Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Denmark is generally included in that group, and this is certainly the first time I've seen the Irish characterized as losing their religion. Considering that the whole Northern Ireland catastrophe is rooted in the conflict between two major branches of Christianity, it's hard to understand why they're blowing each other up if they don't care much about Jesus.
Buddhism at its core is not a religion because it has no gods. Some Asian Buddhists have borrowed their neighbors' gods and some European and American Buddhists have hung onto their Christian and Jewish roots since they find no conflict between them and the teachings of the Buddha. But in general Buddhism should not be listed with religions. My wife is an American Buddhist and she's just as much an atheist as any of us.
I would be really amazed if there is even one member of the Church of Scientology who actually believes that stuff. Hubbard merged his science fiction story with his self-help philosophy of Dianetics, because he realized that way he could call it a religion and get away without paying taxes.
I don't think the negative correlation between religion and rationality is very strong. Plenty of religionists are quite rational in all but a very few aspects of their lives, and plenty of non-believers are idiots.
The American "Bible Belt" has grown out a couple of notches since the Religious Redneck Retard Revival of the late 1970s, but basically it's the old Confederacy, plus the Border States (the slave states which voted to remain in the Union), plus some of the central and southwestern states into which the Southerners migrated, e.g. Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa. The Pacific Northwest and New England give the irreligious segment of America its Northern identification, but religion is also on the wane in the population centers on both coasts. Florida, Arizona and southern California have major Christian populations but I suspect this is due to their large Latino communities.
Then you need to re-read your notes from your second-year university physics classes. What you're complaining about is a reversal of entropy: the appearance of organization where there was none. The Second Law of Thermodynamics--one of the "basic laws of physics" which you hold in high regard--clearly permits spatially and temporally local reversals of entropy, and moreover places no limit on their size. It says that entropy tends to increase, but not that it does so monotonically. So long as the universe continues to degrade and is on its way to a state in which there are no energy differentials, there is no violation of the laws of physics. The fact that it popped into existence is certainly amazing from our point of view, but in a space-time continuum that is infinite both spatially and temporally, all manner of amazing events may occur.
I just love it when people misinterpret the meaning of the fact that nothing can be proven absolutely true in science (only true beyond a reasonable doubt) and that therefore all scientific theories are, in principle, falsifiable. They seem to think this means that anybody with a scientific education can stumble onto the flaws in the theories of evolution, relativity, etc. They forget that it took Einstein to find the flaws in Newton's laws, and even then he did not falsify them, merely build upon them.
No disrespect intended, but I doubt very much that you or any of us here on this forum are going to be the one to find the flaws in Hawking's work. That person is doing postgraduate work at Caltech (or a similar institution in another country) at age fifteen and is on a first-name basis with many of the leading physicists in the country.
Another member of SciForums who needs to refresh his knowledge of the Laws of Thermodynamics. The universe seems to have a perfect balance of positive and negative particles, so there was no net "creation" of matter or energy when it sprang into existence. The "nothing" you refer to is merely a state of maximum entropy, which the Second Law assures us can be temporarily reversed. As for gravity, you may have to wait fifty years before they get that worked out, since it still stubbornly refuses to be united with the other three of the Four Fundamental Forces, all of which are neatly tied up with bosons, leptons and quarks.
But just because scientists don't have that answer YET doesn't mean that it's time to throw science out and look to the fairy tales of the Stone Age for answers. There are a lot of mysteries in the universe and we've only had science for a few hundred years.
We don't know where gravity came from... YET. That's no excuse for assuming that some creature living in an invisible, illogical supernatural universe capriciously waved his magic wand and created it. As for potential spacetime, isn't that more of an abstraction than a "thing"? It's like asking where arithmetic came from: How could one plus one always equal two, if it weren't for the hand of a supernatural creator?