For the sake of this discussion where the question of “Is there a God?” concerned, we will limit the definition of god to being strictly an agent of the big bang. This definition will also consider that the universe is fully functioning within the processes of evolution and can thus be considered "of god" or more aptly portrayed as pantheistic. Discuss and question this theory, it can be interesting.

If you are not able to discuss the Eternal Human questions of philosophy from such a standpoint, please excuse and overlook this thread.

I would like to offer a beginning to this discussion. Abra has brought up on several occasions the Big Bang Theory. I suggest, without a total understanding or even a theory about why/how the Big Bang was initiated,(we will ignore that for now) that after the occurrence, all things began, immediately, to follow a course of natural selection.

That which fit into the logical universal flow was maintained, and even improved on, while that which rendered something less fit, less capable of further development or less likely to survive and prosper in the scheme of things as they developed, was either destroyed, replaced, or overridden by a value proven to be of more worth.

In other words, the only design in the evolution process began with the agents that spread from the initial bang. It was and is necessary that all these agents have the inclination and the ability to adapt in some synchronous fashion with all other agents as they expand to built the universe. This is done through a natural selection process.

Any other ideas? We can discuss more than one question at a time, however, to begin it might be best to let the questions arise naturally from the discussion.

Here are two such questions/ideas for discussion;
1. The big bang theory and the resulting agents having been seperated as a result of the big bang, from a singular origin, which would require similiar natural selection methods, can therefore be considered pantheistic. How would that work and what does that mean?

2. Evolution has been the random creativity behind all that has come into being since the Big Bang. It is the natural selection process that is inherently guided by the agents which are all of the same origin, which is why they seemingly give a presentation of intelligent design.


Thanks for participating, I look forward to seeing some creative and evolved mental processes in this thread.

great.

finally a thread for christian bashers to attempt to discuss something without bringing into it anything Christian.

bravo redy.

I hope you can succeed in this.

Remember what you said, no Christians because of your premise as stated.

No christian bashing either, deal????

Nothing!!! nothing whatsoever, good or bad about Christiuan thought.

I hope it works.

Play the game existence to the end
of the beginning

Wouldee,

This is a very honest attempt to discusss philosophy of interest. It is not, even my desire to dismiss anyone of any belief, however, it is not religious beliefs we will be discussing, but rather philosophy.

That is the reason I have chosen to state that all discussion about god will be from the standpoint of a pantheistic view. One that I've begun to outline in my OP.

Keep the prayer chains going and the biblical scripture comparisons rolling and allow us these discouses and our rhetoric on the philisophical.

If there is ever anything of offence within these philosophy titles, ignore it as I will ignore the offensiveness of some of the biblical threads.

DEAL???

I am not familiar with the big bang theory other than there was a big bang and then there were stars. Can someone briefly summarize the big bang theory and how the theorist supposes it happened and why?

JB

Redy.

I agree.

keep christianity out of it. oil and water, all I'm saying.

I am all for any discussion that doesn't bash christians. period.

It is simple for me.

You should know that.

And I am serious.

I am not one of the offhanded back door pundits.

So, again, good luck with it.

I will read it avidly as I do all the threads in this forum.

But I will not ever, any longer, ever ignore any christian bashing and insults. That means the deconstruction of christianity as some inexplicable excuse to support another view.

stand alone without references to christianity as you said with your pantheistic premise.

I wish you all the best in your discussions.

sincerely, Rich

eeewww

"I am not one of the offhanded back door pundits.

So, again, good luck with it."


I am quoting myself.

I'm sorry for the cut and paste, but I wanted some info on the big Bang so I found it:

Big Bang Cosmology

The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe. It postulates that 12 to 14 billion years ago, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across. It has since expanded from this hot dense state into the vast and much cooler cosmos we currently inhabit. We can see remnants of this hot dense matter as the now very cold cosmic microwave background radiation which still pervades the universe and is visible to microwave detectors as a uniform glow across the entire sky.

General Relativity

The first key idea dates to 1916 when Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity which he proposed as a new theory of gravity. His theory generalizes Isaac Newton's original theory of gravity, c. 1680, in that it is supposed to be valid for bodies in motion as well as bodies at rest. Newton's gravity is only valid for bodies at rest or moving very slowly compared to the speed of light (usually not too restrictive an assumption!). A key concept of General Relativity is that gravity is no longer described by a gravitational "field" but rather it is supposed to be a distortion of space and time itself. Physicist John Wheeler put it well when he said "Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move." Originally, the theory was able to account for peculiarities in the orbit of Mercury and the bending of light by the Sun, both unexplained in Isaac Newton's theory of gravity. In recent years, the theory has passed a series of rigorous tests.

The Cosmological Principle

After the introduction of General Relativity a number of scientists, including Einstein, tried to apply the new gravitational dynamics to the universe as a whole. At the time this required an assumption about how the matter in the universe was distributed. The simplest assumption to make is that if you viewed the contents of the universe with sufficiently poor vision, it would appear roughly the same everywhere and in every direction. That is, the matter in the universe is homogeneous and isotropic when averaged over very large scales. This is called the Cosmological Principle. This assumption is being tested continuously as we actually observe the distribution of galaxies on ever larger scales. The accompanying picture shows how uniform the distribution of measured galaxies is over a 30° swath of the sky. In addition the cosmic microwave background radiation, the remnant heat from the Big Bang, has a temperature which is highly uniform over the entire sky. This fact strongly supports the notion that the gas which emitted this radiation long ago was very uniformly distributed.

I don't care for the big bang, I have an idea of what is and isn't...honestly evolution is a far more logical idea to me, having been through a number of religions they are all pretty much the same aside from the more aged beliefs. I don't believe in a God, I have an idea of what could possibly be a God. Even those ideas lack the logic that I would rather have in them, but I'm a very open-minded person.

I just find it kind of funny how so many are quick to jump on the evolutionists but just as quick to say "don't jump on my belief"...contradiction?

Well,

You have this part just a bit backwards



but are more or less on the money.

Natural Selection sort of informs evolution. The preexisting conditions of the universe sort of setup all the possible permutations and configurations of space, time, energy, and matter.

In trying to draw a direct line from the Big Bang to evolution and natural selection skips over a whole bunch of cosmology that has too take place before we get to the juicy parts of whether an intelligent hand was behind life and everything or not.

We are a very very young species, and have only really begun to understand the universe around us in any methodical and informed way in the last 200 years or so. We have a very limited understanding of how everything works... plenty of mathematical conjecture and hypothesis... and hundreds upon hundreds of man-years staring into deep space; and I mean using telescopes and modern optics that can clearly render things inside star clusters, perform radio-spectrometry, etc.

However, the more we observe, collect facts, and recompile our understanding the better off we are.

Philosophically this eats away at the role of a personal god in people's lives, more or less forcing them to educate themselves, or fight back against knowledge with ignorance.

People used to worship fire, the sun, and the rains. We understand now how to make our own fire very easily, are pretty much certain the sun will continue to rise and set for another several billion years, as it has for billions of years before, and the rain... well we still can't predict that with absolute certainty.

Perhaps there is a big cosmic unemployment office for obsolete gods, and they are the ones sowing all this dissent against science... they just want their jobs back.

The very best site on the Internet about this is:
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/ Here are some great things from that site:

PHYSICAL REALITY

Despite several thousand years of failure to correctly understand physical reality (hence the current postmodern view that this is impossible) it is actually very simple to work out how matter exists and moves about in Space. We just had to take Science (Occam's Razor / Simplicity) and Metaphysics (Dynamic Unity of Reality) seriously and thus describe reality from only one substance existing, as Leibniz wrote;

"Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. When we deduce this most Simple Science Theory of Reality we find that there is only one possible solution: Space must be the substance which exists and matter is formed from waves in Space. i.e. While there are many minds and material things, they all exist in one common Space (just look around you and think about it).

We can then show that the Wave Structure of Matter is the correct solution as it deduces the fundamentals of Physics & Philosophy perfectly (there are no opinions).

I realize that there are a lot of 'crackpot' theories about truth and reality on the internet, but this solution is the most simple one and it is obvious once known (though it takes time for our minds to adjust to new knowledge).

In hindsight the error was obvious - to try and describe an interconnected reality from the foundation of many discrete and separate things, matter 'particles', which then required forces / fields to connect them in space and time. This was always just a mathematical solution which never explained how matter was connected across the universe.

For those who are religious / spiritual, Space is really just another word for God (Brahman, Tao, Spirit, Energy, Light).

PARTICLES

What is certain is that discrete and separate 'particles' do not exist - we are all connected to this space that we all commonly experience. This underlying unity of reality (God) is central to all major world religions, thus their common moral foundation of 'Do unto others as to thyself' as the other is part of the self (we are all one with god / physical reality). Clearly there is still much to explain about our minds, our human emotions and moral / spiritual sense. This is no doubt the future of theology and our understanding of 'God', to explore the properties of this Space we all find ourselves existing in.

JB

That one is actually being tested and proven out by the deconstructionist physicians... now, the definition of space you provided is a bit liberal. The idea behind wave/particle theory is a complex interaction of probability with energy.

One of the classic examples is the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. Everything has a number of possible states. Everything that can happen in some dimension of space time does.

The outcome of the experiment was that the cat could be alive or dead, and until it was actually observed and therefore fixed it was (mathematically, logically, and philosophically) existing in both states simultaneously.

Practically we know this isn't true. The cat is either alive or dead, it's just that we don't truly know till we open the box.

Incidentally, Sikhs have a metaphysical base to their religion that is very much in line with this theory - at least from what I have studied of it.

I think there is an entirely different discussion when considering actual third density physical reality as apposed to maybe a different kind of reality perhaps existing at a different frequency and invisible to us.

I have always said that space or time does not exist except within the mind as reference points and I am talking about the collective mind stuff within a certain unified field (or shared reality.) Call it "our known and shared reality."

When discussing reality and subjective ideas I need to know what level we are on to connect with the different ideas.

JB

The idea of parallel universes existing as probabilities is a good one but a probability is no more than an idea or a dream until attention is placed on it.

In other words, a probable universe will not manifest unless the path is taken by the observer(s). Who knows if a single observer has enough energy to maintain a universe by them self. (We do in our dreams for a short duration)

For a reality to solidify (manifest) and have duration I think a large number of observers may have to contribute their mind stuff and their agreements to that universe or path through the matrix in order to manifest it with enough density and energy to maintain its duration for a reasonable length of time for the incubation of life forms.

I imagine these worlds are managed by watchers and entities (sort of like Gods but not) who help maintain the reality. One of which being third density physical reality. (our reality which includes stars, planets, galaxies etc.)

JB

Well, without the ability to fully transcend whatever frequencies or alternities divide up the different universes anything but Reference 0 - the shared physical reality of you and me and the rock I see you stub your toe on - are not relevant.

The potential existence of alternate universes is infinite. An intelligent entity in some alternate reality kicking off a catalytic reaction in this one is as plausible as any hypothesis of an all powerful supernatural being.

The problem originally presented seems to constrain itself to this particular reference, so the physical laws and evidence compiled here are the necessary basis for discussion.

Perhaps there are ancient alien civilizations that have seeded various planets with the components for life. Perhaps abiogenisis is not as infrequent as we think, we just have not replicated the right conditions to repeat the process yet.

There are quite a number of possible pre-origins. If we follow the big bang line however, there are several billions of years of mass/energy expansion - creating the physical configuration of space we have today... which all result from a quantum burp.

So then in confining us to the current third density reality the discussion of where it came from and how it got here, for me, is rather simple. I don't see it as the only thing that exists, but rather the only thing that exists at this particular frequency.

Hence, I imagine it came from a different frequency, higher or lower, I don't know. It exists inside of its own unified field.

Infinity is infinity. I can't imagine a "nothing" or "void" existing outside of this, our universe. Therefore our universe must exist inside of another, larger universe. Also, our universe contains other, smaller universes.

JB

Not only that, but there are entities who create galaxies, and who is to say that galaxies don't come in all sizes just as black holes do?



Before the creation of our universe... there was infinity.
Perhaps universes are born and die just as creatures do.

JB

Heh... that's very likely quite true.

The only problem is that somewhere in all of this we have to move from quantum waves to genome variance, phenotypes, and survival events.

It seems pretty absurd to think that the entire universe was created in an earth-week, with all life past, present, and future all together for only 6000 years.

There is just way too much universe out there. If there is an intelligence to the universe, it seems possible only from a very high level - a design was coded into every particle of mass and quanta of energy that was kicked of with the Big Bang event that would allow for all the variation of up/down quarks, protons, neutrons, atoms, and compounds to coalesce into the building blocks of this universe and eventually into biological units that were self replicating and genative under their own power.

And if that were the case, here we are insulting the intelligence behind all that by saying it was not so... that in fact some sort of space magician just miracled it all into being, or worse yet - that a group of incompetent giant space humans created things during some sort of drunken space orgy.

Sounds reasonable to me.

I look at these codes as programs. Information, data and programs. I sometimes think that we live in a holographic matrix chocked full of programs and biological living computer-like creatures, which we inhabit in order to experience worlds and collect information and experience to contribute to the over-all universal mind.

Yep, we are nothing more than information gatherers for the Borg collective. LOL

JB