Dan
Thanks, Dan. I guess we didn't need you. He has someone wispering in his ear.
Posted on 06/02/2003 1:46:54 PM PDT by Heartlander
You say so.
"Genesis "void" being a vacuum, you didn't cite an authority. Therefore I suspect you make yourself the authority.
What I said, I said and there was no definition there. Since I gave you my authority and you dismissed what I told you, you must be an authority yourself.
To con the mark into believing that because a chance is random, he has a chance of taking home more than he spends. Now, of course, even if we pretended that the spins of the wheels can be perfectly random, the house simply adjusts the payouts so that at the end of the day more coins were fed into the machine than came out of it. And it's all perfectly legit, which is why only stupid peole like Bill Bennett play slot machines.
Thank you, that is what the vacuum looks like to a physicist, but the physicist can do nothing with them.
Who loves ya, baby?
So, where did God come from, anyway? Fairly silly of you to introduce "First Causes", considering your religion sidesteps the issue completely.
Nope. Science doesn't spend a lot of time pondering questions with no answer. Religion spends a lot of time inventing answers that don't exist.
Yes. If Darwinism is not religion, or is not at least a shot at Christianity, what's the point? The Darwin symbol, mocking Christianity, that we see on the back of autos speaks volumes as to what the Evolutionists are really all about.
I'll agree with you there. People supportive of the rational side of the Evolution/Creationist debate should not engage in the mindless irrational bumper sticker wars, since it lowers the rational side to the same level as the children who think God is best served by recruting from the ranks of those swayed by bumper stickers.
An more basic level, of course, the only reason people decorate their vehicles with bumper stickers and dead fish is to proclaim their membership in a particular tribe, an aspect of human nature that evolved out of an aspect of our territorial instinct. Waving flags, dressing for success, nose piercing, having ashes smeared on your forehead on a Wednesday, sticking a dead fish on a car, and sticking an anti-dead fish are all markers of tribalism.
It also connotes vanity, one of the seven deadly sins.
I have a license plate on my car. That's it.
Only in the last 15,000 years or so has Man's ability to manipulat his environment significantly altered his chances of survival from the preceding millenia. What happened? The rise of agriculture, which effectively eliminated the risk in food gathering (as compared to wandering around looking for things, Man started planning productively - "using" time to His advantage.)
There was still the climate to contend with, and disease, and other things, but food became more reliable than it had been.
Today? Selection and evolution still occur. Who gets the girl? The geek or the class clown? Neither. The jock, still. Just like in the cave man days.
Not only that, they have no ability to give the Putative Creator a reason for Her Urge.
On the other hand, those who believe in the alternative beginning of the universe have the impossible task of trying to show how all that we now know about that universe, and ourselves, came into being through a chain of accidental events. That is, how does purpose spring forth from purposelessness?
You're assuming that purpose has "sprung forth". Identify this "purpose". If you cannot do so, your argument is fatally flawed.
Those of us that contend the Universe is Causeless don't make the mistake of then claiming it has Purpose. Purpose can only be the result of deliberate Cause, and hence anyone assuming a Purpose while postulating the absence of Cause is confused.
Dan
Thanks, Dan. I guess we didn't need you. He has someone wispering in his ear.
They're good reads, if you can accept that from one who still disagrees with his premises. Anyway, they won't tax the ability of anyone with a major in literature.
I'll be short here. In each cm3 of vacuum there is more energy than there is in all the universe. When folks were developing equations in the late '20s that took into account the wave nature of matter, negative energy solutions came out as answers. They were particles of negative energy, the same charge, moving backwards in time. Most rejected them as sports. Dirac was the first to point out that these would be noticed as positive energy particles, of opposite charge, moving forward in time. These particles are called antiparticles. Dirac envisioned the vacuum as a sea of these, "holes", filled with regular particles. His first calculations were with electrons and positrons, later it would be shown that hadrons and leptons exist as pairs. When they are paired, there is nothing observable, except the properties of the vacuum.
The early considerations were with single particles. Later fields were quantized, to look at systems of particles. The particles arrise out of the fields, in this case the electromagnetic field. Feynman did(1949) that and calculated the the fine structure of spectrum of the hydrogen atom exactly, by including terms, called the self energy, that included the electrons interaction with the vacuum. That's what confirmed the correctness of QED, quantum electrodynamics.
That interaction occurs, because the vacuum is not silent. According to the law of conservation of energy, energy can neither be created, or destroyed. The uncertainty principle says that the energy of a particle can only be known to a certain precision. That's expressed as hbar ~ E*t, where t is the time of the observation. If the time is short enough and your looking at the vacuum, (actually it's a particle looking at the vacuum) particles of E ~ hbar/t will be seen. Yukawa explain the weak force in this way back in ~1930. His particle was a pi meson. It is echanged between protons and neutrons, that convert back and forth between each other according to which one holds the meson. There's a probability one of them will drop the ball, a neutron will decay and the nucleus decays. Outside the nucleus the neutron only has a 1/2 life of ~12secs.
There's an experiment that was done around ~1950, but I can't remember the guys name. To metal plates are positioned very close to each other. Since all those particles are popping in and out of the vacuum and observer should be able to measure a force. They do, it's called the (?C... effect, sorry CRS). The force and energy are useless though to do work in this universe.
THe interaction with the vacuum is also what gives black holes their black body radiation. That's radiation that emits from anything with a temperature. There's still not a net gain in E from the vacuum though, because when this happens the antiparticles are decreasing the black holes size. It is essentially boiling off. I'll be gone for some time, maybe someone else could add.
I believe in reading all sides and being well studied...how can you "debate" issues intelligently if you are not informed of where the opponents views come from?
Hmmmm... tpaine, the idea of dysfunction implies some sort of original purpose, does it not? It's a notion for which evolution can give no adequate accounting. If evolution is purportedly responsible for everything that is, what basis is there for condemnation or criticism of the neural activity of Dataman's brain (or anything else for that matter)?
Cordially,
Nah. I was just echoing your excellent little paragraph as a placemarker. Such points need to be made strongly and often.
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