Can Atheists go to Heaven?

pat · April 19, 2012, 8:35pm

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:

But on to a serious question that I’d like to ask of you; how do you square black holes in all of this? You say that something can’t come from nothing, but isn’t this how a black hole behaves?[/quote]

Black holes do not behave like something from nothing. A black hole is simply an area in what general relativity calls spacetime (the term is no longer correct but we still use it out of habit) where the gravitational force caused by matter has become so great within a finite space that the gravitational field is too strong for even light to escape once it has reached the event horizon. They require something (matter) in order to form and the radiation emitted by them is caused mostly by matter reaching and/or crossing the boundary of the event horizon.
[/quote]

And aren’t they usually the result of the death of stars? Which would be a casual factor. [/quote]

It usually takes something on the magnitude of a stellar mass to produce a gravitational field strong enough to cause a black hole to form naturally, and the most numerous objects in the universe with a stellar mass are stars, so most black holes are probably formed from massive stars, yes.
[/quote]

However, that doesn’t explain the whole super massive black hole issue though, correct? As in the mass of a super-massive black hole way exceeds that of even the largest stars. So what’s the going theory on that?

Tiribulus · April 19, 2012, 8:41pm

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]kamui wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]kamui wrote:
Actually, if they are predestined to go to heaven (and if God is consistent), then they won’t and can’t “go full retard”.
They are be predestined to live a christian life, too.
There’s no “half grace”. [/quote]

Are you sure you don’t want to switch sides? You can still have sex. :)[/quote]

Yes, but the Church is still not ok with sex with multiple partners, outside of marriage and without any pro-creative intention nor with BDSM sophistications.
Yet.

In a century or two maybe.

Joke aside, sex has next to nothing to do with it.
the main problem i see with christianism is its anthropocentrism / anthropomorphism.

[/quote]

I didn’t say Christian, just a theist.

And I can say I didn’t see that one coming. Anthropomorphism is not something we believe but Anthropocentrism is in the neighborhood. Yep, we believe humans are special, and it’s not difficult to see why on a high level. Why does that bother you?
[/quote]I’m gonna bet that you misunderstood him entirely Pat.

Dr_Matt581 · April 19, 2012, 8:59pm

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:

But on to a serious question that I’d like to ask of you; how do you square black holes in all of this? You say that something can’t come from nothing, but isn’t this how a black hole behaves?[/quote]

Black holes do not behave like something from nothing. A black hole is simply an area in what general relativity calls spacetime (the term is no longer correct but we still use it out of habit) where the gravitational force caused by matter has become so great within a finite space that the gravitational field is too strong for even light to escape once it has reached the event horizon. They require something (matter) in order to form and the radiation emitted by them is caused mostly by matter reaching and/or crossing the boundary of the event horizon.
[/quote]

And aren’t they usually the result of the death of stars? Which would be a casual factor. [/quote]

It usually takes something on the magnitude of a stellar mass to produce a gravitational field strong enough to cause a black hole to form naturally, and the most numerous objects in the universe with a stellar mass are stars, so most black holes are probably formed from massive stars, yes.
[/quote]

However, that doesn’t explain the whole super massive black hole issue though, correct? As in the mass of a super-massive black hole way exceeds that of even the largest stars. So what’s the going theory on that?[/quote]

On a basic level, when matter reaches/crosses the event horizon of a black hole, some of the the mass of that matter is “added,” so to speak to the black hole and they “grow.” Depending on how much matter is available to a black hole and the overall volume that matter is occupying, they can get up to hundreds of thousands of stellar masses. Supermassive black holes are generally thought to have formed in the early days of the universe when the density of matter in the universe was high enough to form them. I doubt conditions exist in too many places today for supermassive black holes to form.

EDITED: I stopped writing a sentence halfway through and it made no sense.

Dr_Matt581 · April 19, 2012, 8:55pm

[quote]pat wrote:

What are your thought’s on Lisi’s E8 theory?[/quote]

It is an interesting piece of fiction, but as a valid scientific theory it is garbage. There is a reason why Lisi could not get it published in a peer reviewed journal and there is no serious work being done to develop it at all. Distler and Garibaldi did a great job of dismantling it, you can google their paper on it if you want. Right now we just do not have a valid candidate for a unified field theory since experiments have shown major holes in M-theory, which was the best candidate. It is one of the most researched topics in physics today, though.

pat · April 19, 2012, 9:02pm

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:

But on to a serious question that I’d like to ask of you; how do you square black holes in all of this? You say that something can’t come from nothing, but isn’t this how a black hole behaves?[/quote]

Black holes do not behave like something from nothing. A black hole is simply an area in what general relativity calls spacetime (the term is no longer correct but we still use it out of habit) where the gravitational force caused by matter has become so great within a finite space that the gravitational field is too strong for even light to escape once it has reached the event horizon. They require something (matter) in order to form and the radiation emitted by them is caused mostly by matter reaching and/or crossing the boundary of the event horizon.
[/quote]

And aren’t they usually the result of the death of stars? Which would be a casual factor. [/quote]

It usually takes something on the magnitude of a stellar mass to produce a gravitational field strong enough to cause a black hole to form naturally, and the most numerous objects in the universe with a stellar mass are stars, so most black holes are probably formed from massive stars, yes.
[/quote]

However, that doesn’t explain the whole super massive black hole issue though, correct? As in the mass of a super-massive black hole way exceeds that of even the largest stars. So what’s the going theory on that?[/quote]

On a basic level, when matter reaches/crosses the event horizon of a black hole, some of the the mass of that matter is “added,” so to speak to the black hole and they “grow.” Depending on how much matter is available to a black hole and the overall volume that matter is occupying, they can get up to hundreds of thousands of stellar masses. Supermassive black holes are generally thought to have formed in the early days of the universe when the density of matter in the universe was high enough to form them. I doubt conditions exist in too many places today for supermassive black holes to form.

EDITED: I stopped writing a sentence halfway through and it made no sense.
[/quote]

Actually, that made perfect sense. Thanks…

pat · April 19, 2012, 9:09pm

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

What are your thought’s on Lisi’s E8 theory?[/quote]

It is an interesting piece of fiction, but as a valid scientific theory it is garbage. There is a reason why Lisi could not get it published in a peer reviewed journal and there is no serious work being done to develop it at all. Distler and Garibaldi did a great job of dismantling it, you can google their paper on it if you want. Right now we just do not have a valid candidate for a unified field theory since experiments have shown major holes in M-theory, which was the best candidate. It is one of the most researched topics in physics today, though.[/quote]

LOL! So, you don’t like it?? I thought it was interesting of course talking as a lay person. I did hear the math did not hold up though. Of course he recently has claimed to have cleaned it up, so it will be interesting to me if it will gain any traction in it’s revised state. I did not believe to disregard it, as it does have some support. He’s thinking CERN will verify…

What were the holes blown in M-Theory? Or do you have a paper, written in ‘English’ that explains at a high level what the issue is? I don’t need details. I need the basics.

Dr_Matt581 · April 19, 2012, 9:20pm

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

What are your thought’s on Lisi’s E8 theory?[/quote]

It is an interesting piece of fiction, but as a valid scientific theory it is garbage. There is a reason why Lisi could not get it published in a peer reviewed journal and there is no serious work being done to develop it at all. Distler and Garibaldi did a great job of dismantling it, you can google their paper on it if you want. Right now we just do not have a valid candidate for a unified field theory since experiments have shown major holes in M-theory, which was the best candidate. It is one of the most researched topics in physics today, though.[/quote]

LOL! So, you don’t like it?? I thought it was interesting of course talking as a lay person. I did hear the math did not hold up though. Of course he recently has claimed to have cleaned it up, so it will be interesting to me if it will gain any traction in it’s revised state. I did not believe to disregard it, as it does have some support. He’s thinking CERN will verify…

What were the holes blown in M-Theory? Or do you have a paper, written in ‘English’ that explains at a high level what the issue is? I don’t need details. I need the basics. [/quote]

I know he has claimed to have fixed the problems with it, but I doubt it. We will see when he tries to get his new paper published. Until he gets his theoretical work through the peer review process, I doubt the guys at CERN and other major research institutes will bother with his work at all.

As for M-theory, the research is very new that shows problems with it, but basically research into microscopic black hole production have shown some major limitations on the size and scope of higher dimensions to the point of making current M-theory predictions about other dimensions incorrect, and I am not sure it can be modified to account for the new data. This is the only research paper on it that has passed peer review, but there are others in the process and over the next few years I expect to see M-theory disappear.

pat · April 19, 2012, 9:29pm

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

What are your thought’s on Lisi’s E8 theory?[/quote]

It is an interesting piece of fiction, but as a valid scientific theory it is garbage. There is a reason why Lisi could not get it published in a peer reviewed journal and there is no serious work being done to develop it at all. Distler and Garibaldi did a great job of dismantling it, you can google their paper on it if you want. Right now we just do not have a valid candidate for a unified field theory since experiments have shown major holes in M-theory, which was the best candidate. It is one of the most researched topics in physics today, though.[/quote]

LOL! So, you don’t like it?? I thought it was interesting of course talking as a lay person. I did hear the math did not hold up though. Of course he recently has claimed to have cleaned it up, so it will be interesting to me if it will gain any traction in it’s revised state. I did not believe to disregard it, as it does have some support. He’s thinking CERN will verify…

What were the holes blown in M-Theory? Or do you have a paper, written in ‘English’ that explains at a high level what the issue is? I don’t need details. I need the basics. [/quote]

I know he has claimed to have fixed the problems with it, but I doubt it. We will see when he tries to get his new paper published. Until he gets his theoretical work through the peer review process, I doubt the guys at CERN and other major research institutes will bother with his work at all.

As for M-theory, the research is very new that shows problems with it, but basically research into microscopic black hole production have shown some major limitations on the size and scope of higher dimensions to the point of making current M-theory predictions about other dimensions incorrect, and I am not sure it can be modified to account for the new data. This is the only research paper on it that has passed peer review, but there are others in the process and over the next few years I expect to see M-theory disappear.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1012.3375v1.pdf[/quote]

Cool, thank you for this. I will try to work my way through it.
I don’t supposed they threw the baby out with the bath water? In other words, ‘they’ are still expecting a variant of string theory as the way forward?

Dr_Matt581 · April 19, 2012, 9:35pm

[quote]pat wrote:

Cool, thank you for this. I will try to work my way through it.
I don’t supposed they threw the baby out with the bath water? In other words, ‘they’ are still expecting a variant of string theory as the way forward?[/quote]

Yes, there is enough evidence for a general form of string theory that it is still considered our best bet for a unified field theory. The M-theory variant of string theory was considered the best version of string theory, but now some major changes need to be made. I would expect that a new version will be out in a few years.

sufiandy · April 20, 2012, 1:11am

Not relevant to this thread but I don’t see any better active T-Nation threads to post this.

http://htwins.net/scale2/

sufiandy · April 20, 2012, 1:17am

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]sufiandy wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]orion wrote:
By the way, that could mean that the universe caused God.

Bummer. [/quote]

No, it’s not reverse causation, backwards there’s a difference.

Reverse causation is not possible by definition. Effects are results and causes are reasons or acts, if you reverse that, then the role of the effect has switch to a cause and therefore the role reverse, but the cause and effect relationship is still unidirectional.[/quote]

What is reverse and backwards though? You already said time does not matter so what are you basing this on?[/quote]

Time does not matter in the greater scheme, but that doesn’t mean that causal relationships are always time independent. There are time dependent causal relationships we see evidence of that in our daily lives. That does not mean that they are all time dependent.
There are different types of causation. But at the core of all of them is that causes necessitate their effects. ← And that is the only thing I need to make my point.[/quote]

What is one example of a cause and effect relationship that does not involve time?

Tiribulus · April 20, 2012, 2:19am

[quote]sufiandy wrote:
Not relevant to this thread but I don’t see any better active T-Nation threads to post this.

http://htwins.net/scale2/[/quote] VERY cool. (seriously!!!) Here’s a post of mine from a couple years ago to somebody else. A Jehovah’s Witness.

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:Try this:
Take a paper plate and about an inch or so from the edge somewhere make the smallest dot you can with a pencil. The plate represents our galaxy and the dot our solar system. In the middle of our solar system is a flaming ball of gas that emits more energy in one second than every possible man made source in history combined to date.

It is so far away that it takes 13 minutes for it’s light to reach your skin traveling 186,000 miles a second and we are pretty close compared to some of the other planets. That’s one solar system, one dot, in one galaxy, one paper plate.

Now go throw the plate into the middle of the pacific ocean and as it floats there realize that the ocean represents… maybe, what we’ve been able to measure of the universe.

Imagine millions of other paper plates floating around representing millions of other galaxies. Throw in super massive black holes, dark matter (there’s a REAL zinger there) and the rest of the astronomical phenomena that have us staring cross eyed into our equipment. And all this barely scratches the surface.

There is a God who spoke this into existence FROM NOTHING by the command of his mouth… whatever that means. That God, whose mind numbing unfathomable holy power and majesty would consume you (or me) in a nanosecond if He were approached apart from the death defeating resurrected Christ, has chosen to reveal himself to the only part of all of that creation that exists in his intelligent moral image… in a book.

You just keep right on sinfully attempting to fit him into your puny pathetic little mind (mine too) and you will keep right on coming to sinful idolatrous conclusions. You have ZEEROH understanding of even what little of Him can be understood at all by His chosen revelation and yet you continue to proclaim your ability to understand Him fully.

I repeat. Repent of this blasphemy and believe the Gospel.

Yes, temporally we appear pretty insignificant which makes the gospel of Christ all the more glorious.[/quote]

Brother_Chris · April 20, 2012, 4:29am

[quote]kamui wrote:

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:

This oughta be good =][/quote]

I know, right?

Looking forward to it’s potential.[/quote]Pat’s pretty good in these areas though Sparky. BTW, impossible though it is to us? God most definitely does bring everything aside from Himself into existence from nothing. Including black holes ultimately.
[/quote]

That is something i never understood with christian theology. Why “from nothing” and not “from Himself” ?
[/quote]

I’m sure you understand metaphysics. I believe the ancients would refer to the substance of God is made up of “prime matter” and him being pure in that sense. However, the matter that makes up the substance of the world is not prime matter.

sufiandy · April 20, 2012, 5:18am