Gunny's Thread on Religion

[Agnapostate]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

How about the Miller-Urey experiment?

 

[RetiredGySgt]

By the way? When you look out your window and see the clouds blowing by, does that prove or even indicate that across the entire planet the wind is blowing only in one direction?

 

[JBeukema]

Large-scale homogeneity

high proportion of lighter elements

cmbr fluctuations

...

more for rgs to google

 

[JBeukema]

oh, and something can come from nothing

look into quantum field theory

 

[JBeukema]

.

a) "Something can not come out of nothing" - the first law of thermodynamics

The simple statement "something can not come out of nothing" is, in itself, not very convincing. From quantum field theory, we know that something does indeed come from nothing: to wit, "vacuum fluctuations". In the simplest case, an electron, a positron and a photon can appear effectively out of nowhere, exist for a brief time and then annihilate, leaving no net creation of mass or energy. Experimental support for this sort of effect has been found from a number of different experiments. See, for instance, the Wikipedia page for the Casimir effect.
The common point for all of these effects is that they do not violate any known conservation laws of physics (e.g., the conservation of energy, momentum, and charge). Something can indeed come out of nothing as long as these conservation laws permit this. But people often argue that the Big Bang theory violates the conservation of energy (which is essentially the first law of thermodynamics).
There are several valid counterarguments against this: first, as already pointed out, the BBT is not about the origin of the universe, but rather its development with time. Hence, any statement that the appearance of the universe "out of nothing" is impossible has nothing to do with what the BBT actually addresses. Likewise, while the laws of thermodynamics apply to the universe today, it is not clear that they necessarily apply to the origin of the universe; we simply do not know. Finally, it is not clear that one can sensibly talk about time "before the Big Bang". "Time" is an integral part of our universe (hence the GR term "spacetime") - so it is not clear how exactly one would characterize the energy before and after the Big Bang in a precise enough way to conclude it was not conserved.
Assuming we have some way to handle notions of time outside of our spacetime, the universe appearing out of nothing would only violate the first law of thermodynamics if the energy beforehand were different from the energy afterwards. Probably all people will agree that "nothingness" should have an energy of zero; so the law is only violated if the energy of the universe is non-zero. But there are indeed good arguments that the energy of the universe should be exactly zero!
This conclusion is somewhat counter-intuitive at first sight, since obviously all the mass and radiation we see in the universe has a huge amount of associated energy. However, this tally ignores the gravitational potential energy within the universe. In the Newtonian limit, we can get a feel for this contribution by considering the standard example of a rocket leaving the Earth, with a velocity great enough to "escape" from its gravitational field. Travelling farther and farther away from the earth, the velocity of the rocket becomes smaller and smaller, going to zero "at infinity". Hence the rocket has no energy left "at infinity" (neglecting its "rest energy" here, which is irrelevant for the argument). Applying conservation of energy, it follows that the energy of the rocket was also zero when it left Earth. But it had a high velocity then, i.e., large kinetic energy. It follows that the gravitational potential energy it had on the Earth was negative. For another explanation, see e.g. this post about Negative gravitational energy.
In a Nature article in 1973, E. Tryon sketched an argument that the negative gravitational potential energy of the universe has the same magnitude as the positive energy contained in its contents (matter and radiation), and hence the total energy of the universe is indeed zero (or at least close to zero).
Part of the difficulty here is that the concept of "gravitational energy" is essentially a Newtonian one. In GR, the principle of equivalence makes defining a gravitational energy that will be coherently viewed from all frames of reference problematic. Likewise, the idea of the "total energy of the universe" is difficult to define properly. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler (one of the standard texts on GR) discuss this at length in chapter 20 of their book.
Another approach is Wald's "Hamiltonian" or "Hamilton function" for GR as derived in his GR text. In classical physics, this function can (almost always) be interpreted as representing the total energy of a given system. Using this formalism, Wald shows that, for a closed universe, the Hamiltonian is zero. Similar arguments can be applied to the same effect for a flat universe, although for an open universe the formulation for the Hamiltonian ends up ill-defined.
Other efforts to deal with conservation of energy in GR have used so-called "pseudo-tensors". This approach was tried by Einstein, among many others. However, the current view is that proper physical models should be formulated using only tensors (see again Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, chapter 20), so this approach has fallen out of favor.
However, this leaves us with something of a quandary: in the absence of a proper definition of gravitational potential energy, the law of conservation of energy from classical mechanics clearly does not hold in GR. Thus, for any theory based on GR, like BBT, conservation of energy is clearly not something that can be held against it. Hence, the first law of thermodynamics argument becomes moot.

 

[Gunny]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

No such thing. There is nothing that proves any scientific theory beyond the limit of man's intellect and capability. The Big Bang is nonsense dreamed up by someone out to disprove a Creator.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

How about the Miller-Urey experiment?

Interesting but does not validate the theory. It makes several very major assumptions as do all scientific theories. Notice how one of the prerequisites is the absence of Oxygen? It allows for oxygen as part of other gasses but no actually free oxygen.

How does life evolve absent oxygen and then adapt to an oxygen atmosphere?

And no one has ever successfully created life as per any of the theories science has. And there are several major ones.

 

[Gunny]

RGS: Look up red shift, the expanding universe, background radiation...

The expanding universe is illogical. If one cannot pinpoint the center of the universe, and the boundaries, then it cannot be proven.

 

[JBeukema]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

No such thing. There is nothing that proves any scientific theory beyond the limit of man's intellect and capability. The Big Bang is nonsense dreamed up by someone out to disprove a Creator.

it should be pointed out that Lemaitre, one of the originators of the BBT (the central equations of the BBT are often called the "Friedman-Lemaitre equations"), was actually a Jesuit priest!

so yeah, that's a lie, gunny

 

[Valerie]

oh, and something can come from nothing

look into quantum field theory

Is there a word for that?

What if that "something" is intangible? Would you call it an inspiration?

 

[JBeukema]

RGS: Look up red shift, the expanding universe, background radiation...

The expanding universe is illogical. If one cannot pinpoint the center of the universe, and the boundaries, then it cannot be proven.

You simply fail to understand the concept. it is spacetime itself that is expanding. this is not the same as matter moving away from other matter within spacetime Tale the classical example to many dots on a balloon as it is inflated

 

[JBeukema]

oh, and something can come from nothing

look into quantum field theory

Is there a word for that?

What if that "something" is intangible? Would you call it an inspiration?

what are you even talking about?

 

[Gunny]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

How about the Miller-Urey experiment?

A hypothesis. Nothing more. There is not actual fact nor evidence to support such a theory as actual fact.

 

[Sky Dancer]

Life is dreamlike, illusory. Being present, showing up for life on its terms, can be a spiritual path in and of itself.

A creator is more logical than any other explanation.

neither of your assertions is logical[/QUOTE]


Sure it is. You're just being lazy. Ask some questions.

 

[JBeukema]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

How about the Miller-Urey experiment?

A hypothesis. Nothing more. There is not actual fact nor evidence to support such a theory as actual fact.

There is no such thing as 'fact'; there are only models and theories- oh, and the theists' hypothesis

 

[Gunny]

oh, and something can come from nothing

look into quantum field theory

Sorry, but the basic law of physics disagree. Nothing is nothing. Absolute. From zero you expect me to believe as logical that an explosion the size that would be required to create the universe could come?

Sorry. That is illogical. IMO.

 

[Valerie]

oh, and something can come from nothing

look into quantum field theory

Is there a word for that?

What if that "something" is intangible? Would you call it an inspiration?

what are you even talking about?

I'm talking about something coming from nothing. What is the source, do you suppose?

 

[RodISHI]

'Prove it
Perhaps, once you demonstrate what it is



and therefore not on reason or logical deductions.

You bear the burden of proof. Prove I am not god. i might as well say to prove that there's no such thing ads the tooth fairy. Prove that Krishna and FSM do not exist.

Then the religious should stop acting like it's based on reason or any kind of intelligent thought process.



Prove it

You never did demonstrate that

Prove it

Prove that hell and the soul exist, and that a soul can be in hell

Prove it

Proof? Demonstrate that your assertions are valid.

I always love this argument.

Prove what YOU believe is fact.

There has been science throughout the years that has astounded men of all walks of life.

There is already proven invisible energy that cannot be seen through the human eye.

Do subatomic particles have free will?
If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.

Classes of subatomic particles » Leptons and antileptons » Neutral leptons (neutrino)

subatomic particle
Unlike the charged leptons, the electrically neutral leptons, the neutrinos, do not come under the influence of the electromagnetic force. They experience only the weakest two of nature’s forces, the weak force and gravity. For this reason neutrinos react extremely weakly with matter. They can, for example, pass through the Earth without interacting, which makes it difficult to detect neutrinos and to measure their properties.

Subatomic Particles, neutrino

 

[Gunny]

Gunny you obviously missed where a certain poster has stated now that science has an experiment that validates and proves the Big Bang, the start of life on earth and that man evolved from an ape like creature.

No such thing. There is nothing that proves any scientific theory beyond the limit of man's intellect and capability. The Big Bang is nonsense dreamed up by someone out to disprove a Creator.

it should be pointed out that Lemaitre, one of the originators of the BBT (the central equations of the BBT are often called the "Friedman-Lemaitre equations"), was actually a Jesuit priest!

so yeah, that's a lie, gunny

Sorry, I don't lie. The Big Bang theory is EXACTLY what it's called -- a theory. Nothing more.

 

[JBeukema]

Sorry, but the basic law of physics disagree. [/qupte]

Not so. Look into the relevant fields. Heck, you probably think a photon always takes a single pass and everything is always as it is and in a single state

Hate to break it to you, byt reality is quite counter-intuitive

TBB was not an 'explosion'

and your opinion means nothing in light of observed facts and the models of the finest scientific minds and most elaborate experiments currently available to Man