week 5 discussion posts #1-4

On the topic of Creation
Discussion post below altered slightly for the purposes of this blog


Snez makes an interesting comment:
"Obviously we all believe the world was created, so the process of creation is self evident, regardless was it an act of God, or scientific process. Thus we all agree on one - there was a creation! "

Having read the week's course material (purple booklet), I want to raise an counter-point, that some people have beliefs of a cyclical cosmology - which means there is no beginning or end, just as a circle has no beginning and end. What I'm trying to say is, maybe there was no creation at all, and we didn't just suddenly come into existence.. what's around us has always been around, someway somehow.. Even as I suggest this, I'm finding the idea immensely difficult to comprehend!

I like the thought of cyclical cosmology, mostly because it soothes my fear of mortality and that all things must come to an end one day, but at the same time its almost as bizarre a concept as trying to understand how everything was created (i.e. Big Bang theory)!

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In response to Ariella's post, where she mentions that religious beliefs could be damaged by proof of the non-existence of time prior to the Big-Bang - I'm not entirely sure of what she's trying to explain; however, I agree with her idea that religious beliefs could be enhanced by such a proof. When I read the excerpt of Davies' writings, his concept of God being *outside* of time was really fascinating, and strangely enough made perfect sense to me! Surely if He is omnipotent, then wouldn't it be quite possible for Him to have created Time itself :)

I think the question that always stumps me though, is where did God come from? Perhaps it's beyond human comprehension (or at least my own) to understand how and why God exists; the creation of the universe is one question, but the creation of the Creator is a far greater curiosity. (Or is it blasphemous to question this? Any advice from the religious people?)

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From Stuart's post:
"I don't think time as mentioned in scripture [i.e. that time started at the moment of the big bang] can be taken literally. ...it's not like we've had these 365 day years since the beginning of the universe."

I think it's possible that time did begin with the creation of the universe/the Big Bang, because Time and its measurement is a human concept. We use clocks and stopwatches et al to measure time, so that we can bring about some sense of order to our lives; after all, the Sun and the Moon (and the stars :) ) would still be around even if we didn't have clocks to gauge the time.
And I agree, we haven't had 365-day years since forever. On an interesting but mostly unrelated tangent to this topic, there is, in fact, a country that is actually about 7 years behind the rest of us; scroll down to "Ethiopan Calendar Year" at the following link: http://rs6.loc.gov/frd/cs/ethiopia/et_glos.html

But back to Stuart:
"the order in which God created things could simply be the order in which they were revealed to him after the dust after the Big Bang settled so to speak."
To me, this comment seems to imply that God is not the Creator of *everything*, because things were 'revealed' to Him. Doesn't that mean that there were things He didn't know about, in which case there must be a greater omnipotent being, who then created God to create the universe.. Ok this is quite the trippy!

And on the point of "if the universe is as old as science suggests, there is no way it could have progressed as much as it has through random events" - maybe the world did progress through random events, but our minds have developed in such a way that our logic (as we know it) cannot accept the possibility of such an occurrence..

Just throwing around crazy ideas folks :)

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In response to Ariella, who replied to my comment on cyclical cosmology and how she felt she could believe in it if she were to set aside her religious beliefs:

Yeah this is all a huge mindspin hey- trying to comprehend what exists beyond our visual perceptions.. because there's so many ideas people can come up with, and as much as science claims to prove this, that and the other, you could take science to be a commonly accepted fact as well - what I mean is that there could be as much truth to science as there is to religion, which could be zero truth for either, who knows for sure. But then there's the question of "what is truth?", which I don't even want to start thinking about.. that's just way too much!

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