9 ms·

As creation stories go, the big bang is a good one

39 points by dnetesn 5y ago

jqpabc123 5y ago
The Big Bang is unlike mythology in one very important and very significant way. It was never declared to be absolute truth.
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  I wonder how many religious people take their creation myths as 'absolute truth.' Sure, there's the odd Young Earth Creationist around, but I have to imagine that the average Christian doesn't think that Genesis is meant as literal truth (Catholics, for example, acknowledge the science of evolution). Same goes for most religions, I'd think.
  - Quekid5 5y ago
    It's definitely an interesting question, but a minor nit about your comment: evolution is not really about the origin of the universe, just the origin of species. So it feels a bit out of place to state that Catholics have no problem with evolution since evolution and Genesis are a bit orthogonal. Obviously, there are bits of the Genesis story that could be considered counter to what evolution shows -- if taken literally -- but... Maybe I'm being a bit too pedantic.
    - agentwiggles 5y ago
      Nah, that's fair criticism, but my point is really just that at least some large subset of Christians doctrinally accept a scientific explanation for the origin of species. My instinct is that many of those Christians wouldn't have that much trouble reconciling the Big Bang theory with their religion.
      - Quekid5 5y ago
        Oh, for sure.
  - Gualdrapo 5y ago
    Now that you mention it, someone at Reddit just asked a few minutes ago if the Big Bang is the 'answer' to the creation of the universe, and one of the replies was > No. That is just so called scientists guessing. Everyone knows existence was created 4000 years ago by God. Anyone that tells you otherwise is delusional.[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/comment/i5izams/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/c...
    - outworlder 5y ago
      It's interesting how they never question anything past that. That answer just kicks the can down the road. Sure, let's assume it's true. Where did God come from?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - lucidone 5y ago
        That's similar to asking where infinity starts and ends. I like Spinoza's bit about a self-causing cause for this.
        typeofhuman 5y ago
        (function () { new Infinity().start() }());
      - prmph 5y ago
        Well, where did the universe come from? Where did time come from? When did it begin? There are certain things the answers to which goes beyond the bounds of the naive logic we are familiar with. The Bible says that God has no beginning (or end), he exists outside the bounds of time. Though it is hard to wrap our heads around that concept, there is no reason to think it is not possible, considering the rhetorical questions above.
        5y ago
  - prmph 5y ago
    Well, Genesis does not claim the earth is young. It says the earth existed for an unknown period of time, before God began to prepare it for habitation. The period of this preparation is also not given (it could be arbitrarily long). Genesis also gives an order of appearance of life (plants -> animals -> man) that roughly agrees with the fossil record. There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science, and nothing in it that actually supports a young earth.
    - elwell 5y ago
      As a Christian and a believer that evolution is a beautiful thing, the Genesis story increases my faith; even just the idea of whether or not there was a finite Beginning, seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        > seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong. Yes, it turns out it's also an idea that philosophy-crafters and science-crafters can also get wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History
      - gridspy 5y ago
        As a semi-christian, I agree. I think that evolution is the sort of beautiful self-correcting system that God would want to put in place.
    - goto11 5y ago
      > There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science This is so absurd a claim I don't know where to begin. But how about the claim that the sky is a vault which separate the waters above from the waters below? The sky is not actually a vault with water above it, at least according to science. Or how about the claim that the sun and moon and stars was created after plants and trees were created?
      - prmph 5y ago
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Scientists present the Big Bang as the best picture of the process of the start of our known universe according to the data and theories so far derived - a not-completely certain process ongoing discovery. Even if the average religious worshiper might be skeptical or view things metaphorically, religions don't present their creation myths as anything like a process of ongoing discovery.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      To be fair, a fairly basic premise in Christianity is that the truth is unknowable, we as humans are too limited to grasp it, and it is only through divine revelation we may have access to the truth. You really shouldn't be finding people claiming to have all the truths about God's acts, plans, and nature -- at least that's a sign they haven't quite grasped fairly central themes in the faith. Interestingly, there's an extensive tradition of negative theology, that is the study of what we can't know about God. This isn't exclusively a Christian thing, but seems to be the result of the Skeptic tradition of Hellenic philosophy coming into contact with the Abrahamic faiths. John Scotus wrote that "God is not, because he transcends being". Something to think about.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    Depends on how you average. How religious do you need to be to be considered among "religious people"?
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    Religion is all about discarding pieces of data that you don't like while fixating on the pieces you find meaningful. Some people believe the planet is flat, if people can believe that I assume people can at this point believe anything.
  - huntertwo 5y ago
    Something like a third of Americans are young earth creationists.
  - sweettea 5y ago
    Not all Catholics: the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation (kolbecenter.org) attempts to convince others that Catholics ought believe in young earth creationism. (To be precise, they advocate that the church never said one could believe in evolution, rather that evolution could be studied to try to reconcile against traditional understandings of creation, which many took as license to believe in evolution). Even the average Catholic is required to believe that all humans are descended from a literal first man (Humani Generis, p. 37). I would posit that someone believing in YEC is strongly correlated to their willingness to accept and embrace other unpopular and/or hard tenets of their religion. There are, for instance, plenty of Catholics who believe in evolution, but most of those do not go beyond what Catholicism requires in the way of fasting or sexuality. Thus raising the question 'what makes someone a religious person?'...
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Their insight is that you can get all the benefits of believing in evolution just by acting as if you believe it, without believing it. And the same applies to all facts. Scientists, of course, all rely on the same insight, and don't believe anything except experiments; plus God, if they care to.
- outworlder 5y ago
  Exactly. It's just a consequence of our observations. It can easily be replaced if we have a better observation. Also, by definition, no-one is able to infer what would have happened "before" the Big Bang. Even time as we know it doesn't make sense then.
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    which is why the car salesman and dragon tyrant crying "oh wee live in a simulationNNNNN" is just replacing god with ai or whatever the fuck they want without adherence to actual observation. Instead, they're just making up hypothetical probabilities and living in said delusion.
- goto11 5y ago
  I don't think this is is the case for mythology in general either. Greek and Roman mythology does not seem to make such claims of absolute truth.
- Simplicitas 5y ago
  Exactly. It's conditional.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  Ah yes the old fallacy: science or spirituality. Obviously can’t have both as that would require more complicated thought processes than you can fathom. This is a common stumbling block for fledgling minds. Reality is, our best scientists were and to a large extent continue to be Christians. But be dumb and feel superior all you want. You will have plenty of company. Meanwhile, my company will be these people: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_scienc...
  - gridspy 5y ago
    Careful. Remember the best gig for scientific funding in the past was to sign up with the church. It's like posting a wiki entry of those who have tenure at major universities and claiming it's because those people believe in universities.
    - newbamboo 5y ago
      Newton and the others were faking it to get “funding”? I’ll assume you’re joking.
      - gridspy 5y ago
        Indoctrination is a powerful thing. Perhaps they even believed or wanted to believe themselves. It takes real effort to push back against the disinformation of the day.
        newbamboo 5y ago
        These are people you and everyone else should be familiar with. Their beliefs are well documented. No need for “perhaps.” They’ve written eloquently about their beliefs and an intellectually curious, or merely open minded person, can benefit from exploring those thoughts and ideas. It’s not something to cower in fear of. When people who are more intelligent espouse strongly held beliefs that you don’t understand, that’s a good time to ask more questions rather than close your mind and stop reading.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pishpash 5y ago
Similarly, as miracles go, the universe is a good one. Embellishments are unnecessary.
enw 5y ago
Why did Big Bang happen?
- pishpash 5y ago
  Why is not a scientific question. Perhaps you mean, what is the cause of the Big Bang. Since nothing that could have caused the Big Bang is observable, it falls outside physics, but there are some mathematical theories around it.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Why is the mother of all scientific questions. If you just keep asking "why is that?" every time you see something strange, you'll learn so many things. Not everything has a cause, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a why to investigate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ramyarjahani 5y ago
[flagged]

39 points by dnetesn 5y ago

The Big Bang is unlike mythology in one very important and very significant way. It was never declared to be absolute truth.

agentwiggles 5y ago
I wonder how many religious people take their creation myths as 'absolute truth.' Sure, there's the odd Young Earth Creationist around, but I have to imagine that the average Christian doesn't think that Genesis is meant as literal truth (Catholics, for example, acknowledge the science of evolution). Same goes for most religions, I'd think.
- Quekid5 5y ago
  It's definitely an interesting question, but a minor nit about your comment: evolution is not really about the origin of the universe, just the origin of species. So it feels a bit out of place to state that Catholics have no problem with evolution since evolution and Genesis are a bit orthogonal. Obviously, there are bits of the Genesis story that could be considered counter to what evolution shows -- if taken literally -- but... Maybe I'm being a bit too pedantic.
  - agentwiggles 5y ago
    Nah, that's fair criticism, but my point is really just that at least some large subset of Christians doctrinally accept a scientific explanation for the origin of species. My instinct is that many of those Christians wouldn't have that much trouble reconciling the Big Bang theory with their religion.
    - Quekid5 5y ago
      Oh, for sure.
- Gualdrapo 5y ago
  Now that you mention it, someone at Reddit just asked a few minutes ago if the Big Bang is the 'answer' to the creation of the universe, and one of the replies was > No. That is just so called scientists guessing. Everyone knows existence was created 4000 years ago by God. Anyone that tells you otherwise is delusional.[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/comment/i5izams/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/c...
  - outworlder 5y ago
    It's interesting how they never question anything past that. That answer just kicks the can down the road. Sure, let's assume it's true. Where did God come from?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lucidone 5y ago
      That's similar to asking where infinity starts and ends. I like Spinoza's bit about a self-causing cause for this.
      - typeofhuman 5y ago
        (function () { new Infinity().start() }());
    - prmph 5y ago
      Well, where did the universe come from? Where did time come from? When did it begin? There are certain things the answers to which goes beyond the bounds of the naive logic we are familiar with. The Bible says that God has no beginning (or end), he exists outside the bounds of time. Though it is hard to wrap our heads around that concept, there is no reason to think it is not possible, considering the rhetorical questions above.
      - 5y ago
- prmph 5y ago
  Well, Genesis does not claim the earth is young. It says the earth existed for an unknown period of time, before God began to prepare it for habitation. The period of this preparation is also not given (it could be arbitrarily long). Genesis also gives an order of appearance of life (plants -> animals -> man) that roughly agrees with the fossil record. There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science, and nothing in it that actually supports a young earth.
  - elwell 5y ago
    As a Christian and a believer that evolution is a beautiful thing, the Genesis story increases my faith; even just the idea of whether or not there was a finite Beginning, seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong. Yes, it turns out it's also an idea that philosophy-crafters and science-crafters can also get wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History
    - gridspy 5y ago
      As a semi-christian, I agree. I think that evolution is the sort of beautiful self-correcting system that God would want to put in place.
  - goto11 5y ago
    > There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science This is so absurd a claim I don't know where to begin. But how about the claim that the sky is a vault which separate the waters above from the waters below? The sky is not actually a vault with water above it, at least according to science. Or how about the claim that the sun and moon and stars was created after plants and trees were created?
    - prmph 5y ago
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Scientists present the Big Bang as the best picture of the process of the start of our known universe according to the data and theories so far derived - a not-completely certain process ongoing discovery. Even if the average religious worshiper might be skeptical or view things metaphorically, religions don't present their creation myths as anything like a process of ongoing discovery.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    To be fair, a fairly basic premise in Christianity is that the truth is unknowable, we as humans are too limited to grasp it, and it is only through divine revelation we may have access to the truth. You really shouldn't be finding people claiming to have all the truths about God's acts, plans, and nature -- at least that's a sign they haven't quite grasped fairly central themes in the faith. Interestingly, there's an extensive tradition of negative theology, that is the study of what we can't know about God. This isn't exclusively a Christian thing, but seems to be the result of the Skeptic tradition of Hellenic philosophy coming into contact with the Abrahamic faiths. John Scotus wrote that "God is not, because he transcends being". Something to think about.
- pishpash 5y ago
  Depends on how you average. How religious do you need to be to be considered among "religious people"?
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  Religion is all about discarding pieces of data that you don't like while fixating on the pieces you find meaningful. Some people believe the planet is flat, if people can believe that I assume people can at this point believe anything.
- huntertwo 5y ago
  Something like a third of Americans are young earth creationists.
- sweettea 5y ago
  Not all Catholics: the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation (kolbecenter.org) attempts to convince others that Catholics ought believe in young earth creationism. (To be precise, they advocate that the church never said one could believe in evolution, rather that evolution could be studied to try to reconcile against traditional understandings of creation, which many took as license to believe in evolution). Even the average Catholic is required to believe that all humans are descended from a literal first man (Humani Generis, p. 37). I would posit that someone believing in YEC is strongly correlated to their willingness to accept and embrace other unpopular and/or hard tenets of their religion. There are, for instance, plenty of Catholics who believe in evolution, but most of those do not go beyond what Catholicism requires in the way of fasting or sexuality. Thus raising the question 'what makes someone a religious person?'...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Their insight is that you can get all the benefits of believing in evolution just by acting as if you believe it, without believing it. And the same applies to all facts. Scientists, of course, all rely on the same insight, and don't believe anything except experiments; plus God, if they care to.
outworlder 5y ago
Exactly. It's just a consequence of our observations. It can easily be replaced if we have a better observation. Also, by definition, no-one is able to infer what would have happened "before" the Big Bang. Even time as we know it doesn't make sense then.
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  which is why the car salesman and dragon tyrant crying "oh wee live in a simulationNNNNN" is just replacing god with ai or whatever the fuck they want without adherence to actual observation. Instead, they're just making up hypothetical probabilities and living in said delusion.
goto11 5y ago
I don't think this is is the case for mythology in general either. Greek and Roman mythology does not seem to make such claims of absolute truth.
Simplicitas 5y ago
Exactly. It's conditional.
newbamboo 5y ago
Ah yes the old fallacy: science or spirituality. Obviously can’t have both as that would require more complicated thought processes than you can fathom. This is a common stumbling block for fledgling minds. Reality is, our best scientists were and to a large extent continue to be Christians. But be dumb and feel superior all you want. You will have plenty of company. Meanwhile, my company will be these people: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_scienc...
- gridspy 5y ago
  Careful. Remember the best gig for scientific funding in the past was to sign up with the church. It's like posting a wiki entry of those who have tenure at major universities and claiming it's because those people believe in universities.
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    Newton and the others were faking it to get “funding”? I’ll assume you’re joking.
    - gridspy 5y ago
      Indoctrination is a powerful thing. Perhaps they even believed or wanted to believe themselves. It takes real effort to push back against the disinformation of the day.
      - newbamboo 5y ago
        These are people you and everyone else should be familiar with. Their beliefs are well documented. No need for “perhaps.” They’ve written eloquently about their beliefs and an intellectually curious, or merely open minded person, can benefit from exploring those thoughts and ideas. It’s not something to cower in fear of. When people who are more intelligent espouse strongly held beliefs that you don’t understand, that’s a good time to ask more questions rather than close your mind and stop reading.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pishpash 5y ago

Similarly, as miracles go, the universe is a good one. Embellishments are unnecessary.

enw 5y ago

Why did Big Bang happen?

pishpash 5y ago
Why is not a scientific question. Perhaps you mean, what is the cause of the Big Bang. Since nothing that could have caused the Big Bang is observable, it falls outside physics, but there are some mathematical theories around it.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Why is the mother of all scientific questions. If you just keep asking "why is that?" every time you see something strange, you'll learn so many things. Not everything has a cause, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a why to investigate.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ramyarjahani 5y ago

[flagged]