The Big Bang Theory: Half of Americans 'Doubtful' it Happened
236 replies, posted
7 days for an all-mighty being might as well be like 7 billion years.
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610547]because they trash on anyone who thinks diffrently than them[/QUOTE]
No we have discussions. When someone says "x" is untrue or wrong, we ask why.
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610547]because they trash on anyone who thinks diffrently than them[/QUOTE]
If you think you personally know better than the current scientific community on the origins of the universe without a doubt then why haven't you done something to prove it?
Science is a method of questioning evidence and observations and creating ideas and models that best describe the universe. If you have a better one than current science, science will change if it finds it's actually better.
That mindset is the mindset of the people who argue in threads like these for what's "right". No one is high and mighty and over sure of themselves. They believe in a system that is easily shaken up and changed upon new revelations. Yet, somehow, under some description, because we don't take any idea anyone throws from anywhere as a serious idea, we're "close minded"? Bullshit.
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610570]generally a lot of people who do not share the beliefs of the majority stay quiet out of fear of being attacked ridiculously for their beliefs[/QUOTE]
All that has happened is that both sides have come in, and argued their respective points.
I really don't think anyone is being "attacked" or "trashed". If they came into the thread with little understanding of theories or the Big Bang Theory itself, explaining why it's not as untrue as they may think is perfectly logical.
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;44610581]If you think you personally know better than the current scientific community on the origins of the universe without a doubt then why haven't you done something to prove it?
Science is a method of questioning evidence and observations and creating ideas and models that best describe the universe. If you have a better one than current science, science will change if it finds it's actually better.
That mindset is the mindset of the people who argue in threads like these for what's "right". No one is high and mighty and over sure of themselves. They believe in a system that is easily shaken up and changed upon new revelations. Yet, somehow, under some description, because we don't take any idea anyone throws from anywhere as a serious idea, we're "close minded"? Bullshit.[/QUOTE]
Id say its more along the lines of anyone who has a faith in a higher power, and does not back it up scientifically is trashed on. Which I in all honesty find hypocritical when many people here are all advocates for being accepting and open minded yet when someone who is religious comes along they are shit on, figurativly speaking of course
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610605]Id say its more along the lines of anyone who has a faith in a higher power, and does not back it up scientifically is trashed on. Which I in all honesty find hypocritical when [B]many people here are all advocates for being accepting and open minded[/B] yet when someone who is religious comes along they are shit on, figurativly speaking of course[/QUOTE]
Yes, some are rational and open minded, but most likely to logical and scientific ideas over those of faith.
This forum, as I've seen, is more about [I]truth[/I] rather than [I]belief[/I].
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610605]Id say its more along the lines of anyone who has a faith in a higher power, and does not back it up scientifically is trashed on. Which I in all honesty find hypocritical when many people here are all advocates for being accepting and open minded yet when someone who is religious comes along they are shit on, figurativly speaking of course[/QUOTE]
They typically only get "shit on" when they come in here like that guy did with the same tired bullshit. "I don't want to understand it because it's a bunch of crap!"
"It's JUST a theory!" (Swear to fucking god the scientific version of the word theory needs to be driven into people's skulls from kindergarten on.)
If someone came in here and respectfully disagreed without making some completely idiotic statement (there appear to be some passing comments in this thread of that status actually), people aren't going to call them out on being morons.
Actually, this article raises an interesting point. Why don't we trust science anymore? What's happened between the so-called "Golden Age of Science*" in the 40s-60s and now?
Up until the Scopes Monkey Trial, America was fairly accepting of new scientific thought. Evolution became a bit of a touchier subject after that, but other scientific advances were widely supported by the public. What's happened to polarize almost 150 million people into thinking that science is wrong, or evil, or deceptive?
Even from a religious point of view, the Big Bang makes sense. The Biblical concept of [i]ex nihilo[/i] is as close as you can get to an official endorsement. Heck, the first chapter of the Bible even says, very plainly, "There was nothing, then there was something." (To be entirely fair, the concept of a singularity is hard to understand today. Imagine trying to explain it to a bronze age shepherd.) Why, then, do people with a shred of religiosity reject an incredibly similar explanation?
Is there such a degree of irrationality that we've come, as a people, to reject scientific knowledge simply because it doesn't fit with our limited, ignorant views? Have we given up learning, choosing instead to cement ourselves in archaic, metaphorical interpretations of the nature of existence? Is this a massive social movement influenced by nostalgia and groupthink, or an indication of something more sinister in the fabric of society?
What's going on, and why?
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610605]Id say its more along the lines of anyone who has a faith in a higher power, and does not back it up scientifically is trashed on. Which I in all honesty find hypocritical when many people here are all advocates for being accepting and open minded yet when someone who is religious comes along they are shit on, figurativly speaking of course[/QUOTE]
Key word there is faith. Faith is not what I would say is an ideal system for understanding the universe. It's fine if you have faith, it's fine to believe whatever you want. But it doesn't really change what we can best piece together to understand the universe using scientific methods.
[QUOTE=woolio1;44610678]Actually, this article raises an interesting point. Why don't we trust science anymore? What's happened between the so-called "Golden Age of Science*" in the 40s-60s and now?
Up until the Scopes Monkey Trial, America was fairly accepting of new scientific thought. Evolution became a bit of a touchier subject after that, but other scientific advances were widely supported by the public. What's happened to polarize almost 150 million people into thinking that science is wrong, or evil, or deceptive?
Even from a religious point of view, the Big Bang makes sense. The Biblical concept of [I]ex nihilo[/I] is as close as you can get to an official endorsement. Heck, the first chapter of the Bible even says, very plainly, "There was nothing, then there was something." (To be entirely fair, the concept of a singularity is hard to understand today. Imagine trying to explain it to a bronze age shepherd.) Why, then, do people with a shred of religiosity reject an incredibly similar explanation?
Is there such a degree of irrationality that we've come, as a people, to reject scientific knowledge simply because it doesn't fit with our limited, ignorant views? Have we given up learning, choosing instead to cement ourselves in archaic, metaphorical interpretations of the nature of existence? Is this a massive social movement influenced by nostalgia and groupthink, or an indication of something more sinister in the fabric of society?
What's going on, and why?[/QUOTE]
As we look deeper things become more counter intuitive and people don't care to put in the time to learn and understand how the world really works.
[QUOTE=Falubii;44610724]As we look deeper things become more counter intuitive and people don't care to put in the time to learn and understand how the world really works.[/QUOTE]
This seems to likely be the cause. A year or two ago as I was studying something related to the universe (I can't remember what), the thought "this is hard to comprehend" crossed into my head, and I thought "maybe it'd just be easier to believe that God made it so".
After a bit more study, I simply came to the conclusion that, even if I chose to believe it, it doesn't make it true, and even though one explanation is complex, it has more evidence for it and eventually makes sense.
I don't entirely subscribe to the Big Bang theory either.. The general concept, yes, but I feel like there's something we're missing. Something just doesn't add up in my head. Perhaps I'm just not very smart.
I have a somewhat twisted idea/theory of the Big Bang and the creation of the universe as a whole.
I like to think the universe and everything could have been created by a God or a set of Gods.
However, if that was true, they would've been the ones to formulate the Big Bang, and never touched anything afterwards, except to watch over and judge when beings die, hence why science can't prove the existence of any higher deities, because they don't do anything any human can perceive or ever detect.
I like to think that the human concept of religion and a God(s) are just a funny coincidence if the above were true, or maybe people with heightened senses detected a larger presence in the universe, or just a bunch of people tripping balls. Could be either. v:v:v
On that note.. Christianity(?) says God created the heavens and the Earth within 7 days.
.. What is time to God? What is a human construct to their creator? Nothing. 7 days to a higher being could be millions and millions of years to a Human's perception and measurement of time.
I mean, I don't 100% follow or believe in my own theory here, it just sounds really interesting to me, but...
I wouldn't put it out of the realm of all possibility. I mean it [I]kind of[/I] makes sense, doesn't it?
Or am I just fucking crazy?
Really I just wish science and religion could co-exist more than it does right now. I guess this "theory" is a manifest of that wish.
[QUOTE=SuperDuperScoot;44610761]I don't entirely subscribe to the Big Bang theory either.. The general concept, yes, but I feel like there's something we're missing. Something just doesn't add up in my head. Perhaps I'm just not very smart.
I have a somewhat twisted idea/theory of the Big Bang and the creation of the universe as a whole.
I like to think the universe and everything could have been created by a God or a set of Gods.
However, if that was true, they would've been the ones to formulate the Big Bang, and never touched anything afterwards, except to watch over and judge when beings die, hence why science can't prove the existence of any higher deities, because they don't do anything any human can perceive or ever detect.
I like to think that the human concept of religion and a God(s) are just a funny coincidence if the above were true, or maybe people with heightened senses detected a larger presence in the universe, or just a bunch of people tripping balls. Could be either. v:v:v
On that note.. Christianity(?) says God created the heavens and the Earth within 7 days.
.. What is time to God? What is a human construct to their creator? Nothing. 7 days to a higher being could be millions and millions of years to a Human's perception and measurement of time.
I mean, I don't 100% follow or believe in my own theory here, it just sounds really interesting to me, but...
I wouldn't put it out of the realm of all possibility. I mean it [I]kind of[/I] makes sense, doesn't it?
Or am I just fucking crazy?
Really I just wish science and religion could co-exist more than it does right now. I guess this "theory" is a manifest of that wish.[/QUOTE]
The big bang theory doesn't really make any claim about what happened before the universe as we know it. It basically just means if you run time backwards, you'll encounter a time when the universe was really dense and hot.
we cannot make our system of understanding the universe based just on what we "feel" is right.
It has to be based on what we can observe and learn and repeat and test and quantify and qualify.
For all you know, for all anyone knows, we're heads in vats because there is literally(and I use this in the most non exagerative sense possible) no way to discern that our reality is even real. There is no method to prove that anyone but ourselves exist and that anything we experience is real, but again, just because things like this maybe true, doesn't mean we can really base our understandings of anything on faith. We have to do our best to understand things through a method that explains them in the most reliable fashion and changing our entire structure when something comes along that breaks it. Religion has existed for 10,000 years at least. Abrahamic ones for over 2 millenia. They have been along science the entire time. The ideas they present have been talked about in science for a long time. They just aren't accurate though. So why bother with them until they can be proven to be accurate when they haven't been yet?
[QUOTE=SuperDuperScoot;44610761]I don't entirely subscribe to the Big Bang theory either.. The general concept, yes, but I feel like there's something we're missing. Something just doesn't add up in my head. Perhaps I'm just not very smart.
I have a somewhat twisted idea/theory of the Big Bang and the creation of the universe as a whole.
I like to think the universe and everything could have been created by a God or a set of Gods.
However, if that was true, they would've been the ones to formulate the Big Bang, and never touched anything afterwards, except to watch over and judge when beings die, hence why science can't prove the existence of any higher deities, because they don't do anything any human can perceive or ever detect.
I like to think that the human concept of religion and a God(s) are just a funny coincidence if the above were true, or maybe people with heightened senses detected a larger presence in the universe, or just a bunch of people tripping balls. Could be either. v:v:v
On that note.. Christianity(?) says God created the heavens and the Earth within 7 days.
.. What is time to God? What is a human construct to their creator? Nothing. 7 days to a higher being could be millions and millions of years to a Human's perception and measurement of time.
I mean, I don't 100% follow or believe in my own theory here, it just sounds really interesting to me, but...
I wouldn't put it out of the realm of all possibility. I mean it [I]kind of[/I] makes sense, doesn't it?
Or am I just fucking crazy?
Really I just wish science and religion could co-exist more than it does right now. I guess this "theory" is a manifest of that wish.[/QUOTE]
That's the thing, though. Science and religion can coexist. There's nothing about the Big Bang, evolution, global warming, or anything else that disproves the existence of an omnipresent, omniscient, extradimensional creator being.
That said, there's also nothing that reinforces it. You can't find qualitative evidence for God.
We can, however, explain our reality through the means we have to experience it. That's science.
There's a term for what you're describing, actually. It's not a new idea. You've got Divine Nonintervention, Theistic Evolution, and a little bit of Deistic Agnosticism.
It's important to realize, as well, that the Pentateuch, or the first five books of Moses, was supposedly given to Moses in a series of visions culminating in a year spent on a mountain top in a stormcloud. If there's any validity to any of it, it's probably pretty heavily abridged. Have you ever tried to write down your dreams? But, honestly, most of the modern church has started to look at the Genesis account of creation (By the way, there are more of these. Something like sixteen different books on creation, most of them thrown out at the Council of Laodicea. At one point, the 60th canon, the entire Old Testament was thrown out.) as a metaphorical account that the people could understand and the establishment of a creator deity. There are only a few sects that still consider it a literal interpretation, like the Baptists.
[QUOTE=Chonch;44609424]Aaaaaaaaaaactually the Big Bang is just a popular cosmological model--a theory, in theory--which, although extremely satisfying in its explanation of the formation of our universe, is not intended to be treated as scientific fact with the relatively scant amount of evidence it has now.
Blindly accepting every suggestion a textbook throws at you is just as bad as doing the same with a religious text.[/QUOTE]
you're one of those people who don't know what the word 'theory' really entails, aren't you?
[QUOTE=Teracotta;44609627]Just another circle jerk. The Big Bang is as much a theory as anything else out there. Until it's proven completely I really don't think we should market it as the truth and tell it to children as fact. It's like science Sunday school. Let people think what they want.[/QUOTE]
pls
[QUOTE=Native Hunter;44610547]because they trash on anyone who thinks diffrently than them[/QUOTE]
Religious people need to calmly and objectively analyze what is known for fact about our universe.
Nobody important cares if people believe in god, nobody cares if people believe that god made the big bang happen, what is known for certain however is that the big bang [I]did happen[/I], and it happened 13 billion years ago (IIRC). It's honestly not hard to sit down and figure out how your religious beliefs fit into what we definitively know is reality.
[QUOTE=bisousbisous;44610318]These threads always bring out the idiots who think they're so high and mighty for being atheist.[/QUOTE]
to be honest it seems to attract people like you better
[QUOTE=bisousbisous;44610318]These threads always bring out the idiots who think they're so high and mighty for being atheist.[/QUOTE]
i hold a large amount of contempt for anyone who automatically assigns science to atheism
Honestly if I was misinformed as fuck and someone came to me and told me the world was probably created in a giant cosmic fart I'd wonder what the guy's been smoking.
[QUOTE=Tetsmega;44609421]Proof?[/QUOTE]
I'm posting from Hell right now, if that helps.
[QUOTE=Moustacheman;44611948]I'm posting from Hell right now, if that helps.[/QUOTE]
come on america isn't [I]that[/I] bad
I, too, am doubtful that that tv show happened.
[QUOTE=bisousbisous;44610318]These threads always bring out the idiots who think they're so high and mighty for being atheist.[/QUOTE]
What is an antonym/opposite of the "euphoric" meme? It's home is in a reply to your post.
[QUOTE=WillerinV1.02;44612039]come on america isn't [I]that[/I] bad[/QUOTE]
Flagdog just shows me as posting from America. The flag of Hell is so unholy even looking at a tiny sprite of it will melt your fucking eyes and give birth to an eldritch demon.
[QUOTE=Wii60;44609192]i dont know why people dont believe in a big bang, from a christian perspective.
it makes perfect sense for god to just create a big bang to give him a giant sandbox to play around with (which eventually led to the creation of earth and humanity.)
i mean even the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_interpretations_of_the_Big_Bang_theory#Christianity"]catholic church supports the big bang.[/URL][/QUOTE]
You're right. The church agrees that the creation story in the bible isn't really a day by day account of how the universe was created, but rather testament to God's greatness because all things are by his will.
I wish more Christians would accept this, the idea that God flipped on the light switch and let things play out freely from there.
[QUOTE=Moustacheman;44612094]Flagdog just shows me as posting from America. The flag of Hell is so unholy even looking at a tiny sprite of it will melt your fucking eyes and give birth to an eldritch demon.[/QUOTE]
So what does a fictional setting which is a product of a belief based on zero empirical evidence have to do with this thread again?
[QUOTE=Paul McCartney;44609172]Doesn't matter what you think, science is true. That's what's great about it.[/QUOTE]
I can tell you're not a scientist.
[editline]22nd April 2014[/editline]
Damn, you really rustled my jimmies. Understand this - [B]science is a method[/B], not some static, objective "truth".
In science there is no truth. Only different, changeable theories for understanding and predicting our world. You can improve these theories ad infinitum but it will never be "truth".
[QUOTE=CyberHawk;44612433]I can tell you're not a scientist.
[editline]22nd April 2014[/editline]
Damn, you really rustled my jimmies. Understand this - [B]science is a method[/B], not some static, objective "truth".
In science there is no real, absolute truth. Only different, changeable theories for understanding and predicting our world. You can improve these theories ad infinitum but it will never be "truth".[/QUOTE]
The answers that science provides are as close to truth as anyone can or ever will get, so might as well call them that.
I don't think anyone's implying it's static. I'm pretty sure it is objective by definition, though.
[QUOTE=Daniel Smith;44609197]Everyone knows the universe was created in 7 days by an old giant white dude who lives on top of clouds[/QUOTE]
u know wot i'm a good Christian and i've read the bible and i have to agree with u there Daniel
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