did we always have our tilt angle? If it was changed, how?

As far as I know, yes... always been the same.

Did we always have our moon to shine at night and it's gravitational pull on our tides?

Pretty close to always, yes. I think the moon is generally dated as being just slightly younger than the earth and is thought to have been formed by a very very early massive collision between the earth as it was forming and another large stellar body. The debris thrown out by the impact eventually coalesced in a high orbit and became the moon, but that took a few tens of millions of years so it got started just a bit after the earth did.

Of course, nobody was around before that so nobody missed seeing it up there or anything.

Have we always been this distance from the sun?

Pretty close. Orbit's a bit erratic, it's always being slightly influenced by other bodies in the solar system... but it's fairly stable.

Have all the planets in our galaxy always been positioned as they are, to our sun?

Since they formed, yes.

What is gravity?

The deformation of space by objects with mass, or at least that's the most accurate model of it we have so far.

 

[froggy]

if you knew for sure god was real what kind of life would you live?

i have more 'comfort' in being a Christian, my faith gets me through the good and bad times, and my own failures and sins perhaps too...with some comfort after the period of totally bashing myself for my own mistakes....

but i think, if i were an atheist today i would be the same, fairly good person i am today...

i see no difference in my atheist friends vs believing in God friends in their relationship with humanity and themselves....they are all good people, with the same strengths and weaknesses.

thats my point if you knew for sure there'd be no need for FAITH .

 

[N4mddissent]

really? how do you figure such?

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

Job 40:15-24

"15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."
​

Sauropods did not eat grass. Sauropods did not have navels. I'm pretty sure that they couldn't drink an entire river. So we have to assume some exaggeration. His tail was like a cedar? Tail was sometimes a euphamism for genitals. And the hebrew word translated as "moveth" can also be translated as "extends" or "hardens" in reference to genitals. Like a cedar? Did it mean size or that it was hairy?

Behemoth is mentioned as a male force complement the female force of Leviathan in the Book of Enoch. Female-Sea-Leviathan (also very similar to Tiamat in many ways) Male-Earth-Behemoth. Other Hebrew legends have Behemoth as a great mythical creature that can only be killed by its creator, Yahweh.

Behemoth is also similar to Bahamut, an arabic word often referring to a creature with a hippopotamus head that holds up the earth. The word Behemoth itself means hippopotamus in russian.

And dinosaur did not co-exist with humans. The flintstones were not real.

 

[Coloradomtnman]

if you knew for sure god was real what kind of life would you live?

A pious one. One cannot disobey the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the Universe and really think to get away with it.

 

[froggy]

Where in the Bible, Care, is there anything about God creating Dinosaurs or Woolly Mammoths or anything other than the animals that currently exist (excepting the ones which have since, after the writing of the Bible, gone extinct)?

Job 40:15-24

"15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."
​

Sauropods did not eat grass. Sauropods did not have navels. I'm pretty sure that they couldn't drink an entire river. So we have to assume some exaggeration. His tail was like a cedar? Tail was sometimes a euphamism for genitals. And the hebrew word translated as "moveth" can also be translated as "extends" or "hardens" in reference to genitals. Like a cedar? Did it mean size or that it was hairy?

Behemoth is mentioned as a male force complement the female force of Leviathan in the Book of Enoch. Female-Sea-Leviathan (also very similar to Tiamat in many ways) Male-Earth-Behemoth. Other Hebrew legends have Behemoth as a great mythical creature that can only be killed by its creator, Yahweh.

Behemoth is also similar to Bahamut, an arabic word often referring to a creature with a hippopotamus head that holds up the earth. The word Behemoth itself means hippopotamus in russian.

And dinosaur did not co-exist with humans. The flintstones were not real.

no one said they did but god could have had them on this planet long before we were here.

 

[Coloradomtnman]

thats my point if you knew for sure there'd be no need for FAITH .

Why do we need FAITH?