Yeah. I think Atheists are funny. Their brilliant scientific minds notice that everything can be explain in terms of physical cause and effect. There is no mystery or unexplained phenomenon. No evidence of any God. Everything has an identifiable cause except.....everything. The Universe. Existence itself. How did the singularity come into existence and why did it explode? Why is there anything? Why isn't there nothing?

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of
Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so
"profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the internet

Question:

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law >(gas
cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we
need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at
which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul
gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are! leaving. As for
how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions
that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state if you are not a member of their religion,
you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and
since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that
all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect
the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because
Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell
to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls
are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase
until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expand! ing at a rate faster than the increase of souls in
Hell, then the t emperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman
year that, it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you" and take
into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must
be true.
Further, I am sure Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it
follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore,
extinct, leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a
divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh
my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A".

Science simply has no allowance for supernatural phenomenon. Science has to be able to measure and quantify. A supernatural unmeasurable force or cause and effect can't be quantified. There is no way to test it. It is repeatable, or just a one time effect?

Religion says god created everything. Science say we don't really know, but the big bang is the best theory. That exact same question of how did the universe start can be applied to God. Where did he come from? Was he just always there or did he create himself from nothing? Was there a time before God?

If God was always and forever there, can't we say the same thing for the universe?

I have always hoped we would find enough mass in the universe to have a time in the far distant future that the universe would start to coalesce into a smaller and smaller universe and eventually have a big crunch, then a rebound of a new big bang. It looks like the universe will expand forever, and getting faster, and will eventually end in the big entropy fizzle and a cold nothing.

All true, Glen. Science can explain everything in terms of cause and effect except one thing: Everything. Regardless of whether there was (or was not) a time when the Universe did not exist, in either case there has to be a cause. It is very scientific to say that everything can be explained in terms of cause and effect but for the question of how the Universe was created, the answer is different. The answer is "Well.....it just is." One thing (let's call it "Everything") did not have a cause. Everything else did. Huh?

That's a good one - Where did he come from?

If you mean "He," then you are asking an excellent question. You see....there has to be something that is the "un-caused cause." To some, it seems ludicrous that this "un-caused cause" would be inanimate. A thing, like a piece of matter (albeit a very big one). To some, it makes more sense for the un-caused cause to be a deity.

I perhaps should not have taken this conversation into this direction. Religion may belong in the forum dumpster fire next door. But....largely these questions are as much about physics and logic than religion per se. And an interesting topic so long as folks remain respectful. Placed next door, that would certainly not happen.

Could there be an un-caused effect?

I think that is the phrase I should have been using. Un-caused effect. A term which is often used is "unmoved mover." The Universe is in motion, and the idea is that something began that motion.

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I watched a show on Netflix recently that said there’s a very real possibility that since the universe is expanding like a rubber band, that at some point it’s gonna start slowing down and pulling itself back inward to itself and will absorb itself and cease to exist just like it started.. they actually have data on that!

Depends on how much dark matter is in the universe. Will expansion or gravity ultimately win?

Only definitive fact.........we will be long gone before the answer is certain.

When I look at images of space I just wonder at the majesty of it all. Everything is just so massive.

But something that we should all be acutely aware of.

IF we're the only intelligent life in our Galaxy then that makes us very special and therefore important.
We're less than a spec of dust "In the grand scheme of things" but without us our Galaxy has no meaning.

(There must be intelligent life in other Galaxies but they're so far away we'll never interact with any of them.)

BTW It's been estimated that it would take intelligent life about 10,000,000 years to fully explore and populate a galaxy. We're really just at the start of our civilization and we have some hurdles ahead of us. Some of those hurdles may be impossible to overcome which helps explain why our Galaxy is such a lonely place right now. There's a real possibility that 50,000,000 years ago there was an intelligent society in our galaxy but it's now long gone. And at some point in the future, as we venture further and further out we may find remnants of that society.

Why should we be acutely aware of the possibility of other life that is so far away from us we can never interact with?

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Because they may be far more advanced than we are and therefore they've already overcome some of the big hurdles ahead of us.
And they may have left us some bread crumbs to follow that at some point we'll be able to detect.

The truth is I don't have a good answer for you except that at this stage we don't really know what's ahead of us.

Is there something on the horizon that will inevitable end everything that we know? If there is can we do anything about it?
I'm not talking about a massive meteor hitting the Earth but something bigger, more complex and therefore much harder to deal with.

It's possible that societies in other galaxies have already overcome these hurdles.

Absolutely.

Invisible dark matter makes up most of the universe – but we can only detect it from its gravitational effects

Dark matter seems to outweigh visible matter roughly six to one, making up about 27% of the universe. Here's a sobering fact: The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe! But what is dark matter?

I think dark matter is what contains the universe. We speak of the edge of the universe and wonder what could possibly be on the other side. IMO, the other side doesn't have dark matter such that there is...nothing.

We speak of the 'fabric' of space-time and harken to the well-known illustrations of a grid demonstrating gravitational distortions or funneling into black holes. IMO, dark matter is the grid. The bubble in which everything exists. But the bubble isn't a thin membrane with an 'inside' and an 'outside' separated by a rainbow-colored film. The whole of the interior of the bubble is dark matter in which everything is suspended.

Dark matter cannot be described dimensionally such as the dimensions of space or time but rather by some kind of unrecognized dimension not yet thought up (but I'm working on it).

This irregularly-shaped, ever expanding yet immeasurable glob in which everything is contained could simply be a corpuscle of snot.

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The center of the universe is in a small town on the Montana/Idaho border.

Duh!

Ha! I grew up near there. True fact: In my lifetime, one of the brothels in Wallace, Idaho annually sponsored a little league baseball team.

Philo, Illinois might not agree about this...

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1648221188.jpg

The universe is just incomprehensibly huge. All we can see on the darkest of nights with perfect vision is just part of our galaxy. With telescopes, and especially the old Hubble, we now know there are more galaxies in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world combined.