But this is really a ridiculous excuse to get out of the debate you set up in the first place.

In the future, maybe you shouldn’t go out of your way to pick fights with people when you have no idea what you are fighting about.

Nance

And this was in response to your mention of the nothingness before the BB, JJ.

Nance

…

“But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made “not in time, but simultaneously with time.” In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no “before,” no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation.

“Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or “singularity,” at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity.”
…
“The essence of the Hartle-Hawking idea is that the big bang was not the abrupt switching on of time at some singular first moment, but the emergence of time from space in an ultrarapid but nevertheless continuous manner.”
…
“Well, I didn’t promise to provide the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but I have at least given a plausible answer to the question I started out with: What happened before the big bang?
The answer is: Nothing.”
**********

I read this in one of Hawking’s books, can’t remember which one. Oh, it was his “Brief History of Time.” http://www.celebatheists.com/?title=Stephen_Hawking

Nance

Most of us who have posted here have our own blogs already. Why would we need to build yours?

You are the one who has made claims about your beliefs being right and atheists being wrong. I posted in the previous entry — http://allaboutatheism.com/2009/05/11/nothing-an-experiment/#comment-207 — that defining your terms and presenting evidence would be a better way to support your claims than just asserting that you are right and atheists are wrong.

On Lynn’s “bore me to tears” blog — http://boremetotears.com/2009/07/07/science-replaces-god/#comment-2802 — I understood you to agree to that process when you posted: “No problem.”

I look forward to your definition and supporting evidence.

Nance

But then today I was perusing some unschooling courses on DVD from The Teaching Company, and it occurred to me that if I were still a young seeker prone to agonizing over such things, in the third millennium gicven what we’ve learned to date, it might be more suitable to substitute “chaos” for every use of “god” . . .

What to do with that? Maybe we should be debating who created the nothingness BEFORE the Big Bang, because that was the more definitive of Reality, the Universe and Thanks for All the Fish (apologies to Douglas Adams) than is current life as we know it??