It might have been sublime. 
In short we disagree on quite a bit.
I’m not convinced that there was ever a flood that wiped out the majority of people. Maybe there was a big flood in Mesopotamia and maybe not. I’m also not convinced that there was ever a Tower of Babel there either. Could have been a big building perhaps but I can’t imagine it would have been the largest ever or that it was connected to people being scattered or language changing.
I think that the flood is most likely purely fictional. I use to think maybe there was a small regional flood and a man was there that was somehow warned. But it was not the first storm. I think it’s just symbolism for a new creation story.
In the myth the scene is this.
A world going through a massive storm. So the sun would have been blotted out. Storm clouds everywhere casting the world into darkness. The storm even blotted over the land by covering it up with its dark chaotic waves and water. So the world was formless and void. Then instead of it being the breath of God separating it as the god hovered over the waters, we see the spirit as a dove being released and hovering above the waters and landing on a tree and that tree represented a sort of tree of life.
I think the Tower of Babel was something written after there was a king. I think the image is of a giant tower. A monstrous building like the idol of a king. Even though it never says king, you can definitely imagine a pharaoh ruling over it making everyone build it. Someone had to be the workers. Someone was in charge. But the kingdom was destroyed and the people scattered into exile into foreign lands and cultures taking on a new identify instead of the original chosen priestly one.
Now, I agree with you that is what ID is. ID is the belief that science points towards a designer. I disagree that science points towards a designer. I just don’t believe in any fine tuning. I’m not sure where Klax is. But he was actually pivotal years ago making me realize that I don’t have to use Christian jargon to cover up my disbelief. By that I mean it was him who made me realize it’s actually perfectly fine to admit there is no fine tuning. I don’t need it to have faith.
I think the misleading notion here is the phrase “before you have a big bang”.
As others have said, in various words, there was no “before” the big bang.
Time started then or thereabouts. The universe also started off with various parameters set. Only God knows why the particular parameters (“boundary conditions”) were set in a particular way, except that they did generate a universe fit to produce folk like us. No paradox, just a certain amount of human ignorance. Energy could have been one of the initial parameters.
To claim that energy pre-existed denies the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy.
Or do we just throw out all the laws of physics because we are talking Nature?
Richard
You may have misunderstood. Nothing physical pre-exists the start of physical time, by definition! We should suppose God acting from a different mode. But I decline to speculate on the mode of existence of God.
Who said anything about God?
The Big Bang is the alternative to God (in any form not just Genesis)
Which was the whole point of this discussion.
Richard
How is that? The rumor is that ‘big bang’ coined by Hubble was meant as a pejorative because non-theists did not like the idea when Fr. Lemaître proposed it because the big bang made God an alternative to the steady-state universe they were presuming, just the opposite of what you appear to be claiming.
Last I knew there were five mega-floods that covered large enough areas they could be candidates for the Noah account, three in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, one the flooding of the Black Sea, and the other at the head of the Persian Gulf. All it would take to get from one of those to the Noah story would be a family surviving in a craft large enough to take their animals along, and not having evidence of other survivors, and then the writer/redactor to mythologize it.
Except we know that there was an event that had all those. The building was in Eridu, and if it had been finished it would have been the biggest ziggurat ever, except the project was abandoned. The language situation was that the city itself didn’t have a large enough workforce, so they obtained laborers from across the area they ruled; apparently whoever called for this labor force didn’t stop to think about the fact that they spoke a multitude of languages and so translators would be needed. Then IIRC there was a supply aand/or funding issue on top of the ridiculous inefficiency due to the language problem, and in the lull in construction the labor force just packed up and left.
The bit about it being a tower to heaven is a misunderstanding of the purpose of a ziggurat by westerners: Back then it was almost universal that high places were where the gods came down to meet with priests and kings, but Eridu and its fellow cities were on a plain. So since they didn’t have any mountains, their solution was to build imitation mountains that would allow the priests to ascend and communicate with heaven in hopes the gods would come down and speak with them.
To a people whose deity didn’t bother with high mountains, just with a designated place, it was easy enough to misconstrue what was going on, probably deliberately, and to tell the story in a way that attributed all the screw-ups to intervention by YHWH.
And right there is a major piece in the case made for the final version having been set down during the Exile: priests trying to lead the Israelites while they were all in Babylon would have spun things to remind their people that despite what it looked like, YHWH was still supreme – and to stay away from those pagan ziggurats!
In my university days there was a group of students who’d been atheists or agnostics until they got deeply into science and decided there must be a Designer. But everyone was rational enough to recognize that anything beyond that conclusion wasn’t science any more, though for the investigation of which candidate for Divine-Design was the actual one some tried to find some science in the various holy books; mostly, though, they examined the holy books looking for the most rational claim to deity.
And I always got a kick out of telling YECists that the branch of science with the largest number in our informal club wasn’t cosmology but biology – that it was the study of evolution specifically that brought the most to decide there must be a Designer.
It’s hard to deny at least some fine-tuning as there are a number of constants that have values such that if they were changed even slightly the result would be a universe that could not have life. But it’s not so straightforward as is often claimed because not all the constants are independent, plus it’s my understanding that there are some that can vary quite a bit without radically changing the universe.
1 Like
How?
Funny, then, that the idea was initially rejected because it opened a door to claiming there was a God. As Dale noted:
The 1st Law of Thermodynamics is that you cannot create or destroy energy.
I see no evidence of theism in articles on the Big Bang. Whether Hubble et al included God or not, the discussions centre around dark matter and other cosmic phenomena and the observable expansion of the Universe rather than the origins of the initial expansion.
I am not disputing that God is the most logical answer, I am trying to ascertain the scientific solution that excludes Him.
Richard
The scientists at Los Alamos must not have heard of this law. They built a device that excels at creating energy from matter. And the process can actually work in reverse, matter from energy.
I attended a lecture by Robert Jastrow way back in 1967, or there abouts, where he explained all of this.
Clearly you do not understand. Matter contains energy. All they are doing is releasing that energy.
The law of thermodynmics holds.
Richard
E = mc*2 They generate the energy by destroying matter. You know the whole splitting the atom thing. Matter and energy are equivalent.
2 Likes
And?
Not exactly.
Matter has energy stored within it. Splitting the atom releases that energy. When it explodes other matter is formed along with a tremendous release of kinetic energy. That energy is not spent or lost but it is absorbed into the atmosphere until it disipates. Even then it is not actually lost, the mean temperature rises until evened out by combining with the energy levels already present.
There is a reason why the Law of thermodynamics was made. It does not dictate, it observes, and to date there is no exception to it.
Richard
and the little 2?
What does "not exactly mean?
Richard
One big thing that you are missing is that the resultant mass of the fission products is less than the parent isotopes. So you have a lot more energy and less mass than you started with. Some of the mass was actually converted into energy – it wasn’t just ‘released’ by splitting the atom. (This is not unlike your misconception that the big bang was a chemical explosion.)
1 Like
Of course, some of the energy is spent in heat.
Look, I do not want to argue physics , any more than I want ot argue cosmology or even Evolution.
Scientists are notoriously tunnel-visioned. They have their specialties and sometimes they are literally unaware of other disciplines that might impinge or affect their theories or beliefs.
Christians can be likewise. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I have a broad but shallow knowledge of a great deal of science but I am not up to date on any of it. I use the Internet to try and catch up but it is only the popular stuff not the cutting edge.
I throw stuff out and see what bites. Congratulations, you bit. But I do not have the knowledge to completely roll you in.
Richard
And? What about the lost mass? Where is it hiding?
Your insults do not fill the gap of your missing understanding.
1 Like