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I'm an athiest/agnostic because it makes sense. I'm always up for debate, learning etc. and if someone can prove to me the existence of a g-d, then I'm all for it. I study religion and absolutely love it, but do not believe in it myself.
Law 1:
"Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms"
or
" ΣΔH+ΔW=0"
Law 2:
"Entropy in a closed system tends to increase"
I have no idea where you think Haaziq broke the laws of thermodynamics.
If the universe existed in an eternal state of heat loss, or entropy, the would be no heat left. That's one of the reason scientists want so badly to find an original cause because the universe cannot have existed for ever. The universe is moving outward from a single point, these aren't christian astrophysicists and astonomers that are saying this, it is pretty much commonly accepted knowledge in the 'space' community.
In this physical universe that we occupy, matter nor energy cannot be created nor can it be destroyed. I agree with that. I' am positing that an outside source that isn't physical was the first cause. I might add that evolutionary scientist, or whoever looks at the origins of the universe from a naturalistic point of view, are still looking for the cause of the singularity. Everything in the universe is preceeded by other matierials and precipitating factors that bring about it's existence, all the way back to this point. Why don't you think it is a comonly accepted idea amonst scientists that the universe existed forever? It is among some, I understand. But lots of poeple who have lots of knowledge in this area, that are way smarter than me (I can't speak for you, maybe you are one of those scientists) cannot espouse the idea of an eternal universe for the very reason of entropy. There are some ideas of parrallel universes spinning around, touching and exploding creating a new universe, etc. I don't know a tons about these and form my understanding it's all theoretical anyways.
We see entropy everywhere. But on our planet things seem to have moved in the opposite direction, with the evolution of the species into higher forms, etc., scientists say that when there is an outside source of energy, like the sun, this can happen. We get the energy from the sun's entropy, putting energy back into our planet that is otherwise following entropy. I can understand that; it makes sense. This begs the question, however, where the sun got it's energy from. It certainly hasn't been buring forever and there are estimates based on it's surrent consumption as to when it will expire.
I'm certainly not a scientist and Im studying to be a nurse, for cryin' out loud, but it seems that maybe the 2nd law proves the non-eternity of matter. Within this system that is fnite, matter cannot be created or destroyed.
I.... That's one of the reason scientists want so badly to find an original cause because the universe cannot have existed for ever.
tic, you continue to raise some interesting points, but you do tend to default, I think, to the common Christian concept that since we don't (yet) understand something, therefore, QED, it must be an all-powerful being that just "popped us" into existance. (PS: we scientists don't "want so badly" to find anything. We're just inquisitive and relentless. else we wouldn't be scientists. Most Christian scientists, it seems to me, want desperately to find "proof" of a God. Sorry guys, I think you'll be forever frustrated. Of course many of us atheist scientists have been repeatedly insulted for so long, and so perhaps subliminally we would love to find an inescapable set of facts supporting our side of the discussion. That's also pointless because you wouldn't believe even inescapable proof in any case.)
The obvious next question, though, would then seem to be, if you MUST HAVE a super-spohisticated Creator to explain changing entropy (why else would the system run backwards, you say...), then I'd have to ask, who created the creator. If extreme complexity requires a Creator, then your uber-god MUST have ergo been created himself from an even more sophisticated soul. It stands to reason, no? You use partial logic to support Part One of the Intelligent Design argument, but then abandon logic in its next obvious and required step.
I know, that's an old one, but many of us theoretical atheists patiently await the answer. Deferring to the bible with arm waving and faith-based pronouncements doesn't get the job done, and the obvious flaw in Christian thinking on this particular point is left there, fully illuminated but sidestepped. Again, I'd say Christians think they are being logical but it's an alternate LOGIC to the one science uses because it allows the whole system to be tossed on convenience if and when required. As Spock would say, "That, Captain, is illogical!"
I also defer once again to the fact that my cat, Dottie, though wise beyond her years, just can't grasp how a simple VCR works. Lord knows I've tried to explain it to her, in the simplest terms. You know, the full magneto-electronic mumbo-jumbo part of it, logical though it may be to us, it's designers. But since she doesn't / can't get it (not enough brain cells hooked up in the right way I suppose) does that make it's existance a miracle? The result of a god creation? Or just simply beyond her reasoning ability. Just as "infinity" or backwards-running entropy equations, or "The Big Bang" or any other postulated theory is apparently well beyond our mind's ability. We scientists openly admit it; so far we can only try to postulate how it might have happened, given what we can now observe (expanding universe, particles whizzing by our planet, etc.) For now at least: doesn't mean, necessarily, that we'll NEVER get it. Maybe that's true, but meantime I hate to see the cessation of scientific inquiry because some placard-carrying street demonstrator demagogs outside the Large Hadron Collider say we shouldn't even look! It will insult God!
Bah Humbug!
Let's keep religion where it needs and was designed to be: an ethical and spiritual support system for those who feel the need for it, who need guidelines laid out to direct and validate their behavior. (Well, of course history also clearly shows it to be otherwise; a power- and fear-mongering control structure. See "Catholic Church et al... but I digress).
Literal biblical interpretations are, logically, in the realm of true wackiness (two each of every dinosaur, penquin or flea on the Ark? Really? Lemme off!) as with angels on the head of a pin, I post a question for Christian philosophers: How many T-Rexs can dance on the fordeck of a medium-sized home-built cruise ship? And couldn't those pesky carnivorous beasts, in the best spirit of Rodney King, all just get along? Bad T-Rex! Stop eating all the, well... everything!
Perhaps Christians could stop insulting non-believers, or stop suggesting that to live without a specific god is to live unethically, without any spirituality, and to be, essentially, an evil person.
I retire, evil mind and all, to my recliner.
Last edited by rifleman; 10-16-2008 at 10:53 AM..
Reason: typos
If the universe existed in an eternal state of heat loss, or entropy, the would be no heat left. That's one of the reason scientists want so badly to find an original cause because the universe cannot have existed for ever. The universe is moving outward from a single point, these aren't christian astrophysicists and astonomers that are saying this, it is pretty much commonly accepted knowledge in the 'space' community.
That's ok, no one is disputing that there was a big bang. What we don't know however is what went on those billionths of a second from creation and it's really hard to speculate anything because, mathematically speaking, the laws of physics lose meaning at singularities. As far as we know, the big bang is the equivalent to a huge "reset" button coming from an infinite number of cycles or an outside god began it all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
In this physical universe that we occupy, matter nor energy cannot be created nor can it be destroyed.
Careful now, matter and energy are equivalent so it doesn't make sense for you to be speaking about them separately
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
I agree with that. I' am positing that an outside source that isn't physical was the first cause. I might add that evolutionary scientist, or whoever looks at the origins of the universe from a naturalistic point of view, are still looking for the cause of the singularity. Everything in the universe is preceeded by other matierials and precipitating factors that bring about it's existence, all the way back to this point. Why don't you think it is a comonly accepted idea amonst scientists that the universe existed forever? It is among some, I understand. But lots of poeple who have lots of knowledge in this area, that are way smarter than me (I can't speak for you, maybe you are one of those scientists) cannot espouse the idea of an eternal universe for the very reason of entropy.
There are some ideas of parrallel universes spinning around, touching and exploding creating a new universe, etc. I don't know a tons about these and form my understanding it's all theoretical anyways.
You need to make really important distinctions when it comes to the current view of the universe.
The currently accepted model is the dynamic model of the universe, it goes as far back as the big bang but stops at 1x10^-34 seconds. This is opposed to the static model of the universe in which the universe does not expand, the later model has been rejected for quite a while now.
Now if you look at the dynamic model, what happened before those few scraps of time from where they big bang theory begins, is still not know. There are various hypothes(ii?) proposed by different astronomers and others. Even the cyclic hypothesis of the universe has different variations with things like m-branes and other scary sounding words. On some you get things like an expansion in each cycle to go around the entropy problem. On others I can't really tell how they avoid it because past the feyman diagram, I don't have a clue as to what quantum chromodynamics says.
But as you say though, it's all meta-physical speculation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
We see entropy everywhere. But on our planet things seem to have moved in the opposite direction, with the evolution of the species into higher forms, etc., scientists say that when there is an outside source of energy, like the sun, this can happen. We get the energy from the sun's entropy, putting energy back into our planet that is otherwise following entropy. I can understand that; it makes sense. This begs the question, however, where the sun got it's energy from. It certainly hasn't been buring forever and there are estimates based on it's surrent consumption as to when it will expire.
Yep, our sun is about 4.5 billion years and before it reaches 10, it will expand and consume the earth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
I'm certainly not a scientist and Im studying to be a nurse, for cryin' out loud, but it seems that maybe the 2nd law proves the non-eternity of matter. Within this system that is fnite, matter cannot be created or destroyed.
Sure no dispute but the 2nd law of thermodynamics isn't being broken.
Ok, first off, I am in no way bashing atheists! To tell the truth, I am not so sure if I believe in God? I am curious as to why you don't.
Well, I have a long line of reasons - but I'll stick to the high points...
1) I think that religions offer pretty much the same thing - an answer to questions. We look at the stars and wonder where our place is, where we come from, so on and so forth. Religion offers a pretty cut and dry (as far as simplicity goes) answer. which leads to the next one...
2) We fight traffic, bills and the like to spend the majority of our lives fighting with our fellow denizens over the scraps that the man leaves us and in short it sucks. I have talked to many Christians and many have told me "this just can't be all there is". Which leads to number three...
3) We just don't want to accept that we spend the very best part of our lives playing someone else' game for them - so we need an afterlife. and here's where my biggest complaint comes from. With god in control, armed with a perfect plan and an afterlife for all of us what do we really need to do to make the world a better place? and what *DO* we really do to make anything better? close to nothing if you ask me, we just accept a few bucks to buy pseudo happiness and a big TV and we just don't care, we put all those starving kids somewhere in the back of our minds, we put give wars a ten minute attention span while we see it on the news and that's about it. IMO religion and its afterlife remove almost all of our incentive to clean up the mess WE made.
Also, religion has to have a society to thrive on. The society will change, thus the religion has to either change and become something different that what it started as, or it can remain the same and chain the society to ideas that are several thousand years old (which I think is the reason for so many sects of religion - some want to adapt, some want to stay the same and they all supposedly worship the same god, but can't agree on much of anything).
that's pretty much the high points, I'm sure I can think of a few more...
coosjuaquin
Thanks for clarifying me on my space talk. I don't know a ton about space, nobody does, I guess. Hence the whole final frontier thing. So, we can get to 10x whatever seconds after the bang, but that's as far as we can? So here are some wuestions I have that you may know better than I.
What evidence led the physicists or whoever to propose a multiverse? Was it because they couldn't see past trillionths of a second to the exact origin? I'm wondering what led them to these scary words and incredible ideas.
Sencondly, a point that you may or may not agree with. No one can see the origin of the universe. I'll speak for myself, when i say I believe in an uncaused cause, like God; an idea seen as a huge stretch and 'blind faith' to the agnostic or atheist. On the other hand you have agnostics and atheists, not all, mind you, who seem to make an equally huge stretch and leap of belief to come up with ideas like the multiverse and other crazy hypotheses in order to figure out our origins, of which, we have about as much physical evidence as we do for God. But, you seem to have your finger on the pulse of this origins thing, so maybe there is evidence I don't know about. So let me know what you think.
Thanks for clarifying me on my space talk. I don't know a ton about space, nobody does, I guess. Hence the whole final frontier thing. So, we can get to 10x whatever seconds after the bang, but that's as far as we can?
Pretty much. When you get below that scale, general relativity and Quantum mechanics don't mix and anywhere below that starts giving us infinite values for the density of the universe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
So here are some wuestions I have that you may know better than I.
What evidence led the physicists or whoever to propose a multiverse? Was it because they couldn't see past trillionths of a second to the exact origin? I'm wondering what led them to these scary words and incredible ideas.
From my understanding, there are quite a few different reasons which can all be narrowed down to trying to find a theory that unifies all fundamental forces of nature(gravity,electromagnetism, strong nuclear and weak nuclear).
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
Sencondly, a point that you may or may not agree with. No one can see the origin of the universe. I'll speak for myself, when i say I believe in an uncaused cause, like God; an idea seen as a huge stretch and 'blind faith' to the agnostic or atheist.
Sure, it's not the job of an atheist to prove there isn't a god.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
On the other hand you have agnostics and atheists, not all, mind you, who seem to make an equally huge stretch and leap of belief to come up with ideas like the multiverse and other crazy hypotheses in order to figure out our origins, of which, we have about as much physical evidence as we do for God.
Pretty much though these people(mind you, there are religious people in this group as well) are all taken more seriously within the scientific community than those who use the uncaused cause argument.
I think the reason for that is the approach they take. While you may be happy saying that god created the big bang and just leaving it like that, these people see it differently. To them it's not a matter of whether there is a god or not. It's just a matter of there being things we don't know and then going about to try and understand them. The amount of mathematics they use is mindboggling, they create insanely complex concepts but thats not where it ends. From the theories they make predictions and then try to find evidence from them(a la LHC).
I mean really, even if our origins can be narrowed down to a series of branes colliding with each other, you can always say that god created the branes but what does that answer? How did god do it? Why did god do it?
The more we know, the more there is to ask and if we stop asking questions then what are the millions of scientists worldwide meant to do? Sit around flicking their thumbs?
Quote:
Originally Posted by tic_constant
But, you seem to have your finger on the pulse of this origins thing, so maybe there is evidence I don't know about. So let me know what you think.
What do you call a stick without calling it a stick?
If you can understand the reasons behind the question then you can see why everyday I'm more and more confident that we will never know everything(Hint:Not because we can't know but rather because there is always something else.).
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Why an atheist indeed... it's logical!
