What's your opinion mr. longshot: did the universe had a starting point or not? Religious people make one crucial, fundamental mistake in their way of viewing the world: they see God as a separate (from everything else) being. Reality as an interconnected unity is much closer concept to our everyday experience. How did the universe come to be? It did not *come*, it just *is*. No beginning no end. It is not possible to stop or start the cause-effect chain. That's also why there's no purpose. Universe is a never-ending story...
Religious people feel the need to give a name to the force of creation, which I agree is not separate from the universe itself. Then, having given it a name, proceed to separate and distinguish this force from the universe and everything in it. But this thread is not supposed to be about religion, so I will not continue analyzing the fallacies of the religious mentality. The Big Bang theorists believe that the universe did have a specific beginning and likely will have a specific end. But that, too, is just a theory, which will continue to modified, altered, and sooner or later scrapped for likely some very different or partially related but expanded theories. Like, even if there was a Big Bang 15 billion years ago, how do we know that our perceivable or conceivable universe is not just a single champagne bubble in a huge ocean of champagne, each bubble having its own 50 billion year cycle of Big Bang to Big Bust?
easy way to know is to study the brains of different creatures. i'll tell you right now, i'm a more advanced thinker than an ant. just look at the size of my brain compared to an ant's. look at which animals have the most evolved brains to see which are the "smartest."
EXCELLENT POINT! this is something i think about, too. because of red shift, the big bang does have some things going for it. but like you said, how do we know we're not just part of one big bang with many others somewhere else? the more i think about all this, the more i think the truth is closer to my fish example in my first post in this thread. but even still, that leaves many unanswered questions. here is another version of the fish example, which i will compare to the big bang. think of a bacteria that lives in your body. particularly, one that will live and die entirely inside your body..never leaving it. if that bacteria had the brain power of us humans, your body would be the bacteria's entire universe. all it knows is your body. it can not even comprehend what is outside of it ALTHOUGH THERE REALLY IS SO MUCH MORE GOING ON OUTSIDE OF IT! what if our lives consist in our big bang. maybe our big bang is just a small part of something larger that we have no way of understanding. this is the best thing i can think of. even this leaves many things to wonder about. one of my major pitfalls is not being able to understand how something can come from nothing. like dt-waw said, he thinks things never came to be. everything just always is. i can't understand that though. where did all this stuff come from!? if it was always here, how the hell could that have happened?!!?!?!?
Size and apparent compexity cannot necessarily judge "advance". Simply looking at the construction of a brain cannot tell you the most important things about what actually takes place within that brain. We could take the same approach and prejudge that larger computers are necessarily more advanced computers. There are billions of people that you no doubt feel you are smarter than. But if your skull were opened up to look at the physical makeup of your brain, and compared to the same observations of all those stupid people, how much observable difference do you think there would be between your "smart" brain and their "stupid" ones? Comparing to computers again (simply a man-made mechanical brain), there's a lot more to the intelligence of a computer than just the size or even complexity of the hardware. You fill a RAM up with dumbass aol chat, no matter how advanced the computer hardware is, that mechanical brain will still be stupider than an intelligently directed palm pilot with much less apparent capacity.
i agree with you. my "size" example is not really that great. we do know, however, that basic life functions are controlled by the brain stem. more evolved creatures have bigger areas than others other than the brain stem. if you looked at a cat brain and a human brain, you'd see the brain stem (primitive brain), then there are other areas that the cat has, too, but the human's is larger and more evolved. i totally agree size may not be everything. but i do think, when dealing with animals on earth, a lot is to be said for the size and anatomy of a brain when determining intelligence. as you said, a bigger computer is not necessarily better. but at the same time, it's not like a cat brain is a pentium 4 and a human has a pentium 2. in earth biology, i would not be surprised if size is a major factor. i don't think earth brains are wired much different throughout species. is it just a coincidence that cats aren't making and using computers, but we humans are and we also have bigger brains? (yes, i know it helps that we stand upright and have fingers.)
on planet earth, yes. for me to be very sure, i'd want to compare cerebellum size (or whatever part of the brain where complex thinking is done) of the most evolved animals on earth. something neat would be to know if there are any animals on earth with larger cerebellums than humans. as a previous poster said, a big computer is not necessarily better, but i do not believe that animal brains on earth are WIRED much differently. i think the human brain is bigger AND probably wired a little better (bigger and better computer) than any other brain on earth. ANOTHER POINT: the reason i think humans have such advanced brains is because we walk upright and have fingers. these advantages allow us to do sophisticated things--thus promoting the advancement of a more evolved brain. have fun being a dog and creating some complicated machine, standing on your arms and legs and having no real fingers. I PREDICT THE HUMAN BRAIN BECOMES LARGER AS HUMANS EVOLVE. (and i bet they were smaller in the past) INTERESTING IDEA: as we all know, genetic engineering is making a lot of progress. what if in the future we can change how big a brain people are born with. what if we take einstein's dna, raise/school him the same way he was, but give him a brain 50x the size of a normal human. next, how about 1000x... i wonder what would happen if we do this for all humans and change our race.....i wonder if we could advance evolution many generations on our own...