universe

[groovy chick]

how did the world begin?

[jno]

scientific explantion, see here

Religious explanation, see here

[Chessman]

EDDIE51, You've asked for thoughts on the theological creation.

Im my opinion.

God can never be proved or disproved, ergo, it can never be proved God created the universe. In the Old Testament, God was a God of war, full of retribution, jealousy and destruction, I can't believe a God like that would create something, and not look after it, God also said, 'you shall not worship other Gods before me', insinuating there were other gods, so if there were, which one created us?.

I personally, having read the Bible in its entirety, along with the Torah, can't believe in a God, so no link between God and science.

Sorry if thats not the sort of thing your after, but thats my belief.

[jake-the-peg]

I think that page with the "scientific explanation" has lost something in translation especially the bit about the super massive gaseous point!

Maybe a Dutch site translated to English isn't the best place to look.

The point is that the big bang was not a gigantic star exploding as is so often pictured but the instantaneous creation of energy/matter and time itself!

The word begin itself has a implication of 2 states one where something was not and then one later state when that something was.

It's therefore not entirely clear whether the question is actually meaningful.

As for God supplying the energy? Well ask where God came from and substitute the Universe for God in the answer?

Does introducing God get you any further?

[Octavius]

The Big Bang is still in effect a theory, and who knows, in years to come generations may look back with mirth as we do now on those people who thought the world was flat. Most of the Big Bang theory's events are inferred from telescopic observations, particle accelerator experiments, and mathematical algorithms.

Creatonism is another theory that had it's roots in early Judaism, but the theory was around long before the bible, the ancient Greeks thought that Gaea was the Earth and was worshipped as the universal mother who had created the Universe and gave birth to both the first race of gods (the Titans) and the first humans. Thus Graeco-Roman creationism was expolained through myth, starting with Chaos, moving to Gaea and Uranus, and ending with Oceanus and the other Titans.

So maybe our lot got might have got the maths wrong and the bang was more of a squelch.....

[jake-the-peg]

This business of something being a theory rather than fact can get pretty tiresome - you could as equally argue that gravity is just a theory! ( I doubt I'll be drifting to work tomorrow )

The big bang is principally supported by 2 widely accepted pieces of evidence.

1) The expansion of the Universe - play it back and everything starts off in a point.

2) The background radiation - the "echo" of the big bang was calculated before it was observed and was found to be amazingly close to prediction.

OK there are a lot of the fine details to resolve and until somebody gets quantum gravity worked out it'll stay that way but to refer to "the big bang" as just a theory is pretty misleading!

[Octavius]

The big bang was initially suggested because it explains why distant galaxies are traveling away from us at great speeds. The theory also predicts the existence of cosmic background radiation (the glow left over from the explosion itself). The Big Bang Theory received its strongest confirmation when this radiation was discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

Although the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted, it probably will never be proved; consequentially, leaving a number of tough, unanswered questions.

I

[jake-the-peg]

What is your criteria for proof?

Even Fred Hoyle finally accepted it before he died!

Whaddya want a video!!? :c)

Seriously it may never be possible to expain all the details of the origin of the Universe but I think that it began in one cataclysmic "moment" of creation (big bang) is pretty much beyond question now.

After all General relativity did not "disprove" Newtonian Gravitation

[freud01]

If I may add to the debate... The idea of the big bang is not so much a happening like the creation, more of a precipitation of phenomena that we can now observe and measure. Prior to the bang, the universe didn't contain atoms or quarks or neutrinos or strong and weak forces. So it can never be proved because we have no way of measuring the forces that might of existed.

In the same way it can never be proved that god created the universe. It does seem strange though that the bible only bothers to mention that god created the things that 4000 year old humans knew about like light and birds and fishes and things, what about dinosaurs and gravity.

[aphroditee]

well if you read the Bible, it does talk about dinosaurs... it talks about all kinds of animals... it does not say the word dinosaur, but the dinosaur was an animal, wasn't it... all animals were in the garden of eden... if you look closely, you would find the answers.. the Bible is a big metaphore and can be interpreted in many ways. Also, there are books that are missing from the Bible, so thats another point to look at...

[aphroditee]

ok, so you guys think that the big bang just formed out of no where, and that the earth is just so perfect, with gravity and water and land and life... then why dont the other planets have it? why is our planet just so perfect, oh it just happened like that? no. it didnt. it was suppose to happen like that. even the scientific "theories" are not proved, more questions appear... with God, it says, "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" thats it. plain and simple. God created it. With science, what created the big bang? how did the molecules and all the things in the "heavens" get there? Because, in the beginning, GOD created the heaven... from there sceince proves how GOD did his work... things just dont appear for no reason.