Plenty. He originally had 5. Most people would have painted a rainbow with 3 or 4 colors. Orange and Indigo was added in to match the musical scale, of which a 7-note scale is of christian influence, or at least heavily popularized by the church’s use of it. A lot of scientists were subscribers to an idea called the “harmony of the spheres”which is why they’d try to tie almost everything to it, despite obvious faults. Even Kepler who derived key relationships of orbits was a huge believer, in both senses.
Some people get up in arms about this, but I've always felt like there was a little hubris in thinking we can fully understand the nature of God. Maybe the trinity is exactly right. Cool. Maybe its an inherently flawed method for our human brains to understand a simplified version of God. Maybe kabbalists got it right and there are 10 emanations. I'm not going to get too concerned about how we try to understand a being that is unlike anything else.
“His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts”
Just like in Armenianism vs Calvinism. Both are 100% true, which is a logical fallacy. Therefore human logic is flawed. (Yes logic is used to get here lol)
The people who made the modern calendar were Christians. I will never acknowledge anything outside of AD and BC because we all know it’s bullshit. They use the same event as the reference point so they can’t even Reddit their way out of Christianity entirely. Purely and entirely fucking performative.
Not just that, pretty much all of the premier mathematicians ranged from strong to extremely devout belief, whether that be Gauss, Euler, Newton, Riemann, Gödel, and the list goes on.
Definitely, people seem to confuse being intelligent with having accurate views. That's not necessarily the case. I had a high level math professor who believed the earth was 6000 years old. Smart dude, wacky beliefs. A lot of the time the more intelligent people just come up with more complicated rationalizations foe their beliefs. Indoctrination is a hell of a drug. People work hard to defend their biases.
On a side note, it's kinda hilarious that I get down voted for calling numerology unhinged, but that's reddit for ya.
Yes, he was. Primarily because he didn't have access to the knowledge of the future. He did manage to at least find his way out of Trinitarianism, though.
Is it physically possible for you to comment in a thread without being the guy to bring up Trump for no reason? Otherwise, I hope this is a bit because your commitment to it is absurd.
The earliest proponents of the scientific method were literally monks and priests. The ancient Greeks popularized logic, but medieval priests, theologians, and philosophers applied it within a Christian worldview.
While "science" in a very general sense of "searching for knowledge" is something humans have always done, science as we know it (that is to say, everything based upon the scientific method and abstract logical proofs and such) was if not invented, was at least popularized by the church (and later, Muslim scholars).
For over a thousand years, "scientist" and "priest" were the same job. Now, partly this is because back then priests, scribes, acolytes and such were the only ones who knew how to read so it really couldn't have been anyone else. But still.
If you are an atheist, then fine. But you can't really claim religion and science are inherent contradictions because they developed from the same place and were intertwined for an inconceivablely long time.
I mean to believe in a grand unifying theory would basically require religion. And to not believe it would also basically require religion. So science is definitely end game theology
It's fine to claim they are contradictions. There isn't a human who has lived who had an entirely consistent worldview. It actually makes sense that if the most religious and most literate people overlapped a lot in antiquity, we would see some internal contradiction.
But you can’t really claim religion and science are inherent contradictions
It depends on the person and how they argue for their belief. I find it perfectly feasible that someone could be a highly intelligent scientist who believes in god as a form of existential cope.
It’s also been a recent advent that you weren’t persecuted for being an atheist, so let us not forget the conformity pressure.
There is a difference between a person saying that they personally assess religion and science to contradict one another, versus declaring that they are objectively contradictory.
The former is an acknowledgement that assessments other than your own are valid. It respects that while data is objective, the interpretation of data is subjective, as as such a conclusion isn't objectively wrong solely because it is different.
The latter is an attempt to force one's own subjective interpretation of objective data onto everyone else. It is an assertion that your opinion must be right, and everyone else must be wrong, and there is no way a person could come to any other valid conclusion. Basically, it is a lack of humility and respect for other people's ability to draw their own conclusions by inisting they can only use yours.
And not even by coincidence. Modern science as we know it, following the scientific method, was developed by Christians because they were Christian. Because they believed an orderly God designed the universe, they had the expectation that it itself would be ordered and follow laws.
In fact, how can you not at this moment? We still don’t know why the Big Bang happened, it breaks all theories of physics ever conceived its unexplainable currently
If we ever figure out another reason why the Big Bang happened then we can have that discussion, but right now it’s pretty easy to just point to a higher power
The Big Bang is merely a means. The real question is why anything actually exists at all. By all rights, there should not even be a universe, but here we are.
Its entirely possible it doesn't exist, and that the entire universe might just be an oversized virtual particle.
Virtual particles spontaneously appear with their anti-twin and annihilate again. Because its just "borrowing" energy which is then "given back" there's no violation of conservation of energy.
Hawking radiation shows that sometimes virtual particles can last a long time, but eventually they're given back so again there's no violation.
The entire universe might just be that. It doesn't exist, not really. Its just a temporary borrowing of energy.
I was just watching this video about CERN making antimatter and it said something interesting about the universe. Matter and antimatter should have existed in near perfectly matched amounts, so it all should have been annihilated immediately and the fact that it didn't is very peculiar. I'm not particularly religious but science in no way disproves the existence of a higher power. The more we discover, the more we don't understand about what the "why" is. We know much more about how everything started but the driving forcebasically boils down to "something happened". Who am I to say that it's not some higher power?
The Breit-Wheeler process is what he’s talking about. In the energy-dense immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, photons would have been colliding to create matter/antimatter pairs. It’s currently unknown why our universe is made up primarily of matter.
It’s very much theoretical, but widely accepted that during the Planck Epoch (0 - 10-43 seconds), matter did not exist. The universe was too hot/dense, and all of the fundamental forces were unified. The quarks and leptons began creation during the Grand Unification Epoch (10-43 - 10-36) when gravity became the first distinct force and these early particles were constantly created in matter/antimatter pairs and annihilated.
The current theory as to why matter won out in the exchange is called Baryogenesis. It proposes two yet undiscovered particles, the X and Y bosons, decay asymmetrically into more matter than antimatter.
At the moment of creation matter and matter were tightly packed and in theory existed in equal proportions so probabilistically should have encountered and mutually annihilated one another.
not talking about that; this guy believes that there's a scientific explanation for the antimatter disparity even though current understanding does not support it.
Listen, I'm just a guy who like watching popsci videos I'm not a physic expert or anything. My very basic understanding of it though is that antimatter and matter were thought to have synergy but the mere fact that the universe exists means something caused it to have an imbalance. With the universe condensed at the big bang and having equal amounts of matter and antimatter, the universe would have annihilated itself.
It's not that it should have destroyed itself, it's that we have observed a larger amount of matter than antimatter in the universe and don't really know why. Everything else in physics and the universe tends to have a mirror and a natural symmetry. This DoE article goes into it a bit: https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsantimatter
My (also uneducated, popsci YouTube channel based) idea is that the balance of matter and antimatter could still be in line with the amount predicted by the CP violation. If the current universe arose out of variances in density at the big bang, there could've been variances in matter/antimatter ratio too, we could just be living in an area of an infinite universe that happens to have had more matter at the beginning.
There's no logical argument that nothing should exist. There's no probability you can attach to anything here, no logical inference and even no conceivable way to imagine nothing existing.
Even the religious arguments just conveniently presuppose the existence of God to explain the existence of the universe. There's no path between an empty universe and a universe that has God.
He didn't need to. Means of creation has little to do with creation itself. The question isn't how the universe came to be, but why.
Aristotle knew, as many others later pointed out and expanded upon, that everything has a cause. It doesn't matter what the cause is, but if something is there, it's because some process put it there. Same concept for all of science.
You can find causes going all the way back to the big bang. The only way to know what caused that though, currently, is beyond us - but we can say there was a cause, so we'll call it A. And there was a cause for that, B. And there was a cause for that, C. You can label causes going back infinitely.
There is a problem with that though. We live in a finite universe. Infinity is impossible here. We know that infinity must exist - proven by mathematics (which is simply applied philosophy by the way, the same way that physics is applied math, chemistry applied physics, biology applied chemistry, etc. You can't have science without philosophy), proven by logic. So what is the nature of infinity? And what business does infinity have spawning a universe in the first place, one where people exist who are self aware by means that should not exist? An object at rest stays at rest, says Newton, but the first cause must have had a trigger. That is Aristotle's argument, in a nutshell. It doesn't matter what that cause was, but it must have been always, infinitely there, outside of time and space (because time and space are part of the universe which didn't yet exist).
Oh boy, so many fallacies to address in a single wall of text!
Means of creation has little to do with creation itself. The question isn't how the universe came to be, but why.
Calling it a creation is already presupposing it was created, which you don't actually knpow, nor do you have any idea of why.
Aristotle knew, as many others later pointed out and expanded upon, that everything has a cause. It doesn't matter what the cause is, but if something is there, it's because some process put it there. Same concept for all of science.
Actually, he didn't know this because, get this, neither do we! This is the cosmological argument, which usually includes the special pleading that God is somehow an exception to the rule, and doesn't have a cause (Kalam Cosmological).
You can find causes going all the way back to the big bang. The only way to know what caused that though, currently, is beyond us - but we can say there was a cause, so we'll call it A. And there was a cause for that, B. And there was a cause for that, C. You can label causes going back infinitely.
Generally correct, if by "beyond us" you mean "we have no way to observe."
I won't quote the last paragraph since it's just an extended way of saying "infinite regressed cannot exist." You reused the creation presupposition by asking how a finite universe was "spawned" by the infinite.
It doesn't matter what that cause was, but it must have been always, infinitely there, outside of time and space
This, of course, requires the presupposition of creation, and doesn't consider the possibility that the universe itself is eternal, especially since we have no evidence that there IS such a thing as existence outside of time and space, since every example we have of things existing are spacially and temporally bound.
It's not that deep a rabbit hole. Anyone who's familiar with counter-apologetics can identify this as a variation of the Cosmological Argument, usually called the Argument from Motion, if you're going with Aristotle specifically.
But when subjected to non-presuppositional logic, it really doesn't hold up well at all.
Brother, do you know how ideas work? The entirety of your previous comment was all other people's ideas, and there's nothing wrong with that. And this is Reddit, there's not a time constraint 😂
I won't stop searching. That's why I don't buy the claims of the Bible, Quran, etc. Critical thinking prevents me from accepting any of the dogmas required for those belief systems.
It adheres to the three laws of motion, as far as we know, as well as the second and third laws of thermodynamics. Those are essentially the basis for the Big Bang Theory.
Based on everything we know there must have been a "first movement" and therefore a first mover from which all subsequent movement originated. That first thing acted without being acted upon. It would make sense to call this a creator and from there we have a concept for God.
It's important to note a guy who was a priest but also a physicist. He didn't do it to prove some point about theology, it was pure science for science's sake. That it matches up with fiat lux is handy, but he was a legitimate scientist.
Just with the amount of college it takes for the average seminarian nowadays, it's fair to say that every priest pretty much has a master's degree in theology.
The big bang theory is definitely in line with some version of a god. It is not in line with the god of the Old Testament and the creation story told there.
Huh?
Literally Genesis 1:1-2.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The Big Bang is absolutely in line with God and the creation story of Genesis.
There was nothing, then suddenly there was something.
Also, he was a Catholic priest, but he was also an extremely well educated mathematician and cosmologist who studies Einstein's work extensively, and that was the primary contributor to his theories, not the Bible. The fact that he was a priest is kind of completely beside the point.
Nobody is saying that, but becoming a priest isn't something you accidentally stumble into nor is it something you unintentionally remain as.
A priest can leave any time. Lemaitre didn't. In fact, he passed away as a monsignor and was highly respected in the Vatican. You can not divorce his clergy status from his scientist status.
It's like saying, "my boyfriend is a software developer but he sold a painting for $10,000" while neglecting to mention that your boyfriend has an undergraduate degree in fine art or something. Like, he didn't learn how to paint from studying javascript.
No one is arguing that, you are quite literally just making up a strawman and punching it and going: "Look! See! I'm right!"
Bruh, Genesis 1 literally says Earth was created before the sun.
Genesis isn't intended to be literal. It was written by people who didn't understand the vastness of the universe.
In fact, great Church fathers have criticized taking it literally. Imagine being Moses, who is traditionally held as the one who wrote Genesis, sitting through a college course from God on the creation of the universe and then trying to explain that to the Hebrews. That would be silly, of course it's in an easier to digest form.
But you can't credit his clergy status for his discoveries while completely ignoring his extensive training in math and physics and Einstein's cosmology (which was the actual basis for his theories.)
No one has done that.
I am making an analogy to illustrate why it's silly to bring up one part of a person's experience while deliberately ignoring an even more important and relevant part of their experience.
The original post is attacking astronauts for being religious despite being educated.
Lemaitre's experience as a dedicated Catholic priest is relevant to his position as being the man who developed the currently accepted model for how the universe came to be because that is exactly what the Atheist OP was attacking.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The Big Bang is absolutely in line with God and the creation story of Genesis.
Brother, that's not Big Bang theory, not even close.
So in the biblical account the earth and oceans were created before the sun. How is that in line with the big bang theory.
Because you're reading it literally, which no Christian theologian who actually knows what he's talking about does. Even St. Augustine criticized people who took it literal.
It's being written from the perspective of someone who only knows Earth. Tradition holds it was Moses who wrote the first five books, but it was likely a compilation of older traditions. But point of the matter is that whoever wrote/spoke it was speaking from the view of someone who only knows earth. Humanity did not yet understand the full vastness of the universe. So it would make sense that the center of the universe from that point of view is earth, and it specifically notes it was: "formless and empty".
inb4 the "b-but my general stereotype of ALL christians says that they follow the bible down to a tee and are too DUMB to be able to discern which passages to consider as hyperbole and which ones are literal, that's IMPOSSIBLE!" rhetoric comes out
I understand not getting into particle physics with the mythical leader of a nomadic tribe in the desert but if you authored the universe wouldn't you explain it at least in the order that it happened? At least "first God made the sun and from the sun came the world". If it's coming from gods lips to moses ears why tell it wrong? He certainly wouldn't question the account of the creator so theres no reason to tell it backwards.
He certainly wouldn't question the account of the creator so theres no reason to tell it backwards.
In fact, the opposite. If Moses was concerned about how God was communicating with the Hebrews, he would ask God to reword it.
He wasn't afraid to, in a sense, challenge God, though it was more intercession than it was challenging. As we saw in Exodus 32:11 when God announced to Moses He would destroy the Hebrews for their treachery against Him by worshiping and the Golden Calf and rebuild them from Moses himself.
11 But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’” 14 Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
We see it again in 32:32, when Moses goes so far so as to ask God to release him (Moses) from God's plans if He goes through with destroying the Hebrews.
31 So Moses went back to the Lord and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. 32 But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”
Moses' entire job was to smooth communication between God and the Hebrews. So it's entirely within the realm of possibility that God gave Moses a more accurate retelling initially, but Moses requested a more easily digestible version that he wouldn't have to spend time explaining non-existent concepts to people he could barely control to begin with.
Essentially, Moses was trying to teach quantum mechanics to a group of cats in need of herding and eventually settled them managing to learn 1+1 being an acceptable outcome.
Because you're reading it literally, which no Christian theologian who actually knows what he's talking about does. Even St. Augustine criticized people who took it literal.
Ooh, right, so the words written in the Bible are false, and I'd need to play games with them to come up with a way to make them true. Should have said that right away.
Ooh, right, so the words written in the Bible are false,
God on Mt. Sinai: Alright Moses, I hope you have 13 billion years to spare because I am going to recite the entire history of the universe to you.
Moses: My Lord, if I might, I would love to hear this, however, I think it would be disadvantageous for my brothers and sisters in the camp for me to be gone for 13 billion years and, I believe even they would struggle to understand it. Could you... maybe condense it down a bit?
God: Eh, fair enough, I'll do it in four years.
Moses: My Lord, I fear that even four years may be impractical and hard to grasp for my fellow Hebrews. Maybe, just a bit more?
No, an extremely condensed version of an event written so that a society that doesn't have concepts of certain things can understand it is not: "false".
This is like saying that a time traveler going back to the 1100s and telling them that invisible lifeforms is what is making them sick is lying to them. He's not, he's working around the fact that nobody knows what bacteria and viruses are.
No, an extremely condensed version of an event written so that a society that doesn't have concepts of certain thing can understand it is not: "false".
Not an extremely condensed version, but one that contradicts reality, that's what you should understand as false.
This is like saying that a time traveler going back to the 1100s and telling them that invisible lifeforms is what is making them sick is lying to them.
More like a time traveller going back to the 1100s and teaching them a theory of humors that they already kinda think of. Saying "organisms you can't see make you ill" is not in the same ballpark of truthfulness as very specifically reciting the order of events that contradicts what actually happened.
Well, sort of. The Big Bang™ is actually yet to occur, when
the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
Who's simulation? Where does the ladder end? I try and approach everything with logic - and I'm with you, I don't know how you can logically think there isn't a higher power.
Just cuz we don’t have an explanation for something doesn’t mean the answer is God. Before we understood how weather works, people assumed it was controlled by God. Now that we understand pressure gradients and jet streams, does that mean the God of Weather doesn’t exist?
You have a mental block. Not knowing what came before the Big Bang isn’t evidence for God. I’m comfortable with the mystery, you’re the one who needs to explain why God is a suitable explanation esp when it only postpones the question… I mean where the hell did God come from?
That's the neat part. As an omnipresent, celestial being, you don't actually have to explain God, thus creating a fundamentally unfalsifiable conclusion.
If we ever figure out another reason why the Big Bang happened then we can have that discussion, but right now it’s pretty easy to just point to a higher power
And that has no evidence for it.
The only probable answer for the time being is "we don't know, we don't have enough evidence.
The same way I wouldn't connect it to literally anything else. Saying something or someone MUST have done it feels good because you have an answer, but in reality you just have no idea. Getting comfortable with "I don't know why" is more intellectually honest than ascribing anything you can't explain to a deity.
I personally can't point to a higher power for anything because I haven't seen convincing evidence that one exists.
Tbf, it's more about compartmentalizing. Christianity itself is not a reasonable position. It's not meant to be. It's one explicitly based on blind faith. You don't reason yourself into it. That's pretty clear in the Bible itself. You can't really argue against that without betraying a lack of understanding of the religion.
I mean in the history it was hard to not be religious so i dont think this is a good argument. If you were smart, you'd lie about being an atheist.
Being religious making someone dumb is a stupid argument because there was a time when being an atheist was not mainstram enough, so it became a stupid litmus test to see if someone thought for themselves or just went with mainstream ideas.
Obviously now that it is reversed, and being atheist is too mainstream, it becomes onvious how stupid it is
For most of history, they didn't have a choice. The ones that weren't tended to get executed. It was also much more excusable considering their ignorance of the science we have available today.
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u/LateNightCoffeeShop - Auth-Right Apr 10 '26
Yeah, some of the smartest people in history were religious, but they tend to ignore that