Do black holes have a back door?

[MarkFL]

I can't say I find it frustrating...it's simply a claim that I reject because that is the default position.

 

[MoreCoffee]

I can't say I find it frustrating...it's simply a claim that I reject because that is the default position.

Yes, I understand the rejection - bare assertion is not very convincing and it makes one wonder how Christianity gained 2 or more billion adherents, but then when one considers Donald Trump's popularity perhaps bare assertions are convincing to many.

 

[MarkFL]

Well, I don't consider Christianity to be a bare assertion in the same sense that if someone I knew made some claim without evidence that I had never heard before, and that I can't verify it for myself...I would just have to trust him. That kind of claim I could dismiss without much struggle.

With 2.2 billion Christians in the world and 1.6 billion Muslims, more care should be taken in considering the claims of these systems before making any conclusions. While an appeal to popularity should never suffice over actual evidence, it does give reason to use more care when considering a claim vs. a new claim made by an individual.

The bottom line though, is that I respect the right of each individual to come to their own conclusion, and to hold whatever beliefs they wish for whatever reason they choose. It would be wrong for me to tell anyone else what they must or even should believe. I might as well then go on to tell them what they must wear, or eat, or what kind of music they must listen to, i.e., to disregard their rights as an individual.

It is only when someone wishes to convince me of their beliefs, or states their beliefs as fact, that I require that they give me compelling evidence.

 

[MoreCoffee]

Well, I don't consider Christianity to be a bare assertion in the same sense that if someone I knew made some claim without evidence that I had never heard before, and that I can't verify it for myself...I would just have to trust him. That kind of claim I could dismiss without much struggle.

With 2.2 billion Christians in the world and 1.6 Muslims, more care should be taken in considering the claims of these systems before making any conclusions. While an appeal to popularity should never suffice over actual evidence, it does give reason to use more care when considering a claim vs. a new claim made by an individual.

The bottom line though, is that I respect the right of each individual to come to their own conclusion, and to hold whatever beliefs they wish for whatever reason they choose. It would be wrong for me to tell anyone else what they must or even should believe. I might as well then go on to tell them what they must wear, or eat, or what kind of music they must listen to, i.e., to disregard their rights as an individual.

It is only when someone wishes to convince me of their beliefs, or states their beliefs as fact, that I require that they give me compelling evidence.

I do not place my own views and reasons for faith above evidence and do not think that what I found convincing will necessarily convince others yet for me careful thought about the value of goodness and why I consider goodness important led to thinking about God and the gospel according to saint Matthew was formative for my faith in Jesus Christ.

 

[MarkFL]

Yes, I can see and appreciate the difference between personal convictions and evidence that can be considered as objective and compelling/irrefutable to all. One doesn't necessarily need irrefutable evidence for personal beliefs, this is only required when trying to convince others who don't hold the same beliefs.

 

[tango]

But that's just another baton passing (into a hypothesis with no supporting theoretical framework)...where did the speaker come from? Who spoke the speaker into existence? And then who spoke the speakers' speaker into existence...ad infinitum?

Sure (and this is a bit of a rabbit trail from the original post, so quite happy to move it to another thread if you'd rather), the key question is whether some kind of eternal being (i.e. some being with no beginning and no ending) exists or not. If such a being or beings exists (and I'll call it/them god with a small g for the sake of a name), they don't need to have a creator. If no such being exists we end up in the rather curious situation where if we see a paper cup blowing down the street we can figure out that it had a creator and yet the creator of the paper cup didn't need a creator of its own. To me it makes sense that anything created was created by something superior (whether in intellectual or physical ability, or both), so it seems odd to argue that a tin can in the street must have had a creator and yet a design as complicated as the human body merely came into existence by accident.

I wouldn't present that as "proof" in the criminal justice level (i.e. the idea of "beyond all reasonable doubt") but testing it "on the balance of probability" I find it more likely than not that some sort of god exists.

 

[MarkFL]

I'm fine with this thread going where our discussion takes it. I feel like this thread is flowing nicely from one idea to the next and nothing is being interrupted.

Now, to reply...

This is really what I've heard termed "special pleading." The human creator of the tin can requires a creator, but the creator of the human does not. The creator of the human is somehow exempt from the rule that everything else is subject to, that is, the requirement of a creator. As such, it's really a fallacious argument.

We know things like tin cans have creators, because we can go verify that that's where tin cans come from. We can witness them being manufactured by human beings. Tin cans don't occur in nature...we know they are man-made. But, we only know of this one universe and we simply can't say whether universes occur naturally or whether they require a creator. So, we have two choices...to either posit that they do...and then you have much work to do to show that it has to be one specific entity, or we can proceed via science and try to unravel the mystery with theories (scientific) and experimentation. Creationism doesn't meet the criteria of being science...it makes no testable predictions nor does it have any power to explain anything. It "answers" one question (how did the universe come into being) by putting in it's place an even bigger question (how did the creator of the universe come to be).

 

[tango]

I'm fine with this thread going where our discussion takes it. I feel like this thread is flowing nicely from one idea to the next and nothing is being interrupted.

Now, to reply...

This is really what I've heard termed "special pleading." The human creator of the tin can requires a creator, but the creator of the human does not. The creator of the human is somehow exempt from the rule that everything else is subject to, that is, the requirement of a creator. As such, it's really a fallacious argument.

We know things like tin cans have creators, because we can go verify that that's where tin cans come from. We can witness them being manufactured by human beings. Tin cans don't occur in nature...we know they are man-made. But, we only know of this one universe and we simply can't say whether universes occur naturally or whether they require a creator. So, we have two choices...to either posit that they do...and then you have much work to do to show that it has to be one specific entity, or we can proceed via science and try to unravel the mystery with theories (scientific) and experimentation. Creationism doesn't meet the criteria of being science...it makes no testable predictions nor does it have any power to explain anything. It "answers" one question (how did the universe come into being) by putting in it's place an even bigger question (how did the creator of the universe come to be).

This is where we have to consider the simple either/or situation of whether an eternal being exists. If such a being exists (this thing I'll call god with a small g) then it doesn't have a creator because it is eternal. So we end up with a simple question of whether this god exists - if we say yes then we accept the existence of one or more beings that had no beginning; if we say no then we say that no such being exists and everything that exists had an identifiable beginning.

Creationism relies on god existing (whether Yahweh, Allah, Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever is irrelevant for now) and if an eternal being exists the question of where the creator of the creator of the creator (etc, etc) came from goes away because an eternal being, by definition, has no creator. If we deny the existence of god then everything must have been created, in which case everything simply turns back into a question of "but where did the predecessor come from?". Hence the theory of evolution can go some way towards explaining how one living thing evolved into another living thing but passes the baton to the theory of abiogenesis when it comes to the matter of how a living thing started living. Abiogenesis can attempt to explain how something not-living became something living but can't explain how the something not-living got to be there in the first place. Then we go right back to the concept of the Big Bang but with no idea of what caused the Big Bang to occur.

I realise that it's easy to create a "god of the gaps" that becomes progressively smaller as science explains things, and I won't dispute your point that creationism puts forward no testable and no falsifiable theories. By definition the supernatural cannot be tested by the natural, so the existence or otherwise of a supernatural being can never be proven or disproven by science that is inevitably tied to the natural. On the other hand if we regard science as the study of the mechanisms that god put into place with a view to understanding the visions of god and how god chooses to operate we can appreciate some of the majesty of this god. Personally I find it fascinating that the atomic structure is in many ways so similar, yet on such an incomparably different scale, as the structure of planets revolving around a star. It's an appreciation of beauty rather than an assessment of a scientifically proposed and tested hypothesis, but I see that and figure it's almost as if some intelligent designer made it that way.

 

[MarkFL]

Time is said to have begun with the Big Bang...to ask what happened before the Big Bang is akin to asking what lies south of the south pole. The south pole is as far south as you can go, and likewise the Big Bang is as far back in time that you can go (in this universe, which is all we can observe).

The image I have in my mind of spacetime and energy violently erupting from "nothing" (I can't say I truly understand what is actually meant by nothing here) into an expanding universe is not much less fantastic than some entity being there to speak it (or otherwise direct it) into being. I will freely admit that this cries out for a cause, because our experience is that all events have causes...and science has no answers here, since our current theories aren't up to the task of speaking about gravity on the quantum level.

So, when we look to science for the cause of the Big Bang, what we get right now is a resounding, "We don't know." When we look to religion, we are told that a being or beings who exist outside of time and the causal order and who are endowed with the power of creation caused everything to come into being. I can see how this is more satisfactory in some way, to put into place a cause for the existence of the universe vs. saying we just don't know yet, and we may never know.