I thought about doing that. And I have a long list of atheist malfeasance and atrocity. (Not that many so called Christian's poo-poo doesn't stink.) But it's one of those things where if you're interested, you'll have to research it for your own personal infromation. It's sort of like, everybody's hero, MLK jr. Especially among Christians. But when christians wish to know the truth behind MLK Jr.'s christian views and positions and they actually take the time to read his seminary essays and then his speeches and letters (which can all be found online at Stamford university's website), their enthusiasm is curbed. (or at least should be if they understand what Christianity is actually about.) That's not to detract from MLK jr's contribution to humanity. But the "christian" aspect must be put in its proper context as doubful at best, non-existent at worse. Which reminds me of when I was young and how my own enthusiasm for the notion of the forefathers being Christian was curbed when I actually bothered to read their views and writings. Anyway, the point being, atheism, is just like any other "ism." It has it strengths and weaknesses. But it, like any other "ism" is wielded by men. Men who often can't hold back their baser and barbaric instincts. Ideals tend to look good on paper but in practice invariably have horrible failures along the way.
Proof #15 - Examine Jesus' resurrection Jesus' resurrection after his death is the ultimate and defining proof of Jesus' divinity. Just about everyone knows the story, which is summarized in the Apostles' Creed. Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. There is only one way for Jesus to prove that he rose from the dead. He had to appear to people. Therefore, several different places in the Bible describe Jesus' appearances after his death: Matthew chapter 28 Mark chapter 16 Luke chapter 24 John Chapter 20 and 21 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 provides a nice summary of those passages, as written by Paul: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. As you can see in this passage, Jesus appeared to hundreds of people a number of different times. Being like Paul When we look at these Bible passages, there is a question that comes to mind -- why did Jesus stop making these appearances? Why isn't Jesus appearing today? It really is odd. Obviously Paul benefitted from a personal meeting with the resurrected Christ. Because of the personal visit, Paul could see for himself the truth of the resurrection, and he could ask Jesus questions. So... Why doesn't Jesus appear to everyone and prove that he is resurrected, just like he appeared to Paul? There is nothing to stop Jesus from materializing in your kitchen tonight to have a personal chat with you. And if you think about it, Jesus really does need to appear to each of us. If Paul needed a personal visit from Jesus to know that Jesus was resurrected, then why wouldn't you? It is an important question for the following reasons: We are told by the Bible that Jesus appeared to hundreds of people. We therefore know that it is OK for Jesus to appear to people -- it does not take away their free will, for example. We know that it would be easy for Jesus to appear to everyone all through history, since Jesus is all-powerful and timeless. We know that, if Jesus did reappear to everyone, it would be incredibly helpful. We could all know, personally, that Jesus is resurrected and that Jesus is God. If Paul (and all the other people in the Bible) needed a personal visit to know that Jesus was resurrected, then why not you and me? Yet, we all know that Jesus has not appeared to anyone in 2,000 years. In other words, there is nothing stopping Jesus from appearing to you, and several good reasons for him to appear. Praying to Jesus What if we pray to Jesus like this: "Dear Jesus, please appear to us, as you did to Paul and the 500 brethren, so that we can see the evidence of your resurrection. In your name we pray, amen." Here is what Jesus has promised us in the Bible: Matthew 7:7 Jesus says: Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! In John chapter 14:14: Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it. In Matthew 18:19: Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Jesus is actually in our midst. So he is right here already, supposedly. Yet when we pray to him to physically materialize, nothing ever happens. Isn't it odd that Nothing happens, given the fact that Jesus promises us that something will happen? Isn't it odd that nothing happens when, supposedly, Jesus is right here with us already, and materialization would be trivial for him? We have created an unambiguous situation where coincidence cannot "answer" the prayer. The only way for this prayer to be answered is for Jesus to actually, unambiguously, materialize. As you think about this, you will realize that Paul's story in the Bible must be false. Simply look at Paul's story like any judge in a courtroom would. What Paul's story in 1 Cor 15 is suggesting is entirely unprecedented - a man dead three days with mortal wounds came back to life. Yet: There is absolutely no evidence that the story is true, There are many alternative explanations for what Paul is saying. Paul could be fabricating the story, Paul could have hallucinated or dreamed the meeting, Paul could have seen an imposter, etc. In addition, no one is seeing Jesus today, even though it would be trivial and obvious for Jesus to appear to people today just like he did with Paul. Given this evidence, rational people would automatically conclude that Paul's story in the Bible is untrue. There is zero evidence to support Paul's story, zero reason to believe it, a motive to lie and plenty of alternative explanations. There is also the fact that much of the rest of the Bible contains provably false stories. Plus the fact that it would be trivial for Jesus to provide the evidence that Paul needs to confirm his story by reappearing on earth. Add to that the fact that Jesus has promised to answer our prayers but refuses to materialize when we pray to him. The only thing to do is to reject Paul's story. Every bit of evidence points to the fact that the resurrection story is a myth, nothing more. Given that the resurrection story is clearly a myth, it means that Jesus (if he existed at all) was a normal human being, not God. The resurrection clearly did not happen. And with that, we can see that God himself is imaginary. If God actually did exist and was playing any role whatsoever on this planet, there is no way that he would allow an imposter like Jesus.
Understanding the Rationalizations Many believers will try to rationalize Jesus' absence by pointing to his famous statement in the Bible, "Happy are those who have not seen yet still believe." If you think about this statement, what you realize is that it creates the perfect cover for a scam. Let's say you are Jesus, you are a normal human being, you realize that you are going to die and you want to cover for this fact. Here is what you would say: "Happy are those who have not seen yet still believe." What you are saying is, "I exist, and the way I am going to show you that I exist is by not showing that I exist." For every other object in the universe, the way that we know it exists is because the object provides evidence of its existence. If there is no evidence for an object's existence, we call it imaginary (e.g. Leprechauns). But with Jesus, the lack of evidence is turned into evidence. Quite clever, but obviously a scam. You simply need to look at the evidence and accept what it is telling you. If the resurrection were true, then Jesus would be answering prayers as he promises in the Bible. He would also appear when people pray to see him. The fact is, as we saw here and here, there is definitive evidence that prayer accomplishes nothing. It is also obvious that Jesus is not appearing on earth today. While we are on the topic of the resurrection, have you ever thought about how odd the whole crucifixion story is? Imagine the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe sitting on his magnificent throne in heaven. He looks down onto earth and says to himself: Those evil humans down on earth. I hate what they are doing. All this sin... Since I am all-knowing I know exactly what the humans are doing and I understand exactly why they commit each sin. Since I created the humans in my own image and personally programmed human nature into their brains, I am the direct author of all of this sin. The instant I created them I knew exactly what would happen with every single human being right down to the nanosecond level for all eternity. If I didn't like how it was going to turn out, I could have simply changed them when I created them. And since I am perfect, I know exactly what I am doing. But ignore all that. I hate all these people doing exactly what I perfectly designed them to do and knew they would do from the moment I created them... So here's what I am going to do. I will artificially inseminate a virgin. She will give birth to an incarnated version of me. The humans will eventually crucify and kill the incarnated me. That will, finally, make me happy. Yes, sending mself down and having the humans crucify me -- that will satisfy me. I feel much better now. It makes no sense, does it? Why would an all-knowing being need to have humans kill himself (Jesus is God, after all) to make himself happy? Especially since it is a perfect God who set the whole thing in motion exactly the way he wanted it? The story of the crucifixion is absurd from top to bottom if you actually stop to think about it. By combining the crucifixion story with the resurrection story, you can see the truth -- "God" is a mythological creature just like every other human god. The entire religious domain is make believe.
Expanding / collapsing universe anyone? See article below. This theory is interesting because it doesn't require a big crunch... the typical universe can continue expanding, as ours seems to be doing, until it reaches a high entropy state in which future quantum births are possible. (Stu, perhaps these were the 'quantum farts' you alluded to?) Once our universe 'dies', the length of time required for the next quantum fart, er, birth to happen is irrelevant--or perhaps not recognizable as "time" at all--because there is no new beginning until the quantum process begins it. A hundred monkeys and a hundred typewriters and an infinite set of infinities. Not much use for probability with that kind of time on one's hands. It is interesting to observe the march of thought... early man thought he was literally the center of the universe. Then the Copernican revolution changed the Western perspective from a geocentric to a heliocentric one, igniting scientific inquiry in its wake... then the Darwinian revolution changed humanity's perspective as to our place in nature, and our intimate bounding up with it... seems fitting for the next revolutionary step to be on a cosmological level, recognizing that not only man as sentient being, but the very universe man resides in, is merely an infinitesimal part of an infinite whole. Time Before Time An event like the Big Bang is about as likely as billions of coin tosses all coming up heads. Explaining why that is might take us from empty space to other universes--and through the mirror of time. by Sean Carroll ⢠Posted August 28, 2006 11:53 AM From the SEPTEMBER issue of Seed: The nature of time is such that the influence of the very beginning of the universe stretches all the way into your kitchenâyou can make an omelet out of an egg, but you can't make an egg out of an omelet. Time, unlike space, has an obvious directionalityâthe view in a mirror makes sense in a way that a movie in reverse never would. The arrow of time in our universe is puzzling because the fundamental laws of physics themselves are symmetric and don't seem to discriminate between the past and future. Unlike an egg breaking on the side of a frying pan, the journey of the planets around the sun would look basically the same if we filmed them and ran the movie backwards. Rather, it must be due to the initial conditions of the universeâa fact that makes the nature of time a question for cosmology. Remarkably, the answers we're beginning to discover are telling us there may be other universes out there in which the arrow of time actually points in reverse. For some reason, our early universe was an orderly place; as physicists like to say, it had low entropy. Entropy measures the number of ways that you can rearrange the components of a system such that the overall state wouldn't change considerably. A set of neatly racked billiard balls has a low entropy, since moving one of the balls to another location on the table would change the configuration significantly. Randomly scattered balls are high entropy; we could move a ball or two and nobody would really notice. Low-entropy configurations naturally evolve into high-entropy onesâas any billiards-break showsâfor the simple reason that there are more ways to be high entropy than low entropy. The very beginning of time found our universe in an extremely unnatural and highly organized low-entropy state. It is the process by which it is inevitably relaxing into a more naturally disordered and messy configuration that imprints the unmistakable difference between past and future that we perceive. Naturally, this leads one to wonder why the Big Bang began in such an unusual state. Attempts to answer this question are wrapped up with the question of time and have led me and my colleague Jennifer Chen to imagine another era before the Big Bang, in which the extremely far past looks essentially the same as the extremely far future. The distinction between past and future doesn't matter on the scale of the entire cosmos, it's just a feature we observe locally. If time is to be symmetricâif the direction of its flow is not to matter throughout the universeâconditions at early times should be similar to those at late times. This idea has previously inspired cosmologists like Thomas Gold to suggest that the universe will someday recollapse and that the arrow of time would reverse. However, we now know that the universe is actually accelerating and seems unlikely to ever recollapse. Even if it did, there is no reason to think that entropy will spontaneously begin to decrease and re-rack the billiard balls. Stephen Hawking once suggested that it wouldâand he later called that the biggest blunder of his scientific career. If we don't want the laws of physics to distinguish arbitrarily between past and future, we can imagine that the universe is really high-entropy in both the far past and the far future. How can a high-entropy past be reconciled with what we know about our observable universeâthat it began with unnaturally low entropy? Only by imagining that there is an ultra-large-scale universe beyond our reach, where entropy can always be increasing without limit, and that if we went far enough back into the past, time would actually be running backwards. Such a scenario isn't as crazy as it sounds. Our universe is expanding and becoming increasingly dilute, and the high-entropy future will be one in which space is essentially empty. But quantum mechanics assures us that empty space is not a quiet, boring place; it's alive and bubbling with quantum fluctuationsâephemeral, virtual particles flitting in and out of existence. According to a theory known as the "inflationary universe scenario," all we need is for a tiny patch of space to be filled with a very high density of dark energyâenergy that is inherent in the fabric of space itself. That dark energy will fuel a spontaneous, super-accelerated expansion, stretching the infinitesimal patch to universal proportions. Empty space, in which omnipresent quantum fields are jiggling back and forth, is a natural, high-entropy state for the universe. Eventually (and we're talking about a really, really big eventually) the fluctuations will conspire in just the right way to fill a tiny patch of space with dark energy, setting off the ultra-fast expansion. To any forms of life arising afterward, such as us, the inflation would look like a giant explosion from which the universe originated, and the quiescent backgroundâthe other universesâwould be completely unobservable. Such an occurrence would look exactly like the Big Bang and the universe we experience. The most appealing aspect of this idea, Chen and I have argued, is that over the vast scale of the entire universe, time is actually symmetric and the laws truly don't care about which direction it is moving. In our patch of the cosmos, time just so happens to be moving forward because of its initial low entropy, but there are others where this is not the case. The far past and the far future are filled with these other baby universes, and they would each think that the other had its arrow of time backwards. Time's arrow isn't a basic aspect of the universe as a whole, just a hallmark of the little bit we see. Over a long enough period of time, a baby universe such as ours would have been birthed into existence naturally. Our observable universe and its hundred billion galaxies is just one of those things that happens every once in a while, and its arrow of time is just a quirk of chance due to its beginnings amid a sea of universes. Such a scenario is obviously speculative, but it fits in well with modern ideas of a multiverse with different regions of possibly distinct physical conditions. Admittedly, it would be hard to gather experimental evidence for or against this idea. But science doesn't only need evidence, it also needs to make sense, to tell a consistent story. We can't turn eggs into omelets, even though the laws of physics seem to be perfectly reversible, and this brute fact demands an explanation. It's intriguing to imagine that the search for an answer would lead us to the literal ends of the universe. âSean Carroll is a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and the author of a popular textbook on general relativity. He is also a regular contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance.
Quite possibly. It's new to me, but then I'm a bit of a physics dilettante. The article was recent so I thought I'd share it.
I find that explanation a lot more apealing than the one about a great big narcissistic fairy sky elf who gets pissed if you don't sing to it .
Also, scientists have recently discovered mathematical proof for the existence of dark matter (see below). Given the relative abundance of dark matter--and the superabundance of dark energy, an even stranger concept--it seems logical to accept that the vast expanse of space is not so empty as we thought. More like a bubbling dark cauldron. (Hey, wasn't that a Disney movie?) If science eventually finds reasonable proof that big bangs happened before and will happen again, then where do we go next I wonder. Perhaps the debate shifts from 'first mover' to 'first mover thrice removed'? Turtles all the way down perhaps. If God exists, I suspect He has a sense of humor. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060822-dark-matter.html Dark Matter Proof Found, Scientists Say John Roach for National Geographic News August 22, 2006 A team of researchers has found the first direct proof for the existence of dark matter, the mysterious and almost invisible substance thought to make up almost a quarter of the universe. Dark matter does not absorb or emit light. So far, astronomers have inferred its presence only indirectly by measuring the effects of its gravity. But now, by observing a massive collision between two large clusters of galaxies, astronomers have detected what they say could only be the signature of dark matter. The scientists used optical and x-ray telescopes to measure the location of mass in the collided formation, known as the "bullet cluster" because of its shape. More than 90 percent of the visible mass in a galaxy cluster is hot gas. The rest is stars located within individual galaxies. The composite image at left shows that this hot gas (red) was dragged away from the stars and galaxies (blue) during the collision (see bigger photo). But most of the massâand thus matterâis located within the galaxies, or the blue areas, scientists say. In other words, the bulk of visible matter in the clusters has been separated from the majority of massâwhich therefore must be dark matter. "This proves in a simple and direct way that dark matter exists," Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a telephone briefing Monday with reporters. Scientists calculate that dark matter makes up about 25 percent of the universe. By contrast, ordinary matterâthe stuff that makes up stars, planets, and everything on Earthâmakes up no more than about 5 percent of the universe. The other 70 percent of the universe, scientists believe, is made of dark energy, an even more elusive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate.