...then you find better sources in less than 5 minutes I had to rush to dinner, and quickly, so I couldn't get the best quality stuff. Feel free to find other sources and I'll be glad to look at them.

That's where faith comes in. As stated earlier in the article (I'm not trawling through 7 pages to find it), If God were totally provable, then we wouldn't have the free will that God gave to us. As for not siting my sources, I was kind of in a rush at the time, and was hoping someone (thanks, Ashbad! ) would be able to site a few sources for me.

no problem yeah, faith takes over where reason ends. If we had no faith, how could we even have religion? And in this day and age, nobody is putting authority on you to go to church or to even have any faith at all, so it's by free will that we choose to believe. Human reason is too limited for us to compare ourselves to a being infinitely more mighty. However, faith isn't a hard topic to argue and I do admit it's an easy weak point for all religious basing, but miracles most likely occur when god wants to say 'Hey, dude, remember Mr. Almighty is watching you!'

Well this has got out of hand. Now I myself am a Christian. God is not about force. He gives us the choice to do what we want. If your not for god, you're against him. Stop, with these passages. If they don't want to receive him, leave them alone. They have made their choice. They can choose to do whatever they want.

I will not bother anyone with passages or verses but, I will add that everyone puts their faith in something. It is the nature of a human to fill the spiritual part of the brain which does exist with something they can relate to. That is why it is God as we know God. Which religion or belief can be right or wrong if it is Gods plan? It is a question that can only be answered by an individual on their own and reflects an image of who they themself are. There are many types of people and my God has many plans in action. It is as mobutu4 has said. Let them make their own choice. Many have turned to religion in places where the word of a God was never heard of. There is no secret to what God wants but, what does God want from you. We are all connected as brothers or sisters in this world as is everything around connected as well. Voices are in the wind and soon man because of knowledge will make their own if time permits. We have started it already with the langauges cemetech members are learning at this very moment. Soon the voices will be heard around the world and a protective device will be worn to defend our minds from the control of Satan if you wish to call it that. Frequencies will travel through the air with no bounds and corruption of the world may appear or maybe an attempt at a peaceful mind will be put in place to help us resist temptation. They may be implimenting this at this very moment. Who has control of you. Is it the God as I know God or the God as you know God.

I believe a common idea among most christian religions is that God is testing us. Now, what kind of test coerces you into choosing the right answers? Hence, no force.

@basicman that is a little vague for my tastes, but I get what you're saying.

@willrandship I meant for it to be vague. I don't say prayers to Mary because Jesus said only to bow to the father. I had 2 grandparents die in my family in the last 6 weeks. My grandfather died 3 days before my sons birthday. My wifes grandmother died three days before my daughters birthday. We had service and a birthday party on the third day of each. On the third day he rose from the dead. I forgot to mention that i am a decendant of the templar knights and my grandfather was a mason.

I don't pray to Mary. Nice woman, but still just a person. I pray to the father.

I can't say I'm very familiar with Masonic beliefs, although I have heard of them outside of National Treasure.

I'm LDS, BTW.

My family are all a bunch of godless heathen atheists. We often go out at night and have ritualistic sacrifices involving wildlife. Richard Stallman is god.

God.

That's fine with me. National Treasure? I was serious about what I said. Take it how you want.

Ah what the heck, I'll throw in my $0.02's worth:

-C-h-u-c-k--N-o-r-r-i-s--i-s--G-o-d-
Erm... let's try that again:


The universe is a cycle of death and rebirth. A constant repetition of Big Bangs and Big Collisions*. In essence, a metaphorical cosmic phoenix of sorts. As each universe comes and goes, so too do the beings and physics born within them.

But not everything.

When a universe dies, fragments remain behind. These fragments persist as anomalies, things that influence our cosmos that we can't explain. The being we call "God" is one such anomaly.

Born of a previous universe, "God" has persisted ever since through its own universe and an arbitrary number of successors. The seeming omnipotence of "God" is a direct result of the different physics under which it came into being. Perhaps manipulating matter and energy and creating consciousness is child's play in "God"'s universe. Or perhaps "God" is some grand amalgam of consciousness born out of billions of years of evolution, an ultimate evolution of its time and space. Whichever "God" may be; it is, was, and forever shall be alien to us and our cosmos.

It is for this reason that we cannot observe or prove "God" in an empirical manner. Think of it in terms of a computer metaphor. Have you ever tried to plug a Mac formatted flash drive into a PC? It doesn't show up. To the PC, the flash drive doesn't exist. It is formatted in a way that is completely alien and nonexistent to the PC. Does that mean the flash drive doesn't exist? No. It simply means the PC cannot interact with it or prove that it ever existed to begin with.

Similarly, we cannot "see" this "God" because "God" is formatted in a different manner from which we were. Ergo, can we really say that "God" doesn't exist simply because we can't prove it?


*The Big Collision is a hypothetical idea I devised that acts as a two-fold antithesis of the Big Bang event. Essentially, the universe's expansion reaches an asymptotic rate approaching infinity, creating a kinetic speed that overcomes nuclear force and causes the entire universe to simply fall apart. Soon thereafter, electromagnetism and weak force dissipate as well, leaving only gravity behind. Slowly but surely, the formless matter of the once-universe will then proceed to attract to one another and form another Big Bang. In essence, it's a break-down of physical interaction that allows everything to condense back into one point. There's no scientific evidence for this, just my own musing, but how else do you get another big bang if everything dissipates into an infinitely large mass of matter?

Let's put the positions on a spectrum:

-1: Positive assertion of non-existence.
0: No assertion.
+1: Positive assertion of existence.

A "0" is either because:
* You don't know
* You are unwilling to make a claim even though you think you know.

What I'm saying is that the former stance needs no qualifiers, and the latter is dodge.


No. Faith is independent of why you believe something, and blind faith is hardly admirable. Nice ideas aren't worth believing for their own sake - they also have to have actually happened. cf. 1 Corinthians 15.


*Thump-thump*.


If you believe in miracles, believe in miracles - don't denigrate them through naturalizing your faith. But be discerning in what you accept as a miracle. In other words, a true miracle is by definition without natural explanation, but don't accept every unusual thing you encounter as a miracle. Random coincidence or showmanship+trickery are far more common.


Speaking as a Christian, I find the idea that God is deliberately hiding himself or actively deceiving the human race as some kind of test to be repulsive. Tests of faith have everything to do with choosing to act on the principles of our belief rather than taking an easy way out, and nothing to do with belief in the face of evidence to the contrary.

I would suggest that if you think you're being tested by God and the test requires you to believe something in the face of evidence to the contrary rather than requiring you to do something hard, you're experiencing cognitive dissonance rather than a divine test.


The physicist in me winces every time someone proposes a theory without even a mathematical model to accompany it. If your philosophy is dependent on the consequences of hypothetical (note that I didn't say theoretical, which would imply an actual falsifiable theory, or at the very least a mathematically sound model) physical processes, you need to do one of two things:
* Rethink your philosophy.
* Learn physics so you can develop a model for your hypothesis and see if it holds up.

[edit]
Ninja-rewrite of my response to Willrandship

I do believe there has been a model posited about multiple big bangs and cyclical universes. Furthermore, I recall a once announced idea that physics may not be constant everywhere in the cosmos. Moreover, although I'm not sure if this was misnomer or actual fact, I do remember reading that red-shifted galaxies are actually moving away at an increasing rate rather than a constant or decreasing one.

I used this as a basis for my "big collision" idea. If 'C' (speed of light) is the practical particle speed limit (nothing goes faster than light), what happens when these galaxies speed up faster and faster? What happens if something more complex than light attempts to go that fast? Like a poorly designed rocket, wouldn't the stress of the velocity tear the structure apart? Ergo the big rip of matter. However, given that most all matter has mass and mass is a factor of gravity, then even if everything is ripped apart and even if the three other fundamental forces are nullified, gravity should remain. At least, if my Higgs hypothesis proves false or the Higgs particle is bonded by a force greater than strong nuclear force (which is pretty much a stretch).

So, at this point there's at least some scientific basis, however given the fact that I'm not a physicist and never will be, I don't put my idea in a position of anything more than a hypothesis or perhaps not even that, rather just an idea. On the other hand, given that we're pretty much debating over an omnipresent and omnipotent deity that we can't prove or disprove the existence of, I hardly think one silly half-baked science idea is misplaced

I've seen this idea before. If I recall, it was an episode of Futurama...

My problem is not with accepting theoretical cosmologies, my problem is with stitching them together on philosophical grounds without understanding any of the physical consequences of those idea.


It isn't a practical limit, it is an hard barrier which can only be approached asymptotically. This is the Lorentz factor:


It shows up in all sorts of relativistic equations, and makes sure that v != c.


They asymptotically approach c.


It can't.


No, uniform velocity isn't stressful. What would probably tear the rocket apart would be the particles ripping through it in the opposite direction.


You seem to be inappropriately conflating mass and spacetime.


I'll say the same thing I said to bspymaster. We shouldn't believe things because they are nice ideas, we should believe them because they reflect reality.


God's existence isn't (dis)provable. One the other hand, your idea is. My real purpose in this thread is not to try and reach some conclusion or another, but to beat the sloppy thinking out of everyone (and hopefully myself in the process).

If you can't linearly approach, achieve, or supersede C, then in practice C would be a velocity constraint, otherwise known as a limit, thus C is a practical limit. At least, in a casual sense it is. They don't call it the ultimate speed limit for nothing.


Personally, I find it hard to believe that if you're going to eventually end up with galaxies careening across the cosmos at "Great Scott!" velocities, something bizarre isn't going to happen and something isn't going to break down.

Alternatively, perhaps dark matter or dark energy or some as of yet undocumented force plays a hand in this.

And how am I conflating mass and spacetime? Mass is related to gravity. Is there a mass-less particle that exhibits gravitational force?


Well, whatever, I won't argue with a professional. Here, have a new idea: Every time the universe dies and a new big bang happens, it's because the TARDIS exploded again

But y'know, if not for the outside-the-box thinkers who forgo "proper" and "not sloppy" thinking, we wouldn't discover new things. Sometimes a bumbling idiot with fallacious logic will discover something that a prim and proper scientist who properly hypothesizes misses over and over again

I was mostly calling you out on word choice here. Practical usually implies that there are impractical solutions which may still work. The only things (theoretically) faster than light are tachyons, and which never cross the v=c barrier, and may not even exist.


The bizarre things that are known to happen include length contraction and time dilation.


You seem to be under the impression that if the universe expands enough it will somehow disintegrate and the pieces will condense under new physical laws. This is suggestive of a confusion between our universe cycling between a Big Bang and a "Big Crunch" and our universe actually disappearing and being replaced by a new one. If I'm misreading your explanation, I apologize for the confusion.



I have no problem with creative thinking, leaps of intuition, etc (and in fact I have a highly nonlinear thought process). I don't even have a problem with things which are not logical, so long as they are not demonstrably counter-logical. I do have a problem with intellectual sloppiness, which is an entirely different phenomenon.

Intellectual sloppiness is fun!

Anyway, I was more or less suggesting that if all the matter in the universe were to accelerate to a high enough velocity, some sort of phenomenon could cause the strong nuclear force to break down (my poorly built rocket ship simile). The "universe" is just the infinite container of spacetime that all our matter and energy exists within. The "universe" isn't expanding, the matter and energy within is just spreading further and further outwards.

I am well aware of my pathetic understanding of physics (I got a "C" at best in Physics all 5 semesters I've taken it, and no it wasn't for the intentional 'pun''s sake), though, but the whole "big rip" thing was a thought at one point that I've never really discarded.

The whole "big collision" bit is just my thought that gravity might be a different and more persistent force, thus if somehow the "big rip" DID dissolve the other three forces, it might remain.

As to how everything would collide back together, I dunno. Maybe the absence of the other forces would give gravity a much bigger ... erm... "strength", so to speak.

[quote="elfprince13"]

Just as an aside [that I'm sure you're already familiar with], it's not that nothing can achieve C, it's that the norm of the velocity 4-vector must always be C.

To be incredibly general, the product of group and phase velocities must equal c^2, and the signal velocity is always <= c (and = only for massless carrier particles).

@Tsukasa: I'll get to you tomorrow =)