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Originally Posted by jonesy

I think it is reasonable to use terms we are familiar with in these discussions. Saying 'Start', and 'time' may not be meaningful is too simple a way to try to discredit something. These are terms and framworks of a discussion that we can all understand.

Just because we can understand them doesn't mean they're terms that accurately describe reality. There was a time everyone understood what æther was

Originally Posted by jonesy

However, If in fact 'time' and 'start' have no meaning as you say then I would argue that gives more credance to the idea that God has no start and no end and always was, because he exists outside the constraint of 'time' He is looking from an 'outside perspective' as you say.

I'm saying they may have no meaning, if they do we have to define and understand it, we can't just use the words because we understand them and they fit what we already think.

And it doesn't give any credence to the idea of a God that's outside time, that's just giving God some attributes that are convenient and fit the necessary parameters. I can say the multiverse is outside time and has no start or end as well.

Originally Posted by jonesy

This really makes no sense and sounds like smug semantics to me.

It's not semantics. If I say "jonsey says he's seen my ugly carpet and he says he's never been to my house", that's not semantics, that's conflicting claims, both can't be accurate. You said "Evolutionists don't know what it was, and say it was from nothing.", if you say they are claiming they don't know, you can't then accuse them of saying what they know. Your two claims are mutually exclusive.

Originally Posted by jonesy

Again semantics, evolution surely has some ideas on what started the universe, typically referred to as the big bang i believe.

That's like saying gravity has some ideas on how oranges taste. Evolution explains how the diversity of life came about, it has nothing to do with the origin of the universe. Cosmology is the science of studying the universe.

Also the Big Bang describes the history of the universe, not how the universe started.

It's not semantics when misunderstanding how words are being used change meanings and limits clear communication.

Originally Posted by jonesy

I am just asking what banged and who caused it to bang. I have never heard a good response.

Well that's partially because it wasn't a bang at all, and because the cause is not known at this point.

Originally Posted by jonesy

I choose to call that 'force' God. You can leave it unnamed or unknown if you wish.

Sure you can call it God, as I said people used to call the force that cased lightning and caused the rivers to flood God as well. Taking an unknown and attributing it to God just because no other cause is yet known is a logical fallacy, an argument from ignorance.

Originally Posted by jonesy

I was not aware of too many religious evolutionists. I suppose the Catholic church is now that i think of it. I usually associate evolutionist as denying the existance of God. If you say that is not the case, I won't argue.

The majority of Christians accept evolution, associating evolution with atheism is a popular tactic among fundamentalist evangelicals (among others) to try and discredit evolution because they think it threatens their faith, when all it threatens is their particular interpretation of scripture.

Originally Posted by jonesy

I am sorry this does not make sense to me and appears to violate laws of physics, thermodynamics or science in general.

On the contrary, the laws of physics require that there is a constant froth of particles popping into existence out of nothing and then disappearing again as they cancel each other out. This doesn't violate any physics.

Originally Posted by jonesy

I believe this means you think that if the universe started x billion years ago, flourished for many billions of years with countless life forms, planets, solar systems, energy, chemical reactions etc, then died out and somehow and all dissappeared (going back to nothing) then it is ok to say it started from nothing.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but that's a hypothesis that's been tossed around and depending on the specifics physics at least doesn't prohibit such a thing. In an oversimplified way to put it, matter is the same as energy, and gravitational potential is negative energy, so if the universe if flat (and it certainly looks flat to the best we can detect so far) the negative and positive cancel out to zero if you added it all up.

But as I said, it's just all taking and speculating at this point, there's no rigorous scientific theory of how the universe got to be in the state it was in at the "start".

If Bill Nye and Ken Ham were debating the kind of god we're talking about here (a god that created the universe and that was it), then there really wouldn't be much of a debate at this point, because there's very little data with which to feed a debate. And the impact of such a god on society would be basically zero anyway.