How old do you believe the Earth is?

[Kulindahr]

As to what caused the Big Bang, I have no trouble admitting that I HAVEN'T THE SLIGHTEST CLUE.

Neither does anyone else.

The current scientific opinion on this issue involves terms like quantum theory, string theory, alternate universes, M-theory, branes, wormholes, dark matter, dark energy etc.

If you want to be picky, all the efforts to reach to the other side of the Big Bang are metaphysics -- however much they may use mathematics, they're nothing but fancy speculation. So properly speaking there is no scientific opinion on the matter: until something is proposed that is testable, it's metaphysics.

 

[Kulindahr]

Scientist have advance beyond the Big Bang. I know it is hard for a lot to wrap their brain around. But, the Big Bang is yesterday's news and has been for awhile. But, of course with science like it is in public schools you can't really expect people to realize their are theories beyond that of the big bang.

Thew Big Bang is still the standard model for the formation of the universe. The only "advancement" has been in refinements such as inflation.

 

[KingofFaeries]

I say the earth hasn't even been formed yet

 

[Kulindahr]

The current scientific opinion on this issue involves terms like quantum theory, string theory, alternate universes, M-theory, branes, wormholes, dark matter, dark energy etc. a lot of this thought has been around for about 3,000. In some ways they are just catching up to what the Buddhist have know for a very long time. But, that is neither here or there. Today's theories will be yesterday's news, and the question why will remain long after each of us is dead. But, the question why will always remain.

Most of that is mathematical metaphysics, not science.

Dark matter and dark energy have been hypothesized to fill gaps in what we know about the universe as it is; they play a part in the Big Bang only because if they really exist now, they came from it.

 

[bankside]

The question itself encourages people to make the mistake that this topic is subject to personal opinion. The universe has its own age, planets too, and one's beliefs about the matter makes no difference to what that age actually is.

It would be better to ask "Were you aware that the earth is most likely more than 4.5 billion years old?"

It would even be acceptable to ask "Do you approve of the fact that the earth is almost certainly 4.5 billion years old?" or "Would you like it to be newer?"

This question is like asking people whether they would have voted for the law of gravity; it doesn't work that way.

 

[bankside]

OMG Venus spent too much time alone at the bar. Should've had some beauty sleep. And Mars, whoring around so much in its youth that it burnt out like a 1980's club kid from New York. So much potential, wasted.

 

[TX-Beau]

...The problem with the young-earthers is that they don't grasp the nature of the Old Testament...

Not to nitpick here Kuli, and certainly not to defend creationists, but that’s pretty much the charge they level at Christians like you.

Creationism is an article of faith, all the science in the world isn’t going to budge them because the belief in creationism is a banner belief, used to rally the faithful, which is its real purpose, a litmus to discern the righteous from the heretic. I think of it this way. It’s like the Sioux practice of counting coup. It’s certainly not rational to try and get close enough to your enemy to touch them and leave them unharmed, but the glory of achieving this increases everyone’s estimation of your bravery and standing.

Creationists pretty much revel in the amount of scientific opposition to the irrational belief in creationism, and in their own community, standing firm in the face of all evidence to the contrary produces much the same effect.

 

[travers]

Allow me to follow up my original thread with an opinion on the universe......

The age of the universe is estimated to be around 13/14 billion years, when EVERYTHING including time and space began with the Big Bang. after which the universe has been continually and increasingly expanding.

As to what caused the Big Bang, I have no trouble admitting that I HAVEN'T THE SLIGHTEST CLUE.

There are things that are beyond mankind's current understanding. I'm sure that in 50 years / 100 years scientists will have a much clearer frame of reference.

Just like we know today more than Victorian scientists did, who knew more than Renaissance scientists did.

The current scientific opinion on this issue involves terms like quantum theory, string theory, alternate universes, M-theory, branes, wormholes, dark matter, dark energy etc.

I'm afraid that all these terms rather go over my head.

Anyone would need to have a degree in advanced particle physics / mathematics to understand all this, and I am no exception.

But I trust that as the decades pass, this issue will steadily become clearer.

Not to geek out, but the big bang is NOT the beginning of the universe. Rather, it is the beginning of the universe as we know it. I think this is an incredibly important point that is not emphasized nearly enough in education.

When educators tell their students that the universe definitively started 13-14 billion years ago during the big bang, students are lead to make all sorts of religious conclusions based on old flavor of the day science. (The world is round? Blasphemy! It's flat!).

What should be emphasized is not what we do "know", but what we don't know. Does the universe have a beginning? A first cause? Science does not know. Whether or not god(s) exist, science cannot prove. Science is soberingly very limited and restricted. Yet that doesn't make science weak or inferior to religion, au contraire, it makes science the most powerful tool man has ever conceived.

 

[Kulindahr]

Not to nitpick here Kuli, and certainly not to defend creationists, but that’s pretty much the charge they level at Christians like you.

Well, when some of them can read the ancient Hebrew, and demonstrate it by sight-translating a randomly selected page from the ancient Babylonian rabbis, I'll be willing to listen to any argument they might have showing me why the grammar of the first chapter of Genesis is exceptional. Until then....

I ran into the age of the earth problem merely from "within" before I ever dabbled in the difficulty with evolution or anything. It started when my sister, bored one weekend of house-sitting, tried to duplicate Bishop Ussher's chronology. The short of it was that she couldn't, because not only don't we have instructions on how to count the years of a king's reign (Is it a whole year if he takes the throne in the fall? for example), but because there are places where nothing is anchored to counting in the first place.
She had rolls of paper running across the floor, and I decided to try to make things worse for her (mean big brother). I started looking at things on her chart and asking annoying questions, but my breakthrough came when I looked at Genesis One, and asked, "Hey -- 'the earth was without form, and void'... how long?" With a funny look on her face that her siblings know means "significant new thoughts in process" she said absently, "Keep reading". When I got to the first "day" announcement, she stopped me -- and asked me to help her throw away all the chart.
See, even when you're just working in English, and don't know what kind of literature you're dealing with, there is no way to tell from Genesis how old the earth is, because the opening of Genesis 1 gives no time frame at all. There's no indication (taking it sort of literally here) how long the earth "was without form, and void", how long the waters covered the face of the earth, how long the Spirit of God hovered/meditated over the face of the deep....

Creationism is an article of faith, all the science in the world isn’t going to budge them because the belief in creationism is a banner belief, used to rally the faithful, which is its real purpose, a litmus to discern the righteous from the heretic. I think of it this way. It’s like the Sioux practice of counting coup. It’s certainly not rational to try and get close enough to your enemy to touch them and leave them unharmed, but the glory of achieving this increases everyone’s estimation of your bravery and standing.

Creationism may be an article of faith, but it isn't one that comes from the Bible. I've smashed the "young earth" views of numerous Christians with just what I said above, no science. I only bring science in to ask, since the Bible doesn't say the earth is young, and science says it isn't, why try to make the Bible say something it doesn't?
With more educated Christians, I explain that Genesis 1 isn't meant to be a play-by-play summary, anyway; it's a type of literature called a royal chronicle, with certain characteristics, and keeping accurate track of time isn't one of them. Even then, I never mention science to back my point, I only reference what good Christian scholars and archaeologists have learned about Genesis.

I like a poster that hung briefly on the wall in a Christian study center by OSU in Corvallis, Oregon. It had Genesis 1:1 written out... with addenda; it started out like this:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Big Bang -- solar system coalesces -- planets form

And the earth was without form, and void.
molten ball -- meteoric bombardment -- volcanic activity


etc....

Creationists pretty much revel in the amount of scientific opposition to the irrational belief in creationism, and in their own community, standing firm in the face of all evidence to the contrary produces much the same effect.

Yeah, well they should all go back to school and learn Hebrew, for starters...

 

[Kulindahr]

Not to geek out, but the big bang is NOT the beginning of the universe. Rather, it is the beginning of the universe as we know it. I think this is an incredibly important point that is not emphasized nearly enough in education.

Having just finished a book by L. Susskind, one of the originators of string theory, I have to jump in here and comment that you're still saying too much, because you're implying that something 'preceeded' the Big Bang. We don't know that.

 

[bankside]

Not to geek out, but the big bang is NOT the beginning of the universe. Rather, it is the beginning of the universe as we know it. I think this is an incredibly important point that is not emphasized nearly enough in education.

I'm not sure that is right either. The universe may have had no precedent at all before the big bang. Since we can't probe that "time" with any measurements it is hard to say whether anything was here or not.

As far as I understand the best-developed scientific theories about the big bang, it is the event beyond which nothing matters. In other words, you can assume any arbitrary configuration you happen to prefer for what happened "before" the big bang, but it doesn't make a difference to the way things are today. For any set of "prior" configurations which may be postulated, the current universe is an equiprobable outcome for all members of that set.

Any configuration you might happen to favour could have happened before the big bang. The nature of a big bang is like the "cosmic reset button." Anything that happened before it is both immeasurable and irrelevant, because the big bang event totally reconfigured all of existence and the rules of existence. (Or maybe it just configured existence for the first time) Any influence or legacy of anything that might have existed before the event is utterly lost. (or, strangely and improbably, the big bang might not have touched a thing and the current rules of physics might be in complete continuity with what might have proceeded; while this seems incredibly unlikely, since we can never know what preceded the big bang, if anything, it remains a possibility.)

 

[ChickenGuy]

travers - I agree. The Universe, as we perceive it, is not the full story, because something like the Big Bang does not just happen spontaneously.

But to try to grasp what exactly was there given there was no space and no time is kind of mind-boggling.

I think of it as the Universe being the painting, but we are unaware and oblivious of the canvas.

Or, as I read in a Stephen Hawking book, the Universe is like a bubble of air floating in the middle of an 'ocean' of 'something'.

So there is something 'in the background' that we don't know about. I feel that the scientific concepts I mentioned (quantum theory, string theory, alternate universes, M-theory, branes, wormholes, dark matter, dark energy) will have some sort of link to it all.

But it may be many, many, years before we figure it all out....

 

[Kulindahr]

I'm not sure that is right either. The universe may have had no precedent at all before the big bang. Since we can't probe that "time" with any measurements it is hard to say whether anything was here or not.

As far as I understand the best-developed scientific theories about the big bang, it is the event beyond which nothing matters. In other words, you can assume any arbitrary configuration you happen to prefer for what happened "before" the big bang, but it doesn't make a difference to the way things are today. For any set of "prior" configurations which may be postulated, the current universe is an equiprobable outcome for all members of that set.

Any configuration you might happen to favour could have happened before the big bang. The nature of a big bang is like the "cosmic reset button." Anything that happened before it is both immeasurable and irrelevant, because the big bang event totally reconfigured all of existence and the rules of existence. (Or maybe it just configured existence for the first time) Any influence or legacy of anything that might have existed before the event is utterly lost. (or, strangely and improbably, the big bang might not have touched a thing and the current rules of physics might be in complete continuity with what might have proceeded; while this seems incredibly unlikely, since we can never know what preceded the big bang, if anything, it remains a possibility.)

The solid math for the Big Bang for a long, long time had time beginning along with everything else, as part of space-time. Some folks didn't like that, and shuffled things a little to allow for time before -- but as Susskind notes in his book I just finished, that's conjecture, not even really theory.

Actually, you can't assume any arbitrary configuration, because it it was there before the Bing Bang, then it had to have characteristics which would (1) produce a Bing Bang, and (2) produce the kind of Big Bang that produced us.

Better than a "reset button" would be a phase change, where what came before gave rise logically to what came after, but where the rules of "before" can't be deduced from "after".

travers - I agree. The Universe, as we perceive it, is not the full story, because something like the Big Bang does not just happen spontaneously.

Susskind would call that something like an anthropic prejudice. The problem is that we have no way to know what the bigger megaverse (if there is one) contains, because we can't see back past our Big Bang, and we can't see "sideways", because the only direction we have to look is into the past.
Big Bangs (and little, and medium ones) may happen all the time -- or ours may be the only one ever. We have no way of knowing.

But to try to grasp what exactly was there given there was no space and no time is kind of mind-boggling.

I think of it as the Universe being the painting, but we are unaware and oblivious of the canvas.

String theory says the universe and the canvas are the same thing. It's just that the canvas began as something with r=0, and has been getting BIG. As it cooled and spread, pictures appeared.

Or, as I read in a Stephen Hawking book, the Universe is like a bubble of air floating in the middle of an 'ocean' of 'something'.

That's a different illustration: it's picturing the universe (ours) as one of many universes that has "condensed" out of a field of probabilities (the ocean). In great expanses of the field, nothing at all condenses; in some places, things condense out but get dissolved right back.

That illustration doesn't really convey what they're into at the moment -- I think that was from before Hawking finally conceded the issue on black holes eating information, which really changed the scenery.

So there is something 'in the background' that we don't know about. I feel that the scientific concepts I mentioned (quantum theory, string theory, alternate universes, M-theory, branes, wormholes, dark matter, dark energy) will have some sort of link to it all.

There may be something in the background; we can't know.
Oh, we can say somethings, like, if there is a background, there are certain ranges of characteristics it can't have, or has to have, in order to have given forth our universe. That's really what string/M theory are delving into -- dragging quantum theory and all the rest along -- trying to get a handle on what is and isn't possible out there.
Assuming, of course, that any math we can do 'in here' has any meaning to the 'out there'.

But it may be many, many, years before we figure it all out....

If we ever do. As more than one Noel Prize winner in the sciences has held, it's a rather astonishing arrogance to think that the human brain has the capacity to grasp all the principles of existence.

 

[bankside]

Actually, you can't assume any arbitrary configuration, because it it was there before the Bing Bang, then it had to have characteristics which would (1) produce a Bing Bang, and (2) produce the kind of Big Bang that produced us.

Better than a "reset button" would be a phase change, where what came before gave rise logically to what came after, but where the rules of "before" can't be deduced from "after".

I'm not sure you can constrain "preceding states" to only those things which could give rise to a big bang. I suspect you are inclined to do so because you feel the need to find somewhere to work god into the equation. But that doesn't mean it is good physics.

I'm pretty confident in what I've read that if no information comes through the big bang, then no information comes through the big bang; we literally can't make any inferences about "beyond the bang" any more than we can know the position and energy of a particle with infinite precision at exactly the same moment. Maybe something utterly not conducive to big-banging was extant; then it banged anyway.

 

[Kulindahr]

I'm not sure you can constrain "preceding states" to only those things which could give rise to a big bang. I suspect you are inclined to do so because you feel the need to find somewhere to work god into the equation. But that doesn't mean it is good physics.

I'm inclined to because there's no choice. If we were "candle people" living in a candle flame, trying to figure out how our flame came to be, we'd be constrained to looking at situation that could give rise to a flame.

That's what string theorists are about these days, trying to get a picture of the 'Landscape' (as Susskind calls it) of possibilities. Since they haven't thrown causation entirely out the window, the only places in the landscape that are considered 'real' (meaning their possibility can't be denied) are those whose existence could flow from some conditions which could (and apparently did) produce us.

I'm pretty confident in what I've read that if no information comes through the big bang, then no information comes through the big bang; we literally can't make any inferences about "beyond the bang" any more than we can know the position and energy of a particle with infinite precision at exactly the same moment. Maybe something utterly not conducive to big-banging was extant; then it banged anyway.

Heh -- they're still arguing that. Susskind says that information did come through the Big Bang: it's the cosmic background radiation (I don't quite follow him on that; it looks to me like he's making that same set of radiation do/be three different things, and I missed any argument that they're actually the same). But it's like the information that comes back out of a black hole: we drop the Library of Congress onto the event horizon, and what we get back is all the letters and pixels rearranged in a pattern for which there are as many possible keys as there are Planck masses in the black hole (including the new addition). So, yeah, it's information in the physics sense, but not in any human sense.

By "conducive" I mean what a physicist would mean: something that contains the possibility of an event. It doesn't have to be likely, just possible. And even with that wide definition, they're finding that there are a lot of things in the 'Landscape' (of all possible universes) that just aren't possible.

Interestingly, among those who ardently hope that in the end we find out that this universe is the only one that was possible, or at least that it is a solution for which the constants we observe had to be what they are, are a number of atheists, who are opposed by some who are Christians, Jews, and such who would be disappointed if this turns out to be the only possible universe.
So you have to be careful assuming that someone's view of a thing is guided by his beliefs -- because you don't know which way those beliefs are going to take him.

Me, I don't care how many universes God made possible or even made; I just want to know how He did it. Assuming beforehand anything about that blocks answering the question.

 

[travers]

As far as I understand the best-developed scientific theories about the big bang, it is the event beyond which nothing matters. In other words, you can assume any arbitrary configuration you happen to prefer for what happened "before" the big bang, but it doesn't make a difference to the way things are today. For any set of "prior" configurations which may be postulated, the current universe is an equiprobable outcome for all members of that set.

You are alluding to the argument that the big bang represents a singularity (which is wrong), which means all physical values are set to infinity. If that is the case, then it indeed does not matter what came "before." Generally speaking, when you have singularities in physics, it means something is wrong with your model because the math becomes untennable and unpredictable. If the singularity is the entire universe, this is tantamount to saying "god exists."

The solid math for the Big Bang for a long, long time had time beginning along with everything else, as part of space-time. Some folks didn't like that, and shuffled things a little to allow for time before -- but as Susskind notes in his book I just finished, that's conjecture, not even really theory.

The math for the Big Bang is NOT solid. In fact, the math of general relativity (GR) breaking down is the entire reason that the Big Bang was labeled as the beginning of the universe. GR simply could not penetrate it. Of course, now that we have better maths, scientists are beginning to see the Big Bang as "nothing special" in the big, big sense. The old theories about the big bang are simply not correct. They are based on old physical models which are now known as incomplete.

Susskind would call that something like an anthropic prejudice. The problem is that we have no way to know what the bigger megaverse (if there is one) contains, because we can't see back past our Big Bang, and we can't see "sideways", because the only direction we have to look is into the past.

The reason it's stated that we can't "see" past the big bang because it represents a singularity, which is simply not the case, if quantum cosmology is anywhere near on track.

I don't mean offense, but I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about. Also, your usage of "universe" is very loose, and in the very least, isn't the whole picture of what is scientifically/religiously/philosophically interesting. I'll admit that next generation math is completely untennable to me, (and so I'm restricted to talking about ideas, which is less appealing to me than talking about math.) However, I can tell you that GR, the model used to conclude the big bang to be the beginning of the universe, is flawed. Further, all candidate theories necessarily incorporate existence outside of the classical 4 dimensional model of GR.

There is actually very little evidence for and a great deal of evidence against the big bang being the beginning of the "universe" (and by universe, I mean existence/EVERYTHING). As far as I know, there is only one conjecture for this: the Hartle-Hawking "No Boundary" proposal in which the universe comes into existence uncaused. And I'm pretty sure Christians don't like it and hate Hawking anyway, for obvious reasons.

 

[bankside]

travers, yes; that is the theory I understand best from what I've read. I am happy to note it is still a matter of contention and that the "no boundary" proposal is still in the running. I have no idea how a singularity is an indicator of divinity. I don't see how that follows.

Kulindahr, it is usually not hard to impute religious reasoning to your posts; it is the base you believe to be solid. It would be more surprising if you advanced an argument which was at odds with your understanding of christianity. As far as imputing religious reasoning generally, the only thing I have to be careful of is pointing it out when I see it.

I would also suggest that atheists are very well prepared for the emotion of disappointment that might occur should a particular atheist's pet theory about the nature of the big bang be disproved. All of the intellectual effort invested in a model, swept away with new evidence! Yaaaay! I don't have to be careful in that regard because I am happy to drift one way or the other, depending on the evidence.

Me, I don't care how many universes God made possible or even made; I just want to know how He did it. Assuming beforehand anything about that blocks answering the question.

And how about not assuming beforehand that there was a god who could do any of that? You are a bundle of contradictions that you know the problem with that kind of assumption - you state it in the second sentence - yet you still cling to it.

That would be the reason I brought it forward in the first place; you are not looking for evidence of what the big bang might represent, you are looking for evidence only of what a proper christian big bang would entail. They may be one in the same, but intellectual honesty requires the distinction be made.

 

[Kulindahr]

You are alluding to the argument that the big bang represents a singularity (which is wrong), which means all physical values are set to infinity. If that is the case, then it indeed does not matter what came "before." Generally speaking, when you have singularities in physics, it means something is wrong with your model because the math becomes untennable and unpredictable. If the singularity is the entire universe, this is tantamount to saying "god exists."

Susskind talks about singularities in his book and notes that not all physicists agree that the appearance of a singularity means that "all physical values are set to infinity"; it may merely mean that they cannot be described with the particular math being used.

I don't see the logic to your statement which I put in bold/blue, at all.

The math for the Big Bang is NOT solid. In fact, the math of general relativity (GR) breaking down is the entire reason that the Big Bang was labeled as the beginning of the universe. GR simply could not penetrate it. Of course, now that we have better maths, scientists are beginning to see the Big Bang as "nothing special" in the big, big sense. The old theories about the big bang are simply not correct. They are based on old physical models which are now known as incomplete.

If there were no solid math for the Big Bang, theoretical physicists would have tossed it as a theory.

The reason it's stated that we can't "see" past the big bang because it represents a singularity, which is simply not the case, if quantum cosmology is anywhere near on track.

Not at all what Susskind was talking about: he meas that we cannot see past the big bang because the speed of light can't get us observations even back to the beginning of our own universe; the universe is broader than it could be crossed at the speed of light in the amount of time it's been here (unless you want to conjecture with the guys who think that the speed of light changed, and there was no inflationary phase...).

I don't mean offense, but I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about. Also, your usage of "universe" is very loose, and in the very least, isn't the whole picture of what is scientifically/religiously/philosophically interesting. I'll admit that next generation math is completely untennable to me, (and so I'm restricted to talking about ideas, which is less appealing to me than talking about math.) However, I can tell you that GR, the model used to conclude the big bang to be the beginning of the universe, is flawed. Further, all candidate theories necessarily incorporate existence outside of the classical 4 dimensional model of GR.

Unless I've been a little sloppy, I use "universe" to mean what resulted from our Big Bang and anything like that; i.e. a 'pocket universe' in the 'Landscape' of string theory.

I may have to review Susskind (I read the book rather quickly), but I don't recall him referring to General Relativity anywhere as being flawed, and that's the sort of thing he definitely would have done. He did discuss it with reference to the nine dimensions necessary to make string theory work (or which are indicated to exist by string theory, depending on your perspective), and I got the impression that GR works just fine in nine dimensions as well.

There is actually very little evidence for and a great deal of evidence against the big bang being the beginning of the "universe" (and by universe, I mean existence/EVERYTHING). As far as I know, there is only one conjecture for this: the Hartle-Hawking "No Boundary" proposal in which the universe comes into existence uncaused. And I'm pretty sure Christians don't like it and hate Hawking anyway, for obvious reasons.

Most Christians I know love Hawking, especially his one offhand remark that the Big Bang could be described as "there wasn't even nothing, then it began to spin". That's very akin to a remark by another Nobel Prize winner that the Big Bang got started when God put His finger out where there wasn't a where and made it one.

At any rate, Susskind does indicate that the math of string theory still holds the possibility that this is indeed the only universe in the Landscape, which he would find immensely disappointing were it true, while that's what some of his colleagues hope for.

 

[bankside]

Susskind talks about singularities in his book and notes that not all physicists agree that the appearance of a singularity means that "all physical values are set to infinity"; it may merely mean that they cannot be described with the particular math being used.

I don't see the logic to your statement which I put in bold/blue, at all.

travers, when kulindahr and i agree it is a significant moment in history.

If there were no solid math for the Big Bang, theoretical physicists would have tossed it as a theory.

Not at all what Susskind was talking about: he meas that we cannot see past the big bang because the speed of light can't get us observations even back to the beginning of our own universe; the universe is broader than it could be crossed at the speed of light in the amount of time it's been here (unless you want to conjecture with the guys who think that the speed of light changed, and there was no inflationary phase...).



Unless I've been a little sloppy, I use "universe" to mean what resulted from our Big Bang and anything like that; i.e. a 'pocket universe' in the 'Landscape' of string theory.

I may have to review Susskind (I read the book rather quickly), but I don't recall him referring to General Relativity anywhere as being flawed, and that's the sort of thing he definitely would have done. He did discuss it with reference to the nine dimensions necessary to make string theory work (or which are indicated to exist by string theory, depending on your perspective), and I got the impression that GR works just fine in nine dimensions as well.



Most Christians I know love Hawking, especially his one offhand remark that the Big Bang could be described as "there wasn't even nothing, then it began to spin". That's very akin to a remark by another Nobel Prize winner that the Big Bang got started when God put His finger out where there wasn't a where and made it one.

there is absolutely no comparison between your nobel prize winner and what Hawking said there. Hawking's remark isn't just dissimilar, it precludes your interpretation.

At any rate, Susskind does indicate that the math of string theory still holds the possibility that this is indeed the only universe in the Landscape, which he would find immensely disappointing were it true, while that's what some of his colleagues hope for.

And we're back to disagreeing over basic terms. You take the universe to be a particular thing which exists in a greater context. What do you call that larger, all-consuming context if not the universe? I'm in need of a noun here, in order to make this conversation productive.

 

[Kulindahr]

travers, yes; that is the theory I understand best from what I've read. I am happy to note it is still a matter of contention and that the "no boundary" proposal is still in the running. I have no idea how a singularity is an indicator of divinity. I don't see how that follows.

I've never quite figured out what the quantum background radiation is, if the "no boundary" idea is true.

Kulindahr, it is usually not hard to impute religious reasoning to your posts; it is the base you believe to be solid. It would be more surprising if you advanced an argument which was at odds with your understanding of christianity. As far as imputing religious reasoning generally, the only thing I have to be careful of is pointing it out when I see it.

I'd say you have to be more careful of presuming what is and what is not religious influence. You see it where it isn't present.

And how about not assuming beforehand that there was a god who could do any of that? You are a bundle of contradictions that you know the problem with that kind of assumption - you state it in the second sentence - yet you still cling to it.

What assumption?
And what contradictions? If I make any assumptions beforehand about how God did something, that gets in the way of finding out how He did -- that's not a contradiction, it's just common sense.

That would be the reason I brought it forward in the first place; you are not looking for evidence of what the big bang might represent, you are looking for evidence only of what a proper christian big bang would entail. They may be one in the same, but intellectual honesty requires the distinction be made.

What's a "proper christian big bang"?

I can tell you: it's a fantasy you're inventing because of some prejudice. The only "proper Christian Big Bang" is the Big Bang that really occurred.
That's the same as a "proper Christian" anything -- a proper Christian history would be one that tells history as it was; a proper Christian biology would be one that describes biology as it really is; a proper Christian chemistry would be one that explains how chemicals really do interact.