Believers don’t need science to prove faith since, by definition, faith doesn’t need evidence.  Religion and faith lose credibility when they try to argue outside their holy book

Mike78 - 07 May 2012 08:21 AM

Josh - 06 May 2012 04:47 PM

My thread is more of a “something or someone outside of nature, NOT bound by its laws, made all this…..hey, maybe we could call it God” type of thread.

Not knowing the answer to a question, and then naming that unknown answer “god” advances nothing.  The question you should be asking is whether there’s any basis to conclude the unknown answer is the god you’ve selected to be your religious figurehead.  Hint:  No.

Let it be known that Project Reason officially recognizes Josh’s formulation as ‘Thread Theory’ and hereby relegates it to the trash bin.

MARTIN: If your serious in understanding it all, it’s possible to do without a god in mind as your starting position because a god is not necessary.
Quantum fluctuations in a universe with zero energy can account for everything from nothing with the laws of physics as they stand. 

If you have time, try watching Lawrence Krauss “A Universe from Nothing”, it’s long but helps explains a great deal.

Yup. I enjoyed listening to Krauss at teh Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne last month.

This hope of finding a gap for god by way of thermodynamics is so passe. It’s a shame theists don’t do a bit of reading before they come in here and try to use science to back thesism. It can’t be done. And it’s silly to try because all science is provisional and hitching ones theism to the latest science leaves ones theism open to being debunked with the next scientific advance.

Have faith in god(s) if you must but don’t bother trying to find evidence for your god with science. If there was evidence it would no longer be faith. And if there were evidence ahteists like me might change out minds. Yes, that’s right. Unlike theists we know what it would take to change our minds.

Josh - 05 May 2012 08:09 AM

But the big bang theory, which has replaced the steady state theory as the most widely held view among scientists of the origin of the universe, leads us back to a moment when everything BEGAN. So all this energy didn’t just always exist. Only something (or someone?) outside of, and not bound by, these laws of thermodynamics could have caused all this to be.

Any assertion about the cosmos “prior” to the bang is nothing more than speculation.  In this case speculation driven by bias.
Positing a ‘god’ being does nothing more than open up additional questions, and really answers none.  It merely serves as reinforcement of believer bias, and serves to provide a false veneer of ‘cause’ or ‘closure’ to the inquiry for those who are uncomfortable or uneasy when uncertainty is the best explanation for a concept of phenomena.

*Note “Prior” written in quotes because the chronological meaning of the word may not be strictly appropriate outside of a rough conceptualization.

Stephen Hawking has remarked that asking what existed prior to the BB is like asking what is north of the north pole. The question is incoherent, since the BB produced space/time. Space/time is the only thing coherent for human understanding at this point in our evolved consciousness.