Thanks,
FlowerChilddd

By the way, I'm out of town and hope that the rally goes well today. I look forward to hearing the impressions from those who are there.

No one has ever explained how mental concepts come from physical phenomenon like synapses firing in the brain. It cannot be explained as an epaphenomenon of physical reality. The mind and the brain remain two different things despite the determination of materialist scientists. Spirituality remains.

Actually, you might be surprised what people have been able to do lately. In particular, it is now becoming possible to read minds from the brain waves. Not detailed as yet, but enough to make the lives of certain paralyzed individuals easier.

Spirits are an un-needed hypothesis.

For the record, the Big Bang theory was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest, who served on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

For some, that might be a recommendation of the theory, for others a mark against it, but it's worth noting.

The fact that a book is only made out of letters doesn't make it meaningless.

When analyzing the brain in terms of chemical reactions, you are making a similar error of levels.

We may have chemical reactions in our heads more complex than the ones in a bottle of soda, but if, at the end of the day, they are merely chemical reactions, then they do not, and cannot, mean anything.

And I disagree that there has to be cosmic meaning for there to be local meaning. I certainly see nothing in the universe as a whole that suggests that life on this small planet orbiting an ordinary star in one largish galaxy among hundreds of billions is particularly meaningful. But, it *is* meaningful to us, since we live on that planet. Our actions are meaningful *to us* because they affect us. So I heartily reject the idea that these particular chemical reactions do not mean anything. It's just that meaning isn't a cosmic thing; it's a local one.

A chemical reaction is meaningless. It has no moral value or anything like it. A thought, on the other hand, has immense meaning and can have moral value. But we all know there is a vast gap between a thought and a chemical reaction.

But if the synapses firing in your brain right now have no spiritual reality behind them, they are just that, chemical reactions. And complexity only separates the bottle of Dr. Pepper and my brain by a difference of degree, not of kind.

Again, I deny this conclusion. Since the can of soda is not complex enough to hold a large number of bits of information, there is a huge difference in kind. The complexity is a physical and chemical one, but the very fact that the state of an outside world can be modeled in this complexity is the reason we give it meaning. Spirituality is irrelevant to this: it is a completely natural complexity.

Also, that thought is different from that chemical reaction because of the possibility of having non-trivial information about the universe. The chemical reaction at most codes for pressure, temperature, and a few other gross-level variables. The thought, though, is as a series of chemical reactions and so encodes more information because of how those reactions are distributed in space and time.

Believing everything began with a “Big Bang” is more of a leap of faith then believing that God is the Creator of all things. We are “light years” away from even beginning to understand the creation of the universe. Where, for example, would you say the original “Bang” come from? This is one of the ways we "see" God because logic makes God a necessary part of creation.

First, most popular treatments of the Big Bang are at best cartoon-like caricatures of what the science says. This is because the concepts are strange from a everyday perspective. But that is what happens when dealing with the universe as a whole.

When you say it takes as much faith to believe in the Big bang as it does to believe in God, have you actually looked at the evidence? Have you investigated the evidence for general relativity and looked at what it says when applied to the whole universe? Have you considered the abundances of light elements and seen how they correspond to the predictions made by a hot Big Bang? Or the nature of the cosmic background radiation and how that matches predictions? I have. I plan to make it my second career. We are now in the era of precision cosmology, so your claim that we are light-years away from understanding is simply false. Our understanding is good enough to have accurate correspondence with data from models of the universe when the current expansion phase was less than a second old. At that time, the temperature was high enough for nuclear reactions to happen in space.

Your question about where the Big Bang came from is a common one. One big problem is that any information from before the current phase of expansion has been probably been destroyed. So testing the hypotheses that are out there isn't possible as yet. I'll try to give some idea of what is known and/or conjectured.

The first thing to realize is that general relativity considers time as part of the universe. When the universe as a whole is modeled it turns out that there is a 'singularity' at the Big Bang and it is impossible to extend the concept of time to 'before the Big Bang'. This come directly out of the math. In essence, asking about 'before the Big Bang' is like asking what is 'north of the north pole'. Time itself began with the universe.

Now, general relativity is certainly not the 'ultimate explanation'. In particular, it doesn't include quantum mechanics. The problem is that there are several different ways of merging the two, none of which is particularly good. They also all give different answers to the question of 'before the Big Bang'. Some agree with general relativity: there simply is no such thing. Others describe a previous, contracting phase for the universe. Some others describe the universe as a 'brane' in a higher dimensional setting and the Big Bang as being caused by the collision of two of these branes. In all of these, there is a Big Bang in the sense that there is a time of very high density and temperature which expands to produce the current conditions.

Which is right? We don't know. My personal inclination is away from the brane theories and towards either the ones saying there is no before or there was a previous contraction. These theories can be tested in other realms to see how they hold up. At the present time, our best theory of gravity is general relativity, though.

You're close, but you're still not getting the pointy end of this argument. The very fact that you can use your senses and analyze the data they give you and make something out of these molecules banging about in your head proves the very point I'm making.

We may have chemical reactions in our heads more complex than the ones in a bottle of soda, but if, at the end of the day, they are merely chemical reactions, then they do not, and cannot, mean anything.

A chemical reaction is meaningless. It has no moral value or anything like it. A thought, on the other hand, has immense meaning and can have moral value. But we all know there is a vast gap between a thought and a chemical reaction.

But if the synapses firing in your brain right now have no spiritual reality behind them, they are just that, chemical reactions. And complexity only separates the bottle of Dr. Pepper and my brain by a difference of degree, not of kind.