The Big Bang

I find that the internet brings out the less sensible people far more frequently than it does sensible people. My case and point here is basically any article on science that is posted on any website. As soon as it is posted, droves of fundies of various belief systems come out and say ridiculous, polemical things that usually are not well thought out.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_switzerland_antimatter#mwpphu-container

This article in particular has inspired this posting. I was sneakily roaming facebook and came across one of my less intelligent friend's page and she had posted this and wrote "Take that, Creationist," next to it. Interestingly enough she has the most confused religious views I have seen posted on facebook, but that is besides the point. To keep it short, she adheres to gnosticism, while claiming to also be Catholic and a general Christian.

The most interesting part of this is that the article says nothing of Creationist or their opponents. It's a short article musing about how we cannot use this material to make warped drives or bombs. The real meat of the article is just the fact that we have been able to make anti-Atoms from anti-Matter (makes logical sense that anti-matter would have anti-Atoms, though I could be wrong) stick around long than .00001 milliseconds. We were able to look at it and perhaps one day we will figure out why we cannot see it and why it "disappeared." I put that in quotes because if we can gain access to it, it's obviously not disappeared.

Anyway, as soon as you scroll down the comments you see the uninformed fundie Christians battling the uninformed fundie Atheists and neither gaining ground because both are likely stupid. Fundie, if you haven't figured it out yet, is a slang term for fundamentalist. Yay, urbandictionary.com (plug). In any case, some particular gems of argument are:

-I have never seen atheism, dumb and bandwagon used together before....because it is erroneous. You should check out Dawkins religious belief scale. I can pretty much guarantee you intelligence increases towards the atheist end of the scale.
(note: I'm assuming he's talking about Richard Dawkins, a notorious polemic and ridiculous person. How this person would not assume that Dawkins belief scale in regards to intelligence is skewed. I've known many brilliant, brilliant theists (and still do) and they were in droves at Baylor including my professors, of course. However, some supposedly unrelated study, does say that those who choose atheism are quite intelligent, and far moreso than theists. More on that later.)
-You believe in:

* A Jewish Zombie who was his own father that can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master so that he can remove an evil force in your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

*You think hes real just because he cant be disproved

*The 2000 year old fairy tale book

-... This in no way whatsoever proves "God" exists. If anything, it shows more and more that the idea of God is false. HUMAN scientists created this, it wasn't some invisible being performing a magic trick to hint at it's fake existence.

Go back to reading your Bible and playing with crayons.

-Man, this is fascinating..
...its funny how religious people say that their god or gods exist,
yet most religious ppl are ignorant and never read a science book to expand their minds and get different views on life.
That there's more to life and thats it's beautiful and rather they choose to believe that a "god" magically created everything and himself and that if u do good u go to heaven, or u do bad u go to hell..
if ppl were smart enough to think about it, they'll figure out that religion is the most stupid thing in this planet, it's one of the things that seperate us as humans!

-Man I wish all religious people would walk to their nearest cliff and take a leap of faith. If you are able to cross to the other side then you would have proven Newton's second law wrong and I will be the first to bow to your god. However, since you are not going to do this because gravity will take care of you, then please free up some room by crawling back under your rock and letting real knowledge develop.

-I am an ignorant god fearing simpleton, my beliefs are based on a book that was written by ignorant primitives many hundreds of years ago. I have been brainwashed since birth to reject any other belief or to open my mind to scientific discoveries and to aggressively defend my beliefs. I will also try my best to make you believe. I dont care that science is based on facts such as fossils etc. The devil planted fossils and bones of early hominoids to trick us non believers. My savior was a murderous criminal nailed to a cross for his crimes but I will make him my martyr and kill other religeous fanatics and non believers who dont share my beliefs. I will spend an eternity on a cloud playing a harp with all my relatives while the non believers burn. I can do all kinds of crimes and sins and be pardoned on Sunday. None of my prayers have ever been answered but that dont deter my closed minded belief system. My preacher is sodomizing children and lives in a big house but thats just gods way. I feel sorry for all you non believers.

-I have been having trouble finding the "Christian" counter part but, I think the reaction against it was so large (1300plus comment) I cannot find them, but here is a synopsis of what they might say:

SCIENCE IS WRONG.
THE BIBLE SAYS....insert pretty much anything here
YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!!!
etc. etc.

Yes, I chose the ones I found most ridiculous. The point is mainly that these crazies exist. I will say that this particular forum was interesting because I saw smatterings of sensibility. I was pleased. Good job, people! *five*

Anyway, I haven't looked at this for...a couple days, so I think I lost my original point. But, I'm sure it was that none of these are even decent arguments for or against God and that it is really pointless to make every scientific discovery a huge issue. St. Augustine (my patron) had a theory of evolution ages ago. Most of the big scientific discoveries were made by religious men or monks (see: Newton, Copernicus, Galileo (he was religious, he just was kind of a dick) etc). This science versus religion dichotomy is ridiculous. Science cannot disprove the existence of God; it can, however, show us plenty of reasons to think there is at least some sort of creator deity. For me, the issue is not the existence of the Creator, but rather what sort of being the Creator is and what we are to it/he/she/it. There are simple facts that point to a Creator:
- The fact that we can make sense out of anything in this universe points to a mind being behind it. The universe would far more likely be nonsense if there wasn't a mind that created it and set rules in place.
-Because the universe would be nonsense, we would not be able to make sense of it and science, as it is, would not exist. There would be nothing to figure out; meaning that, even if we did search for underlying laws etc., we would find none.
-There is a starting point to the universe. At one point, there was nothing, and then there was something. Adding on into the equation does not mean things weren't created, rather it more likely means that the created universe had to be created specifically and very delicately.
-After the bang, the slightest change to the initial environment would have resulted in nothing. One way, it would have retracted on itself. While another way, it would have expanded and stars never would have been formed. We should all know by now that we quite literally come from the stars. None of the heavier elements that went into making planets and us would have existed without them.
- Even if string theorists are right, and they likely aren't, multiple big bangs and "branes" would not eliminate the need for a creator. Why should "branes" be the only eternal thing? It still does not prove that the universe wasn't created, it just adds a more experimental feel to it.


There's more, but I'm le tired.

Peace EASY,

Zaire