Posted on 03/31/2011 11:50:50 AM PDT by LibWhacker
“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." -- Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, physicist, Cambridge University
Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space.
Great Wall: The most vast structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable universe. It is theorized that such structures as the Great Wall form along and follow web-like strings of dark matter that dictates the structure of the Universe on the grandest of scales. Dark matter gravitationally attracts baryonic matter, and it is this normal matter that astronomers see forming long, thin walls of super-galactic clusters.
If it took God one week to make the Earth, going by mass it would take him two quintillion years to build this thing -- far longer than science says the universe has existed, and it's kind of fun to have those two the other way around for a change. Though He could always omnipotently cheat and say "Let there be a Sloan Great Wall."
The Great Wall is a massive array of astronomical objects named after the observations which revealed them, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. An eight year project scanned over a quarter of the sky to generate full 3-D maps of almost a million galaxies. Analysis of these images revealed a huge panel of galaxies 1.37 billion light years long, and even the pedantic-sounding .07 is six hundred and sixty billion trillion kilometers. This is science precisely measuring made-up sounding numbers.
Sloane_9: This isn't the only wall out there -- others exist, all with far greater lengths than width or depth, actual sheets of galaxies forming some of the most impressive anythings there are. And these walls are only a special class of galactic filaments, long strings of matter stretched between mind-breaking expanses of emptiness.
Some of these elongated super clusters have formed a series of walls, one after another, spaced from 500 million to 800 million light years apart, such that in one direction alone, 13 Great Walls have formed with the inner and outer walls separated by less than seven billion light years.
Recently, cosmologists have estimated that some of these galactic walls may have taken from 80 billion to 100 billion, to 150 billion years to form in a direct challenge to current age estimates of the age of the Universe following the Big Bang.
The huge Sloan Great Wall spans over one billion light years. The Coma cluster (image above) is one of the largest observed structures in the Universe, containing over 10,000 galaxies and extending more than 1.37 billion light years in length.
Current theories of "dark energy" and "great attractors" have been developed to explain why a created universe did not spread out uniformly at the same speed and in the same spoke-like directions as predicted by theory. But as Sean Carroll of the Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics at Cal Tech is fond of saying, "We don't have a clue."
Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, says some of the cosmos’s biggest mysteries, like the Big Bang and even the nature of our own self awareness, might never be resolved. Rees, who is also President of the Royal Society, says that a correct basic theory of the universe might be present, but may be just too tough for human beings’ brains to comprehend.
The better they are, and the more they know, the more likely they are to admit that they know almost nothing. This has been my long experience of scientists.
Sounds like you have a lot of faith in things that you have no evidece for. And you were disagreeing with me how?
I was speaking in hyperbole...in contrast to the long periods of time originally.
“Why would belief in an infinite and eternal Universe abnegate the existence of an equally infinite and eternal God?”
It wouldn’t, but it seems that in that model the Universe becomes an eternal and coequal partner with God - and there would be absolutely no way to say that God created it.
How can you create something that always was.
The God of the Bible is a God who created the universe, not one who exists coequal to it.
So whoever this God of an eternal universe might be - he isn’t the God of the Bible.
Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space.Maybe the "that have clumped together" indicates that the "hundreds of millions of galaxies" indicated in this sentence is a subset of ALL the galaxies in the universe. And maybe the sentence is saying that "hundreds of millions of galaxies" is the total galaxy count in our universe.
It's not clear to me what that "hundreds of millions of galaxies" refers to. All galaxies, or some galaxies.
Probably my fault.
Anyway, the actual number of galaxies:
The most current estimates guess that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars. A recent German supercomputer simulation put that number even higher: 500 billion. In other words, there could be a galaxy out there for every star in the Milky Way.--www.universetoday.com
You have an awfully limited view of God.
If the universe is eternal then there was never a time when there wasn't a universe - erasing the need to have it be created.
My view of God doesn't include “Last Thursday-ism” - such is a useless speculation - as all reality would conform to there actually being a reality and existence before last Thursday.
And while your view of God may indeed include many preposterous and/or contradictory things - my view of God includes only the one described in the Bible.
The God of the Bible created the universe. The universe did not always exist.
“Sounds like you have a lot of faith in things that you have no evidence for. And you were disagreeing with me how?”
Mea Culpa. I do not accept what I don’t know and what I know nobody else know either!!!!
On the other hand I must assume that you DO accept what you don’t know. Now I got the dos and don’ts right.
And the other thing on sentient beings,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, the odds are mightly in my favor thank you
Yet, you can't possibly know what the odds are, can you? Still having faith in things not in evidence.
Ah, I get your point... my construct did give that impression, though that is not what I intended.
Don't call God a liar. I'm not sure God would like that.
The God of the Bible created the universe. The universe did not always exist.
You are entitled to your opinion.
It is not an opinion, it is a matter of exclusion.
Either the universe is eternal and always existed or it was created.
The only exception to that you carved out is if God created a universe (thus it did NOT always exist) that gave the appearance of being eternal (which would be a lie, or illusion).
It is not my opinion that the God of the Bible created the Universe - it is the description of God given in the Bible.
So.... there was a beginning.
It is not eternal.
In this beginning God CREATED.
There is no need to create that which has always existed.
As far as “Last Thursday-ism” you struck on why it is preposterous your very first try - it makes God out to be a liar. By suggesting the universe was created to mimic the appearance of being eternal - it is you who make God out to be a liar.
Or are you implying that God didn't exist prior to the Bibles codification by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD??
A shame to waste it by denying what simply IS...
Apparently, our views on God are fairly divergent.
If the very fist line of the Bible is accurate, your “eternal universe” is not.
“In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth”
Whoever your God of an eternal universe is - it isn’t the God described in the Bible. That is fine, many people worship many different gods - not of the Bible.
The evidence points to a universe with a finite beginning.
You can argue evidence or you can argue God, but arguing that God manipulated the evidence is just preposterous.
Trivia test.......
What is the largest man made structure in the continental USA?
Whatever... Have a nice day.
No, you suggested that God would create evidence contrary to fact.
Either the universe is a created object “in the beginning”.
Or there was no beginning and the universe always existed.
Whatever, you are free to believe whatever you want, but it isn’t compatible with “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth” if there was no beginning and God didn’t create it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.