... If an acceptable answer for where the universe came from is that it always existed...
The observed evidence is against the concept of an eternal universe. This used to be believed, but modern evidence points to a definite beginning of time, space and matter-energy. Scientists have labeled this creation event "The Big Bang" which arose from what they call a singularity.
The evidence is that ALL of the universe, including time itself and all laws of physics, came into existence from this singularity. Nobody can calculate back any further than about 10^-44 seconds AFTER the singularity appeared. Nobody has any idea where the singularity itself came from. It seems to us it came from nothing, but this is a belief in the same way as a belief in God.
God just IS, He was not created. No scientific OBSERVATION or experiment has ever contradicted the majestic opening sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The Bible is the only time tested document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
...There are a bunch of people who argue that the King James version is the "correct, God-inspired translation....
Unless you know Hebrew and Greek, a way to get around this is to get as many translations you can afford and compare them. It turns out most of them agree amazingly well except those put out by specific organizations that have certain of their doctrines reflected in their own specialized translation.
...that life could come out in Silicon or something we do not know it as...
Any possible life has to be able to synthesize molecules with a large number of atoms in complex configurations. Living cells can be thought of as incredibly complex nano-machines, miniature factories producing an almost endless variety of molecular products.
A central building block atom with just the right binding energy is needed at the hear of these machines. The other atoms it binds with must also have comparable binding energies. Bonds must be strong enough to hold together fairly well, but not so strong so it takes inordinate amounts of energy to break and rearrange them. The elements must also be reasonably common and widely distributed. Having wood and nails that needed a 50 pound sledge-hammer to build a house would be difficult, if not impossible.
Of all elements carbon is the best central atom to bind to any other elements. It is widely available in the CO2 of the air. Besides carbon, the other two widely distributed main elements with compatible energies are oxygen and hydrogen. These are also easily available in the form of water. These are the three most common elements of life. Silicon binding energies to other common atoms are considerably higher than carbon. That is why silicon compounds, such as silicon sealers and greases are used where high temperatures are present. Other common element are included for specialized molecules needed for the many complex functions of life. Some less common elements are used for the special properties and functions they empower the cellular factories to provide.
The Creator God, the one of Genesis 1:1, designed the correct binding energies of the main building blocks of the physical life He wanted to create and then picked carbon, hydrogen and oxygen as the basis for life.
I still have a not so current 1978 VW Rabbit diesel which we use occasionally to carry dirty cargo (such as garden stuff or our usually filthy dogs) not suitable for our 2005 Prius. It still gets 55mpg. It is very gutless, loud and does put out black smoke when floored. It often sites around for weeks without being driven, but starts up right away when needed.
....Again, the big bang did not create the universe, but it created space WITHIN the universe....
That is not what the evidence points to. The evidence is that ALL of the universe, including time itself and all laws of physics, came into existence from what scientists have labeled a singularity. Nobody can calculate back any further than about 10^-44 seconds AFTER the singularity appeared. Nobody has any idea where the singularity itself came from. It seems to us it came from nothing, but this is a belief in the same way as a belief in God.
No scientific OBSERVATION or experiment has ever contradicted the majestic opening sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The Bible is the only time tested document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
All this cannot be PROVEN, but can be BELIEVED in the same way as the conjecture about multiple universes can be believed or not. I CHOOSE to believe that there exists an eternal, intelligent, transcendent Creator God who has communicated to us humans in a message from beyond time and space, in a set of books we call the Bible. He authenticates this message by doing what no human can do. He ACCURATELY writes history before it happens. Some of this in advance written history, called prophecy is re-told in today's newspapers and the nightly news on CNN.
...So it's conceivable that an ISP would allow you to Bittorrent basically all you want between midnight and 6am...
Yes that would be conceivable, provided the torrent servers and clients were in the same time zones or at least adjacent ones. As a transmitters and receivers of the data are more widely separated in time, this becomes increasingly harder to implement and less effective.
...I'm afraid you are mistaken. Things like endogenous retroviruses can only be explained using the evolutionary model..
I looked at Wikipedia on endogenous retroviruses. Here is his sentence from the very first paragraph:
"Many _believe_ that they play a key role in evolution as well."
A little further down in the article there is a sentence:
It is _believed_ that the ancestors of modern viviparous mammals evolved...
I have never read an article longer than a few paragraphs on evolution, where the word BELIEVED or ASSUMED was not found. The theory of evolution is not a scientific one, but a religious one where the high priests calling themselves scientists, promulgate the certain beliefs.
These viruses, like all viruses still remain that, namely viruses. They never themselves became a different life form, nor were they able to transform themselves they invaded in to another organism.
You cannot get around the fact that all laboratory experiments ever done has not produced a single new life form. And no matter what experiments were done with viruses, they always were, without a single exception always still viruses or virii if you like. All experiments with e-coli have never produced anything but more e-coli. All the thousands of generations of fruit flies (drosphila) have never produced anything except, guess what, fruit flies. Cats have always made more cats and dogs have always made more dogs.
Calling those who disbelieve the high priests of evolution loonies, does nothing to change such experimental evidence, but it is a sign of desperation of people who want their evolutionary religious beliefs to be upheld as science and truth.
...Evolution is biology. It deals with life on earth....
That is the area of science that Darwin first formalized the idea of natural selection. This blind process, rather than the input of a rational mind is theorized to be behind the origin and development of life.
This idea, as well as modified versions thereof, have been extended to cosmology and astronomy. Books and scientific papers on these subject, also use these evolutionary concepts to explain the origins of other areas of the cosmos.
(..This is false. You are clearly deeply ignorant about science. Or dishonest..)
Instead of making personal attacks, why do you not give me an example of only ONE model on the subject of of origins, that is based solely on facts and makes no assumptions whatsoever.
I can however, spare you the trouble by pointing out that ALL origin models, without a single exception, always assume that presently observed processes can be extrapolated over immense time periods. In nature, linear relationships are the exception rather than the norm. Over the extremely short time span we have observed a given process, we may not have noticed its nonlinearity. The segment of the curve we have access to is just way too short. Therefore we assume is a curve but a straight line that can be extended back as far as we like.
For example, the process of radioactivity is used to date living and non living objects. Science has known about radioactivity for about 100 years. Over that time span we observed radioactive decays to be occurring at a quite regular, apparently highly predictable rate. We assume (believe) therefore that this is a linear process, even over immense amounts of time, millions and even billions of years. This assumption of linearity underlies all models of radioactive dating. Even an incredibly small nonlinearity in the rate of the ticking of this atomic clock, would make all dates and numbers obtained totally wrong.
We observe geological processes such as erosion, mountain building, continental drift etc. occurring at what appears to us as rather constant rates. Based on the assumed constancy, we build models reaching back millions or billions of years.
..it implies that possibly there are infinite universes...
Which of course is also nothing more than a belief. We KNOW that here in OUR universe, complex human made systems don't arise without thought and planning. It is much less of a leap in the dark to put forth the proposition of an intelligent designer, for the non-human generated parts of THIS universe, than to come up with a conjecture about multiple universe. Besides, that pushes the whole issue of origins back one level. Where do those universes come from? Why should they be eternal, uncaused, since we have overwhelming evidence that the one we are in had a definite beginning?
The very word "Universe" means One Verse, a single spoken word. Of course, the ONLY place we read that everything that exists was SPOKEN into being by the transcendent God who is outside of and independent of time, space and matter-energy, is in the Bible. Repeatedly we read; "..and God said... and it came into existence. In the Gospel of John the genealogy of Jesus is given simply as the eternal WORD.
..forcing people to download illegal encrypted content that wouldn't get picked up by the filters...
Why should ISPs care about what sort of information, encrypted or not, the bits they send to your connection represent? After all, the electric company doesn't care what you plug in an outlet do they? The electric company simply charges you for the total energy delivered. The ISP simply charges for the total number of bytes. Problem solved. No filters needed. Encryption always takes more bytes than the equivalent plain text. Therefore, unless somebody has deep dark secrets, which need to be encrypted, it would be cheaper to send plain text files.
All ISPs should be treated the same way that telephone companies have been for years. They do not monitor your conversations nor care what you tell your grandmother or significant other. They still have this thing called common carrier status and are not held responsible for the information the Digital bits of your voice represent. Why should digital bits representing other sorts of information, such as video, software programs and who knows what, be treated any differently?
...Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth....
Really! Our gateway router to the Internet keeps track of every byte that comes and goes.The ISP most likely has the means to keep track of every byte on every line. If the electric company can keep track of every kilowatt hour used and make you pay for it and the gas and water companies can keep track of every cubic foot and make you pay for those also, why should an ISP not also charge according to data usage of each customer? The hard-core WoW addict pays more in the same way as someone who turns the thermostat up to 80 degrees in the house. Most utilities also charge a basic service fee even if you use no electricity or water gas.
...If bandwidth is a scarce resource then just charge people per gigabit of data sent and received....
So, what else is new? Does the electric company not charge per kilowatt hour? Do the gas and water companies not charge per cubic foot? So what is so unusual for an ISP to charge by the gigabyte delivered? The electric company doesn't charge you more if you turn on all your lights making the meter spin like crazy. You don't get charged by the spin rate of the meter, but by how many total revolutions it makes. The same way, you shouldn't be charged by an occasional one or 2 GB download, but by the total number of gigabytes delivered each month.
...ISP execs like the simplistic idea that they need to be punitive....
Why should it be considered punitive for Internet utilities (ISPs) to charge more for more service? If you want more kilowatt hours of electricity you pay for them. If you want more water, you pay for it. If you want more megabytes, you pay for them. Now what is wrong with that?
...I worked for an ISP, and the reason we oversold...
Are not many, if not all utility services oversold? If everybody flushes their toilet at once, does the water pressure in the mains not drop? If everybody picks up their telephone at once, do many users NOT get a dial tone? The electrical service of the average home is 200 amps. If every home started using that full capacity, will the electrical grid not collapse? Just last week, when about 2 million people suddenly had to get out of New Orleans. Were there are not many miles long traffic jams on at other times perfectly serviceable roads? In LA, and other large cities, are the freeways not often long parking lots during rush hour? Why should the Internet be any different? After all, it has been called the information HIGHWAY.
Is there a power company or water service that offers unlimited service for a fixed price? Is there not a water meter or electric meter on every house? Does the service company not come out periodically and read such a meter? Do the customers not get charged according to how much they use? Why then, should the Internet be any different? Every utility has only limited resources which they sell for prices the users are willing or able to pay. If your electric bill is too high, you find ways to save power.
All utilities and many other business services are scaled to average projected use. When you want to make a phone call, most of the time you to get a dial tone and there is no problem. The same is true of your other utility services. ISPs only need to and do scale the networks for average service, not the peak. They should be easily able to determine how much use there is by the average subscriber as well as the highest and lowest users. Then they can structure their prices according to use, just as any other utility does. I don't think that Internet service providers are any greedier than the average utility company.
is fanciful conjecture. Science is about experiments and observation HERE and NOW, not assumptive speculations about what MIGHT happen in millions of years. You COULD conceivably learn to do something in your lifetime, that no other human has ever done. That doesn't mean you evolved into something OTHER than a human.
(..What HAS been proven in the lab is evolution itself...)
That is simply an often repeated, yet still bald-faced LIE you have swallowed. ALL attempts to make evolution happen in the lab, in real time, have NEVER produced a new organism. They have ALWAYS merely been the creatures with a few new tricks.
You have fixed nothing except added the usual speculation about immense amounts of time ostensibly solving the problem that there simply is NO factual, experimental or observational evidence for the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution insists that a frog can turn into a prince, no, even a ROCK can become a prince. Evolution is like faith in a magic recipe, the magic ingredient of time, mixed with a dash of chance.
...Which experimental data show "that the first cause, or Creator, has to be external to our time space matter-energy universe"?...
No experiment, but straight forward logic borne out of cause and effect. If there is no external cause, then there two other logical options. One is that the universe created itself. That is logically absurd. The other is that the universe has no cause. Time, space and matter-energy have always existed, that is, they are eternal. That used to be the accepted belief, before Einstein and others showed that there was a point of beginning. Scientists call this beginning "The Big Bang". The echoes of this creation event still reverberate through all of space today. This carries the label of "Cosmic Background Radiation".
Since we and the Universe exist, that leaves as the last option that the universe was caused by something or someone without a cause. This is what we read in the first sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The one doing the action is Elohim in Hebrew. Interestingly, this is a plural word form.
The eternal, self-existing God, gives us the answer, simply and straight forward in a single profound statement. Scientific observation corroborate Genesis 1:1. Time, space, and matter-energy came into being suddenly, all together.
....They can, via natural selection + evolution, eventually morph into completely different bacteria with completely different functions....
If you learn to do calculus while riding a bicycle on a tightrope, are you no longer human? It would be an entirely new function which likely no other human has ever done.
The fact that bacteria have acquired, with intelligent human help, the skill to make a new enzyme or protein, even one never seen before, doesn't them into a different organisms. They will still, always be bacteria of a given kind. If you stared with e-coli, you will always and forever only have e-coli. If you use coccus you will get more coccus.
You can label such bacteria with new name, but the organism is still essentially what it has always been, even if it now has a new ability and function.
The definition of the word "species" is not rigidly defined. Are all dogs of the same species? Then there is the word "genus" wherein organisms are grouped. Breeding of dogs has produced many sizes, shapes and capabilities, but they have been and always will be dogs. If one were to take a pair of every known breed of dogs and confine them all on an island where they could survive and interbreed without the interference of humans, you eventually get some kind of generic mutt dog, but still only another dog. Dogs always make more dogs, cats more cats and spiders more spiders. Nobody has ever demonstrated anything else, EVER.
...Actually, we have observed actual speciation. And especially among bacteria we see new proteins enzymes appearing...
The fact that bacteria have acquired, with intelligent human help, the skill to make a new enzyme or protein doesn't make into something different. If you learn chinese, you don't become a chinaman. Similarly, the newly skilled bacteria were and are forever, still only a bacteria with a new ability. You can LABEL such bacteria a different species, but the organism is still essentially what it has always been, even if it now has a new skill and a new label imparted to it by an intelligent scientist.
Now if an experiment could tun a e-coli into a pneumoccus, or an amoeba into paramecium, then your evolution argument MIGHT hold up scientifically. As far as I know, that, or anything like it has ever happened. You can teach dog all sorts of new tricks, but it will still be always and forevera only be a dog.
....As long as we can agree that laws of physics...
It is interesting that should bring up the laws of physics. In our human experience, all laws, in this case man-made laws are products of mind, arising out of processes of thought. Complex man-made structures, such as computers and airplanes, or even the simple devices such as a pencil or ballpoint pen, are the result of careful thought and planning.
Is it now so far-fetched to say that the laws of physics are also a product arising in a mind? Are the laws of physics not like the blueprint by which time, space, matter-energy operate? We have people called legislators who come up with laws, products of their mind, by which society operates.
If the laws and relationships of physics would not be the way they are, life as we know it could not exist. For example, we know by direct measurement that the inertial mass of a proton is exactly 1836 times that of an electron. If that were some other ratio, either larger or smaller, no life could exist, because no molecules would ever form.
Only the very specific electronic properties of the element carbon are such as to make possible, the complex molecular structures life depends on.
The relationships between certain fundamental forces (fine structure constants) of nature must be just so. How easily light and other forms of energy travel through matter and what effects the energy going through will produce. Among other things, this also determines the size and structure of stars. Gravity acts to pull them together and the energy acts to push them apart.
The size mass-distance relationships of the earth and sun cannot be much different that what they are. Half of all stars in the universe are too close to each other to have a planet that could have life.
There are many more such "fortuitous" relationships and laws and structure in the universe all contrived towards the goal of having life, and with that life, scientists who are able to study these laws and relationships. To have all of these come together by any other process besides careful planning and thought is exceedingly remote.
The probability of a functional 747 airliner self assembling in an automobile junk yard is higher.
....Too bad the range of that electric force is too short....
Both diminish the same way, but unlike gravity, electricity can also repel. All this black hole idea is a mathematical fiction which has NO physical reality. The immense energies involved with so called black holes can easily be interpreted to be the result of intense electromagnetic interactions. We have observed intense magnetic fields traversing cosmic distances in space. The sun and planets have magnetic fields. The sun produces a measured electric current named the solar wind. We know of NO way to produce a magnetic field without the electric current. These two ALWAYS, without exception. appear together.
(..If black holes were wells of primarily electric force, why would they trap light making them so well, "black"..)
That's exactly my problem, if black holes existed, we should be able to see a black, lightless area around them. Because the electric force is so much more intense than gravity, every single effect that has been imputed to gravity alone can be easily explained equally well and most of the time better than gravity operating alone. It takes BOTH forces working together to explain the operation of the large scale universe.
When an electric field gets intense enough, it also affects light, which is after all an electromagnetic wave which travels throughout the immense distance of space just fine. Electrons, protons and other charged particles as well as photons are particles that can and certainly do travel vast distances. You are mistaken about the short range of the electric interaction.
I worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator where lasers and electrons as well as positrons routinely interacted. The incredibly intense electric fields of both the accelerating microwaves and the electrons themselves affected the laser beams more than even the most intense gravitational field could. So, a highly charged star, such as our sun could certainly affect electromagnetic waves such as light far more than the weak gravity of the sun. This can easily explain the so called "gravitational" lensing also.
(..The rule of event-horizons being a point-of-no-return for light has not been "reworked"..)
The so called "event horizon" has to be reworked, if, as is now theorized, black holes can "evaporate".
(..By the way, if you don't believe black holes should exist, what do you think is supposed to happen when a star's mass exceeds..)
The mass of a star is only a secondary effect. When any star, regardless of mass gets under sufficient electrical stress, it may explode. We call this a nova or even if it's a really big explosion a supernova.
If you have ever witnessed what happens when the electric current to a large inductance is suddenly interrupted, you get a microscopic demonstration of what happens on a cosmic scale when an over-stressed star suddenly interrupts a galactic scale electric current. All the magnetic energy stored in the cosmic inductance is suddenly released in a concentrated space and in a short time at the point of interruption. This energy is sufficient to vaporize most of or in some cases all of a star in a cataclysmic display of electric fireworks. The amount of energy released is only loosely dependent on the size and age of a particular star.
...Mostly because these texts were translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek into Latin....
Your arguments of transcription and translation errors is largely nullified by the discoveries in 1948 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars were amazed and surprised how closely the traditional translated and recopied documents matched the scrolls which had lain in those caves for centuries. If this was true for the sections of scripture found in these scrolls, there is no logical reason why this would not be the case for the rest of Scripture as well.
Any God, worthy of the name, wishing to communicate with us, would have to have the ability not only to get his message across, but also to preserve it for whatever time periods this message needs to be preserved. Unlike other religious writings, the God of the Bible wants to ensure that his message is spread to every nook and cranny, to every tribe and nation on this planet. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century ever since the art of printing was invented, no other book, by any stretch of the imagination, has seen wider distribution than this one. It is also true, that no other book in history has been the object of as much banning and burning by both secular and ecclesiastical governments.
Even if the Bible were not God's message to mankind, it still is surely the most unique book in existence.
Slashdot Mirror
... If an acceptable answer for where the universe came from is that it always existed...
The observed evidence is against the concept of an eternal universe. This used to be believed, but modern evidence points to a definite beginning of time, space and matter-energy. Scientists have labeled this creation event "The Big Bang" which arose from what they call a singularity.
The evidence is that ALL of the universe, including time itself and all laws of physics, came into existence from this singularity. Nobody can calculate back any further than about 10^-44 seconds AFTER the singularity appeared. Nobody has any idea where the singularity itself came from. It seems to us it came from nothing, but this is a belief in the same way as a belief in God.
...Unless you answer where god came from ...
God just IS, He was not created. No scientific OBSERVATION or experiment has ever contradicted the majestic opening sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The Bible is the only time tested document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
...I realize it's a fallacy to presume you believe 100% in the full text..
Anyone who can truly believe the first verse of the Bible, should have no problem fully believing the rest of it.
...There are a bunch of people who argue that the King James version is the "correct, God-inspired translation....
Unless you know Hebrew and Greek, a way to get around this is to get as many translations you can afford and compare them. It turns out most of them agree amazingly well except those put out by specific organizations that have certain of their doctrines reflected in their own specialized translation.
...that life could come out in Silicon or something we do not know it as...
Any possible life has to be able to synthesize molecules with a large number of atoms in complex configurations. Living cells can be thought of as incredibly complex nano-machines, miniature factories producing an almost endless variety of molecular products.
A central building block atom with just the right binding energy is needed at the hear of these machines. The other atoms it binds with must also have comparable binding energies. Bonds must be strong enough to hold together fairly well, but not so strong so it takes inordinate amounts of energy to break and rearrange them. The elements must also be reasonably common and widely distributed. Having wood and nails that needed a 50 pound sledge-hammer to build a house would be difficult, if not impossible.
Of all elements carbon is the best central atom to bind to any other elements. It is widely available in the CO2 of the air. Besides carbon, the other two widely distributed main elements with compatible energies are oxygen and hydrogen. These are also easily available in the form of water. These are the three most common elements of life. Silicon binding energies to other common atoms are considerably higher than carbon. That is why silicon compounds, such as silicon sealers and greases are used where high temperatures are present. Other common element are included for specialized molecules needed for the many complex functions of life. Some less common elements are used for the special properties and functions they empower the cellular factories to provide.
The Creator God, the one of Genesis 1:1, designed the correct binding energies of the main building blocks of the physical life He wanted to create and then picked carbon, hydrogen and oxygen as the basis for life.
...Current US Diesels get great mileage...
I still have a not so current 1978 VW Rabbit diesel which we use occasionally to carry dirty cargo (such as garden stuff or our usually filthy dogs) not suitable for our 2005 Prius. It still gets 55mpg. It is very gutless, loud and does put out black smoke when floored. It often sites around for weeks without being driven, but starts up right away when needed.
....Again, the big bang did not create the universe, but it created space WITHIN the universe....
That is not what the evidence points to. The evidence is that ALL of the universe, including time itself and all laws of physics, came into existence from what scientists have labeled a singularity. Nobody can calculate back any further than about 10^-44 seconds AFTER the singularity appeared. Nobody has any idea where the singularity itself came from. It seems to us it came from nothing, but this is a belief in the same way as a belief in God.
No scientific OBSERVATION or experiment has ever contradicted the majestic opening sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The Bible is the only time tested document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
All this cannot be PROVEN, but can be BELIEVED in the same way as the conjecture about multiple universes can be believed or not. I CHOOSE to believe that there exists an eternal, intelligent, transcendent Creator God who has communicated to us humans in a message from beyond time and space, in a set of books we call the Bible. He authenticates this message by doing what no human can do. He ACCURATELY writes history before it happens. Some of this in advance written history, called prophecy is re-told in today's newspapers and the nightly news on CNN.
...If you design your whatever-network to max out at the average (or medium) usage...
Are you telling me that ISPs are less able to figure out the size of their pipes than the water or gas company?
...So it's conceivable that an ISP would allow you to Bittorrent basically all you want between midnight and 6am...
Yes that would be conceivable, provided the torrent servers and clients were in the same time zones or at least adjacent ones. As a transmitters and receivers of the data are more widely separated in time, this becomes increasingly harder to implement and less effective.
...I'm afraid you are mistaken. Things like endogenous retroviruses can only be explained using the evolutionary model..
I looked at Wikipedia on endogenous retroviruses. Here is his sentence from the very first paragraph:
"Many _believe_ that they play a key role in evolution as well."
A little further down in the article there is a sentence:
It is _believed_ that the ancestors of modern viviparous mammals evolved...
I have never read an article longer than a few paragraphs on evolution, where the word BELIEVED or ASSUMED was not found. The theory of evolution is not a scientific one, but a religious one where the high priests calling themselves scientists, promulgate the certain beliefs.
These viruses, like all viruses still remain that, namely viruses. They never themselves became a different life form, nor were they able to transform themselves they invaded in to another organism.
You cannot get around the fact that all laboratory experiments ever done has not produced a single new life form. And no matter what experiments were done with viruses, they always were, without a single exception always still viruses or virii if you like. All experiments with e-coli have never produced anything but more e-coli. All the thousands of generations of fruit flies (drosphila) have never produced anything except, guess what, fruit flies. Cats have always made more cats and dogs have always made more dogs.
Calling those who disbelieve the high priests of evolution loonies, does nothing to change such experimental evidence, but it is a sign of desperation of people who want their evolutionary religious beliefs to be upheld as science and truth.
...Evolution is biology. It deals with life on earth....
That is the area of science that Darwin first formalized the idea of natural selection. This blind process, rather than the input of a rational mind is theorized to be behind the origin and development of life.
This idea, as well as modified versions thereof, have been extended to cosmology and astronomy. Books and scientific papers on these subject, also use these evolutionary concepts to explain the origins of other areas of the cosmos.
(..This is false. You are clearly deeply ignorant about science. Or dishonest..)
Instead of making personal attacks, why do you not give me an example of only ONE model on the subject of of origins, that is based solely on facts and makes no assumptions whatsoever.
I can however, spare you the trouble by pointing out that ALL origin models, without a single exception, always assume that presently observed processes can be extrapolated over immense time periods. In nature, linear relationships are the exception rather than the norm. Over the extremely short time span we have observed a given process, we may not have noticed its nonlinearity. The segment of the curve we have access to is just way too short. Therefore we assume is a curve but a straight line that can be extended back as far as we like.
For example, the process of radioactivity is used to date living and non living objects. Science has known about radioactivity for about 100 years. Over that time span we observed radioactive decays to be occurring at a quite regular, apparently highly predictable rate. We assume (believe) therefore that this is a linear process, even over immense amounts of time, millions and even billions of years. This assumption of linearity underlies all models of radioactive dating. Even an incredibly small nonlinearity in the rate of the ticking of this atomic clock, would make all dates and numbers obtained totally wrong.
We observe geological processes such as erosion, mountain building, continental drift etc. occurring at what appears to us as rather constant rates. Based on the assumed constancy, we build models reaching back millions or billions of years.
..it implies that possibly there are infinite universes...
Which of course is also nothing more than a belief. We KNOW that here in OUR universe, complex human made systems don't arise without thought and planning. It is much less of a leap in the dark to put forth the proposition of an intelligent designer, for the non-human generated parts of THIS universe, than to come up with a conjecture about multiple universe. Besides, that pushes the whole issue of origins back one level. Where do those universes come from? Why should they be eternal, uncaused, since we have overwhelming evidence that the one we are in had a definite beginning?
The very word "Universe" means One Verse, a single spoken word. Of course, the ONLY place we read that everything that exists was SPOKEN into being by the transcendent God who is outside of and independent of time, space and matter-energy, is in the Bible. Repeatedly we read; "..and God said... and it came into existence. In the Gospel of John the genealogy of Jesus is given simply as the eternal WORD.
..forcing people to download illegal encrypted content that wouldn't get picked up by the filters...
Why should ISPs care about what sort of information, encrypted or not, the bits they send to your connection represent? After all, the electric company doesn't care what you plug in an outlet do they? The electric company simply charges you for the total energy delivered. The ISP simply charges for the total number of bytes. Problem solved. No filters needed. Encryption always takes more bytes than the equivalent plain text. Therefore, unless somebody has deep dark secrets, which need to be encrypted, it would be cheaper to send plain text files.
All ISPs should be treated the same way that telephone companies have been for years. They do not monitor your conversations nor care what you tell your grandmother or significant other. They still have this thing called common carrier status and are not held responsible for the information the Digital bits of your voice represent. Why should digital bits representing other sorts of information, such as video, software programs and who knows what, be treated any differently?
...Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth....
Really! Our gateway router to the Internet keeps track of every byte that comes and goes.The ISP most likely has the means to keep track of every byte on every line. If the electric company can keep track of every kilowatt hour used and make you pay for it and the gas and water companies can keep track of every cubic foot and make you pay for those also, why should an ISP not also charge according to data usage of each customer? The hard-core WoW addict pays more in the same way as someone who turns the thermostat up to 80 degrees in the house. Most utilities also charge a basic service fee even if you use no electricity or water gas.
...If bandwidth is a scarce resource then just charge people per gigabit of data sent and received....
So, what else is new? Does the electric company not charge per kilowatt hour? Do the gas and water companies not charge per cubic foot? So what is so unusual for an ISP to charge by the gigabyte delivered? The electric company doesn't charge you more if you turn on all your lights making the meter spin like crazy. You don't get charged by the spin rate of the meter, but by how many total revolutions it makes. The same way, you shouldn't be charged by an occasional one or 2 GB download, but by the total number of gigabytes delivered each month.
...ISP execs like the simplistic idea that they need to be punitive....
Why should it be considered punitive for Internet utilities (ISPs) to charge more for more service? If you want more kilowatt hours of electricity you pay for them. If you want more water, you pay for it. If you want more megabytes, you pay for them. Now what is wrong with that?
...I worked for an ISP, and the reason we oversold...
Are not many, if not all utility services oversold? If everybody flushes their toilet at once, does the water pressure in the mains not drop? If everybody picks up their telephone at once, do many users NOT get a dial tone? The electrical service of the average home is 200 amps. If every home started using that full capacity, will the electrical grid not collapse? Just last week, when about 2 million people suddenly had to get out of New Orleans. Were there are not many miles long traffic jams on at other times perfectly serviceable roads? In LA, and other large cities, are the freeways not often long parking lots during rush hour? Why should the Internet be any different? After all, it has been called the information HIGHWAY.
Is there a power company or water service that offers unlimited service for a fixed price? Is there not a water meter or electric meter on every house? Does the service company not come out periodically and read such a meter? Do the customers not get charged according to how much they use? Why then, should the Internet be any different? Every utility has only limited resources which they sell for prices the users are willing or able to pay. If your electric bill is too high, you find ways to save power.
All utilities and many other business services are scaled to average projected use. When you want to make a phone call, most of the time you to get a dial tone and there is no problem. The same is true of your other utility services. ISPs only need to and do scale the networks for average service, not the peak. They should be easily able to determine how much use there is by the average subscriber as well as the highest and lowest users. Then they can structure their prices according to use, just as any other utility does. I don't think that Internet service providers are any greedier than the average utility company.
...If, in a few million years time,....
is fanciful conjecture. Science is about experiments and observation HERE and NOW, not assumptive speculations about what MIGHT happen in millions of years. You COULD conceivably learn to do something in your lifetime, that no other human has ever done. That doesn't mean you evolved into something OTHER than a human.
(..What HAS been proven in the lab is evolution itself...)
That is simply an often repeated, yet still bald-faced LIE you have swallowed. ALL attempts to make evolution happen in the lab, in real time, have NEVER produced a new organism. They have ALWAYS merely been the creatures with a few new tricks.
You have fixed nothing except added the usual speculation about immense amounts of time ostensibly solving the problem that there simply is NO factual, experimental or observational evidence for the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution insists that a frog can turn into a prince, no, even a ROCK can become a prince. Evolution is like faith in a magic recipe, the magic ingredient of time, mixed with a dash of chance.
...Which experimental data show "that the first cause, or Creator, has to be external to our time space matter-energy universe"?...
No experiment, but straight forward logic borne out of cause and effect. If there is no external cause, then there two other logical options. One is that the universe created itself. That is logically absurd. The other is that the universe has no cause. Time, space and matter-energy have always existed, that is, they are eternal. That used to be the accepted belief, before Einstein and others showed that there was a point of beginning. Scientists call this beginning "The Big Bang". The echoes of this creation event still reverberate through all of space today. This carries the label of "Cosmic Background Radiation".
Since we and the Universe exist, that leaves as the last option that the universe was caused by something or someone without a cause. This is what we read in the first sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The one doing the action is Elohim in Hebrew. Interestingly, this is a plural word form.
The eternal, self-existing God, gives us the answer, simply and straight forward in a single profound statement. Scientific observation corroborate Genesis 1:1. Time, space, and matter-energy came into being suddenly, all together.
....They can, via natural selection + evolution, eventually morph into completely different bacteria with completely different functions....
If you learn to do calculus while riding a bicycle on a tightrope, are you no longer human? It would be an entirely new function which likely no other human has ever done.
The fact that bacteria have acquired, with intelligent human help, the skill to make a new enzyme or protein, even one never seen before, doesn't them into a different organisms. They will still, always be bacteria of a given kind. If you stared with e-coli, you will always and forever only have e-coli. If you use coccus you will get more coccus.
You can label such bacteria with new name, but the organism is still essentially what it has always been, even if it now has a new ability and function.
The definition of the word "species" is not rigidly defined. Are all dogs of the same species? Then there is the word "genus" wherein organisms are grouped. Breeding of dogs has produced many sizes, shapes and capabilities, but they have been and always will be dogs. If one were to take a pair of every known breed of dogs and confine them all on an island where they could survive and interbreed without the interference of humans, you eventually get some kind of generic mutt dog, but still only another dog. Dogs always make more dogs, cats more cats and spiders more spiders. Nobody has ever demonstrated anything else, EVER.
...Actually, we have observed actual speciation. And especially among bacteria we see new proteins enzymes appearing...
The fact that bacteria have acquired, with intelligent human help, the skill to make a new enzyme or protein doesn't make into something different. If you learn chinese, you don't become a chinaman. Similarly, the newly skilled bacteria were and are forever, still only a bacteria with a new ability. You can LABEL such bacteria a different species, but the organism is still essentially what it has always been, even if it now has a new skill and a new label imparted to it by an intelligent scientist.
Now if an experiment could tun a e-coli into a pneumoccus, or an amoeba into paramecium, then your evolution argument MIGHT hold up scientifically. As far as I know, that, or anything like it has ever happened. You can teach dog all sorts of new tricks, but it will still be always and forevera only be a dog.
....As long as we can agree that laws of physics...
It is interesting that should bring up the laws of physics. In our human experience, all laws, in this case man-made laws are products of mind, arising out of processes of thought. Complex man-made structures, such as computers and airplanes, or even the simple devices such as a pencil or ballpoint pen, are the result of careful thought and planning.
Is it now so far-fetched to say that the laws of physics are also a product arising in a mind? Are the laws of physics not like the blueprint by which time, space, matter-energy operate? We have people called legislators who come up with laws, products of their mind, by which society operates.
If the laws and relationships of physics would not be the way they are, life as we know it could not exist. For example, we know by direct measurement that the inertial mass of a proton is exactly 1836 times that of an electron. If that were some other ratio, either larger or smaller, no life could exist, because no molecules would ever form.
Only the very specific electronic properties of the element carbon are such as to make possible, the complex molecular structures life depends on.
The relationships between certain fundamental forces (fine structure constants) of nature must be just so. How easily light and other forms of energy travel through matter and what effects the energy going through will produce. Among other things, this also determines the size and structure of stars. Gravity acts to pull them together and the energy acts to push them apart.
The size mass-distance relationships of the earth and sun cannot be much different that what they are. Half of all stars in the universe are too close to each other to have a planet that could have life.
There are many more such "fortuitous" relationships and laws and structure in the universe all contrived towards the goal of having life, and with that life, scientists who are able to study these laws and relationships. To have all of these come together by any other process besides careful planning and thought is exceedingly remote.
The probability of a functional 747 airliner self assembling in an automobile junk yard is higher.
....Too bad the range of that electric force is too short....
Both diminish the same way, but unlike gravity, electricity can also repel. All this black hole idea is a mathematical fiction which has NO physical reality. The immense energies involved with so called black holes can easily be interpreted to be the result of intense electromagnetic interactions. We have observed intense magnetic fields traversing cosmic distances in space. The sun and planets have magnetic fields. The sun produces a measured electric current named the solar wind. We know of NO way to produce a magnetic field without the electric current. These two ALWAYS, without exception. appear together.
(..If black holes were wells of primarily electric force, why would they trap light making them so well, "black"..)
That's exactly my problem, if black holes existed, we should be able to see a black, lightless area around them. Because the electric force is so much more intense than gravity, every single effect that has been imputed to gravity alone can be easily explained equally well and most of the time better than gravity operating alone. It takes BOTH forces working together to explain the operation of the large scale universe.
When an electric field gets intense enough, it also affects light, which is after all an electromagnetic wave which travels throughout the immense distance of space just fine. Electrons, protons and other charged particles as well as photons are particles that can and certainly do travel vast distances. You are mistaken about the short range of the electric interaction.
I worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator where lasers and electrons as well as positrons routinely interacted. The incredibly intense electric fields of both the accelerating microwaves and the electrons themselves affected the laser beams more than even the most intense gravitational field could. So, a highly charged star, such as our sun could certainly affect electromagnetic waves such as light far more than the weak gravity of the sun. This can easily explain the so called "gravitational" lensing also.
(..The rule of event-horizons being a point-of-no-return for light has not been "reworked"..)
The so called "event horizon" has to be reworked, if, as is now theorized, black holes can "evaporate".
(..By the way, if you don't believe black holes should exist, what do you think is supposed to happen when a star's mass exceeds ..)
The mass of a star is only a secondary effect. When any star, regardless of mass gets under sufficient electrical stress, it may explode. We call this a nova or even if it's a really big explosion a supernova.
If you have ever witnessed what happens when the electric current to a large inductance is suddenly interrupted, you get a microscopic demonstration of what happens on a cosmic scale when an over-stressed star suddenly interrupts a galactic scale electric current. All the magnetic energy stored in the cosmic inductance is suddenly released in a concentrated space and in a short time at the point of interruption. This energy is sufficient to vaporize most of or in some cases all of a star in a cataclysmic display of electric fireworks. The amount of energy released is only loosely dependent on the size and age of a particular star.
...provides evidence of a creator...
Evidence from science ALSO shows that the first cause, or Creator, has to be external to our time space matter-energy universe.
...Mostly because these texts were translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek into Latin ....
Your arguments of transcription and translation errors is largely nullified by the discoveries in 1948 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars were amazed and surprised how closely the traditional translated and recopied documents matched the scrolls which had lain in those caves for centuries. If this was true for the sections of scripture found in these scrolls, there is no logical reason why this would not be the case for the rest of Scripture as well.
Any God, worthy of the name, wishing to communicate with us, would have to have the ability not only to get his message across, but also to preserve it for whatever time periods this message needs to be preserved. Unlike other religious writings, the God of the Bible wants to ensure that his message is spread to every nook and cranny, to every tribe and nation on this planet. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century ever since the art of printing was invented, no other book, by any stretch of the imagination, has seen wider distribution than this one. It is also true, that no other book in history has been the object of as much banning and burning by both secular and ecclesiastical governments.
Even if the Bible were not God's message to mankind, it still is surely the most unique book in existence.