The Big Bang, Darwin and the God of the Gaps

Was it just chance? (Clue - no, it wasn't.)

If not by chance then design?

If you look at the virus, it's mutating randomly all the time. But most of the mutations don't make it any more infectious, or any more "fit" for purpose in any other way. So they just tootle along without anybody noticing. Once in a while one of the mutations confers a benefit to the virus, e.g. make it more infectious, like the Kent variant. So it becomes more prevalent and takes over from the other variants.

No design needed, many random mutations of which a few become widespread because they make the virus more "fit" for its environment.

Alegrias1, you said ‘Nobody knows what was there before. Physicists are the first to say that.’

That’s not strictly correct. According to the standard model of cosmology version of the Big Bang theory, time began to exist as the moment the singularity expanded. Thus, there was no ‘before’.

I once had a discussion about this after a rather boozy evening with a French friend on a beach in Brittany. He was a top NASA cosmologist, and he was explaining string theory to me, drawing in the sand and using keys and flip-flops to mark points in his diagrams and calculations. For one glorious moment, I actually understood string theory with brilliant clarity (but by the time I woke the next day with a hangover, the understanding had evaporated).

In the course of the conversation, I asked him what he thought existed before the Big Bang. He pursed his lips, shrugged, and said ‘Madame, I am merely a physicist, so that is not my expertise. You would need to ask a theologian.’

We don't know. I would have thought the most exciting and encouraging religious and scientists are those who admit we don't know Callistemon. Life and progress are very limited for those who have come to an end of their questioning - and for the rest of us when they do.

A leaf in a spray on a twig on a branch at the outer edge of the crown of a thirty-foot tall forest tree surrounded by hundreds of others could probably (if it could reason) trace a path directly back to the roots, and as a consequence believe that all the previous growth had happened with the purposeful design of producing itself.

However, starting from the root end of the system, its tracing could have followed hundreds (thousands? millions?) of paths which would have ended in different leaves. If it had budded on a different twig and been eaten by a passing caterpillar, it wouldn't have existed and been able to look back at its "inevitable" existence.

If the result of one of the thousands of mutations that produced our "inevitable" uniqueness (or the uniqueness of any living thing) had been that it was eaten at once by a predator, or wiped out by a drought, we would not be here to look back and say that there was a design to our, or anything else's, evolution.

In retrospect the route is obvious by the footprints left, but from the start it is a trackless waste to be wandered through in trial and error, and the errors could have resulted in our never existing, and never knowing that we didn't exist. For egocentric beings with the ability to reason and plan ahead, that is a hard thing to accept.

As only 'not very bright' people can post on here then this is for me. Evolution.

In our experience, those who shout the loudest against God, are the ones who become Christians. Most people don’t care. Richard Dawkins showed he wasn’t sure just from one chapter in his book, The God Delusion, entitled “ There is almost certainly no God”. I’ve done as much as I can here, and am signing out,
God bless you all.

I think I started talking about Dawkins self-characterisation as an agnostic. In the God Delusion he uses a 7-point scale where 1 is complete believer to 7, an atheist, if I remember correctly. He puts himself at about 5 or 6, I recall, because he does not have absolute proof that God exists, so he keeps an open mind. But everything he has seen so far tells him that God probably doesn't exist.

I thought about putting in something in my Big Bang post geekesse about time not existing before the singularity, but decided against it. But I agree of course. With string theory, I can usually remember enough to say that elementary particles are an expression of a nine-dimensional entity with specific vibrational frequencies, in the three dimensional space we can observe, then the rest leaks out of my brain, never to be seen again ??

I haven’t posted for a while, but have been reading this thread with interest. I have to respond to Holysox , as I did just that. I am a Christian, but a few years ago, when one of our daughters was searching, she borrowed a copy of The God Delusion. I was interested to the point of that chapter you speak of. I switched straight off. I couldn’t understand why someone would write a whole book, and put all that work into something that “ probably doesn’t exist”. That means it probably does then. I think I’ll stick with Pascal’s wager. Needless to say, my daughter, in fact all my children, became Christians. Thank you Richard Dawkins!

The God Delusion is a bit polemical, but I do agree with him generally.

The God Delusion isn't about God, its about the Delusion.

I don’t believe most people don’t care HolySox. I think many question life, what’s it all about, and whether this is all there is, and vaguely believe in something/one there beyond the visible. I also think that many put thoughts of mortality to the back of their mind, preferring to think death is what happens to others.

I was a Christian but felt there were too many unanswered questions for me, and I felt uneasy that evangelicals I knew had such explicit understanding of God’s thinking and purpose.

None of us can prove whether there is a god or not, but on available evidence I don’t believe there is, but will always continue to have dialogue with others who think differently. Life can be tough and whatever it helps to get through is fine by me.

There's always Voltaire "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him."
It's probably not a statement humanists approve of, believing that respect for others can be established just on the basis of human worth. But many of the laws and controls in our society were first established by religious concepts. Of course there have (and still are) some pretty objectionable concepts and practices adopted along the way.

The problem with Pascals Wager, is that it posits that belief in the existence of God is sufficient to ensure eternal salvation.

Whereas Jesus demanded more than that. The Gospels record very clearly that his followers are required to live in a certain way: to deny themselves, to give all they have, to love their neighbour as themselves and follow him, to humiliation, suffering and death, if the world requires it.

I don’t see that in people who say they are Christians. They mostly live the same kind of life as everyone else. They pretty much view their faith as an added benefit rather than a tough faith that requires enormous self-sacrifice.

So my question is, if you don’t actually practise the faith as laid down by Jesus, can you still expect the benefit?

Or like Pascal, is it enough just to believe that God exists?

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

John Lennon

Darwin's wife (he married a Wedgewood) worried terribly that
he would not go to heaven, so they would not meet there.
I have no difficulty accepting Darwin's theory and believing in God.

I have some practical problems with an after life, if it exists. How for example will we recognise those we have loved and long since died, and what if we have re married I can’t imagine spending eternity with some people. How would we spend our time with everlasting life stretching out for er ever? What about those that don’t make it, such as me? Can we really believe in a biblical fiery hell lasting similarly for eternity?

Alegrias1

The God Delusion is a bit polemical, but I do agree with him generally.

The God Delusion isn't about God, its about the Delusion.

The delusion of what then, if it isn’t God?

Religious belief in a personal God, Toadinthehole. But the book isn't about God him/her/itself, its about how its a belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.

So he's not talking about God as such, but the belief systems of humans. He put the work into writing a book about how people have such belief systems, not writing about something he doesn't think exists. I don't understand how you can draw that conclusion.

People write books about the Greek myths, but that doesn't mean they believe in them

There will be no time in eternity to get bored. If time didn't exist until the Big Bang and the start of matter, then it won't exist either when we have left this life of beings made of that matter. Eternity will then be the same as timelessness and all of it will co-exist in one moment (but of course there will be no such thing as a moment)

That does assume, however, that eternity is there for us to experience, whether the experience is boredom or ecstasy, and that we will be there to experience it and aware of where (and when??) we are having that experience.

It is all rather like debating how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, isn't it?

I don’t understand your thinking at all Alegrias. Have to leave it at that.

Sorry, was being rather frivolous Elegran

I'm not surprised, Greeneyedgirl, in the face of all this serious discussion.

BTW, the fiery biblical hell seems now to have been relegated to - er - Hades. Those who don't qualify for eternal bliss are now just sort of switched off and go into oblivion. That is what a JW relative says, anyway.

I am liking your thinking & logic Elegran .

I think of course there is a place for serious discussion about religion, but a little levity doesn’t hurt. It’s tricky challenging religion by evidencing scientifically based contradictions to belief, because religious beliefs are often emotionally deeply rooted, and challenging this can be upsetting.

Of course I don’t believe in any form of afterlife. But I can’t see the point of it in any case.

One might like to hope that we will met our beloveds again, but if course we won’t. And if we did what then? Do we sort of float around for eternity? The more thought given the sillier the idea becomes.

Give your beloveds all the love and care now! You’ll never ge5 another chance.