like you said, to be a scientist back then, you had to be a part of the church and only give out the findings they allowed you... how many "scientists" were killled because they went against god/church?

I just reread your post. I never said any such thing. I said for the majority of Western history, Theology was called the "Queen of the Sciences". People who studied science almost always also studied theology. That doesn't mean they were forced to or were force to avoid certain fields of study.

I'm not here to defend the Catholic Church, they did plenty of wrong. But I don't think you have any place trying to somehow read Newton's dead mind and come to the conclusion that he was a Christian only because the church forced him to be. There were plenty of scientists who pursued their studies unmolested by the church throughout the middle ages. To suggest otherwise is to reject accepted history. You need to try to understand this: There are some atheists who hold the belief that "if we are right, everyone else must be evil" and they make stuff up. The Catholic Churches' persecution of scientists boils down to Galileo and Giordano Bruno, who was burned for heresy not his work in the field of science. I'm not excusing his murder, they were wrong to do it, but imprisoning one person for 8 years and executing another doesn't build this giant conspiracy of scientific suppression to which you and other atheists fervently believe.

It's possible for you to be right that God doesn't exist AND for Christianity to be compatible and favorable to science. There is no need to make up false history or believe other people's lies about history.

agnostic, not atheist... i think the gods were other beings, just more advanced than us at the time...

Bruno!
Galilei had to recant,or he would have shared the same fate as Bruno!
Da Vinci would have been a Goner if the Church had discovered some of his Research!

Bruno was executed for being a monk and supporting heresy, there is no indication that he was executed for his scientific research. How do you know that about Da Vinci? You don't, you just made it up.

If your position is so weak that you have to lie and make up claims out of whole cloth, why do you continue to believe?

(born 1548, Nola, near Naplesdied Feb. 17, 1600, Rome) Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and occultist. He entered a Dominican convent in 1565 and was ordained a priest in 1572. He abandoned the order in 1576 after being accused of heresy. He moved to Geneva in 1578 and thereafter traveled Europe as a lecturer and teacher. Rejecting the traditional geocentric astronomy for a theory even more radical than that of Copernicus, he hypothesized an infinite universe and multiple worlds. His cosmological theories, which anticipated fundamental aspects of the modern conception of the universe, led to his excommunication by the Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran churches. In 1592 he was arrested and tried by the Venetian Inquisition, which extradited him to the Roman Inquisition in the following year. After a seven-year trial, he was burned at the stake. His ethical ideas have appealed to modern humanists, and his ideal of religious and philosophical tolerance has influenced liberal thinkers. His most important works are On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584) and The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584).

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/giordano-bruno#ixzz2sz9MrNQQ

Flatly untrue. He was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for rejecting the belief on the virginal birth and Mary's purity and for supporting the Arian heresy. He was excommunicated by the Calvinists for an article attacking a local philosopher, but was re-communicated later. Finally, he was excommunicated by a local Lutheran church for his ideas on the universality of salvation.

When you read what actual historians have to say about the guy, you find that he didn't contribute much of anything to science. You'll also find that we don't know why he was tried for heresy, but there is strong evidence that his support of Copernican beliefs was only mentioned as supporting evidence for the heresies.

Once again, I'm not defending the Catholic Church, they were wrong. But, the truth should be said, even in that case. The Catholic Church burned a man to death for his crazy ideas on religion, not because he was some great scientist.

read the article, the first paragraph...(the link that came with it)

I agree, burning people alive really shouldn't be done...

Please tell me again about the great Era of Free Scientific Inquiry from the End of the Roman Empire up to the Renaissance,supported by the Church,until the Renaissance put Paid to it!
Stop trying to sell that Revisionism!
The Church was a Millstone around the neck of Scientists,and it was only Islam,that for a while upheld Scientific Thought,until the Fanatics there also got the better of the more enlightened Leaders,and followed the Footsteps of the Catholic Church!

When was Giordano Bruno executed? 1616. When was Galileo put under house arrest? 1633. When was the Renaissance? Approximately 1250 - 1750. Oh no! Look at that. These two incidents happened right in the middle of the Renaissance.

From the fall of the Roman Empire until the early 1200's, Europe was under near constant attack by foreign invaders. The Vikings, The Huns, The Goth's, the Muslims, etc. It was when these small wars and invasions stopped that science started to progress. Science, which was embraced by the Catholic Church, I might add. The fall of Rome would have wiped out most, if not all Western scientific advancements, if not for the church preserving much of what had been written.

Show some respect for yourself and for the people around you and don't comment on subjects of which you know nothing. Educate yourself in the least!

Due to your lack of respect for the subject, the people who are reading and for me, I will no longer respond to your posts. A heartfelt apology will enable us to resume a conversation, but we both know that is not forth coming.

James Randerson, science correspondent


The Guardian, Thursday 4 May 2006



The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory.

The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs.

"People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn't any reason for that inference," said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, "What we are proposing is very radical. It's saying there was time before the big bang."

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. "I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though," said Prof Turok. "There doesn't have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large."

Today most cosmologists believe the universe will carry on expanding until all the stars burn out, leaving nothing but their cold dead remains. But there is an inherent problem with this picture. The Cosmological Constant - a mysterious force first postulated by Albert Einstein that appears to be driving the galaxies apart - is much too small to fit the theory. Einstein later renounced it as his "biggest blunder".

The Cosmological Constant is a mathematical representation of the energy of empty space, also known as "dark energy", which exerts a kind of anti-gravity force pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate.

It happens to be a googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes) times smaller than would be expected if the universe was created in a single Big Bang. But its value could be explained if the universe was much, much older than most experts believe.

Mechanisms exist that would allow the Constant to decrease incrementally through time. But these processes would take so long that, according to the standard theory, all matter in the universe would totally dissipate in the meantime.

Turok and Steinhardt's theory is an alternative to another explanation called the "anthropic principle", which argues that the constant can have a range of values in different parts of the universe but that we happen to live in a region conducive to life.

"The anthropic explanations are very controversial and many people do not like them," said Alexander Vilenkin a professor of theoretical physics at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Rather than making precise predictions for features of the universe the anthropic principle gives a vague range of values so it is difficult for physicists to test, he added.

"It's absolutely terrible, it really is giving up," said Prof Turok, "It's saying that we are never going to understand the state of the universe. It just has to be that way for us to exist." His explanation by contrast is built up from first principles.

But if he's right, how long have we got until the next big bang? "We can't predict when it will happen with any precision - all we can say is it won't be within the next 10 billion years." Good job, because if we were around we would instantly disintegrate into massless particles of light.

Interesting. If this is true, how much more likely does it make God? That some entity which has existed for a trillion years is repeatedly creating universes over and over again.

makes it less plausible for me...a being/entity living/being around that long? in a billion years, it would be a billion times more boring... trillions of years?... I don't have that kind of faith...

See, I think the problem is that you have some misinformed ideas about God. God is perfect, therefore God doesn't get bored.

You conceive of a strange god who needs to be entertained. I'm not talking about Zeus or Odin, but a perfect being which is complete in Himself.

I don't think it's a problem...just not what I believe...

What do you believe? And on what do you base it?

I look at the universe as a big recycling pit... everything gets used and used again, and I also think it is trillions of years old too... similar to evolution, but on a much grander scale.. and I base that on from what I perceive things to be, and form my opinions on what makes the most sense from the perceptions...

Have you ever heard of Leibniz? Famous mathematician, philosopher, theologian. He was actually the first person to invent Calculus. He asked a question: "Why is there something, rather than nothing."

Why do you think something exists, rather than nothing. You have pushed the beginning of the universe by trillions of years, but why did it begin in the first place? Making the universe older doesn't remove the need for the universe to have a creator.

I can see the evolution now, without a creator, why would I need to add the creator just explain something I don't know?

So you don't see an issue with the universe just existing. Somehow nothing evolved into something?