Question: How did the universe begin?

Ehm, I think that the Bible said that Cain and Abel were the sons of Adam and Eve, as I seem to remember something about Eve loving Abel more for his gentle nature, but I may be mixing in some Joseph... I don't really care, it's been years since I read any of that.

Also:

it is impossible to have evolution without God.

Last I checked, Satan caused the world to evolve, by triggering the banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden. Had they not eaten of the Forbidden Fruit, they would still be ignorant and happy in Eden.

to have the faith that a big bang just existed without anything causing it is a bigger leap than to believe God caused it and far more obsurd

If God exists, why would he define a codified set of Laws (Physics), create a Big Bang, and whatnot rather than merely Create the world as the Bible says? Obviously, the Bible is wrong in the sense of God creating the world, and earlier versions even told of Him setting the stars and Sun to rotate around the Earth as a symbol for His love for us. Obviously, that's not the case, and that was removed lest people lose faith.

basically none of that could happen unless acted on from outside. evidence, solid, that an outside will exists.

I can turn that right around and ask what outside force brought about the existence of God? If you say, "He's always existed", I will ask, "Why couldn't Matter have always existed?". All things have a beginning. Even as I think Wilma said about the donut, sure it would work, but how did the donut start? We're just going to be going around in circles forever.

Go Voll. Stick it to him......OK I'll kinda shutup now.

Anyway, apparently, the Universe is infinite (yet expanding, what???) so that means there cannot be anything outside, the inner, as it were, being infinite and filling up the infinite space if there were an outside. .'. The cannot be an outside...thing creating order in the Universe. Also, God must have been outside the Universe if he were to create it, as if it didn't exist, he couldn't be inside to create it, but he couldnt be outside even, as there is, as I have stated, no outside. But that then brings about the question, if there is no outside, then how could there be an inside, and if there is neither, why us?

I usually get round the latter question by going crazy and saying: You are all figments of my imagination. But then some smart-alec always comes up with: And you're a figment of our imagination. So......

Anyway, apparently, the Universe is infinite (yet expanding, what???)

The universe itself isn't expanding, just everything in it is moving outwards to the "edges", or so the theory says.

Ah, but what edges? It's infinite, right?

Yeah, but I didn't really know how else to put it, the "edges" are the hypothetical stopping points, where all the planets and such start moving back in towards the center and pack in so tightly another big bang occurs.

Big Splat take 2? Some theories say it all started with a splat before the bang. Or Implosion. Apparently, due to this moving to the hypothetical edges, in a couple of billion years or so, the Sun will lose it gravitational hold on the planets, and our solar system will be no more. But, the Earth will lose it's hold on the moon way before that. It's been happening ever since we got the moon, it is slipping away each year.

God created physics? I think not. We merely invented physics to find systems that suit our world somewhat well. In reality, almost everything is relative to each other in various ways. We merely use scientific models to help us approximate things. Science easily narrows down our perspectives, and easily causes us to lose the grasp of things at large. Looking at gravitation between two planets might make us forget that there are other planets, and stars in the universe that exert force upon our system, too. Scientific models get thrown aside by the day, too.

The "infinite" universe expands at high velocities, and is accelerating away from other parts of the universe. Why this happens, science does not know. Maybe there is something outside what we know, some matter with great mass that is pulling our outer galaxies apart. The big bang theory has flaws, just like the Bohr atom model. It seems like an awesome thought that the universe might once have EXPLODED from a single point, but it was more complicated than that.

And for the religious models, some have been "revised" over time because science has proved them wrong. If the universe was created roughly 6,000 years ago, then why are there materials that are billions of years old in the universe?

I don't blame anyone for having their own beliefs, but this question is, in my opinion, almost as bad as discussing what religion is right, or what happens after we die. Science DOES have quite a bit of clues in this particular question, but things are still far from final. But again, it's easier to just buy some random theory that sounds nice, especially if others believe in it, too.

Why search for the truth in areas that might never give us true answers? Because it's interesting, and that's part of our human qualities.

God created physics?

I phrased that wrong. I meant more along the lines he created the relationships between things that we study and call Physics.

To those of you who say god created the universe and us. Why are we here then? Why create us?

I dont belive in god. There might have been some sort of human-oid being (or even a con artist) that directed the evovling human race to do so. Every one in those time periods were kinda whack because they didnt have science to explain things. The red sea couldnt have parted because someone said so. There are arguments and flaws in the time frames throughout the bible due to oral tradition. Since oral tradition very accurate its very hard to prove precisely what happened but we do have an idea what might have happend. knockblocker1 brings up the issue of why? noone can answer that unless a "god" did exist and "god" himself answered that question. Simply as that religion has only a grasp of that happened to our comprehension because we werent there when it happened. We wont ever know unless someone invents a time machine (lemme know if you do so i can win the 106 million power ball in like 2000 ya? and rape a few chicks while im at it :P j/p)

For the big bang, what caused it is unknown and cant be explained through our limited technology as of now (until we figure out how to develop warp drive * 234587243569634 we can yah ). However if we find out that quarks have mass we are all fucked in about 329872395624356 billion years (hypothetical number i pulled out of my ass but its like some where in the high billions) with another big bang (anyone wanna join me to see the fireworks?_?). As for the laws of matter, i would theoritically guess that matter has existed like the space time continium as how electrons move throughout an electric circuit, they are already there. A battery merely acts like a pump moving the electrons to do w/e. Simply to say, matter always existed and a bad pressure moment could have forced an explosion/implosion creating the big bang (possibly an accident).

My point is that Matter couldn't have always existed, much the same as God couldn't have always existed.

Thiis the question I always see, and everytime I see it, it makes me believe in GOD more or some kind of super human/squirle/dog/anything to have created it.
I mean try thinking back of how it begain. What is the first thing ever? The first planet? Was it just nothing, complete blackness for centries? Something had to have started something. I mean my head starts hurting when I get asked this, because I start thinking as hard as I can to come up with anything. But thats the problem, there is nothing. And I doubt scientists will EVER find out how EVERYTHING (planets, universe, where the nothing came from, how long ago that nothing started, and how?) was created. Sure they will most likly get far but no one will ever know how anything was started.

It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.

My point is that Matter couldn't have always existed, much the same as God couldn't have always existed.

It could have. If you cant explain how time works than you cant logically say that matter couldnt have always existed. We know its always been around. If there was no space time continium, how are we alive. Things wouldnt have time to evolve or yet alone let the big bang occur. matter has always existed -> "Matter cant be created nor destroyed". Logically prove me wrong, that is if you can.

Shinto: matter is matter, negative matter is matter only negatively charged so to speak.

Arbitus: a time machine could, granted that we fiigure out how to bend/rip/manipulate the S.T.C, other than that in my previous statement. We will eventually figure it out with time.

Arbitus: a time machine could, granted that we fiigure out how to bend/rip/manipulate the S.T.C, other than that in my previous statement. We will eventually figure it out with time.

What would we set the time machine to? "Before nothing"? lol jp

It just bothers me. Yes maybe there was a big bang, but from where? meaning where did it occur? if there was nothing. where did the first darkness come from?

Time machines are a paradox. Take the example that you can go forward into the future and see yourself. You would then travel back to present day, and most people would try to change their future. But that means that the future they saw could never exist because they just changed it, or that the one they saw was the changed one, but then that couldn't have been because they had not yet seen it to go back and change it.

Also, if you went back in time, you would definitely kill something or other that would change something, wether unimportant or extremely important in your present day --> you are billions of years (they say the Universe was created 15 billion years ago) from home, which means the results are amplified more than, say, if you went back just one year. There are too many things that we don't know about, that we ca either kill or change, even if we can't see them, to be able to garanty(sp?) that we wouldn't kill or change anything.

Time machines are a paradox. Take the example that you can go forward into the future and see yourself. You would then travel back to present day, and most people would try to change their future. But that means that the future they saw could never exist because they just changed it, or that the one they saw was the changed one, but then that couldn't have been because they had not yet seen it to go back and change it.

Wrong. If you go ahead of time to see a future you, that means your future you, at a younger age, went forward in time to see his future self. Its a loop. Also, for time travel to work, the dimensions, universes or whatever, that constitute the place in time that you are in must be linked to each other in some way. What you are saying depends on that. Same with my theory.

There is a sort of "One way time machine" theory that can only get you into the future. Scientists, using the theory of relativity, state that as an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down for it. So, theoretically, if a spacecraft could attain the speed of light minus 1 mph, while one hour passes for you, a trillian years could have passed for the earth. You'd emerge from your 2-3 hour trip to notice that the sun has long since nova'd and there is nothing left of earth.

"Matter cant be created nor destroyed".

ugh

Following that philosophy, there would have to be another Universe/location where we got OUR Matter/Energy from (since it couldn't have been created here, and it's impossible for it to have existed for all time). We could follow that succession backwards ad infinitum as well. -.-

This is like the Cosmological Arguement kinda. There's all these theories (against it) about The Big Bang, the Big Splat preceding it, String/M-theory, and there's the Oscillating UNiverse Theory. DOn't know if you've heard of the latter. If not, here's a rundown:

Our Universe is made up of a series of expanding and Contracting Universes.



Thing about all this is that it goes into the kinda sci-fi aspect of multipkle dimensions (M-theory, Osc. Universe theory) and makes it sound kinda...geeky. Hard to get your head round as well. Nice little bit of explanantion from a site I think was posted in this thread earlier:

M-theory For the uninitiated, the ideas are difficult to grasp. At their heart is string theory, the idea that the fundamental building blocks of space and time are tiny vibrating strings. String theory has excited theorists in the past few years although it has remained very much untested. Steinhardt's ideas about the origin of the Universe are based on an extension of string theory called M-theory. M-theory does not do away with the Big Bang. The evidence that everything emerged from a 'fireball' with a temperature of 10 billion degrees, expanding on a timescale of one second, is now very compelling and uncontroversial. Instead, M-theory looks at events before the Big Bang, proposing that the Universe has 11 dimensions, six of them rolled up into microscopic filaments that can, for all intents, be ignored. Professor Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University told BBC News Online: "Steinhardt and his colleagues offer a fascinating idea, invoking the idea of more than one universe embedded in higher-dimensional space." The action of the Universe takes place in five-dimensional space. Before the Big Bang occurred the Universe consisted of two perfectly flat four-dimensional surfaces. One of these sheets is our Universe; the other, a "hidden" parallel universe. According to the Princeton researchers, random fluctuations in this unseen companion universe caused it to distort and reach towards our Universe. The floater "splatted" into our Universe and the energy of the collision was transformed into the matter and energy of our Universe in a Big Bang. According to Professor Sir Martin Rees: "All these ideas about the ultra-early universe highlight the link between cosmos and micro-world - the ideas won't be firmed up until we have a proper understanding of space and time, the 'bedrock' of the physical world."

This theory backs the Big SPlat theory (the Splat was the floater, it's in there somewhere).

it began because God was angry with one of his angels.

God: "Go to hell"

and here we are.