Leave the graffitti, or paint it over?
I feel it depends on the content.

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'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

If it was cussing, I would say paint over it. But since it s a pretty good look inside his head, I say leave it for all to see.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

On other boards, I would agree; but not this one.
It reminds me of the quote: "I may not agree with your opinion, but I will defend to the death your right to voice it."
I feel the term 'opinion' is key here. That was not an opinion. I intend to drop the subject.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

I would leave it up. If it was cussing, I'd say edit it to indicate that obscenities were edited out by replacing the words with *.

Speak for yourself. I happen to be very significant. [-X

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~~ ><>><> ~~ ><,,> ><,,> ...`;=;p d;=;' /\/\^/\ ^^ ^/\/\_
Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

As to the possibility or impossibility of ever knowing what occurred before or at the beginning of the big bang if that model is correct:

First, I think the model is correct as far as it has been described which is back to a particular fraction of a second after it began.

Second, conclusions about a precondition can be correctly drawn from the state of something now, so I don't hold to the premise that, 'we can never know'.

We may in the future discover other universes and thereby learn more about ours.

__________________
~~ ><>><> ~~ ><,,> ><,,> ...`;=;p d;=;' /\/\^/\ ^^ ^/\/\_
Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

Hi guys. How are things?

I've heard it said that the Big Bang theory does not deal with the actual explosion. OK, so the explosion is something separate. I gather that the Big Bang theory itself would then refer to the theoretical formation of stuff after the bang. My arguments concerning thermodynamics and dark matter mostly deal with this anyway, and the explosion is naturally closely related, so that also should be discussed.

Tobin Dax (I'm a fan of DS9), you mention that dark matter, should baryonic particles and neutrinos be so classified (I know nothing about either) still is not enough to account for gaps between galaxies. The universe is obviously uneven, with galaxies in one place and expanses of vacuum in another. This does not square with formation from an explosion, after which the universe should be of uniform density.

Musashi: Matter being outside of time does appear to be the general Big Bang explanation in the first place. The reasons for its appearing from nowhere and suddenly exploding for no good reason - yes I know you have said that is not part of the theory, but the theory depends on it - would appear to be nonexistent. God is not 'sidestepping' the rules by being outside of time. Naturally this is a matter of belief, but being eternal as the Bible says, that is His basic status.

Someone else brought up the subject of why we Christians must interpret the Bible literally, and why we can't put both it and the big bang together. Firstly, it's because we'd rather believe what God says, and the six-day purposeful creation outlined in Genesis (along with the genealogies, which add up to several thousand years) directly contradicts the big bang theory. There is a much more important reason as well. The Bible reports that everything was perfect before Adam sinned:

The mainstream chronology of big bang, evolution, and survival of the fittest requires billions of years of death and suffering. We see diseases such as rheumatism in the fossil record, as well as animals buried and some in the middle of having lunch. But all this was supposed to be before man, and the Bible says that before Adam's first sin there was no sin at all. Thus, the evolutionary chronology does not fit the Biblical viewpoint. Furthermore, the latter verse up there demonstrates that if there was no basis to Adam's original sin, there would have been no basis for Jesus Christ to rid the world of sin by dying on the cross. Without sin, no need to clean it up.
So, the big bang and the entire evolutionary theory completely contradicts every facet of the Christian faith.

TruthSeeker: The Bible also says, Love your neighbour. Please do be polite. This is supposed to be a place of amenable discussion.

Makes sense to me why it's hard for a believer to try to make some of the creation account be a story and still hold that the rest is true.

What doesn't make sense then, is why so much evidence exists that the creation account in the Bible isn't true. You note yourself that, "We see diseases such as rheumatism in the fossil record, as well as animals buried and some in the middle of having lunch".

My favorite contradiction in the Bible from the original sin story is that women were to be punished for sin by having to bear pain in childbirth. So did god come along and invent anesthesia 1900 years after Jesus for any particular reason?

I know this is getting away from astronomy, but I bring it up because it's less questionable than arguing against the science of dating techniques or BB theories. In other words, it doesn't take a science background to understand the weight of the evidence.

__________________
~~ ><>><> ~~ ><,,> ><,,> ...`;=;p d;=;' /\/\^/\ ^^ ^/\/\_
Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

At the beggining, maybe equal amounts of positive and negative enery were created. That made it possible for the universe to originate from nothing! :wink:
(-ax + ax = 0 )

What do you think? + = {}

I don't understand the logic behind the thought that if the universe were created by an explosion that it should be uniformly dense. Explosions rarely ever seem to be uniform. Large chunks fly this way, small chunks fly that way. If the universe was the result of some violent explosion then the our current model seems quite reasonable.

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

Calling it an "explosion" is not accurate and can lead to many misconceptions.

As ocasey points out, this is not accurate. An explosion is very uneven. The BB "event" could be expected to be uneven, too, as the newly created matter interacted with itself, setting up gravitational eddies. I forget the exact number, but as I recall, all it would take to get a universe with today's "uneveness" is a "disruption factor" in the first second on the order of 0.1% (I think that's high.).

Well, the second reason derives from the first, and the first reason depends on accepting on faith that the Bible is either the direct Word of God or at least God-inspired.

But, then, every Religious Book of Choice (RBOC) makes that claim. And many disagree on the Origin of Everything. How do we know which one is real? (Won't we all feel silly if, when/assuming we make it to Heaven, we find a bald guy in a safron robe waiting for us, and wanting to know why we never gave at the airport?)

The Pope might disagree with you, as well as several mainstream faiths, Christian and non-Christian.

Aha! A point of strong agreement. (For those who prefer something non-Biblical, follow the Thumper Rule.)

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

So now you're speaking for all Christians? Fascinating. I suppose those Christians who disagree with your views are not True Christians, then.

The microwave background is interpreted as the relic of that explosion and it is very uniform. The fluctuations astronomers measure in the CMB are just a fraction of a degree K. So if the CMB is the remnant radiation from the beginning of the universe, it suggests the universe began very uniform. One of the benefits of the Inflationary model is that it offers an explanation as to why the CMB is smooth.

As someone else said, the Big Bang wasn't really an explosion, and should not be thought of as such. As for uniformity, do you consider a diamond uniform? It has large gaps in it between the carbon atoms. The universe *is* uniform. It looks the same from every direction, from every point. Fluctuations did happen on a small scale at first, but tehy grew over the billions of years since then. However, they stayed uniform in distribution.

........hmmmm.....
.....
...
.....hold on....
.....let me drink some coffee first... ... ....
.....aaahh!.....
....
..ok...
...
.. so.... why is it that a belief in a certain structure of religion would have anything to do with why and how our universe moves or expands or whatnot? The age of the earth is most definitely older than 6 thousand years, and we have records to show this... WE HAVE RECORDS TO SHOW THIS... we have recor---- oh... i said that already... =)
**sip coffee**
anywayz...

This CMB, a big cosmic microwave background of sorts... it has an appearance of being smooth from our perspective... but, from another perspective, as in being infront of the so-called expanding wave of the CMB, the form of the CMB may be totally different from what WE see...
The aforementioned bits and pieces of debris flying aorund, that would be on the OTHER side of the CMB that we are seeing... not on this side...
the unevenness that we may see throughout our universe is more than likely caused by the formations of gravitational singularities that had formed either by the CMB expanding or by amounts of Dark Matter/Energy being present before the CMB commenced its journey...

Our universe as a whole could have been a certain charge at first, be it negative or positive... and an opposite charge could have been introduced that caused the reaction prior to the BB expansion.... or there could have been a plentiful amount of negative and positive amounts of matter/energy everywhere but with no force to conduct their charges together to cause the BB, so a certain element could have been used to help that conductive charging of particles... like a 9V battery.... stick your tongue on one tip, either negative or positive, one at a time, and you get nothing.... but stick your tongue on both charges at once... OI!!

We do have very old particles that are still around, that were around even before the birth of our world, just floating in space... pockets here and there, empty voids of matter with nothing to do but be pushed and pulled... any mixture of certain particles that might create such a CMB could have been used to excite the BB into reality... .. .

. .. ...and about there being a Creator to all of this... well, of course there is!! You think we are here just because? If we are learning what it means to have a mind and a will and an intensely, unending excitement towards finding our origin of birth, than we are most definitely related to something that has given us these wants and needs of understanding and overcoming the obstacles put before us to achieve what it was that our ancestors couldn't... If you recall, the Bible was written just recently compared to the actual longevity of our world... only 2 thousand years prior... within a time when Man could finally use words and the reach of the Holy church to establish a rule of how Man should be....

This was Man's decision to allow the voice of Religion to gain a foothold on the soul's of Man... .. . Man wrote the chapters in the Bible as we see them... and the Church organized it as it saw fit to do... .. even leaving out chapters that have been written by others, but didn't really reflect with what the Church had in mind... ..

Religion aside... we are here, and we need to be there... so how do we get there with all the different feelings rolling around inside of us?

A certain platform must be established in order for all voices (intelligent or not) to be heard that may have an interested opinion in the matter of why and how... if i die, will i be cast into fire? i most definitely DO NOT think so.... as my parents and church has seen to drive into me since i was young.... but, being older now, 28 as of January, i have finally begun to realize that 1) there is no reason to condemn someone to a life of gnashing teeth and eternal torment if they've done nothing wrong (being that that person is actually a good person).. and 2) we didn't find ourselves to be the center of the universe.... far from it.... literally... as had a certain Text has proclaimed... something does not match up with the words that are written by Man.... the Words that are written by the Creator or NOT the words written by Man.... Man may have tried to interpret a meaning of something shown through their consciousness, as how the Bible seems to be done... but, Man could never fully understand what it is that has created us enough to understand how it was that we were formed.... give these visions of Creation to someone of today's understandings..... i believe that the Bible may look alittle bit different than what we read today....
The Words of the Creator are above us, in the night sky.. in the far reaches of the cosmos.... in the stars... the formation of galaxies... the turning of planets around suns.... the explosions of supernovae cascading their particles all over the regions in which they inhabited... the unknown sources of negative and positive energies that we still have yet to discover their full meaning...
Yin and Yang... formlessness... an open mind... a transcendence from a form of solid matter to formless energy, that inturn can create its own matter.... and so on... .. .

Be good to eachother... and don't take things so serious that you can't see flaws when they are present, on both sides of the argument... give way when another view may lead to progress... keep morality within reach, but personal beliefs at arms length, yet close to your heart (if it gets you up in the morning, let it)... view from the third perspective, one outside of right and wrong, but one not so distant that you couldn't see the finest details of those lines being drawn....

No one ever mentions the fact that if God created light, then would Satan be the Darkness that we see.... its an argument better left for a time when we can more fully understand ourselves and our universe first... everything is just.... speculation..... and nothing to get worked up over, especially since we have such a looooooooooong way to go...

**sips coffe again**

....ok!! =)

. ..-={A}=-.. .

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. ..-={A}=-.. .

i'm not going to take sides right now, but i do recall a certain model that we used in my Earth Science class a couple semesters ago. (it relates to uniformity, hold on!)

imagine the universe as a loaf of raisin bread. a really BIG loaf. the BB theory is sort of like watching the cooking channel--you don't worry about where all the stuff comes from, you just worry about what it does once it's arrived. theories of pre-BB origins are something else.

anyway, for the rest of this i'll quote from my book. (yes i kept it...partly cause the bookstore ordered a new edition. darn bookstore! also cause i'm a "nerd" though. :-? )

here goes: i'll pause here to explain the diagram. (figure 22.24) there is a picture of a small loaf and a raised loaf. in the small loaf there are many raisins, three marked. one is the "local cluster" galaxy in the analogy. raisin two is two centimeters away. raisin three is five centimeters away.
in the raised loaf, we still see just as many raisins. the "home" raisin is marked, but raisin two is now three times farther away--six centimeters. raisin three is also three times farther away--fifteen centimeters. in the same three hours one raisin moved four centimeters and one moved ten. this is due to the dough growing at a uniform rate of one centimeter an hour (slow bread, but hey). the difference also grew constantly. the original difference of distance was 3centimeters (5cm-2cm). the new difference is three times that--9cm (15cm-6cm).

anway, onto the second (and last) paragraph: (cluster=raisin here) and it goes on to talk about Hubble and the BB in more detail.

all quotes taken from "Earth Science", ninth edition, by Tarbuck and Lutgens. page 622, paragraphs 3-4.

now as i said, i'm not going to jump on one bandwagon or the other. Hubble was a pretty smart guy. not to be dismissed lightly as far as i can tell. so is God from what i can tell. i'm sort of stuck in the middle as to how to resolve the apparent differences between them. bit by bit though i find hints. some are good, some awful, still others painful or joyful. science is an ongoing process, as am i. someday i may have a complete answer, but until then i'm going to keep trucking away! anyway, enough of me, your eyes are probably tired of reading by now so i'll let you go--for now. maybe more later if i think of it.

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None to speak of

Please don't imply that you speak for all Christians. You most certainly do not speak for me. What God says? This has been coverd in other threads and is a bit OT, but nowhere in the Bible does it even claim that more than about a hundred words is the literal word of God. The very most that can be claimed is that it was in some way INSPIRED by God, which is a very different concept indeed. Accepting this simple fact will allow you to INTERPRET the Bible and end your losing battle with reality. Like others have said, the term "explosion" isn't quite right, but in any case, an explosion in space (supernova) is exactly radially symmetric. It has to be because of gravity.

I would simply like to point out that this statement, often repeated by BB critics, would not be true, even if it were not wrong to think of the BB as an "explosion". Just look at the Crab Nebula, or this new HST image of SNR LMC N49, or just about any other supernova remnant you care to choose. There's no doubt that SNR's are the results of a real explosion, and they are anything but "uniform". Especially the HST image of the core of the Crab. Just think of the filaments in the Crab as analogous to the filaments in the universe, along which galaxies form, and the two are actually quite similar.

The reason for this is that in an explosion, or in the BB, the fabled 2nd law of thermodynamics forces the formation of non-uniform distributions as a direct result of cooling by expansion. No fancy cosmology required, this common anti BB argument is easily relegated to the dustbin by very ordinary physics.

Imagine if the BB did result in an even distribuition of matter.

All the creationists would point and say "Look how evenly distributed the universe is, there's no way that could happen naturally"

__________________
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

We came from a giant mega-supernova. That actually makes sense. Those SNRs look very much like the larger Universe.

Does that hypothesis fit with the composition of the Universe? (IE the amount of hydrogen, etc etc?) I don't mean that the mega-nova was a star. I'm not trying to oversimplify things here. The mega-nova would still have had to have originated from something much different than a star. But could it have been the result of a collapse and explosion like a nova?

__________________
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Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

This reminds me of a program on PBS some years ago that showed a docent at the Institute for Creation Research museum explaining how there was no death until the Original Sin. Now all the creationist "science journals" that I've ever seen had very little real science in them, just recitations of how perfectly adapted living things were to their respective niches, how could this have "just happened"?

What I want to know is, what did the lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) do while waiting for Man to throw out the Original Sin? Hang out at the salad bar?

Elmo: This rabbit food is a real drag!
Patsy: Sure wish Adam and Eve would sin so we can kill something and have some real food!

Oh, wait a minute, I suppose that would mean killing plants, or at least some cells of plants. Maybe everyone in Eden just stood around in the sunlight and photosynthesized?

Elmo: This standing around in the sun is a real drag!
Patsy: Sure wish Adam and Eve would sin so we can kill something and have some real food!

The sad thing is that death is completely misunderstood. Perhaps it is time to state the obvious--The First Law of Biology:

Almost all organic matter, no matter how unappetizing or even toxic, is ultimately eaten.

We are no exception to this, never have been, never will be. You'll take your turn on something's plate one day. Death is not some divine punishment, it is part of that "intelligent design" some people rave about. It is presumptuous of some people to take the credit for it or to assign the blame to one gender.

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

If you look at it on the scale of the whole universe, it's extremely, EXTREMELY uniform. What little unevenness there is is more than accounted for by quantum fluctuations.

Since time started at the BB, there is no "suddenly." Christian: "Why did it decide to start just then?" Pi Man: "Because 'then' was it's first possible chance, because 'then' was the first moment of time." Please stop asking about what happened before the BB, and such.

So, 6000 years of death and suffering is preferable to several billion years of death and suffering? The death and suffering is observed. Whether you believe it drives evolution or not, it happens. Tell me it doesn't! It's not evolution's fault that things die!

One can't take the Bible that literally. It's not the "transcribed" Word of God, it's the inspired Word of God. Do you believe literally that Adam's birthday was specifically Oct 23,4004 bc and around 4:00 am? How far are you willing to deviate from that? Hours, days, years, decades, centuries, millenia, millions of years?

No. I diasgree completely. It doesn't matter *how* we got original sin. It only matters that we have it. Original sin is only the ability to go against God's will knowingly.

The BA doesn't smile on non-astronomy related posts (and he frowns very much on religious posts), so we should quit posting non-astronomy related posts, but PLEASE feel free to send me a private message on those fassets of your beliefs.

Well, we could go on arguing about this for several millennia, but I strongly suspect that we won't get far. Face it, we all have our predetermined biases, instilled in us from childhood or otherwise from a very long time ago. We look at someone who doesn't agree with our worldview and think to ourselves what nonsense they're spouting. Something as undefined as the big bang theory, which you have mentioned is not really an explosion, (even though you recently talked about unevenness of explosions when you put forth some arguments) and doesn't really deal with the actual event of the big bang... well, something like that is more of an idea about origins - a concept - than a scientific theory. We all have our ideas about how the universe began, but they're often difficult to prove because they're not observed now.

Given that, I would have to suggest the following fact:

Almost all of you postulate the idea that the big bang originated from a black hole of some sort. You may have remembered that we discussed this at the beginning of the thread, when someone said that the big bang came from a black hole and I recalled that black holes come from stars in the first place. The big bang generally relies on a super-dense original clump of matter - a black hole, an object so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape.
Thus, all the matter expelled from the big bang could not have escaped in the first place, because black holes suck matter in. They do not let it out. No matter could have escaped the original black hole's gravity well. I suspect that anything as dense as the original 'cosmic egg' would have had the same effect.

Regarding the unevenness of the universe, then, a detonation set off in the original clump of matter - whatever it's called - would not have done much more than blast out a cloud of hot gas particles. They would not be likely to start clumping together and form galaxies. Think about it for a while. I'm no astronomer, so don't get too mad for any misunderstanding of physics here, but common sense tells me that the particles of gas, etc., that might have come out of the big bang wouldn't just have started coming together. Think of two hydrogen molecules in space, a kilometre apart. Would they under normal circumstances start clumping together and form a planet? Gravitational attraction does depend on mass and density. Even with something as big as the Earth, the moon's still drifting away, not moulding itself to us to make a bigger planet.
Things tend to disorder, not to order. That's the fundamental law of entropy. A special creation - with everything winding down from there, according to laws of thermodynamics - does fit with that.

For those who have claimed that no more than a hundred words in the Bible are the Word of God, read it again. Psalms 119:160 says that all His Word (referring the Bible there) is true. The end of 1 Peter says in effect that all the writings in the Bible are breathed of God. Most importantly, the Bible also states that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for correction. But that's getting off the subject, excuse me. ops:

I know, as you mentioned, that I don't speak for all Christians when I say evolution conflicts with the Bible, but I heartily wish I did.

__________________
"God is dead." - Nietzsche

"Nietzsche is dead." - God

Cyreks reply:

Jim wrote:

Does anyone else see the paradox here?

Cyreks reply:

Regarding my comments above, there is no paradox here because I do not demand that one has to believe in what I say.
I welcome criticism because I believe in free speech. That is why I feel free to comment or explain my concept of scientific evaluation whether it is I or my critic.
It is the reasons for the evaluations that are important to me.

Tobin Dax wrote:

What I want to know is why you consider it is not to be real science.

Cyreks reply:

Regarding my comments about the ‘big bang’, listed below are my reasons for refuting its scientific concept.

Creation out of nothing…… An impossibility. Also, a violation of the laws of conservation.

Uniform expansion…… From a starting temperature of 10^32 K to an ending temperature of 2.73 K. How can this be a uniform expansion?
Although the uniform expansion started at a temperature of 3000 K, the sudden drop to this temperature from 10^32 K after a brief period of 300,000 years seems unrealistic.
Also, after the recombination of matter, the gravitational deceleration would be weakening as the expansion increased. Therefore, the expansion would be increasing rather than being uniform.

Every point in space is central to the observer….This concept is made analogous to a two dimensional spherical surface. This is a false analogy.
All three dimensional bodies have a common center known as the ‘center of gravity’. That is why a three dimensional body expanding from one point cannot be expanding both radially and spherically at the same rate.

Expansion of space….. No reason given for why this is happening. Since there was no explosion, why is space expanding? What is the driving force?

Tobin wrote:

What is your support of this? I want to know your reasons.

Regarding my belief in a steady state, I said the Universe is in a balanced state.
The velocities of encircling bodies around a gravitational source will adjust their velocities to their orbital distance to maintain their momentum relative to the central body. Thus, this creates a balanced state. This will remain an eternity until something disturbs that state. Since space is a vacuum, there will be nothing to disturb that state except wayward bodies.

Incidentally, my idea of a steady state does not include an expansion or contraction of the Universe.

Uh, you were the one talking about the evenness of explosions being proof against the BB. While the BB was not an explosion, your concept of "even explosions" needed to be addressed.

Nope, sorry, not so. There are some who go with the singularity (not really a "black hole"), but there are others who prefer the membrane concept, or vacuum fluctuations/false vacuum (me, for one). All of these fit nicely with the BB.

No. Most theories of what precipitated the BB do not deal with matter at all. Those that do, deal with the smallest amount of matter imaginable... a vitual particle/anti-particle pair.

Again, not so. Black holes evaporate over time, and will actually explode.

You are assuming that the matter already existed. It did not. The matter and energy were created from the BB event.

Think "gravity."

Okay, think some more about it.

The moon is pulling away from the earth because of its momentum. If it suddenly lost that momentum, the moon would be pulled toward the earth. (Actually, it's being pulled toward the earth now, but it's momentum is great enough to overcome that attraction. At some point, it will not be, and the moon will begin approaching us.)

Which only applies within a closed system. First, define your system. Make sure it's closed (no outside effects). Then look for the total entropic effects.

Also, don't confuse particles coming together to form (eventually) planets as being anti-entropic. Which has more "order" to it, paint sitting altogether in a can, or that same paint spread on a canvass by Monet? Clouds of water vapor, or the rain that falls from those clouds?

But, that "special creation" surely violates the Second Law in some instances. If it's "winding down" and becoming more chaotic, how can trees grow?

If you consider the growth of a tree to be order from dis-order, yet still allowed, how can you then say that the "growth" of a planet is order from dis-order and therefore not allowed?

You most certainly do not speak for me, and I am most heartily glad you do not.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

For most of us, the predetermined bias we hold is the desire for evidence.

Nothing is ever going to change your mind about how the universe is created, nothing short of your god coming down and telling you otherwise.

For the majority of the rest of us, all it takes is either a new better theory, or something that totally disproves the Big Bang theory. We're not going to sit around and try to defend an undefendable theory just because we like it.

On the other hand, the only proof or evidence that backs up your theory is the bible, a book that is thousands of years old and has been translated dozens of time (often to better suit the translators goals).

When taken literally, it's obvious that the bible is incorrect about a great many things, and there are hundreds of different ways to interpet the meaning (as witnessed by the number of different Christian sects).

Finally, there is no outside evidence or proof that even remotely supports the bible. It's all self-contained inside the bible itself. That would be like me writing "Don't worry, all the following answers are correct so there is no need to grade this exam, just give me an A" on one of my exams. I doubt the professor is going to believe me.

__________________
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Incomplete. The other half of the scientific bias is a mind thats open to changing a theory if the evidence contradicts it.

The religious bias depends on BOTH never accepting new information and never changing the ideas themselves. It is the ultimate dogma.

Of course if you look at the history of religion, all religions DO evolve because there are very few people who'se religious bias is absolute. The Catholic church DID eventually pardon Galileo (he'd been dead for a couple hundred years, but its the thought that counts, right?) because despite their religious bias, they couldn't completely ignore reality.

Maintaining the dogma in the face of irrefutable contradictory evidence only serves to destroy the religion.

"all His Word" does not necessarily refer to the Bible as a whole. It could simply mean all of the words in the Bible that came from him.

The books have the author's NAMES on them. At the very least you must concede that the books were written on paper first by humans (unless of course you believe God is trying to decieve us). So then does God use a pseudonym (again, implying he is trying to decieve us) or did he directly dictate the words to the people who wrote them? If so, why does the gosphel contain 4 different (though similar) accounts of the same events? Did God have trouble making up his mind? Did he redraft and forget to delete the earlier versions?

Christian, your point of view here simply does not make SENSE.

Hopefully the quotes aren't muddled above.

I need to correct Jim, if I understand him correctly. The moon is losing its momentum to tidal friction as it drifts away from us. This loss of momentum is what causes the drift. (The BA's tides page might explain this, I'm too busy to check right now.) The moon is equilibriating the current energy due to momentum with the potential energy due to the earth's gravity. This balance between momentum and attraction is what keeps it in a stable orbit. This, Christian, is also why the moon is drifting away from us even though it is gravitationally attracted to the earth.

I agree that that would be a violation, and I, too, have issues with something like this. However, I do not kow enought about the prevailing theories for how the universe started to say whether or not this even seems to be the case.

That first question is too vague. If this were an old high-school level story problem, I'd say that there wasn't enough information. You cannot take a starting point and ending point as data and say that such-and-such a fit will work. But I think I can answer the question you mean to ask: Take the raisin bread model mentioned above (I think). Temperature is inversely proportional to size of the universe. As the universe (the bread) expands, it stays uniform as far as the positions of all of the "raisins" are concerned. This is a uniform expansion, and one that fits the temperature decrease. Note: uniform refers to space staying uniform during expansion, not necessarily a uniform expansion over time.

What do you define as sudden? The decrease from the initial temperature to 3000K at decoupling was over the entire 300,000 years, not a matter of seconds or some such small timescale. As I said earlier, the temp of the universe decreases as it expands, and it was expanding the entire time before decoupling. A sudden decrease might be unrealistic, but that is hardly the case.

On a quick side note, I believe you are misusing recombination as the 3000K separation of matter from energy, which is decoupling. Recombination is when atoms de-ionized, IIRC.

As for your gravitation argument, nature does not abhor a vacuum. The initial pull on the expansion to slow it would still be in effect now, it's just not a constant force. The gravitation attraction does decrease with time, and this slows the deceleration of the initial expansion (assuming no cosmological constant). The Big Bang is also not a constant force, so (with no cc, again) there is no force still actively pushing us now to increase expansion rate. Again, this expansion that is currently happening is uniform in space, not at a uniform rate over time.

See the raisin bread example for how the expansion works. The rates can't be the same for the a uniform spatial expansion. It seems that you are misinterpreting uniform expansion as meaning a constant rate, not uniform in space.

This is a question scientists have and are still trying to answer.

How does this fit in with the observed expansion of the universe? Are you saying that everything is still expanding to reach it's equilibrium for a Keplerian orbit around the center of the universe, what ever that might be? This is definitely not yet balanced, so how is the universe currently balanced in light of our knowledge of it?

More importantly, what huge object is everything else orbiting around, and why haven't we found it yet? It can't be the center of mass of the universe. Two-body problems don't work that way.

This is exactly what Steady State Cosmology says. Everything is balanced just right, and there is no expansion or contraction.