How did you come to that conclusion? Well God can't be human-like as humans can't create the Universe. That's what makes him a higher being. He created humans for his own purpose. What part of the earth is humanized other than humans?

Ska comes to that conclusion because you keep using "he" to describe God as if you are assigning him a gender. Only humans have genders.

Well, not just gender, but 'he' usually refers to a living organism that adopts a thought pattern of some sort. You don't call a rock, or a cloud 'he'. So 'he' makes the assumption that we're speaking of a conscious singular being. Which, if studies of the earth and universe are correct, is unlikely.

:banghead:

Whatever man, God is 'it' then. Happy?

The Universe is created by God, God is not the Universe.

What do you mean "motive?" The God in Judeo-Christianity is not physical matter, nor contains physical matter, God is a perfect Being that transcends Space and Time.

The big bang is the being of the physical universe, "birth" and "existence" are used to describe a sentient being, the universe is not a sentient being.

Not to the Hindus.

I mean this: God created the universe... why? What is the motive to the universe's creation? If we can assume there's one singular force that's more powerful than everything dictating everything, then what's it's purpose?

On what grounds do you make that assumption?

It's all how you look at it, God is not "dictating" everything - that's your assumption. God created human beings and they have free will.

I made the assumption that the big bang is the being of the physical universe based on The Big Bang Theory.

How I look at it, assuming there's a God is an act of redundancy, entirely.

I know it's 100 percent probable that these types of threads will result in debates about whether there's a god, but this thread is about the Big Bang theory, if I'm not mistaken. We have plenty of "is there a god" threads.
I shouldn't need to do something as drastic as editing the thread title and adding "NO GOD DISCUSSIONS", but I think there are enough people in this forum who like to have scientific discussions without people bringing god into it and starting a never-ending debate about it.

So if we can, please, let's stay on topic.

as yet again, I reiterate that the universe just appeared suddenly out of nothing and not the Big Bang

-The universe appeared out of nothing.

-The universe has ALWAYS been, as time is simply a creation by man.

-God created everything.

All of these theories are equally as likely, and equally as far fetched.

Time is a human invention for sure, but the events that it uses as a measure are very real. If the universe has no beginning or end it is infinite, which I have no objection to, though I wont accept it as unquestionable proof since I've never bothered to try and find any evidence, and I probably wouldn't understand any evidence I might find.

Anyway, the whole idea of God is ridiculous to me. And I was just talking about occam's razor before, so I don't see the point of saying God isn't made of matter or whatever. If he/she/it exists in any way shape or form he/she/it is part of the universe and therefore could not have created it.

Calling the universe itself god/God/gods is also kind of moronic to me. It serves no purpose. And even if there were a god/God/gods which had an intent, it still wouldn't make me care about the intent of said force/entity, because the motives would hold no more weight than my own in any way other than the power that enforces them (a power for which there is no evidence).

But evidence very much does point to a universe that had a "beginning", and thus time that had a "beginning". While both scenarios (infinite vs non-infinite) are possible, they are not equally probable.

I thought that science pointed to a sequence of events that had a beginning? I know that we can only trace the history of the universe to the big bang, but that isn't to say that nothing happened before it... only that all events afterward were the result of it and that there is no trace of history from before it.

All of that is really over my head but let me know if I'm far off.

Thank you! This thread is not meant for theological debate. By all means create a separate thread but I wanted this thread to be based upon scientific observations and that is what I want to read about regarding other peoples opinions.

It does as far as I know, I'm not sure where we disagree

Speculating about "before" the big bang is purely philosophical and ascientific, but that's not to say I don't agree with everything you've said so far.

OT: "Big bang" can mean several things. For a cosmologist, it's a theoretical framework which claims that the Universe was hotter and denser in the past. If you push the predictions to the edge, they predict a singularity, or a single point of infinitely dense matter. We don't know anything about this singularity because we know our laws of physics fail before reaching it. Some speculative theories try to go beyond it and predict things like a bounce, the creation of our Universe or some counterintuitive phenomenons.

For a layman, "big bang" is this singularity itself, considered as the creation of the Universe. There was nothing and BANG the Universe was created. But then there are a lot of strange questions that are the crux of cosmology, and as I said before, they are purely philosophical. What was before the Big Bang? Nothing? How can we create something out of nothing? Did time exist before the Big Bang? What does "before" mean then? (The term "big bang" was invented by Fred Hoyle who didn't believe in this theory and wanted to mock it). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sit here and argue about these questions because we don't have any evidence one way or the other. You can change many details and go much deeper depending on how philosophical you are. But what we really know is that there was a period of exponential inflation once, and afterwards the temperature was big enough to explain nucleosynthesis. This is more than a single theory, it's a big paradigm that's very very unlikely to be disproved.

According to some studies I've googled, about 95% of cosmologists agree that the standard model of big bang cosmology is the most plausible way to describe the origins of our universe.

happy stumbling:



Spoiler:

The universe and everything in the universe is a fractal black hole, the universe experiences itself by drawing smaller versions of itself into itself, this is what is known as gravity.

This information crosses the event horizon and then radiates outward, which is known as electricity.

As information travels along this continuous, circular path, it changes. This makes the circle a coil, and results in a universe that is eternal, always different, always the same, in which it is possible to have the illusion of a beginning and end, defined by crossing the event horizon.

The entire scientific enterprise has, until now, been defined by dissection, which is actually explosion. The idea behind dissecting something is that we will understand it better by reducing it to its components. What we are really doing is taking a cohesive unity and blowing it up so that the next fractal level of cohesive unities is revealed. We continue to do this, hoping to get to a bottom level so that we can work our way up, but we never get there.

Explosion is directly related to electromagnetism, whereas implosion is related to gravity. This is why we do not have a good scientific understanding of gravity. The method of implosion is that of meditation, which is the other side of science which many still discard. The method of implosion is to dive deeper and deeper into your own personal subjective experience of reality, and to experience it on subtler and subtler levels. Only this method can reveal that the universe is an infinite fractal in which everything is a manifestation of one consciousness.

This inward journey strengthens the gravitational field which makes a person 'deep' or 'heavy' and as the gravitational field strengthens so does the electromagnetic field, which is the 'shadow' of the gravitational field, and so this person becomes more magnetic, draws others to them into molecular structures, and becomes able to start an organization or even a religion. This is also why people like Jesus or Buddha are often depicted with very powerful and colorful auras. They are essentially supernovas.

Because everything is a constantly-changing fractal, the same patterns play out on every 'level' of reality but their outward appearance is always different. Hence, if we understand the patterns of personal growth and social evolution we can understand the pattern of everything in the universe, the tao.

Ultimately, this leads to the realization that all intellectual knowing is pointless because the flow of the universe cannot be stopped and everything that happens is a part of it. Since this flow will take us exactly where we want to go, there is nothing we have to do, and focusing too much on understanding the flow will actually cause us suffering, because ultimately the flow is incomprehensible.

The ultimate illusion of analysis is that there is an in-flow, gravity, and an out-flow, electricity, but this is just the clearest, paradoxical manifestation of mind: really, there is only flow.

Is this something you personally buy into?

I know that a big bang in my pants is capable of creating life.

I don't exist.

/thread.

:laughing:

It doesn't work when you do it in your pants (you need one of those girl things)

I thought the big bang was the creation of multiple planets via two large masses colliding together. But anyway, just as Cardboard Adolescent says there is no real beginning and no real end to the universe and trying to find a clear beginning or end is impossible.

CA, when I read text like what you posted, I notice that it's so vaguely formulated that it's largely up to the observer to try and give it meaning. He says the universe is a black hole with an event horizon, yet for what we know based on observation, our universe is expanding. The collective mass in the universe has no event horizon; light and matter is still travelling outwards from the big bang. If the universe is a black hole, where is it? And where is it's event horizon? He also freely mixes abstract ideas of spirituality with real macrophysics, suggesting that people who go on inward journeys become denser and have more gravity than others and that an example of such a person is Jesus. If people are stars, then these are equivalent of supernovas and this makes people gravitate towards them and makes them capable of f.ex starting religions.

If getting more enlightened also makes you heavier, then that sounds like a testable hypothesis to me, but I doubt you'd find evidence for it if you looked :p: All in all, it looks like complete bollocks formulated by someone arrogant enough to believe his vague and uneducated hypothesis about how the universe works - devoid of real substance or observational evidence and littered with the abuse of scientific jargon - is something worth teaching people. Believing it would be an excercise in stupidity as it would teach you to accept outlandish claims from a very poor source.

I was more agreeing with the what he said about the universe being like a spiral/coil.

If you imagine an explosion and the ensuing debris being blown away from it, how do you propose all that ends up in a spiral?

edit :

I assume you believe in the Big Bang :p:

Ha! I'm getting a bit mixed up. Forget what I said, not exactly thinking clearly right now.

I'll admit that I am confused about the "nothing begins, nothing ends" part of the theory. As well as the "universe, within a universe". If these are true, then wouldn't it be true that not only would there always be something bigger in existence to find if you looked long enough, but the same could be said for smaller objects within both our world and the universe as a whole. If the entity that we call "the universe" is just a smaller object within a larger one, why couldn't there be another smaller "universe" within what we are existing in at this very moment? If we are even existing at all.

Furthermore, if any of this is true, then why are we still calling things that we theorize are not alone in making up "the universe", universe's themselves?

Fractals means it's made up of pieces that resemble the whole. I assume he believes these fractals, micro universes which resemble our own, to be atoms or even smaller particles.

You should really trip more, dude.

Huh? The theory says everything is a point. The notion of bigger/smaller is an illusion created by perspective. Points all the way down, points all the way up. Every point is the same size, because all points are sizeless. That's true equality. You and I might be different configurations of points, but we're still both points, and hence we are one. Be happy.

So you're saying that the planet we call earth, and the marble sitting on my desk are both points, and there is no difference between them outside of what I perceive?

As for us all being one? How does that work? In our state of flesh, I could stab you and kill you (as you could to me) leaving one of us behind, the other to go on. We are two separate entities.

On a larger scale, thousands of people are killed, die, or hurt everyday. None of which affect me personally whatsoever, how can "we all be one" if this is the case?

The more I understand this logic the less I agree with it. Or maybe I don't understand it, maybe it doesn't understand me. But people are separate entities, in truth. While you can perceive that we are all one, all connected, I simply don't believe it's so. I could jump off a bridge right after posting this, and so long as you weren't directly under the point off which I jumped, it wouldn't affect you in the slightest. In fact, you'd have no idea I was dead unless another separate human entity were to convey that information to you.

It's a great mind bender to think about if you're in a happy place (i.e. a drug induced nirvana) but in cold dead reality, there's little to support it.

My theory is that we are infinitely flawed mortal creatures, who were lucky enough to be given a chance at life on this rock that just happened to be almost perfect to sustain our being. Yet, we are so ignorant to that fact that we have constantly seeked meaning to it all via religion, science, and philosophy and failed. We will continue to fail, the answer is all around us. We are here, we exist in our current place, state, and time. Nothing more.

As far as how it all started? That's a whole other beast. The Big Bang Theory is pretty hard to believe, how can something appear from nothingness. There has to be a base for the existence of anything. There has to be a foundation to everything that exists out there somewhere, maybe it's here, maybe it's everywhere, maybe we're in the ****ing matrix. I sure as hell believe that more than there being some all seeing god somewhere in a place called heaven judging us for everything we do. **** that idea.

As we know there is a force out there that scientists just cannot fathom out and that is 'dark matter'. It is invisible and makes up around 75% of our universe.

The Big Bang apparently sprang from 'nothing' but we know that there is no such thing as 'nothing'. Even in an airless vacuum activity exists so what if the 'dark energy' has always been here before the big bang and actually facilitated the process? Have scientists looked into this at all?

They are looking into dark matter Lee (and dark energy too)...but at the end of the day, the only thing most of the qualified folk (astrophysicists and mathematicians and the like) who are looking into it are doing is attempting to squeeze in their findings with already established theories, and thus aren't getting a complete picture.

I sometimes think the human mind is too insular for its own good, and not completely unlike our current understanding of the universe: we observe certain guiding principles and formulate cause-and-effect in regards to brain function...and yet consciousness itself remains a black box that becomes relegated to a realm of subjectivity and mystery even among those who claim to have all the answers.

On top of all this, even fundamental phenomena such as gravity are changing radically as far as definition goes (in terms of what it really is), with a common consensus emerging that gravity itself doesn't even exist here in the material universe we live in. Rather, it is a force being projected from a reality beyond our own. And the implications of something like that once you bring in matter and energy into the equation...how's that for a mindfuck?

Strange times we are living in guys...strange times indeed.

Without getting too deep as it's late for me, you raise many salient points and because we are using 'human' understanding regarding the universe we still may be well out of whack regarding our understanding of things.

Just because the maths and equations we use to explain things doesn't automatically mean that they are correct thus far. We are probably miles out in our calculations for many things.

The only thing that is becoming apparent if we use our human deductions is that the universe follows many rigid patterns and codes and this has really scrambled my brain. It has started me to question a lot of things as if there is a whole design behind everything and surely it is not all just chance happenings.

Maybe there is someone punching code into a computer and seeing what is successful or not and it's all simulation. Damn I am getting too deep now!

What are you looking for?

I find the question of 'where did it all begin?' terrifying. I cannot even begin to fathom the concept of 'nothingness', but surely, at some point, that's all there must have been, right?

Uh, thinking about it is like staring into oblivion.

What if "where did it all start?" is the wrong question?

There's no such thing as nothing. That's why. ;)

No. It doesn't make sense to think of a time of "nothingness" before the Big Bang. Speaking in the most generic sense, the phrase "Big Bang" has two different meanings. On the one hand, it means that thing that happened fourteen billion years ago. On the other, it means event one, the start of all things.

It makes no sense, obviously, to talk about the event that came before event one. If there was an event before the one we currently believe to have been the first one, then that would be the first one. There is no before when you're talking about that-which-preceded-all.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that there were events that occurred before that-thing-fourteen-billion-years-ago. It's just that we have no evidence of them. We have no reason to believe that they exist. Everything we've ever seen adds up to the conclusion that the thing that happened fourteen billion years ago was event one. Is it necessarily true that that's the case? No. But it's not reasonable to believe otherwise unless and until some kind of evidence to that effect makes itself known.