Topic: Holes in scientific theory (Read 8003 times)

meiting · Reply #50 on: January 04, 2004, 12:13:27 AM

My two cents. This post will take me far longer than I have to write, so I'll either do multiple, or just let the window sit here and return to it later

First things first: God and science CAN coexist. it's only the Christian god and science that cannot. Remember that a being that is technologically advanced enough will seem to be a god-like creature, and we don't really know enough about the universe to know whether or not technology might exist for something to be created out of nothing (which I'll get to in the next paragraph). Yes, current scientific theories say that conservation of energy/mass means that nothing can be created or destroyed, but that doesn't really mean much. Every theory/law that we have is based on observation and human calculations, and we really don't KNOW that they will stand up in all circumstances. So it is really possible that a god created the universe, but for that to be true certain things have to have happened in order.

I'll detail the big bang theory here a bit more for those of you who didn't pay attention in school

The big bang comes from what we can a singularity. Now this gets a little tricky, because we don't know what happens in a singularity. Conventional laws of physics hold true until extreme circumstances, and anything that people tell you about what happens inside a star is already only based on theory. But theory can't touch a singularity because the number "infinity" is involved, and then all of it breaks down. Quantum theory holds up slightly better, but it does not apply to anything larger than a proton so it doesn't really help us that much. Now, a singularity is also what we call a Black Hole, which I'm sure all of you have heard of. The conventional understanding of a black hole is that it's a lot of stuff packed into the smallest space possible, and that anything goes in can't come out. It's actually not quite true. Apparently, some black holes are LOSING mass. and that leads to interesting side-issues that I'm not going to get into. In reality, we have absolutely no idea what happens inside a blackhole. So the original big bang is kinda like a black hole, where all this matter is squished into this point - except that this theory has major holes and doesn't really work, at least can't work without us knowing a bit more about singularities. Because what goes into a singularity can't come back out again, so how does the big bang occur? There are other theories on how big bang occured, but there is none that completely solve every problem. One interesting conjecture is that matter CAN be created out of nothing, and basically the big bang was the only time when all the circumstances were met (and we have no idea what they are) and hence this lotta matter was spat out of it, creating this universe. If that is true, then there could very well be a god who created the universe.

Now, regarding matter, what came out of the big bang was not exactly hydrogen, or even particles. Only afterwards did the stuff coalesce into quarks etc. So if common theory of the big bang is correct, and that there could have been or was another universe before this one, it could have had completely different atoms, possibly even a completely different set of laws of physics.

Personally, i'm not a christian, and I find the bible to be childish and funny. Let me explain myself (and therefore adding my two cents). For those of you who has read Dan Brown's Da Vinci code, bear with me. For those of you who has not, I highly recommend it. The writing is not that great, the book is so-so, but the research he did was superb. One has to take what he writes with a grain of salt, because he is trying to make a point and will likely discard certain bits of information as he sees fit, especially in a novel. Indepedent research, however, will show that what he said about the dead-sea scrolls are correct - they contain a couple other gospels that were written. The story appears to be that when the Church was putting together the new testament, there was a call for people to write gospels, and compete to be put into the bible. And something like 53 gospels were written, which meant that almost 50 gospels were not included in the bible. And the Church went ahead and destroyed all of them, except that a few made it to us through the dead sea scrolls. The fact that you have all of these people worshipping the bible and its stories, and that they were obviously only versions of what happened (The church had specific criteria for selection I'm sure - one of which was that the gospels HAD to make Jesus look like the son of god, and not all of them that were written believed so.), just makes me laugh.

Anyway, that's my two cents. And that took erm, an hour and a half, with 5 Scarlatti sonatas between the first two paragraphs, and first movement of Chopin #2 concerto during the final one.

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