Hypothesis/Theory

Originally posted by 667joe
So then you are saying that something can exist without being created. Can you see the problem with your position? (I know you are not ready to admit your lack of logic. I am hoping, however, to put a crack in your faith.)

Nothing physical can exist without being created or made. However, God is spirit with the ability to create the physical out of nothing. 😏

HalleluYah !!! Praise the LORD! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Originally posted by RJHinds
Nothing physical can exist without being created or made. However, God is spirit with the ability to create the physical out of nothing. 😏

HalleluYah !!! Praise the LORD! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Nothing physical can exist without being created or made...

How do you know?

We can observe [the effects of] particles appearing out of 'the aether' and
if you don't regard light as being physical, we can directly observe energy
turning from light to matter and back again.

And even if we had not observed something from nothing... that doesn't mean
it can't happen.

For starters, we don't necessarily HAVE any 'nothing' of the type that the universe
might have come from... because we live in the universe, we live in the something
that came from nothing [if it did].
So as we don't have any of that nothing to observe, we can't have observed something
coming from it.

Also, we can observe MANY things being made or created from other stuff by the
laws of physics interacting with ordinary matter.
In fact, of the things we observe, only a tiny tiny fraction of a subset have been made
by any intelligent beings.

So this statement of yours is completely unfounded.

However, God is spirit with the ability to create the physical out of nothing.

Special pleading.

You also have no foundation or evidence for this assertion.

Originally posted by stellspalfie
do you accept that a scientist could determine your age by studying your body?

Yes!

Which is my point!

Does that also mean that if the first person on the planet was looked at the
same way I would be the day they were created, would that mean the
scientist would come up with the wrong age?

The scientist today looking at what he or she has around themselves can
have a firm grasp on current events, but we are not talking about current
events we are talking about how everything got here! If we have no idea
how or why it started all of our assumptions about the past are just best
guesses, we really don't know.

Originally posted by Ghost of a Duke
Was i present at the big bang?

No.

Do i have common sense, and have i considered the considerable evidence out there?

Yes.

I'm happy for you, for your common sense, does that give you insight into
billions of years ago, or do you just look at the universe around you today
and assume you know what it all says about the past?

I for one was not there either, and I for one also can look at the
considerable evidence we see today and have to acknowledge that I do not
know how it all started, so that assumptions on age are just that and
nothing more, assumptions on age.

If the universe was created, what would be different using your
considered common sense from one that was not?

Originally posted by 667joe
So then you are saying that something can exist without being created. Can you see the problem with your position? (I know you are not ready to admit your lack of logic. I am hoping, however, to put a crack in your faith.)

No one I know says that this universe always was, most I know put a time on
it mainly because after so much time even a vast amount it would all cool off
and die.

God on the other hand is called an eternal being outside of our universe with
out the limitations of it. There is not problem with that position.

Originally posted by googlefudge

Nothing physical can exist without being created or made...

How do you know?

We can observe [the effects of] particles appearing out of 'the aether' and
if you don't regard light as being physical, we can directly observe energy
turning from light to matter and back again.

And even if we had not observed something from nothing ...[text shortened]... ing.[/quote]

Special pleading.

You also have no foundation or evidence for this assertion.

Some things are known by special revelation and other things can be known by discovery.

The Universe - Created Out Of Nothing?

YouTube

Originally posted by 667joe
So then you are saying that something can exist without being created. Can you see the problem with your position? (I know you are not ready to admit your lack of logic. I am hoping, however, to put a crack in your faith.)

Why would you 'hope to put a crack in our faith'?

That's disgustingly mean-spirited and sick.

Originally posted by 667joe
Hines is saying that everything must have a cause. Then he says that god did not have a cause. The two statements are contradictory.

I suppose by Hines you really are referring to me.

I am not sure it is proper to call God a thing. Anyway, God is referred to as the uncaused cause because God is the beginning cause because He is eternal and transcends time and space.

Is that clear now?

Originally posted by KellyJay
I'm happy for you, for your common sense, does that give you insight into billions of years ago, or do you just look at the universe around you today
and assume you know what it all says about the past?

I for one was not there either...

It's good that we agree that neither one of us was present at the beginning of the universe. (Although when time travel becomes possible on the 03/06/2037 it is my intention to pop back and see what all the fuss was about).

Common sense doesn't enable me (on my own) to say how old the universe is; but it does enable me to examine the overwhelming evidence accumulated by minds far more brilliant than my own.

If a man objectively sat in a room for a month and comprehended all the evidence available as to the age of the earth he could be in no doubt that it was vast.

Originally posted by Ghost of a Duke
It's good that we agree that neither one of us was present at the beginning of the universe. (Although when time travel becomes possible on the 03/06/2037 it is my intention to pop back and see what all the fuss was about).

Common sense doesn't enable me (on my own) to say how old the universe is; but it does enable me to examine the overwhelming ...[text shortened]... all the evidence available as to the age of the earth he could be in no doubt that it was vast.

This is a very simple question, do you know how and why it began? If you
don't know how it began than whatever it is you are looking at may not have
anything to do with how old this place is. What good is knowing the rate of
anything if you don't know how long it has been doing what its been doing?

Originally posted by KellyJay
This is a very simple question, do you know how and why it began?

How?
No.

Why?
No.

When?
Billions of years ago.


Do i know how and why the battle of Waterloo began?
No.

Do i know when?
1815

An event can be dated even if its cause (or the reason for its cause) is unclear.

Originally posted by KellyJay
This is a very simple question, do you know how and why it began? If you
don't know how it began than whatever it is you are looking at may not have
anything to do with how old this place is. What good is knowing the rate of
anything if you don't know how long it has been doing what its been doing?

Actually no, it's not a simple question.

Answering your question requires explaining a huge number of observations
and discoveries along with their explanatory framework and that is a big task.

Take for example [because it's relatively easy to explain] our estimate for the
age of the universe. [time since the big bang].

Looking at the sky using telescopes, we can see galaxies, huge assemblies of stars
like the one we live in.

To tell how far away these galaxies are, we need what are known as 'standard candles'
objects that are of a known brightness. Because if we know how bright an object actually
is, and we can measure how bright it appears to be, we can work out how far away it is.

For galaxies that are close enough to us we can pick out individual bright stars, and there
is a certain kind of star called a Cepheid Variable which we can use as a standard candle.

These stars are unstable, and fluctuate in brightness. And looking at stars in our own galaxy
that are close enough to directly measure their distance from us using parallax, we can tell
precisely how bright these stars are. And it turns out that their absolute brightness depends
only on the period of their oscillation. Which is great, because we can measure the period of
this oscillation in these stars in the nearer galaxies. Which then tells us how bright these stars
are and allows us to measure the distance.

We also want to know if, and how fast, these galaxies are moving relative to us.

Fortunately we have a method of doing that as well.

Gas in the 'atmosphere' of stars absorbs specific frequencies of light. Which when you break the
light down into a spectrum [rainbow] show up as dark lines, called absorption lines.
Different chemicals have their own unique frequencies at which they absorb light, and they act
like a finger-print telling you what elements/chemicals are in the stars atmosphere.

If an object is moving towards us the light from that object gets shifted towards shorter [blue]
wavelengths, and if it's moving away from us then it gets shifted towards longer [red] wavelengths.

By measuring how far the fingerprints of the elements in the spectra have shifted towards the
red or blue ends of the spectrum we can tell how fast the stars are moving towards or away from us.

We can do this for galaxies as well, using the light from many stars instead of one.

And what we discovered using the information we had for how far galaxies are away from us, and how
fast they were moving, was that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it was moving away from us.

This was observed in the early part of the last century, and we have made many many many more,
and more precise observations since then. [it was a large part of the Hubble Space Telescope's mission
for example] and we now use a whole bunch, of more accurate standard candles that allow us to
measure galaxies even farther way [right to the edge of the visible universe].

Now if all the galaxies [barring a few local ones] are flying away from us, at greater and greater speeds
the farther away they are, then in the past if we run time backwards they were closer to us.

And we can run the clock back [taking into account the effects of gravity to slow them down over time]
and we can see that at some point in the past all the galaxies where in one place.

We can also, look out and see how far away the farthest things we can see are, and given that we know
how fast light travels, and how far the light has travelled, we can see how long the light has been travelling.

This gives us two different ways of telling how long since all the galaxies were piled up on top of each other.

The answer is about 13.8 billion years ago [plus minus about 100 million years].

Now if it were true, that all the galaxies were once crammed in on top of one another, and that all the
matter in those galaxies came from a smaller and smaller volume, then at one time the density and temperature
of that matter would be such that it would be a 'solid' sea of plasma. Like the surface of the sun.

Plasma is opaque, which is why we can't see inside the sun, and so as we look out into the universe,
seeing light from farther and farther away, and thus farther and farther back in time... We should eventually
come to a point where the light came from this plasma, at the moment it cooled enough to condense into
regular matter and become transparent. And because this happened so long ago, and the space has expanded
and red-shifted the light so much, we would expect this light to be very dim, and at very long wavelengths.

Which is of course exactly what we see. It's called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation [CMB]
and it's observed in every direction, exactly as we would expect, at exactly the temperature we would
expect [~2.7 kelvin] based on the predicted age of the universe.

We thus KNOW that the universe was once entirely made of plasma glowing like the surface of the sun.
And we know that it was like that about 13.8 billion years ago.


Thus we know the age of the visible universe is about 13.8 billion years old.


Now for the complexity of the answer... I have simplified a lot of concepts here, but even so there is a whole bunch
of stuff you need to already know and understand for that explanation to make sense. I don't know if you know and
understand all those things. But if you don't then the explanation must get even longer, to add in explanations of
those things... and if those explanations rely on things you don't understand then those other things must also be
explained.

There is a reason that becoming a scientist takes so many years of study.

You need a good primary and secondary education to give you the very basic tools and knowledge.
You need then to follow that up with a good university undergrad education taking 3~5 years.
You then need to follow that up with doctoral study, where you specialise and really get to grips with
the subject 2~5 years.

THEN, you might start making a significant contribution to the field and do more than catch up with where
the experts in the field already are.

It's incredibly rare for big physics advances [or biology/chemistry/ect] to be made by anyone younger than
30~40 years old. Because the easy simple stuff has already been done.


This does actually pose a problem because it becomes pretty much impossible to give a full understanding of the
current state of scientific knowledge to a lay person. Because a proper understanding requires so much extra knowledge
that they haven't spent years accumulating.

It's like trying to explain rainbows...

I can say that a rainbow is formed by sunlight light refracting through raindrops...

But I then have to explain what refraction is, how sunlight is made up of lots of different colours of light,
why the different colours refract by different amounts, the process of total internal reflection, why raindrops
are the right shape to cause the effect, why the rainbow is the shape and size it is, the mathematics of
wave propagation, trigonometry, how the eye works, how the brain perceives colour,..... ect ect ect.

It's easy to give a 'simple' explanation... the problem is that it's simple because it assumes that you already know
a huge bunch of concepts.

You evidently don't know most of these concepts, which means explaining these phenomena to you is not simple.

Partly because it's hard to tell which concepts you don't already have. So it's hard to know where to start.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Actually no, it's not a simple question.

Answering your question requires explaining a huge number of observations
and discoveries along with their explanatory framework and that is a big task.

Take for example [because it's relatively easy to explain] our estimate for the
age of the universe. [time since the big bang].

Looking at the sky us ...[text shortened]... se it's hard to tell which concepts you don't already have. So it's hard to know where to start.

Probably one of the best posts i have read on this site.

I learnt something. (Not sure how long i'll remember it).