No Time To Write My Recent Brawl That Began Over Larry Krauss

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• Note:  "He" in this first comment is Lawrence Krauss.  This is from a brawl I'm having at Religion Dispatches.  The Democratic, liberal Media Matters is infested with Republican trolls, Religion Dispatches is infested with atheist trolls.  You have to wonder if that's not planned, organized, perhaps financed trolling.  And also note that cutting and pasting is always an adventure in the complexities of HTML, of which I'm an entire novice.  The "preview" of this is clear enough but I'm not entirely happy with the format Blogger gave it. The comments by "Camera Obscura" are mine. 
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  pyx • a day ago
• He has single handedly advanced our knowledge of the origins of the universe further than what the bible or Quran has been able to do for millennia
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  Camera Obscura  pyx • a day agoWell, big deal, that's not the issue. Bobby Fischer did more for the game of chess than the Bible did, that didn't make him any kind of an expert on the issues under discussion.
  And that's if the line of cosmological speculation Krauss engages is is right, which is still an open question disputed in science. And if it isn't today, just wait, there have been more disposed of "origins of the universe" in cosmology than there have been in those scriptures. Your phrase, using the plural "origins" is a dead giveaway of that fact. There was only one origin of the UNIverse, not more than one. Science has yet to identify, securely, exactly what that origin was, yet you use that as a standard of measuring quality of arguments entirely outside of that dispute.
  Jim Reed  Camera Obscura • 18 hours agoI think his point is science has advanced our knowledge of the origin of the universe, but scripture has only set it backwards.
  Camera Obscura  Jim Reed • 18 hours agoYou don't know that until you can actually account for the one and only origin of the universe.
  Your statement, though, only shows that you are remarkably ignorant of the history of modern cosmology. When Fr. Georges Lemaitre proposed the big bang, complete with the concept of a singularity, etc. the idea was successfully resisted for about three to four decades because the atheist cosmologists and physicists didn't like the implication that that aspect of Genesis was right. As late as the 1990s one of the major figures of scientistic materialism, John Maddox, was condemning the idea because of its possible religious implications, the same reason that atheists invented those jillions of universes, the greatest and ultimate violation of, among other things, the principle of parsimony, Occam's razor, and the need for science to be verifiable in the observable, natural universe. Atheists would seem to have set back cosmology more than religious folk did during that epoch and they may turn out to inhibit the future as they insist on inventing ever more things that can't really be science.
  Atheists are, if anything, worse with historical fact than they are with logic.
  nightgaunt  Camera Obscura • 6 hours agoCuriously that before the Big Bang, the Steady State theory held and was called Biblical as well. So they can take either one and claim it to be of theological origin? That is quite the scam to do that.
  Atheists are just human and science was critical in accepting it till facts supported it. And the microwave background radiation was predicted and later found. Piltdown Man skull was reexamined and found to be a forgery. Doesn't happen too much in religious circles because they have different values.
  Camera Obscura  nightgaunt • 26 minutes agoI have never, once, read the Steady State theory of the universe being called "Biblical," it is certainly not compatible with the first sentence, chapter or book of The Bible or with any theological understanding arising from that book which I've ever read of or heard of. Which is why it was favored by materialists and atheists such as Bertrand Russell and John Maddox and a line of atheist cosmologists who seem to pretty much run that field of speculation. My theory is that you just made that up as so much internet information is just made up for clearly polemical purposes, and, I don't hesitate to say, there is no group more prone to doing that than the online atheists. Give me the quotes to the effect that a Steady State universe is compatible with the Hebrew Bible, central to the Jewish and Christian and, to an extent, Islamic religions.
  As to the idea that religions don't reexamine ideas, that is clearly absurd as well. Just for one tiny, little example, there was this thing called The Protestant Reformation which reexamined and changed a good many religious ideas, and the reformers kept reexamining ideas and a myriad of different churches formed, and still form due to reexamination of ideas and disagreements over them.
  You can either have one argument or the other, you can argue that religion is static and frozen into an unchanging monolith and therefore is invalid or that there are myriads of different ideas about the topic, with vastly and varying ideas about it and therefore is invalid. You can't pretend one on one occasion and the other on another occasion is the truth, not if you care about the truth which, I also don't hesitate to point out, is of no real value in the materialism that Larry Krauss seems to believe in, the truth has no transcendent value in materialism and a lie is as good as the truth if it gets you what you want.
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