OMFG, creationism? It had to be you, Haplo.

I think we need a thread where we can debate the rules of this thread. :88)

This reminds of the last time I was in the US and I saw Knowing (Nicolas Cage movie) on the TV.
/FACEPALM

Okay teenager mode is over. I'm not religious but Neal's pov seems sound to me. So yeah, what he said.

Huh, I didn't know that the theory explaining change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next addressed the formation of the Moon.

Argh! I want to walk away from this thread but I... just... can't...

Failing that I want to construct a rational argument but.... FFS.... how can one be expected to be rational against such... such... UGHHH!!! :damn:

Write a detailed reply at least 5 paragraphs in length stating your position and the flaws in the position of those you disagree with, liberally spicing it up with some witty scarcasm, then instead of hitting submit reply, hit the back button and go for a walk in the sunshine.

:hmmm:

Okay, maybe I will, as long as it's 4.5 billion-year-old sunshine.

Besides that such math is based purely upon a singular rate of change, wheras we KNOW that there's be variable speeds, I must correct one other glaring issue in your argument.

The age of the Earth and moon is not speculated on by the theories of evolution - it has far more to do with geology.

Touche! :D

Okay, now I have to dig in.Wine corks are far more porous than rocks, and my collection of wines aren't leaking. Or even champaign for that matter, which involves a bottle under pressure.

How porous something is has nothing to do with whether or not it can create a seal. The equation involves DENSITY.I used italics, bold, and underline to demonstrate the HUGE flaw in your argument.

There's no reason to assume that. In fact, when gravity first began the process of fusion, the matter which comprises the sun would have had to shrink FAR MORE RAPIDLY than that in order to because the process.

Furthermore, you mention measurements of the sun's diameter over the course of several hundred years. Accurate measurements of the sun's diameter have really only been available for less than a century.

In any case, that "shrinking sun" argument has been proven to be patently false. The sun is indeed losing mass - but that has not led to any effect of the actual diameter of the sun shrinking. In fact, astronomers have known for years that the sun actually increases in size occassionally.

http://www.tim-thompson.com/resp8.html
http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...shrinking.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Obs...on_and_effects
What evidence? What's the math and science behind this?That is incorrect.

The problem with that argument is that the people postulated it are attempting to combine the logic of the mathematics which have created the concept of mitochondrial eve with mathematics that would complete invalidate the concept entirely. Meaning, if they prove the current estimate of the age of "Eve" wrong, they ALSO prove THEIR estimate wrong.

Ultimately, the science you're proposing is flawed for that same reason. It is content to use current scientific axioms - until it simply decides that those axioms are incorrect.

That is a highly flawed approach.

This is, of course, assuming that there is in fact a conscious god in existence who does indeed bother with the universe in the first place. And a supreme being can in fact be refuted. To explain how god cannot exist, however, let's get one thing straight: if Person A believes in a god, and if Person B does not, neither of them are required to justify and/or substantiate their beliefs so long as neither one states their belief as fact and asserts its validity. You assert your validity, I assert mine. So I'll provide my line of thinking for my conclusion.

If an entity is composed of qualities, which are contradictory, then that entity cannot exist. To elaborate upon this, I'll use a scenario. Imagine that you enter a foreign room, where there is a message stating that somewhere inside of the room there is a cube. Then it asks you what this cube contains. This is a futile question. The cube itself may be large or small. It may be a vacuum chamber with nothing but spacial bits of gas inside. It may contain any one of trillions of objects or varieties thereof- such as a picture of a donkey, or a toy boat. Etc. You could never, because of this, give a precise and justifiable answer (this is a key point to understand; I strongly emphasize the justifiable part as well).

If you were asked, however, what does the cube NOT contain, then you could give many precise and justifiable answers. For instance, the cube could not contain the solar system, the 18th century, the Amazon River- or absurd objects that are contradictory such as a bed made of sleep or gold made from iron. There are more justifiable answers you could give to this question than the first one, because of an interesting way a-symmetry works in this scenario with the cube.

It is true that there are countless possibilities and countless impossibilities you could give as answers to either question. Despite this, there exists no evidence given from the cube itself, so we can only justifiably comment on the impossibilities but not the possibilities.

Sure, a person could claim that it contained a stainless-steel spoon and nothing else inside and be right. But since this is being said without evidence, there exists no valid justification. Ergo, there is no reason to accept this claim.

So suppose there exists a realm of existence outside of our universe, like the cube. Because our realm that we exist in contains the natural, the other realm must contain the supernatural- which must transcend our realm of existence in all ways. Vis a vis, it is inaccessible to all things here- including us. This draws questions to mind: would things be different here? Could we deduce what occupied this realm, such as a god/divine being?

No. The same a-symmetry principle as before comes into play here again. Countless possible things/beings could exist independent of our universe. Countless logically impossible things/beings cannot. But while we can list many kinds of things/beings that cannot exist independent of us in the other realm because of contradictory logic (i.e. an omniscient being capable of choice; or a non-spacial omnipresent being), we cannot list the things that DO exist independent of us in the other realm with certainty. Therefore, it is unknowable. So any attempt to argue that a specific divine being of any kind exists in an inaccessible realm of reality is an attempt to argue for either the impossible or the unknowable.

Logic alone CAN refute impossible beings, but it can't show that actual possible beings exist without evidence. So reason dictates that there exists no coherent reason to be an agnostic- because you are taking the side of the unknowable and that which does not exist as far as we're concerned- because there is an astonishing lack of evidence for that view. Do you see where I'm going with this? There exists, for example, a contradiction between a omniscience and free will. Thus, while any generic sort of god may exist, any omniscient god who has anything to do with free will cannot. And this can refute almost all of the gods that exist in mainstream religions' belief systems- including the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish gods to name a few of the bigger ones, because they are said to be omniscient but have given us and have some measure of free will. So long as people keep claiming that there is a god and assign certain qualities to them, it is possible to refute them.

Just say God created evolution and everyone will be happy.

This thread will inevitably lead to confusingly mixing in the origin of life. So before it gets that far, let's all at least begin by recognizing that evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. That's more deeply rooted inside of things like biogenesis and abiogenesis. Summarizing how scientific discoveries have revealed how we got here today and where it all came from, let me put it like this: After the Big Bang, the universe consisted of mostly free energy released from a near singularity, if not a total singularity. This thing had held the combined energy of the universe today inside of it in a form that is incredibly difficult to understand and that we're just beginning to discover due to titanic and mind-boggling mathematical postulations with modern general relativity and quantum mechanics, physics, and the lot.

This free-floating quantum energy, riding on a tidal wave of expanding space-time fabric, took tens of millions of years- that is for this energy to condense into the first fundamental particles, like leptons, quarks, up-downs, which are all beyond sub-atomic particles in complexity and in minuscule size. With that said, these same sub-atomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) were formed from these things. From these components, eventually, atoms would be born when atoms begin assimilating.

The simplest, easiest combination of these particles is an atom of hydrogen. Hydrogen has three isotopes: one with an atomic mass of one due to a lack of a neutron, one with a mass of two because it has a neutron (deuterium), and one with an atomic mass of three due to it's two neutrons (tritium, which is incredibly rare). This element was, is, and will likely continue to be until the end of all time (the death of the universe, that is). Really, it is the most common stuff in the universe, but it's because of it being so rare that it's often left out of the other gases like hydrogen, helium, etc. in universal quantity.

Eventually, gravity started taking hold of large amounts of hydrogen and brought them together in precelestial bodies- essentially massive clouds of gas. Friction and pressure combined to formulate and ignite the first stars. The first stars burned purely on hydrogen, with sizes, lifespans, and brightness levels varying based on their size/mass. We know this because of imaging NASA has done with microwaves that can go as far back as to when the universe was just a little over 365,000 years old (or thereabouts, I forget the exact number).

Anyway, stars are the birthplace of higher elements. It is in them where fusion takes place; basically, take two atomic nuclei, mass them together, you get a new element and some energy- a process far more efficient than fission once it's started. The first hydrogen atoms inside of stars would smash together to form the element we know as helium. This helium could then combine to form higher elements, like carbon, nitrogen, etc. (basically all the elements we have around us today, and elsewhere in the universe).

It is within carbon that the building block of all organic life is found (known organic life anyway; silicon organisms could theoretically exist elsewhere in the cosmos, if they don't already somewhere here in our own solar system).

Speaking at an elementary level, it took the death of the first stars for their matter to be sprayed across the universe, eventually coalescing into planets and other spacial bodies (like comets, asteroids, moons, etc). Eventually though, this organic matter finds itself where it can be used for the development of life, especially when combined with other materials like nitrogen, oxygen, etc.

From all the stuff scientists and enthusiasts of science have gathered over the decades, the date of the first life forms comes to be around 4Ga, with a margin of error of only 100,000 years. Simple nucleotides formed amino acids, and amino acids are the basis of life as we know it. This is known as the Primordial Soup Theory, and it is very viable (read up on the Miller and Urey Experiment's success in confirming that it was possible for life or at least early forms of life to assimilate from organic matter that was not already a form of life). Over the eons, life developed and became more and more complex due to changing factors within the environment, a need to compete with other species, etc. (this is an incredibly simplified rundown of the Theory of Evolution). And with it becoming more and more complex, there came about differences in allele levels inside of organisms (this is evolution, and this has been observed many times by geneticists and biologists alike).

I once saw a really cool video which explained the big bang. I sat down to watch it and was presented with some computer animation (the informative type, not the flashy type) showing what happened. This was voiced-over by a calm female narrator who explained that I was seeing the first few nanoseconds of the universe. These squiggly things came out of the singularity, they wobbled for a nanosecond, then changed into long wavy lines, then into balls and more squiggles and all sorts of stuff. As this was happening there was a timer in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen showing the time. It had started at zero and was incrementing in millionths of a second or something like that. In the first microsecond of the universe a whole ****load of stuff happened. It was all quite fascinating and it took a few minutes for her to explain it all.

So there I was, 0.001 seconds (or whatever) after the big bang, and the universe was looking a bit like minestrone soup. The narrator explained that the soup was rapidly expanding and cooling. I waited to see what would happen next. I was thinking: at this rate, this could be a long video. The narrator then calmly stated:

"The expansion and cooling continued in this way, with no real change in composition, for about three hundred thousand years."

The clock in the bottom right corner of the screen updated accordingly, and for some reason I found this hysterically funny. I laughed so hard that I nearly fell off my chair. I turned the video off, and to this day I have no idea how that soup ended up writing piffle on the internet.

It isn't our celestial neighbour, it is a light that the creator placed in the bowl that covers the earth.
I do like that site you took your points from though....

A serious contribution:

For me, the key word in the name 'Big Bang Theory' is theory. It's a guess. It could be right or wrong. It doesn't matter to me. What matters is that the guess is based on knowledge and reason. Some people have observed what they can and extrapolated from those observations and said "we think the universe might have started out like this" (keyword in that sentence: think). I'm perfectly happy to accept that theory for what it is: an educated guess at what the early stages of the universe might have been. It doesn't attempt to explain why the universe started or even how it started, it just describes what it might have been like and what might have happened afterwards. It has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. The fact that the time line disagrees with a two thousand year old text is incidental, not intentional.

BTW, if I were a creationist who felt the need, I would argue their case a different way to what is being tried here. I'd say God created the universe a few thousand years ago, but (being all-powerful like he is) he created it in such a way that on day one it already had the properties of a universe which is a few billion years old. It already had fully developed galaxies and fossils with old carbon dates and so on. From that point on everything continued as normal. Why did he do that? Well that's for him to know. Obviously it's all part of his Plan.

I'd like to hear from anyone who thinks they can find a flaw in that argument, given the assumption that God exists and is all-powerful. :|\\

The debate can be quickly closed by asking what would falsify creationism?