God Did Not Create the Universe

[rhonjonParticipant]

My aunt Shirley is a space buff. She wanted to show a friend a picture she’d downloaded from the internet. But the woman turned away and said “I don’t want to see that. The bible says the sun revolves around the Earth. I don’t want to see pictures of the Earth revolving around the sun.”

 

She was wrong, of course. The biblical writers evinced not the slightest idea of anything revolving around anything. There is no universe in the bible.  God placed the sun, moon, and stars as lights right here in the Earth’s atmosphere—the firmament.

 

Christian apologists say it doesn’t matter because the bible doesn’t claim to be a science tome. Only the passages about salvation matter.

Excuse me? If I can’t trust the bible about things that can be proven, why should I trust it about things that can’t be proven? That’s like say my basic arithmetic may be faulty, but you can trust my calculus.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Obviously people used to claim that the Bible is a science book.  But that was before we had actual science.

The passages about salvation, going to heaven, immortality, etc., look pretty wacky to an atheist.  This is one point where our paths completely diverge.  But I presume that people sincerely get their spirituality from the Bible and the life of Jesus, so it’s not all useless and wacky, even from an atheist perspective.  The spirituality of a healthy religious person is going in the same direction as that of a healthy non-religious person.  By healthy I mean non-toxic.

[DavisModerator]

There was something akin to Science before the method was more frequent adopted for inquiry about the natural world during the Enlightenment. Even Aristotle had a psudo method for verifying information and the Greeks had worked out something along the line of critical thinking. To say that the Bible was written in a time when or even during a time when people could use reason to make claims about the world rather than parroting nonsense people made up is going too far. Yes, it wasn’t overly sophisticated and the pressure to conform was strong…but writers still should have known better.

The New Testament is much less Jesusism as it is Paulism. And Paul was not trying to ascertain truth to push a new religion onto people. The aim is not to say anything that can be backed up, but that will motivate people to jump on the bandwagon and swallow a lot of his bizarre world view and his own strict moral code of the day. Paul didn’t live in a world of ignorance but knowingly spread ignorance to suit his agenda.

[_Robert_Participant]

Davis wrote:

There was something akin to Science before the method was more frequent adopted for inquiry about the natural world during the Enlightenment. Even Aristotle had a psudo method for verifying information and the Greeks had worked out something along the line of critical thinking. To say that the Bible was written in a time when or even during a time when people could use reason to make claims about the world rather than parroting nonsense people made up is going too far. Yes, it wasn’t overly sophisticated and the pressure to conform was strong…but writers still should have known better. The New Testament is much less Jesusism as it is Paulism. And Paul was not trying to ascertain truth to push a new religion onto people. The aim is not to say anything that can be backed up, but that will motivate people to jump on the bandwagon and swallow a lot of his bizarre world view and his own strict moral code of the day. Paul didn’t live in a world of ignorance but knowingly spread ignorance to suit his agenda.

Yes, there was real science, math, engineering and even some true medicine going on. They knew the earth was round (~5th century BC) and even had astronomical computers like the Antikythera mechanism 50BC.

[UnseenParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

Yes, there was real science, math, engineering and even some true medicine going on. They knew the earth was round (~5th century BC) and even had astronomical computers like the Antikythera mechanism 50BC.

For f**k’s sake. European astronomy didn’t even start to catch up to the cosmological and astronomical knowledge possessed by the Mayans, the Indians, the Egyptians, and even the Druids, among others, until Galileo. And they did it without the benefit of telescopes or (as far as we know) higher mathematics.

[rhonjonParticipant]

This was a great way to hide the fact that Jesus was born on Natalis Solis Invicti.

[rhonjonParticipant]

Here’s the whole message:

What we call the age of discovery was actually the age of rediscovery. Very few intellectuals today want to admit it, but I think that when a mob of angry Christians burned the library of Alexandria in the fifth or sixth century, they didn’t destroy everything. They kept some of that knowledge just like the Conquistador kept some of the Mayan knowledge. Is it just a coincidence that soon after the Conquistador returned to Europe, Pope Gregory switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregoria calendar, which like the Mayan calendar puts the winter solstice on December 21. This was a great way to hide the fact that Jesus was born on Natalis Solis Invicti.

 

Wasn’t it the religious folks who accused Socrates of atheism and forched him to commit suicide. So the inimical relationship between religion and reason didn’t begin with the Christians.

[_Robert_Participant]

Unseen wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:

Yes, there was real science, math, engineering and even some true medicine going on. They knew the earth was round (~5th century BC) and even had astronomical computers like the Antikythera mechanism 50BC.

For f**k’s sake. European astronomy didn’t even start to catch up to the cosmological and astronomical knowledge possessed by the Mayans, the Indians, the Egyptians, and even the Druids, among others, until Galileo. And they did it without the benefit of telescopes or (as far as we know) higher mathematics.

I didn’t exclude any culture, but that’s on par as you have proven to me that you are a professional at making bad assumptions.

[rhonjonParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

Unseen wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:

Yes, there was real science, math, engineering and even some true medicine going on. They knew the earth was round (~5th century BC) and even had astronomical computers like the Antikythera mechanism 50BC.

For f**k’s sake. European astronomy didn’t even start to catch up to the cosmological and astronomical knowledge possessed by the Mayans, the Indians, the Egyptians, and even the Druids, among others, until Galileo. And they did it without the benefit of telescopes or (as far as we know) higher mathematics.

I didn’t exclude any culture, but that’s on par as you have proven to me that you are a professional at making bad assumptions.

 

Is there anything in particular with which you disagree? I will look up some of the technologies he presented. If he is mistaken then I will be able to tell people exactly where he went astray.

 

The one thing I do know is that a Greek cat named Democritus wrote about atoms in the fourth century BCE.

 

But these are not assumptions. These technologies either existed or they did not.

[Andrew BrownParticipant]

Lots of great points!

The New Emperor doesn’t like to be questioned, thus burn the old empire and history away so we can forge a new world.

This reset happened across many civilizations and every library burned equated to 1000s of lifetimes worth of research and discovery lost to the ego of brutes.

We made great strides over the last century and I plan to continue the journey as far as we can go before the Cosmic Dice Roll resets the Earth again!

[rhonjonParticipant]

This is one of the main reasons why I’m an atheist when it comes to the God of the bible.

 

As long as you keep God out there, nebulous and ineffable, his existence cannot be disproven. But when you entomb God in the pages of a book and claim he did this, that, and the other in human history, you open those claims to the scrutiny of historians and scientists.

 

If the creation story is false, then the creator is also false since that particular God cannot be identified outside of that particular story.

[RichRaelianParticipant]

Hi! According to the Elohim the universe is infinite in time and space with no beginning,middle or end just existing in the ever present eternal now moment.

[rhonjonParticipant]

RichRaelian wrote:

Hi! According to the Elohim the universe is infinite in time and space with no beginning,middle or end just existing in the ever present eternal now moment.

RichRaelian wrote:

Hi! According to the Elohim the universe is infinite in time and space with no beginning,middle or end just existing in the ever present eternal now moment.

 

I may be totally wrong (correct me with chapter and verse and I will not be offended) but I don’t know where the bible says that. Unless you are of some other religious persuasion which worships the Elohim. To my knowledge, that is a Hebrew designation for God. Did you get that doctrine from the Talmud?  Some form of Kabbalism?

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Hi! According to the Elohim the universe is infinite in time and space with no beginning,middle or end just existing in the ever present eternal now moment.

That is not scientifically correct.

[rhonjonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Hi! According to the Elohim the universe is infinite in time and space with no beginning,middle or end just existing in the ever present eternal now moment. That is not scientifically correct.

 

I had to think about that. My conclusion is that while it’s true space is infinite(if humans could live long enough and travel fast enough to reach the edge of outerspace, we wouldn’t rest until we found a way to breach the barrier and discover a new frontier on the other side of the end of nothing), the visible universe as we know it did began with the big bang, and it may end when the galaxies are so far apart that they become parts of other universes, just as when a sun goes nova the elemental particles that made up that sun travel outward to form other suns.

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