(May 8, 2014 at 1:47 pm)lordofgemini Wrote: I meant how it came to existance. He clearly didn't read the entire thread.I read the entire thread. The notion that there must have always been something seems reasonable. The notion that it was an ultra-complex, hyper-powerful and transcendentally intelligent being who decided after a (literal) eternity to start creating is simply less reasonable than the idea that perhaps the material of the universe itself has always been there, acted on by whatever natural forces may exist in those states. Maybe the universe expands and contracts on some timetable, or maybe it came into existence through a black hole in another one, part of a growing lattice of universes.
All we know is that the universe is here, and signs point to some kind of beginning, and those signs only point to god when we wedge him in there with no consideration of what that might imply. It is possible that the first act of creation was when a larval worm spun a cocoon around itself, billions of years after that first spark (accidental or otherwise) birthed the universe.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
