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...
Care4All said:
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.
The deformation of space by objects with mass, or at least that's the most accurate model of it we have so far.
