(September 11, 2014 at 12:18 pm)sswhateverlove Wrote: The two commonly held opinions are “from nothing, God created everything” and “from nothing, the Big Bang created everything”. One is called “religion” and the other is called “scientific fact”, but both make the same claim.You've got a grasp on the religious belief, but your understanding of how science approaches knowledge is badly lacking. There might be a crackpot theory out there that states that "from nothing, the Big Bang created everything" but it's not taken any more seriously than "from nothing, God created everything." Scientific theories about how the universe began are just that-- theories. Religious claims about how the universe began are just that-- horseshit.
"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