DoubtingThomas wrote:Res Ipsa wrote:I googled "Mormon scientist big bang god" Nowhere did I find even a hint of a claim that God had nothing to do with the Big Bang.
A Mormon astronomer said, "The biblical account is a remarkably peaceful story. By contrast, the big bang is a story of incredible violence, involving inconceivable forces and energies.
It seems extremely unlikely that these two stories describe the same event, especially since the Bible deals specifically with objects and conditions on the earth. To read universe and big bang into the biblical creation account requires a spectacular leap of logic....Universes that bubble up from the multiverse might differ greatly from ours in their force constants or natural laws. If so, most would quickly disappear, and only a very few would have properties that allow for the formation of atoms, stars, life, and intelligence."
http://scholarsarchive.BYU.edu/cgi/view ... ontext=msrIt doesn't sound that he believes god created our universe.
DT, I'm going to start with a technical nitpick here. In your quote, you splice together with your ellipsis unrelated sentences that are separated by 17 or 18 pages. That's a misleading way of representing what the paper says. It implies that the two sentences are part of the same thought. They aren't. Your quote should look like this:
A Mormon astronomer said: "The biblical account is a remarkably peaceful story. By contrast, the big bang is a story of incredible violence, involving inconceivable forces and energies. It seems extremely unlikely that these two stories describe the same event, especially since the Bible deals specifically with objects and conditions on the earth. To read universe and big bang into the biblical creation account requires a spectacular leap of logic."
He also said: "Universes that bubble up from the multiverse might differ greatly from ours in their force constants or natural laws. If so, most would quickly disappear, and only a very few would have properties that allow for the formation of atoms, stars, life, and intelligence."That tells the reader that it's you who has connected the two passages, and not the author. I don't think you meant to be misleading, but the form of your quote was misleading, nonetheless.
Nothing in what you quoted gives any hint about the author's opinion as to whether God created the universe. To see that, it helps to pay attention to the context of the quoted sentences. The entire paper is a rebuttal to a book published by two Christian authors. This quote from that paper nicely sums up the relevant part of the Christians' argument:
The Big Bang represents the origin of all matter and energy, even of physical space and time themselves. . . . Therefore, to hold that matter/energy are eternal or that God is the physical product of a beginningless progression is irreconcilable with the theory. The problem posed by the Big Bang for Mormon theology is especially severe, not merely because the Big Bang theory supports creation ex nihilo, but because the Mormon concept of God as an extended material object existing in the universe requires, in connection with Big Bang cosmogony, that God himself (or his progenitors) came into being ex ni- hilo. Thus, Big Bang cosmogony is a veritable dagger at the throat of Mormon theology. (p. 146)
See page 282 of the paper you linked.
Your first quote is one of many specific responses to that argument. Here is your quote in context:
4. Copan and Craig unjustifiably conflate the creation account in Genesis 1:1 with the idea that the entire universe originated by creatio ex nihilo. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”—so opens the creation story in the majestic prose of the King James Version of the Bible. From the start of the Christian era, the theological discussion of the world has always been focused on the earth and its associated heaven (the celestial sphere), which constituted the known world of the early church fathers.
The biblical account is a remarkably peaceful story. By contrast, the big bang is a story of incredible violence, involving inconceivable forces and energies. It seems extremely unlikely that these two stories describe the same event, especially since the Bible deals specifically with objects and conditions on the earth. To read universe and big bang into the biblical creation account requires a spectacular leap of logic.
So, all this says is that the creation account in Genesis is an account of creation of the earth, not the universe. It says absolutely nothing about what the author's beliefs are about the relationship between God and the creation of our universe.
The second sentence comes from a section of the paper that is simply a general explanation of what multi-verse theories are. Again, no hint of the relationship between the various multi-verse theories and God.
This is one of the papers I read as a result of my Google search. The purpose of the paper is to (1) refute the claim in the book that the Big Bang is a death knell for LDS theology; and (2) show that nothing in the field of cosmology is inconsistent with LDS theology.
It also says this:
A Mormon cosmology ought to relate Latter-day Saint doctrines of God, spirits, revelation, and resurrection to the physical world. All truth must come together, but of course that will happen only in God’s time. After we have understood and obeyed the commandments al- ready given, we may receive more light. Clearly we have far to go.
Despite writings by several Latter-day Saint authors (including the groundbreaking book by Erich R. Paul,33 a few other books and articles,34 contributions in the book Of Heaven and Earth,35 and this present article), no well-defined field of Latter-day Saint cosmology exists. Perhaps our knowledge of the physical universe and of Latter- day Saint theology will never be sufficiently complete to allow it in this life.
pp.307-08.
When you say something like: Mormons believe God didn't create the universe, that's a claim that there is a well-defined, uniformly held Mormon cosmology. The author of this article says the exact opposite. He says there isn't one, and may never be one.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951