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To: Tell It Right
Yes, long days for me. And I’m not a theistic evolutionist (a term I’ve heard some people use to say they believe God took a deistic approach in creating life, including man, by saying He built the mechanism of natural selection and started the first simple organism, then sat back and watch His creation naturally create mankind). I believe God created us in a very intensive and intimate way (especially man, with phrases in Genesis like “in our image” and breathing life into man).

Fair enough.

I'm in awe of a God Who can speak 100,000,000,000 galaxies into existence in a single moment as part of a chore on the 4th day. This gives us a reason to consider God's relationship to "Light" which is a very important word developed throughout the scripture.

45 posted on 02/06/2019 5:48:16 AM PST by DungeonMaster (Vote your bible.)
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To: DungeonMaster
If I may, I think we've reached a point in our knowledge of the universe that we're seeing limits to how many galaxies, stars, and planets there are. Still a very awesome creation pointing to a very awesome Creator.

But IMHO it's becoming more and more of an apologetic point to show that Earth is unique for advanced life, in a star system that's unique for advanced life, in a galaxy that's unique for advanced life, in even a universe that seems specially primed for advanced life.

For example, when the Hubble telescope was first put up in the late 90's plenty of astronomers/cosmologists made predictions on what we'd find (which is always a healthy scientific exercise to help exclude bias created after observing new experiments by focusing on beliefs held to be true before the experiments).

At the time the prevailing belief was in an oscillating universe -- that there was a big bang billions of years ago that spit out matter and energy all over the universe. But it's not a unique event because there were infinite big bangs before it -- all matter always slung out with each big bang -- and always the expansion of the universe slows and eventually reverses to bring the matter back to the point of origin to repeat the process again. It was the atheists' answer to Christians who kept pointing to the Anthropic Principle (we observe so many things in nature and astronomy that had to be fine tuned in order for life to exist -- therefore odds say a Creator set up things correctly). The idea was that with every big bang all the physics of the universe are reset in a random way, all the matter is slung out in a random way, etc. So if the big bang happens infinite times then even random chance will make all the variables just right for advanced life --- at least once every blue moon.

So the expectation before the Hubble telescope was fired up was that we'd observe that our expanding universe had been expanding at a faster rate in the past. And that the further back in time we look (by looking further away) the more we'd observe a big bang effect of the universe expanding at first at a very rapid rate to slow down to it's current expansion rate.

But that's not what we find! We find that the universe's expansion is slowly accelerating. It still looks like some major expansion event started billions (or more) years ago. But for all we can tell it's a one-time event. There's nothing we observe to make us think the expansion rate will reverse and bring all matter back to a single point to repeat the big bang process. So the universe isn't like an Xbox with a reset button to try again if things don't work out like you want. If the universal constants that drive atomic cohesion ain't right now and here, they ain't never gonna be right any time or anywhere. And that's just the universal constants. We could spend all day talking about the arrangements of galaxies so that our milky way has enough cosmic radiation from other galaxies to provide us energy and some matter, but not too close to other galaxies so that the cosmic radiation fries us like a microwave oven. And... we could go on forever. :)

46 posted on 02/06/2019 7:20:01 AM PST by Tell It Right (1st Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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