What do you think about the creation of the universe?

Question

I just want your opinions.

I believe in the Bible but I want to hear the "scientific" side of the story.

Answer 1

This is another of the God Squad's planned and well-rehearsed raids into a scientific forum hoping to drum up some converts to swallow their dogma.

Kindly keep your views to the Spirituality and Religion pages where people interested in such topics can migrate to debate them. We don't post science questions on the Religious pages so kindly treat us with the same respect. People come here to debate scientific issues and glean information about them.

I advise the questioner to search for Big Bang and read answers to questions on that topic and follow the links provided there.

I see the answerers who claim they find no contradiction between science and religion as conducting an ideological softening up of confused readers to encourage them to start abandoning scientific thinking and open themselves up to faith-based world views.

I find it totally hypocritical how Christians conveniently forget that the Roman Catholic Church tortured and burned at the stake scientists who questioned religious orthodoxy if they would not recant their "heretical" views. And threatened to torture Galileo for his temerity in proving the Copernican view of the Solar System to be correct by proving Jupiter had 4 moons that went around it, and the earth was therefore not the centre of the universe.

So how do the "there is no contradiction between science and religion" camp explain away that history, which clearly demonstrates the authoritarian suppression by organised religion of the fruits of scientific enquiry?

Answer 2

I see the Creationists are on the warpath again.

The idea, put forwards by Haratu, above, that God created the universe relatively recently but made it look older than it actually was derives from the work of Philip Henry Gosse, (1810 - 1888) an opponent of Darwinism, who in 1857 published his book Omphalos: Untying the Geological Knot.

The Omphalos hypothesis argued that the World had been created by God recently but with the appearance of old age. This was largely ignored, at the time, and some considered it blasphemous because it accused the Creator of deceit.

It has however re-emerged as a desperate attempt to reconcile the literal reading of Genesis (Bishop Usher's calculations that the world began in 4004 BC) with the radiocarbon dating and other geological evidence that the world is 4.5 billion years old.

The harder it became to dispute that evidence, the more the Creationists have had to resort to chicanery to salvage some credibility for the "Young Earth" theory.

Doppler shift evidence of the distance of far-off stars has also proved deeply embarrassing for Creationists. Also, we now have evidence of an extra-solar planet 21,000 light years away from earth. And how do the Young Earth Creationists explain that?

They don't. They shift their ground again! As you can see above. Notice how Haratu quickly changes the subject and says it doesn't matter when it was created, so as to avoid us probing too deeply into that Achilles' Heel of the Creationist position,

Intellectual dishonesty is their trademark and by these signs shall ye know them!

Answer 3

Listen, Mo. The people responding to your answer mean well. They are sometimes heavily influenced by religious beliefs or scientific beliefs. They mean well. They really do. I have often pondered your question, and in my many years of life I have come up with the following conclusion.

You should pay attention to science. Read and learn. There is much truth there. However, temper this knowledge because as we discover more, learn more, through science, we often find out that we were wrong. Science often turns facts upon their heads. For instance, Pluto; Science taught that Pluto was a planet. Today, we debate that, and we conclude that it is not. This is just a simplified example. There are many more meaningful ones. It's about discovery and rediscovery. That's what makes science beautiful. There is no fear in being wrong. There is not fear in learning more and changing what we thought was fact (For the most part).

Religious beliefs are similar, but there was much resistence in changing established beliefs. You had religious leader or leaders, that proposed 'facts.' They proposed facts, whether they truely knew the truth or not. They based their conclusions on faith and sometimes, just power. There was no divine revelation. They did not speak to God more than you do. They did not see more than you do when reading the Bible. They are just men, but there are many that are willing to learn as well.

Leaders of the scientific world and religious world are only men. They falter and make mistakes. Temper your knowledge or what you think you've learned of both. Watch out for people, organizations or whatever, that refuse to change despite the scientific evidence presented before them. This life is a journey of discovery...

It's okay to believe in God and to believe in what you learn from science. Do not base your faith on the religious dogma. Question, question, question and you will learn and relearn. I believe God created the universe. I don't take the creationist view in terms of timeline, nor the view that the universe was created 'old.' I believe what I see, what I learn. I reconcile that with God alone, not with any religion. For me, our universe is too beautiful to be random. There's a hand of a creator. At least that's what I see.

Mo, you shouldn't be forced to chose sides, either creation or science. Instead seek the answers that can reconcile both. The answer may never come in your lifetime, but the journey to find them are just as important as the answer itself.

Answer 4

If we ever discovered the way this universe was created that would be The greatest discovery of all time...
But unfortunately at the moment we just have theories related to existance of universe and NO HARD SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE...
I dont think that in the near future we will come to the answer as lately we even havent been able to answer the way we and other life forms were created on this planet...So answering the question of existance of universe is a much bigger task

Answer 5

This must be the third or fourth such God Squad-orchestrated pretence of an innocent question that I have read and an accompanying set of rehearsed answers by evangelicals pretending to be sincere open-minded members of the public.

It is all part of a PR attempt to make dogmatic views sound plausible by the people stating them making themselves sound reasonable.

What I have noticed is that when the scientists among us argue back, the evangelicals go very quiet, as if they realise they have been rumbled again. Or as if they are under a 3-line whip not to sound argumentative but are told to just make sincere-sounding statements of belief,

On one of those questions, though, their gane plan was rather spoiled by an old-fashioned Bible basher joining in and telling the scientists that they would all burn in hell-fire for their heresies and sins. i.e. showing us evangelical Christianity for what it is, with the mask taken off. I had to laugh at how this thunderer was making the carefully-planned marketing exercise go pear-shaped!

Either way, sincerely dogmatic or tub-thumpingly bigoted, there is no place for beliefs that go unquestioned in a scientific discussion as the questioning of received ideas is at the very heart of the Scientific Method,

So back to the Religion and Spirituality pages with the lot of you! And don't come bothering us again!

Answer 6

I believe in God, but i am also a scientific person.
I guess everyone have heard about big bang. The whole universe used to be a very small ball of matter with a density at least close to infinity. But big bang happened and it exploded. Its matters are scattered everywhere and it created planets/stars/asteroids/us/etc. In fact the universe is still expanding right now, one proof that in the past the universe was at one single point.
I believe that big bang really happened, but it was God who made it happen. With God's existance, it doesn't necessarily mean that the universe is created over one night, but through a process. The Big Bang, that is.

Answer 7

How much time do you have? If there are star nurseries who moves them to another location? In the beginning there was darkness and there was void? OK, which spot in the universe was that? It's like planting seeds in an endless expanse.If the Heavens are other solar systems than it is just a reference to their distance from us. For some the description of God is the universe and all of the knowledge it contains from beginning to end and of each star system. So with God all these things or knowledge of becomes possible even God. God=>Universe.

Answer 8

God created the world old...

I say God created the universe, however he created it to appear much older than it really is. He also created it to appear that processes took place before he created it, these processes began when created but were made to appear to have been going for longer.

Understand this and you get to the point that it does not matter when the universe was created, nor how it was created.
All that matters is WHY it was created.
It is the question WHY? that is far more important.

Answer 9

A product of the 4 fundamental forces

Answer 10

I agree. This is such a charade, this display of benign open-mindedness, when really what they are attempting is revisionism of science to slip creationism in the back door, as best they can,

Intellectual dishonesty is right!