Sorry to disagree but you are not entitled to have your views respected - what you are entitled to is the right be able to defend your views from criticism in public. You're not however entitled to have your views protected from criticism. Its quite ridiculous to also beleive all views are equally valid. We are all equal in the ability to have views and opinions of course, but that does not mean they are all founded on the same bedrock of rationality. Now, IF you had said that you just don't like the idea of Big Bang theory but confess you have no alternative that better fits the observed facts then that's fine. That's a subjective opinion and you're welcome to it. However you said the BB theory was as likely to be true as the existance of a supernatural deity with only your personal incredulity to back up the claim. I offered a rushed summary of current theory and answered your specific question about baselines for distance. Somehow that wasn't good enough, but you haven't explained why. If you're not tolling but playing devil's advocate, great, but come a little better equipped for the debate and please don't take offence if your opinion is not repected by default. Some people may feel quite passionate about these things.:wink:
Fella you can say what you like. One of us has an open mond. One of has a closed one. The rest is history.
My Vicar also told me that God also takes his time with some things, just like the Aprilia spares departement. OK we are here, Human mankind, the epitome of inteligent design and a million years of evolution. So what went so horribly wrong? . How can the Italians make such perfect food, build cars and motorcycles of such perfect design and yet place "Tim nice but dim" in charge of their electrical engineering departement. Anyone got a starter solenoid for a 916 ? Roy
In any de-bate, there has to be a bit of "bait". :biggrin: It's a debate - thus a fairly virulent defending (or expounding) or one's position. However, my post is not ad hominem - it ridiculed a position that I find laughable and one that I find surprising for an intelligent member of this forum. I don't think you're dumb, therefore the only explanation is that in this instance, you are being intellectually lazy because you can't equate science with religion and give them equal weight without the slightest argument. I am very liable to take exception to any argument you might care to advance, but that is the subject for a future post. It comes down to religion vs the Renaissance - and I know whose side I'm on. Certainly there is no insult intended. But I don't think you're setting out your stall credibly and I invite you to do so.
In order to convince the masses, first one must make the message easily understandable and second from a level-status position. aloof and patronising sneer attached to long words and a sense of educated self-importance do not I form my challenge by means of questions, others by means of statements and ridicule. In true political form, I know nothing
Viz: The problem with all post-Newtonian physics is that it has become difficult to understand and often counter-intuitive. We are designed to understand things on a physical level which corresponds to us - our time frames, speeds and sizes. In the quantum world, things appear to be very different and weird. In the astronomical world, things like relativity are also odd to us - the idea that space time is a warped fabric. But that theory is built into the navigation systems of spacecraft - if it wasn't, they wouldn't go where we intended them to. You can either accept that these odd things are so, or you can just say "it's magic" or "God moves in mysterious ways" and not accept the physical laws that seem to describe the universe. Only a couple of hundred years ago, if you'd said that an iron ship weighing many thousands of tons would float, or huge aeroplane weighing hundreds of tons would fly, no one would have believed you. Science won out. Even modern science leaves some room for a universe-creator, if you really want one. You could still admit all current scientific theories and then just say "I have a gut feeling that something is behind all this". That is fair enough. What isn't fair enough is to suggest that there is no difference between observable and measurable fact (even if it takes very expensive and obscure machines to do the measuring and observing and highly skilled operators) and a belief in the supernatural. Science shrinks the amount of phenomena that have to resort to the supernatural to explain them. It's a process that has been happening for centuries. A religious viewpoint can only really be respected when it respects science. If it seeks to gainsay what we know (or strongly suspect) by pretending that we don't know it, then that undermines its validity. But it is surely easy to understand that as science explains more and more, and leaves less and less room for supernatural explanations, that there could (in theory) come a time when it explained everything and there was nowhere left for a supernatural being to hide.
Apart from the gentle banter and good natured ribbing, I don't think anyone has been patronising or sneering about you persoanlly. It's the ideas that are getting a kicking not the person proposing them. So let me take a different approach and add to what Glidd has said. I understand where your coming from Bradders, because we all are used to using 'rules of thumb' or 'common sense' and it's natural to try to extrapolate these heuristics beyond the scales and energies that they evolved to cope with. 'Seeing is beleiving' works as a good rule of thumb in the scale of everyday human experience. It doesn't work so well at the subatomic scale, or the femto-second time frame. So we've developed intellectual tools that help extend and augment our abilities when our rules of thumb no longer work. The old rules don't stop being useful though: they still provide a limited toolset for explaining and approximating reality (that spanner you put down should still be there and hasn't spontaneously vanished into thin air). When Newton came along we gained a refinement in the toolset and we eventually used it to go to the moon. But Newtons' laws are only an approximation of reality. Then came Einstein and gave us another refinement, a simpler explanation of gravity by doing away with forces. It didn't render Newtonion physics any less useful, but as an approximation of reality it was better because it explained more and assumed less. Then came Quantum Mechanics which gave us insights at the scale of the atom (and smaller) and gave us a finer approximation for reality at those scales. But you wouldn't use Quantum Mechanics to calulate trajectories for the next Mars mission any more than you would use Newtonian physics to work out how to get out of bed in the morning. So when you say you don't beleive in the big bang theory because no one's been back there to see it you're really expressing a fact about your own lack of a good explanatory toolset rather than a fault with the BB theory. You're right noone has been back there to see the big bang - but that's not a problem since the theory contains an explanationwhy noone could have been there to see it. You then mistakenly compare the lack of a contemporary visual account with another thing noone has seen, god and give both equal probability of being true. That's the error. What is important in all this is to understand the science is not about absolute certainty (unlike religion). Its about coming up with ever finer approximations to reality: simpler explanations that explain more.
This thread should have been closed down the moment someone (had to) mention Hitler...............Godwin's Law.
That was me But as I wasn't directly comparing the opposing argument to Hitler or the Nazis it doesn't count under Goodwin's Law. :tongue: It was a meta-reference. On the flip side surely any decent internet debate about religion is required to contain references to Hitler though right? What's the fun in it if you can't! I'm just surprised it wasn't mentioned sooner.:biggrin:
As it happens, I love a bit of science. Son is doing A levels in biology and chemistry as well as maths and psychology, is strongly agnostic (only because I tell him not to burn all his bridges, you never know ;-) ) I did well at school in these subjects (all those moons ago) and am fascinated by the world in general. Not religious at all. But I can see why people feel the need to believe and have faith in something. What annoys me, and it has a bit during this thread, is how some talk of open minds of science etc but in their language distinctly express the opposite. Decrying and insisting others are wrong. Who knows whats right or wrong. Not too long ago who would have thought the DNA of any living thing could be viewed, dissected and to some small extent understood. Learning is what we do, its how we survive, so closing your mind of to anything at all, whether Darwinism or the thought of a heavenly presence, in my mind is folly and inhibiting.
Look, I'm not claiming authorship of any of the ideas I've put forward and I won't feel agreived if you want to criticise them. I think you may be taking things too personally, I'm just defending science with reasoned argument. I'm not insisting you're wrong, I'm trying to offer an explanation why I think you're wrong. There's a huge difference. (It's probably good that you're annoyed as it might spur you into action and try picking holes in the opposing argument by checking if the facts mentioned pan out. This can only be a good thing and I'd urge you to examine some of the ideas mentioned more closely). Thankfully we live in a post-enlightenment world of free and open criticism - science is the epitome of this. It is demonstrably the opposite of what you are claiming it to be as several people have made the effort to point out. As I said before, and contrary to popular beleif you are not entitled to your opinion, you are only entitled to what you can defend against crticism. Denying others the right to criticise your ideas is an authoritarian, pre-enlightment mind-set and the very definition of closed mindedness. I'm sorry, I not only think you're wrong, I think you're wrong at a deeply ironic level.
