Blinded with 'science' - Atheist's worst nightmare takes apart Hawking's 'design' flaws

WND ^ | September 24, 2010

[Conservative Coulter Fan]

God didn't create the universe, Stephen Hawking says in his latest book, "A Grand Design."

Rather, the renowned physicist writes, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."

Everything – created from nothing? The assertion begged a reply from the author of "Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution."

"It is embarrassingly unscientific to speak of anything creating itself from nothing," said Ray Comfort, a best-selling author and acclaimed minister who's confronted and confounded some of the world's most accomplished atheists. "Common sense says that if something possessed the ability to create itself from nothing, then that something wasn't nothing; it was something – a very intelligent creative power of some sort."

Hawking commits several "greater fallacies of logic," says Comfort.

[metmom]

The Bible supports a spherical earth.

The only ones who claim that it doesn’t at the atheistic, God hating ones who want to make believers look like idiots. So they go around making unfounded and untrue statements about what the Bible says and what believers must believe about it.

IOW, they lie.

[HerrBlucher]

I think it is a reasonable assumption that Hawking must get some reward out of life or he would have given up and died. His condition is something very few could endure for as long as he has without something driving him to push on. Even if he is not happy, he is still a remarkable man to keep going like he has when so many have everything anybody could want and still kill themselves. I believe that his will to live against all odds is rooted in a subconcious belief in God and he just cannot admit it to himself because his self image is that of an elitist academic who is above such silly notions.

Pride is the tallest hurdle back to God.

[Vanders9]

It wouldnt surpise me if some of his anger started as a result of the limitations God placed on him in other ways.

[Vanders9]

The definition of God (well one definition anyway) is that which was not created.

I know you are trying to equate my thought with what hawkings and co are saying, but that is not the issue. The point is that Hawkings is saying he CAN explain everything, literally everything, logically and rationally. I'm not saying that I can, I'm saying that he can't. In fact I'm saying that no-one can.

[Vanders9]

Funny, my statement of belief is just as much of a statement of belief as Hawking's belief in nothing making something.

That is exactly right. The difference, of course, is that you are honest enough to recognise the fact.

[Vanders9]

LOL

[Cboldt]

-- Physics cannot speak to the time before the Big Bang because there is no data. --

The physicist says the notions of time and space, before the big bang, have no meaning. There was no space, there was no time. Same conditions exist inside a black hole.

The "empty space" that we occupy can give rise to all sorts of weird events, including particle creation - but that "empty" space is limited to the volume of the universe.

[Vanders9]

You know, I might be wrong and doing the man a disservice here, but I think there is an element of trying to "recapture past glories" with Hawking today. The simple fact is that science is a youngsters game. As you get older your mental powers decline - you are still as smart but it takes a little longer to get to the conclusions, to work things out in your head, and so on. And for a long time you can counter that with greater experience and wisdom, but eventually you just cannot keep up. And, in all fields, very early success leads to a higher expectation for the future, which it is almost impossible to match. In Hawkings case he also has the obvious and marked deterioration in his physical condition too.

I think he might be trying too hard to make another "big splash".

[Vanders9]

But that’s the whole point of the argument. Hawking has only pushed everything “one step back”. The problem is he doesn’t recognise that. He thinks that he has disproved the entire contention of the existence of God based on this theoretical postulation that “nothing” can become “something”. And of course he hasn’t.

[Vanders9]

Gravity is an illusion.

The Earth sucks :)

[Vanders9]

But nothing to cause it either :)

[daniel1212]

What Hawkins has done, and what atheism must do, is to powers of Deity to matter, which essentially leads to worship of nature (which is what Hitler privately proposed). And which is exactly the case referred to in Rm. 1, with the resultant moral decline. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, “ (Romans 1:22)

[aruanan]

The Bible supports a spherical earth.

The only ones who claim that it doesn’t at the atheistic, God hating ones who want to make believers look like idiots. So they go around making unfounded and untrue statements about what the Bible says and what believers must believe about it.

IOW, they lie.

For my first two years of college I went to an extremely conservative Christian school. One of my professors was a creationist who said, when I pointed out such verses that mention "he hangs the earth on nothing" and "the circle of the earth," that such verses cannot be used to claim that the Bible explicitly teaches a spherical earth; the first because, whatever "hanging on nothing" means, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sphericity except by imputing to that passage something currently known by other means; the second because it also describes with complete phenomenological accuracy what happens when you stand on a high place and, pointing, trace the horizon until you come back to where you started, describing a circle. The most you can say is that it doesn't teach anything that contradicts the (to be more completely accurate) oblate sphericity of the earth.

The fault in logic, though, of many who seem especially eager to discover in the Bible a teaching about the sphericity of the earth or a Copernican astronomy is their assumption that not having anything explicit must be equivalent to contradicting observable facts of nature. This, curiously, is the same attitude of those who try to claim that the Bible teaches verifiably untrue things about nature. They claim that "the circle of the earth" proves the Bible is teaching a flat, disk-shaped earth, which, as I have shown above, is not a necessary or even adequate interpretation of that verse.

The Bible doesn't have anything to say about radioactive decay or the number of elements or the atomic nature of matter or RNA versus DNA viruses or the role of mitochondria in programmed cell death and millions of other things. Who cares? Failing to cite them is not equivalent to contradicting their existence or evidence of scriptural failure. It was never intended to be an encyclopedia galactica containing every fact about every thing throughout every moment of time. Those who say it is false if it doesn't harmonize with their now-current scientific paradigms are fools if they believe it must or deceptive if they claim it should. Those who believe it cannot be true if it doesn't harmonize with now-current scientific paradigms and spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort trying to make it look as though it does are, likewise, fools if they believe it must or deceptive if they claim it should.

Take, for one small example, those who claim that the Bible asserts that bats are birds. They take a current classification system of living things and impose it upon another system, find things that don't match and then claim that the other system has made a scientifically inaccurate claim. This is just a steaming pantload. If I have a system of classification that places all flying things that don't have more than two legs into the same category, I haven't done anything unscientific, I just haven't made the specificity such that it would make a distinction between flying things with two legs with feathers and flying things with two legs with fur.

[adorno]

There’s absolutely, positively no way that anything I say on this forum would change any Freepers mind and cause them to vote for Coons over O’Donnell assuming they are from Deleware.

Being a bit short-sighted there, aren't you?

The fact is that when it comes to national politics, every single one of the important battles, whether for a senate seat or for a congressional seat, does matter. It doesn't matter that a battle is in Delaware or in Florida or anywhere else. Why do you think that the governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey were crucial? Why was the election of Scott Brown important for "just a senate seat"? The whole country is paying attention to what happens in Delaware and in Florida and elsewhere. You can't separate the "local" elections from the larger picture in national politics. It's all tied together. But, apparently, you don't understand that.

So anything I say about O’Donnell’s unelectability won’t cause her a scintilla of harm since I don’t go around shilling for Coons.

That's the wrong way to look at things.

You're stating that because you're not shilling for Coons, you're not necessarily hurting O'Donnell. But, just presenting any kind of negative is a way to help the opposition. When the opposition sees "their enemies" fighting amongst themselves, they're being encouraged to continue with their methods and attacks. It's all about "divide and conquer".

What the hell do you take me for? I’m just expressing my opinion (yep, I’ve got one of those too) that she’s not going to be elected.

Wrong argument!

Nobody's trying to take away your right to free speech or to express your opinions. Your current defense is not winning you the argument.

I’ll see you back on one of these threads after the Republicans kick down the House door and maybe the Senate door and we’ll compare notes.

So, you're one of those that just waits for the final results before comparing notes?

Why not effect the outcomes by being principled and doing as much as you can to get the right outcomes? Speaking against O'Donnell in any way, even if not directly attacking her, is not at all helpful.

In politics, it's better to be proactive than reactive.

To you she may not be the ideal candidate and she may not be the best candidate that we could've selected, but, even saying that she's not a good or electable candidate, is not helpful at all and it encourages the opposition camp into believing that they have a better chance than then they otherwise might have had.

When it comes to politics and campaigns for office, each and every one of us should take what we have as candidates and work towards getting them elected or getting our team in place. Just knocking them at every turn is counterproductive.

[metmom]

Which all is irrelevant to the point that the atheists and those who wish to discredit God lie and state that the Bible teaches that the earth is flat and that creationists are ignurint knuckle draggers who want to teach stuff like that again.

Those verses may not be as strong as many would like. Unless it were printed specifically that the Bible says, *The earth is a sphere*, there are some who just simply wouldn’t believe it. And even then they’d argue something else.

[HerrBlucher]

I think you posted to the wrong person, the wrong post, AND, even the wrong thread.

[adorno]

Thanks.

I don’t know how that happened since I was in a “posts to you” window when I clicked to reply.

[HerrBlucher]

Whatever happened, it was a doozy..:) The crazy thing is, I have been defending Odonnell and ripping her detractors for weeks now.....LOL!

[adorno]

Sounds like I should be posting to wrong threads more often.

That way, I might be changing the topic in the “wrong” discussion, but I might bring positive results for whatever I was talking about in the “correct” thread.

[tpanther]

VERY well said indeed!