Mushroom Queen wrote:
Please do not point fingers. There are fundamentalists on both sides of this debate.
That, is, in fact, pointing the finger, MQ. Not me, nor Waffles, nor Brad, nor any of the atheists in this debate are fundamentalist. We may be passionate, but we are not fundamentalist.
Richard Dawkins wrote:
No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.
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I can't prove God to you, and you can't Disaprove him to me.
You can't prove the big bang, and I can't disaprove it.
Again, there is a significant difference between God and the big bang. There is plenty of evidence for the Big band and evolution, and none against; whereas there is no evidence for the existence of god, or against it. In fact, I shall describe the biggest chunk of big bang evidence now.
The Doppler effect states that when an object is moving towards you that is giving out waves of some sort, those waves get 'squashed up', so to speak. When an object is moving away, the waves get stretched out. Go outside and listen to a car right now if you dont believe me - when the car is coming towards you, it sounds higher than when it is moving away, does it not?
The same is true of electromagnetic radiation - light, radio waves, etc. When a far-away galaxy is moving away from you, its waves get stretched, and are shifted towards the longer end of the spectrum - the red. We call this Red Shift. If stars and things were moving towards us, they would be shifted towards the other end - Blue Shift. The method we use of telling these waves are red shifted is by observing distinctive lines given off by certain elements - for example Sodium gives a very distinctive bright yellow line, and various other elements do the same kind of thing. These lines, when looking at far-away galaxies, have been shifted to the red end.
Now, the proof of the big bang is in this: everything is redshifted. No Blueshift has been observed to happen, and therefore everything is moving away from us. If everything is moving away from us, and nothing seems to be converging on a single point, we can deduce that everything is also moving away from each other, and therefore the space in between stars is expanding.
If the space is expanding now, then in the past, the space must have been smaller - it is logically impossible for it not to have been. Do the maths, and we find that 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was nothing but a singularity, and has expanded from that singularity for the last 13.7 billion years.
Now, this is what we call evidence. We have observed red shift, and deduced (not induced, deduced - the conclusion was not plucked out of a hat, the conclusion is logically necessary) that the universe expanded from a single point, and therefore the Big Bang happened.
Now, I have presented evidence. I am sure Brad would be more than happy to present some evidence in favour of evolution, but I wont ask him to. You have presented no irrefutable evidence that God exists. While I cannot go back 13.7 billion years and show you the big bang happening, it has evidence, it is logical, and it has been deduced. And best of all, it is not refutable.
I will agree that it is impossible to prove or disprove god either way. But the argument presented above is irrefutable, solid evidence for the Big Bang.
Now, go ahead and argue God's existence with an argument as strong as that.