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This is a great link from Scientific American Magazine and is written by Lawrence M. Krauss.
United States adults are less willing to accept the BIG BANG and EVOLUTION as factual than the adults in most other industrialized nations.
When presented with the statement "Human beings as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals"......just 45% of Adult Americans responded "Yes". Contrast this affirmitive number with Japan...78%; Europe...70%; China...69% and South Korea...64%.
Only 33% of U.S. adults agree that the Universe began with an initial explosion i.e. The Big Bang.
According to a 2009 PEW Survey 31% of Adult Americans agree that "humans and all living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time". So much for dog and other animal selective breeding, plant cross pollination and bacteria evolving to resist Penicillin and many other antibiotics.
Here is the link to this fascinating article and other informative links relating to this thread.
I have observed that somehow religious people "wall off" the part of their brains that believes religious teachings from the logical, critical part. They prevent what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (or the discomfort the brain feels when believing mutually exclusive things) by simply never "thinking" about the religious ideas.
But I was shocked to find that when forced to choose between the two, Americans tend to side with the religious teachings.
Apparently we haven't evolved as much as I had hoped!
Most people I know believe God created human beings. However they falter a bit when they are asked if man was created from a lump of clay and woman from a man's rib. They are more accepting of a mixing of religious and scientific views of life; of God as enabler rather than director.
Let's face it, whether you are religious or scientific, there are far more questions about life's origins than there have been answers provided in the holy books or scientific research.
And nothing is ever written in stone. The Big Bang is a theory that could be overturned by another scientific hypothesis. Creation is a story of a specific faith and can be overturned by a person's or society's acceptance of a different faith.
most people i know believe god created human beings. However they falter a bit when they are asked if man was created from a lump of clay and woman from a man's rib. They are more accepting of a mixing of religious and scientific views of life; of god as enabler rather than director.
Let's face it, whether you are religious or scientific, there are far more questions about life's origins than there have been answers provided in the holy books or scientific research.
And nothing is ever written in stone. The big bang is a theory that could be overturned by another scientific hypothesis. Creation is a story of a specific faith and can be overturned by a person's or society's acceptance of a different faith.
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i for one do not believe in the big bang theory.. i think in terms of a chain reaction created by a very ancient intelligent life form that was messing around with particle smashing science to figure out how our the universe works LHC.?? well curiosity killed the cat, poof they were gone.!! they triggered off a chain reaction with there experiment.insted of one big bang theory, you know like everything was compressed into a particle smaller than a quark exploding and ejecting all that mater out into space in equal directions.. that just don't cut it for me.. this ancient intelligent life form set off the god particle the particle that was the failsafe trigger created by the most advanced life force in this sector of space, in the space time continuum. it's kinda like nano technology, all mater existed it just was transformed into a particle separating chain reaction thats still expanding till this day 13.75 billion years later. and some day it will peter out in an infinite amount of space.. and after enough time passes all particles will cling back together starting the universe all over again...... well we are on the way to setting off the same chain reaction with the LHC..hadron collider.. but the big differece between the ancient aliens and us, is i don't think we will ever get close to setting off the doomsday chain reaction. we will kill ourselves out way befor we ever get close to smashing the god particle..
i know it sounds kinda heavy. it's just a theory.?? and so is the big bang there's no difinitive proof it's just the most excepted theory on the shelf right now
That's right. Of course, we have to remember that 'The Big Bang' is a bit of an over -simplification just as 'Missing Link' is an over - simplification of evolution theory.
That said, there is a much more complete record and hands - on support of evolution theory than there is for the Big bang. I point out that I use 'Evolution' in the correct Biological sense of the development of life from when it first began, rather than how the universe, stars and planets camer about. It is also pointed out that Abiogenesis is not part of 'Evolution theory' though I suspect, if they can ever show complex fossil molecules coming together into a fossil proto DNA, Evolution theory will put that on page 1 of the textbooks.
I just say that there is so much evidence for evolution that Bible - literalism if just foolishness, no matter how much money is poured into it.
The origins of universe are more debatable. Nonthing coming from nothing now looks more possible than a complex fully aware uinvisible cosmic intelligence having always existed, but -who really knows?
Nobody. Which is why agnosticism is the only logical knowledge - position and, as I keeep saying, bocause one cannot logically believe in what one does not know, non - belief is the only logical belief position.
Most people I know believe God created human beings. However they falter a bit when they are asked if man was created from a lump of clay and woman from a man's rib. They are more accepting of a mixing of religious and scientific views of life; of God as enabler rather than director.
Let's face it, whether you are religious or scientific, there are far more questions about life's origins than there have been answers provided in the holy books or scientific research.
And nothing is ever written in stone. The Big Bang is a theory that could be overturned by another scientific hypothesis. Creation is a story of a specific faith and can be overturned by a person's or society's acceptance of a different faith.
AS much as the theory of Electromagnetism is correct,( we are never 100% sure of all the minute details of any scientific theory), I assure you that The BIG BANG is essentially correct as we have direct evidence from the WMAP(Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) survey of what the Universe actually looked like when the four fundamental forces of nature seperated from one another(379,000 years after the Big Bang). Information before that time must be ascertained from Particle Accelerators etc. because light was still bound up within the other four fundamental forces.
We know that out theory of electromagnetism is essentially correct; otherwise we would not have electricity nor computers to be having this cyber discourse. Science is of course fluid and our theories are always going to be refined...no scientific principle says it is written in stone; however there are fundamental principles which obviously we are correct about; otherwise much of our technology would not be functional.
I have no problem with Faith itself, but when it denies evolution for instance or tells me the Earth is only thousands of years old, instead of Billions, then we run into problems as this information that is faith based is simply incorrect.
There's some correlation, but the more religious nations of Europe (Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Ireland to an increasingly lesser extent) I think do significantly better than us too. In fact I seem to recall even Filipinos do better.
The US is one of the few developed nations (outside of maybe Northern Ireland, which isn't a nation in itself) that has a strong conservative Protestant element. Greece doesn't, Malta doesn't, Poland maybe does a little but not much, and Cyprus I think barely has any such thing. So the dynamic is different here besides just being religious.
That being said America is still a very inventive and technologically advanced society. It's not clear to me that people who do menial jobs or even teach Spanish actually do need to understand or accept even basic biology or cosmology. (Granted they really should know math and probably some Newtonian physics) It would be good if they did, but I'm not sure how it effects their ability to do their job or that it makes them "dangerous." There seems to have been some perfectly good engineers who believe in some of the most hare-brained Creationist ideas. So I'm not sure I see the danger as such.
It's like on some level I think educated Americans should know the name of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the Prime Minister of Britain, but a sizable minority to small majority don't know either one. It's unfortunate, but I don't know I can call it "dangerous" so long as the people who should know those things do.
I have observed that somehow religious people "wall off" the part of their brains that believes religious teachings from the logical, critical part. They prevent what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (or the discomfort the brain feels when believing mutually exclusive things) by simply never "thinking" about the religious ideas.
But I was shocked to find that when forced to choose between the two, Americans tend to side with the religious teachings.
Apparently we haven't evolved as much as I had hoped!
THANKYOU and I agree Science never states there is no God; only truth as far as we can ascertain about how our Universe came into existence and how it functions. I too was astounded by the percentages, but this helps explain why the students and adults of the U.S.A. are so far behind the rest of the industrialized world in the fields of Mathematics and Science..
i for one do not believe in the big bang theory.. i think in terms of a chain reaction created by a very ancient intelligent life form that was messing around with particle smashing science to figure out how our the universe works LHC.?? well curiosity killed the cat, poof they were gone.!! they triggered off a chain reaction with there experiment.insted of one big bang theory, you know like everything was compressed into a particle smaller than a quark exploding and ejecting all that mater out into space in equal directions.. that just don't cut it for me.. this ancient intelligent life form set off the god particle the particle that was the failsafe trigger created by the most advanced life force in this sector of space, in the space time continuum. it's kinda like nano technology, all mater existed it just was transformed into a particle separating chain reaction thats still expanding till this day 13.75 billion years later. and some day it will peter out in an infinite amount of space.. and after enough time passes all particles will cling back together starting the universe all over again...... well we are on the way to setting off the same chain reaction with the LHC..hadron collider.. but the big differece between the ancient aliens and us, is i don't think we will ever get close to setting off the doomsday chain reaction. we will kill ourselves out way befor we ever get close to smashing the god particle..
i know it sounds kinda heavy. it's just a theory.?? and so is the big bang there's no difinitive proof it's just the most excepted theory on the shelf right now
Your assertions are essentially incorrect and based on my scientific knowledge simply absurd; since Dark Energy is now causing the Universe to accelerate in it's expansion and will NEVER collapse back in on itself as once postulated.
This is the "beauty" of Science/Mathematics....it seeks the truth based on observations NOT personal conjectures as you are doing. And when Science is wrong, which it sometimes is, it refines it's theories and discards nonfactual information based on someone's pet/personal beliefs.
Also I see NO scientific links to back up your post/assertions>>>>>And see the previous posts on the BIG BANG...it's a fact as sure as you expect your keyboard to function as you use a computer and the internet to have this conversation.
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