Riddle Me This, Richard Dawkins

sceptical guy wrote:

Right. # 1 I’m setting aside the Bible or any other Holy Book in trying to think about God. I’m sticking to science – in particular a science whihc tries to reason about the origins fo the cosmos. Dawkins sticks to evolution, coz it’s what he feels nice about, and uses our current knowledge of how long ago life evolved, and the process of evolution, to lay to waste the creation myths of Genesis and other stories abounding in the Near East/Asia Minor region a couple of thousand years and more past. Big deal! The Roman Catholic Church rejects the Creation myth as unscientific, too. Dawkins, though, has the limited mind of the True Believer. The only real believers in God the Creator are the dogmatic fundamentalists for whom every word of the Bible is literal truth. You can have so much fun with these people by pointing out problems from word 1. There are actually two creation stories in Genesis (as any Catholic Commentary will tell you) and the four gospel writers can’t even agree on the inscription written on the Cross on which Jesus hung and died. And that’s for starters. In short the fundies are easy meat, Aunt Sallies on which to prove your cleverness, and Dawkins can’t really handle any others. He’s a DNA man, not much more when it comes to being authoritative.. So – let’s start with science. #2 in a minute, and then I’ll wait for responses.

What evidence is there that ” the catholic church rejects the creation myth”?  I can assure you the catholic church has done no such thing and still firmly subscribes to the stupidity of the garden of eden.

You state” the only believers of God the creator are biblical fundamentalists” which is nonsense as many religions other than christianity believe in that concept including those in the Christian church who accept the bible shouldn’t be taken literally but still subscribe to God being the ultimate creator.

sceptical guy wrote:

#2 – I am not a scientist, not a cosmologist, but the following is simple enough for even me to grasp after reading a small number of books (by eminent scientists like Jeremiah Ostriker’s Heart of Darkness) Scientists have been making striking discoveries about the origins of the cosmos for the last century, since Einstein discovered that space and time are elusive – they both curve, which is hard for our minds to handle at first. For many years there were two competing ideas about the nature of our cosmose whihc pointed to different origins. There was the Big Bang – the idea that the cosmos had a beginning, and that space and time had a beginning. Before that point – a millisecond (that’s my way of putting it, it was infinitesimally shorter than a millisecond) – there was no space and no time. This is something we cannot imagine, but we can believe it. The other was called the Steady State theory. This was the idea that the cosmos is as it has always been and always will be. There is no beginning in space or time – there has always been space and time, and there will be no end of space or time. The Church took a firm stand on this (I’m not talking about the fundies). In the early 1950s, Pope Pius XII stated that the Church held to the Big Bang theory, and that atheists held to the Steady State approach. This should be qualified. You have no need to be a Christian to hold to the first. But it is more true to say that the Big Bang was much more compatible with a theist approach to God, and Steady State with an atheist approach. Since the 1970s, it has been accepted that the Big Bang is the likely event, since the Steady State approach has been disproved by astrophysicists*. As with any scientific discussion, nothing is settled. A lot of scientists are now thinking in terms of a possible big bounce – where our cosmos started with a big bang, will reach a limit to expansion, and then will return to its origins before space and time, only to re-start the big Bang. In short there may have been any number of Big bangs before the one which created out cosmos. But the Big Bounce, whatever the outcome of scientific work in the future, doesn’t get away from a possibility so startling that we can’t get our heads around it. Time and Space came into existence at a point – prior to that point there was no time, no space. I use the term prior here to express what cannot be expressed. prior doesn’t mean ‘before’, as the was no before. So atheist arguments that God doesn’t exist have been trumped by Christians (as long ago at least as Aquinas, but actually St John in the New Testament and even Job). God doesn’t exist, say Christians – God couldn’t exist. God created existence. That last sentence doesn’t end discussion, but let’s leave it there for the moment. *there is a very good history of teh conflict between Big Bang and Steady State called Cosmology and Controversy, by Helge Kragh I have this, but I’ve not read it yet, but it seems to be accepted as the definitive account.

I don’t accept that the big bang theory implies there is a bigger likelyhood of a “God” or “creator” as you are using newtonian implications of cause and effect contrary to  widely held view that something can come from nothing as I explained on the other thread involving quantum physics. It’s far too simplistic to simply say that because many people are taking an educated guess which is what the big bang theory is responsible for , ( the emphasis on theory) it means there must be a God.   

Let me put a counter argument… how does science support the creator argument ? Please don’t say the big bang theory as that doesn’t support anything.

None of you posting on this thread (me included) will ever know the answer to what you’re discussing …. so my question is, is there any point in discussing something to which there is no ‘proven’ answer to and never will be in any of our lifetimes and long beyond ?

If so, mind telling me what said point is, besides each of you giving their own point of view on the subject and what influence does it actually have on your lives, considering you even have one?

draculina wrote:

Freesia wrote:

If so, mind telling me what said point is, besides each of you giving their own point of view on the subject and what influence does it actually have on your lives, considering you even have one?

Who knows what influence it might have on my life, someone might come up with an argument as to why God exists that I believe, and I convert. Or I might simply learn something about physics that I didn’t before.

I doubt what anyone says on these boards is actually going to influence you on your choice of converting, as it has all been said before….but hey, anything is possible.

As for physics…happy learning