"I don't believe that the earth has existed forever because forever doesn't exist!"
No one said it has or that forever exists. What I said was that all of the evidence supports the idea that everything that exists now, has always existed in one form or another. Nothing has ever been created.
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"Quite simply, if anything was created by a "big bang" what caused the bang?"
Again, no one said the Big Bang created anything. I said quite the opposite. I said the Big Bang was an event of transformation, not creation. The Big Bang was most likely caused by imbalance at a critical state. That's what causes transitions.
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"What is your elaborate overly self indulgent hypothesis on that?"
Nothing I offered was even close to elaborate. It was all incredibly simplified in the hope that it might be understood by those who do better with simple explanations. And it's not at all "self-indulgent". It's simply the objective conclusion based on the evidence.
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"I like science very much. But the big bang theory is complete trash. If the chicken came from the egg, then where did the egg come from?"
I can only conclude that if you think the Big Bang has any relation to the chicken and the egg, that your proclaimed love for science isn't accompanied by any appreciable understanding of science. The two have nothing at all in common. The Big Bang is a scientific theory -- a conclusion which just happens to fit with all of the available evidence. In fact, before we were able to map the cosmic background radiation thought to exist as a remnant of the Big Bang, physicists spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to calculate the levels of that radiation at points across the known universe. Years later we developed the means to actually photograph the background radiation and it matched almost exactly, the calculated model. That's more than just slightly coincidental, don't you think?
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"A lot of people are like me and our faith harms no one."
I work as a 911 dispatcher. When people fall for fraud schemes, I'm often the first person they report the activity to. Please don't try to tell me that faith isn't harmful, it's a component of just about every fraud scheme ever developed and it always has to be exercised by the intended victim. Believing in that which disagrees with logic, reason and evidence is always false (never once has it been shown to be other than false), and believing false-hoods is harmful. Need I mention the Branch Davidians in Waco, the People's Temple in Guyana or the Heaven's Gate community and Marshall Applewhite to make the point?
Faith allows people to avoid learning anything they don't wish to learn. It allows them to hold false-hoods when truths are readily available and it slows the spread of truth in favor of holding onto fallacies and myths. It's harmful.
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"And we don't judge or criticize anyone else for believing what they want to."
It would appear that you simply don't recognize it when you're doing it. You just got through using the terms "elaborate" and "self-indulgent" in an insulting manner toward something I believe and can support on evidence, simply because it's not what you believe yet you have nothing upon which to support your belief. You also just called the Big Bang Theory "complete trash", which tells me that you lack a working understanding of what a scientific theory is.
All of those comments and several others I won't bother repeating are highly critical. So while you might want to believe you're not critical of others for what they believe, you've clearly demonstrated the opposite to be true.
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"But some of us do take offense to our faith being called stupid and ridiculous."
Some of us might take offense to having words put in our mouths. No one called your faith "stupid" and no one called it "ridiculous". And if you like to be offended, then by all means, go right ahead. I have a few comments concerning people's misconceptions about their right to be offended in my journal. Feel free to give it a good read. It's under the "Spells" section; the last entry on the page, called "My gentle RANT!".
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"My faith harms no one, but then again my faith is all my own."
Of course it's your own. No one is attempting to take anything away from you. But as for your claim that it harms no one, I would have to point to your decision to discount all of the evidence that leads to the Big Bang as the best conclusion based on the evidence. When people begin to believe that their subjective opinion -- a belief formed purely to serve their emotional desires -- is actually more valid than a conclusion based on objective assessment of evidence, they're already demonstrating the harm that has come from faith.
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"At least I like to think so."
This is a sort of big red flag when it comes to faith. It's an indication that you're picking beliefs based not on credible assessment, but purely upon desire. It's what you "like to think" that matters rather than what can be demonstrated to be true. And yet when I point that out, you claim you're being "ridiculed" and your beliefs are being called "stupid", despite the fact that neither was stated or implied and despite the fact that you turned right around and demonstrated that beliefs of faith are what you "like to believe".
Beliefs based on faith are the reason that the man now known as "The Father of Science", was treated as a criminal in his day and spent the last nine years under house arrest after being forced to tell the public that his correct findings were actually false. People of faith forced him to do that. People of faith locked him away in his home and hid his work from the public eye. People of faith burned Giordano Bruno to death in 1600. And they did these things on faith. If you think faith isn't harmful, just look to the rules of the forum. Faith is so vulnerable that there is a special rule to protect certain kinds of faith from objective evaluation. When a belief or belief system is so fragile that it must be sheltered from objective discussion, it clearly cannot stand up to scrutiny based in truths.
And holding onto that which cannot hold up to truths is certainly harmful.
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"But you speak as if your post is fact, when it's all mostly just theory."
I spoke as if everything I stated can be demonstrated to be true because it can be. I don't subscribe to beliefs of faith. But understand that being demonstrably true doesn't make anything "fact". It simply means that an objective demonstration can be offered which conclusively supports the assertion being presented.
Science doesn't operate on proofs and it presents no facts. It operates on evidence and presents theories. The term "just theory" suggests an incomplete understanding of what it takes to constitute a theory in the world of science. Nothing is "just a theory". "Theory" is the pinnacle of scientific credibility. Nothing tops theory in science. But science, unlike faith-based positions, holds a recognition that even things which are demonstrably correct might later be demonstrated to be incorrect. It's all based on evidence. New evidence can lead to new conclusions. New methods of analyzing evidence can lead to new conclusions.
Gravity is a great example. Was Newton wrong about his Theory of Gravity? In essence, no he wasn't. He correctly calculated the effects of gravity to such a degree of accuracy that his equations could allow us to put men on the moon and probes on Mars. But Einstein looked more deeply at the evidence and found that gravity isn't really a force. It's simply a consequence of warping space-time. Einstein enhanced Newton's work. But had anyone proclaimed Newton's theory of gravity to be a "fact", they would have been wrong based on what Einstein was able to show the world. That's why science used "theories", "hypotheses", and "laws" and doesn't call anything "fact".
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"You can believe what you want to believe."
No I can't and that's very much the point. Believing something just because you want to believe it is practicing faith and I don't subscribe to beliefs out of faith. I subscribe to beliefs out of evidence and demonstration.
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"But insulting people of faith is highly disrespectful."
And yet I insulted no one. I simply defined faith as what it is demonstrated to be by the very people who claim to hold beliefs of faith. (You've provided that very demonstration twice in your response.) The idea that this was an insult comes from you. And yet you offer nothing to counter what you show faith to be -- belief based on personal desire, even to the exclusion of reason, logic and evidence.
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"because you can be wrong just as easily as we can."
Well, that's simply not true. That's been the one lesson no one should discount throughout man's existence. Beliefs held on faith always show a markedly greater chance of being incorrect than beliefs held on logic and reason applied to the objective assessment of evidence.
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"You don't know everything about everything and neither does science."
No one claimed that I did or that science did. But you have to remember what you're attempting to compare it to. Billions and billions of people have held all kinds of beliefs on faith and the vast majority of those beliefs, from the idea that Zeus created lightning to the belief that Horus and Set battled over the light of day and dark of night, have been utterly wrong. I'll ask you to think long and hard about this next question. When has there ever been a single confirmed instance where beliefs of faith were in opposition to beliefs of reason, logic and evidence, and the faith-based belief turned out to be right? Name just one.
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"Religious tolerence is a great quality to have ya know."
That's most certainly arguable. Is it good to show tolerance for people who shove their children into active volcanoes, simply because it is their religious belief? Was it good to show religious tolerance for the beliefs held by the followers of Reverend Marshall Applewhite when 38 of them committed suicide in pursuit of their religious beliefs? Would you consider it a good thing to show religious tolerance for the former members of the People's Temple; 900 of whom committed suicide or were killed by other members in accordance with their religious beliefs?
During the Dark Ages the idea came about that a person's religious beliefs were somehow special and to be protected from rational examination by those who don't hold such beliefs. That idea was spawned by people who held the majority beliefs of the day as a way to prevent people from demonstrating the failures of their beliefs. If you utilized reason to show the failures and spoke out, you were simply killed as a heretic. Unfortunately for mankind, that concept has persisted but it's completely bankrupt as any kind of rational idea. Religious beliefs are just like any other belief; if it's wrong, then it's wrong. And if one who holds such beliefs places them on the table for discussion (as you did by proclaiming "faith"), then they shouldn't be surprised, shocked or offended that the issue is then on the table for both sides.
We've moved past the Dark Ages in many respects but this seems to be one of the clinging remnants that is only now beginning to be challenged.
Wrong, harmful or irrational beliefs should never be seen as beyond being challenged by anyone or for any reason. People used to believe that the Earth was flat as a part of their religious beliefs (a very small few still do). Some used to believe that the sun revolved around the Earth as a part of their religious beliefs. Many people held that disease was caused by evil spirits rather than microbes and even insisted on avoiding proper medical treatments as a part of their religious adherence. The assertion that such ideas shouldn't be challenged simply because they were held on religious grounds has served to retard man's acceptance of knowledge, and therefore, man's advancements.
I used to hold beliefs on faith and after 16-years of re-evaluating, I can easily see the damage it did in my life.
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As for the LHC, I would expect many failures to plague the first year or two of use. One has to remember that the people who built this device couldn't just run down to the hardware store and buy a Higgs boson detector. Almost every piece of the machine is a one-off original, hand-built, with very little actual experience upon which to avoid many of the potential pit-falls.
If anyone expected the initial phases to go off without a hitch, they simply weren't being realistic.
