by Simon 108 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Simon: Here is where science rocks - you may not like the answer but at least it has one.
Um, not always.
Watch this and reflect:
There is a fundamental flaw in our understanding of physics and quantum mechanics that prevents them from answering some big questions regarding the nature of reality. In fact, they are in direct conflict on certain matters.
There are limits to not only what humans do know, but apparently to what we can know.
I'd rather have someone be trying to figure out what the answer are than the answer be "it's a mystery and STOP ASKING QUESTIONS!"
Science is always being refined and corrected where necessary. Religion seems to always be about vagueness and not being pinned down (except for the loony young-earth creationists who don't care how crazy they appear).
Simon,
We can't comprehend infinity because there is no end to it, no number that one can say, "this is infinity"
My own opinion on why God didn't create the universe the day before he did is a matter of being aware of oneself. There may have been a long period of time when God had no awareness of his existence. He/She just existed without consciousness. And after that, maybe something sparked - God became aware of itself.
Thought is creative energy. Words are thoughts expressed. And action is words in motion.
Why should the Creator have to make everything in a day? There was a process. If we are to understand the limited creation account in Genesis, it would seem that God made the universe ("the heavens and the Earth") from the beginning.
Before that "beginning"or the start of the visible material universe, God created his Son, Michael/Jesus.
Proverbs 8:22 ""The LORD formed me from the beginning, before he created anything else."
So before the universe existed, and time as we know it, there may have been another dimension or sphere of existence.
Christ (The Word) was created into Eternity therefore he is also Eternal but His Father has always been Eternal.
Eternity by definition is indefinite and unending. It has no beginning and no end.
Psalms 90:2 reveals God has existed forever.
Psalms 93:2 reveals God is from time indefinite. Job 36:26 says God is beyond our comprehension. His eternal existence cannot be measured by our inferior minds. Our limited thinking and reasoning process cannot comprehend eternity.
We are instilled with a beginning for our start in creation. We cannot fathom anything in existence that did not have a beginning.
When did the "Beginning" come into existence? John: 8-58, Jesus revealed that he (Jesus the Word) existed even before Abraham came into existence. Abraham was born well before Jesus made his human appearance on this planet. Jesus was imparting a revelation, in that he had existed with his Father at an earlier time in eternity.
How do we know that Jesus existed during eternity with his Father? John 17:5 answers that question. He has glory along side
his Father prior to the creation of the world. So, was that the "Beginning?" It was a beginning, but not our beginning. It was still etrnity
at that time.
Revelation 1:1 and Revelation 3:14 reveals that Jesus was the beginning of the first creation by his Father.
Colossians 1:15 reveals Jesus was made in the image of his Father.
We also know that he existed with his Father before coming to Earth because of what is revealed at John 6:62.
Something happened that caused the change of status quo that led to the existence of the universe. It could have taken a fraction of a second; it could have been a lot more. But surely it could have been measured in time.
That's normal human thinking. The frigging geniuses ask "WHY?" Why are we so sure it could/would/should have been measured in time? They step back and consider that time was nonexistent and didn't factor in at all.
These are very different concepts from our basic cause-and-effect thinking.
I read an interesting book called WHY THE WORLD EXISTS, a precursor to many of the current "Something-from-nothing" books out there. It mentioned some interesting thoughts on the very idea of a "beginning of existence." Some philosophers don't dwell on a start to matter/energy. They don't have a problem with "something" having existed already to create the universe. (I am not saying I agree with them, but you have to start your thinking somewhere.)
Many recognize thoughts about "before the big bang" as coming from Christianity. Even though they may not be Christians, many philosophers (I use that term 'philosopher' because it is thinkers more so than scientists in a laboratory, but the scientists are included) have recognized that it was Christianity that insisted on a "CREATION" that took us down the path of a time before time.
An actual "infinity" before the universe started may not be applicable at all. We might be trapped in normal human thinking to consider an infinity before time existed, a universe of nothingness until something occured. Some scientists are looking at the ideas that the laws of physics did not exist so our way of thinking is out the window.
We may never figure it out because we cannot go back in time to before time existed- a statement that really doesn't make sense. Maybe we will be able to create another universe in a laboratory one day, but that will just allow us to understand that matter/energy can cross over. It still wouldn't tell us where the matter/energy got it's start.
A great scientist once said ' The bible tells us how to go to heaven not how the heavens go'.
Those words were first said by Galileo and later repeated by John Paul 2 when Galileo was exhonerated in 1979
I've been away for a while and came back to this thread. And now my brain hurts. I'm going back to bed.
You are moving through space:
moving forward,
moving up,
moving sideways, particularly if you are a crab.
What makes you think that you are NOT MOVING through time, when your clock shows that you do?
when did all this stuff start moving? 13.6 billion years ago.
Whatever was before that, did not MOVE through time,
so there was no waiting.
was God, the divinity, greater in size, older in age than the newly nascent big bang singularity, cosmic egg?
is he/she today?
since anything would be greater than a singularity,
has the universe outgrown "God" today?
or is it possible to think of the creator (if any) as both eternal i.e. existing in eternal stationary time, and therefore exceeding in extent. the cosmos?
God does not dwell in temples, for the heavens of the heavens can not contain him. a quote.
In such a condition,
"God's" NOW would be eternal, whereas our NOW is of zero length.
There would be no waiting if you are always in the same NOW.
Just a little insight in just how expansive the universe is known to be by recent scientific measurements and analysis.
Are conceptual understanding of the universe is restained by are knowledge of it, as time progresses more understanding
will eventually come forward and realized.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz),
R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team
This picture may look familiar to you, even though you’ve probably never seen it before. The Extreme Deep Field (or XDF) is actually a part of the Ultra Deep Field, which you can see for yourself if you rescale both images and rotate them at 4.7 degrees relative to one another, as I did here.
The XDF has far more galaxies in it than the HUDF does in a comparable region of space. Take a look for yourself at a small portion of these images, compared side-by-side with one another, and you can clearly see how many more galaxies there are in the XDF with your own eyes.
Image credit: cropped, identical portions of the HUDF and XDF images
Sure, the Ultra-Deep one (at left) is very impressive, especially considering that—by all appearances—this is just a blank patch of featureless sky. But there are maybe 75% more galaxies-per-patch-of-sky in the XDF! Applying the XDF results to the entire sky, we find that there are more like 176 billion galaxies in the entire Universe, a huge increase from our previous estimate from the HUDF.
We sit in only one of these billions of galaxies ..... something to think about.
I think it is the finite world that defies comprehension, not infinity. For instance many scientists, who in this instance were predominantly atheist, used to believe in the solid state universe that never changed and never had a beginning. Of course when it was discovered that all matter was rushing out from a singular point, this was proved wrong, not least because of the singularity that Einstein predicted for such a start point (even though the maths here also produce an infinity) and silly creationists hailed the discovery as a victory. My point though it not the illusion of the creationist so called victory but that an infinitely old and static universe was preferred by the atheist world view because it seemed to remove the need for a God. Infinity or infinite time was not seen as a problem by atheists in this instance but when the finite world was proved via the scientific evidence, it was this that created problems.
Of course if the universe had been the static solid state one postulated in the past and infinitely old as a result, this would have produced other issues because finite structures still existed and there is no way to combine the finite with the infinite in a logical framework. Infinity on its own with absolutely no division in itself is fine and perfectly understandable because there is nothing about it to explain because nothing happens. Finite things on the other hand have to start and end otherwise they are not finite and this is where the non-comprehensibility comes in. It is not understandable to get something from nothing as with a finite object unless it came from something else but that leads back to infinity again, which is fine, if it was only infinity but we have a finite object to explain in this case. The limits of knowledge is actually what drives the search for knowledge else it would be a futile thing to do, as no matter how much you got one would always be infinitely far away from anything useful. It’s good to acknowledge the limits of science if one respects science while not prematurely stopping the search.
Scientists should never stop asking questions because one cannot know what can be discovered without going to look, unlike creationists who stop asking altogether. However at the same time it is folly to think that a brain made of up matter and governed by physical laws and fed by data and input from an exclusively physical environment can get beyond itself to be objective about what itself is trapped in. One can’t be truly objective about something one is and one is in. To do that one would have to literally get outside oneself and physics and that cannot be done. We are in what we study thinking we can get the big picture when we are in that picture. It’s like pointing a camera at the universe and wondering why we are not in the frame. In many ways some atheists and some Christians are in the same boat thinking they have all the answers or the approved and fundamental way to get all the answers. I say fundamentalists abound in both the atheist and theists camps although there are decent non fundamentalists in both groups also.
