Do Black Holes Exist? Are Black Holes Scientific?

chrispalasz · Post by **chrispalasz** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 12:01 am

I wasn't sure where to ask this question, but it is related to the "Do you believe in Santa" thread, which is under the Christian topic, so I posted this one here too.

For Clarification: Black Holes are often discussed in science. There are many new and interesting theories being developed on them every day. Black Holes are not observable.

If God is going to be dismissed from possibility because such observable evidence cannot be produced - then Black Holes must also be dismissed from possibility.

So, for the same reasons - only with an opposite objective, let's ask these questions:

Do Black Holes exist?

Are Black Holes Scientific?

Cheers. 8)

aprilannies · Post by **aprilannies** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 3:23 am

GreenLight311 wrote:
I think this is a good point. Of course there are areas of science that do not have that willingness. Einstein is another example in that he would not accept Quantum Mechanics, even given the evidence. Also, while religious leaders do tend to be stubborn... that doesn't stop change from occurring when credible evidence is presented. I offer Martin Luther and the reformation as an example.

Interesting tidbit about Einstein, I wasn't aware of that

. But science as a whole you will agree is pretty flexible, if not always leading scientists. Most people, leaders or otherwise in this day and age, with strong dogmatic convictions are slow to revise them in light of strong evidence or not.

I feel like the reformation occurred more as a result of the abuses of the Catholic church rather than a change due to new evidence. But it did occur right after the advent of the printing press, right? So maybe increased circulation of the bible in the vulgate was a factor. Good point to think on.

ST88 · Post by **ST88** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 3:21 am

RevJP wrote:ST88, your support provides sufficient reason to accept Greenlight's view. The lie is not in the world, but in you. You understand that there are truths and realities beyond your senses, yet you only accept or consider what your senses reveal, or what your intellect currently understands.

I think you may have misunderstood me, but no matter. GreenLight and I agree on some things (I think), the most major being the scientific imperceptibility of God. This is all I was saying. I did not say that I thought there were truths and realities beyond my senses -- in fact I said I was deeply skeptical of such things. I accept the possibility of such things, but this does not mean I expect them to be true or even plausible. Possibility does not imply plausibility.

By "lie" I assume you mean the lie that there is no God. Well, that's fine. But in the God Model it's not a lie that comes from me, it's the lie that God made so that I can fool myself. It may very well be that God created the universe such that it was designed to fool scientists and people like me into thinking that he didn't exist (like Kayser Soze). But, such is life, that I can't accept that kind of explanation because it remains exclusively in the realm of rationalization.

RevJP wrote:By omission of possibility you lie to yourself. (references to YOU are generic not personal...)

There are plenty of positions one can take if one assumes that all possibilities are true. This does not mean that one needs to act as if they were true. In fact, I do not omit the possible. I merely state that it remains within the realm of possibility among all the other possibles, conflicting and overlapping as they all are. If there is no rational reason to hold one possible over another, it is necessary to treat them all with equal skepticism and suspicion.

RevJP · Post by **RevJP** » Tue Jan 18, 2005 11:47 am

By "lie" I assume you mean the lie that there is no God.

No sir, by lie I mean that you claim not to accept things that you readily accept. Faith, belief in things you cannot verify with your five senses, etc.

ST88 · Post by **ST88** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:03 pm

RevJP wrote:
By "lie" I assume you mean the lie that there is no God.
No sir, by lie I mean that you claim not to accept things that you readily accept. Faith, belief in things you cannot verify with your five senses, etc.

Acceptance of such things that I can't verify is probably the wrong word. In terms of day-to-day living, I can accept that there are quantum particles, for example, even though I personally can't prove that they are there. I feel confident, however, that should I get into the field of sub-atomic dynamics (or whatever the field is called), I would be able to work within the idea that they do exist (assuming I had the intellect for such a thing). This isn't because I think that the concept is valid or even likely, it's that so many other people who are in the field have reported their results to the satisfaction of other people in the field, and that many other theories fit nicely with the concept.

God, as far as I can tell, is an individual-witness-based concept. And anecdotal evidence is OK as long as the anecdotes generally agree with one another. But they don't. Many people reporting contact with God have wildly different, contradictory stories about it. Some who have been through the same experiences report different conclusions about it, such as the recent Virgin Mary on a Shingle cheese toast sandwich news item. What are we to make of priests who alter and deface statues to make them bleed tears in order to get more people to tithe? Is deception really the best way to get people in the door? What I mean to point out is that "lie" and "truth" have little meaning when it comes to faith.

RevJP · Post by **RevJP** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 2:31 pm

The difficulty I see is that you reference acts of men, things men do to enforce, or support, or advance, their religious ideologies, or scams, and attribute that to faith and God.

The two are mutually exclusive. Man has a way of taking something, anything, and bastardizing it in such a way to benefit himself. This is not something of faith, nor of God, which makes it truly sad for those like yourself, and most skeptics, who look at evidence or for evidence and often times see the surface and dismiss what truly lies beneath.

ENIGMA · Post by **ENIGMA** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 3:28 pm

RevJP wrote:The difficulty I see is that you reference acts of men, things men do to enforce, or support, or advance, their religious ideologies, or scams, and attribute that to faith and God.

The two are mutually exclusive. Man has a way of taking something, anything, and bastardizing it in such a way to benefit himself. This is not something of faith, nor of God, which makes it truly sad for those like yourself, and most skeptics, who look at evidence or for evidence and often times see the surface and dismiss what truly lies beneath.

Right, you only wish to claim the good things. Simple enough.

RevJP · Post by **RevJP** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:14 pm

I'm sorry, I don't get your meaning. What things am I claiming?

ST88 · Post by **ST88** » Sat Jan 22, 2005 1:05 am

RevJP wrote:The two are mutually exclusive. Man has a way of taking something, anything, and bastardizing it in such a way to benefit himself. This is not something of faith, nor of God, which makes it truly sad for those like yourself, and most skeptics, who look at evidence or for evidence and often times see the surface and dismiss what truly lies beneath.

"What truly lies beneath?" Are you saying that we shouldn't be skeptical of such claims? Because this completely validates the Christianity-as-The-Big-Lie argument. I have often argued for that Christianity is an accident of history, but this Big Lie argument intrigues me. I suppose you might argue that erstwhile holy men who fake such things are just bad apples. But what happens if these fakeries are never found out because the skeptics such as myself no longer practiced their skepticism? Would those good people persuaded to enter the Church based on such fake miracles be tainted Christians without even knowing it (idolators and such)? Which ones are fake?

See, the problem I have here is that when we say that Black Holes explain a particular set of otherwise anomalous data, we have the confidence of many many other instances where this kind of interpolation produced correct results. This is not faith, it is expectation, experimental prediction. Science isn't afraid of skepticism.

Dilettante · Post by **Dilettante** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:21 am

Greenlight311 wrote:

Quote:
Trebors1989: Black holes do exist. We have not seen black holes but we have observed them, just as we observe air, by noting their affect on things around them. This is how most scientific discoveries work.

Greenlight311:
Really? That's cool. That's how I know God exists too.

God does exist. We have not seen God but we have observed Him, just as we observe air, by noting His affect on things around Him. This is how most scientific discoveries work.

God is no more fiction than so many of our scientific notions. He is no less real, either. All the laws as we know them break down in Quantum Physics.

Greenlight, I'm afraid your above argument is not a good one. For one thing, the word "observe" when applied to measurable things cannot mean the same as when applied to God. Your argument reminds me of a similar one I once heard and which goes like this:

"God is invisible, but we can feel Him. Just like the wind is invisible
and still we can feel it on our faces"

The problem here is that the meaning of he word "feel" shifts in mid-argument (like the meaning of "observe" shifts in yours). "Feel" as a physical sensation is not he same as "feel" as a mental, subjective experience. Therefore, the argument is not valid. If you had a hundred people standing on a windswept plain, all of them would be able to feel the wind. But if you had those same people stare at the starry sky or the many natural wonders of our planet, not all of them would see God's hand behind them. Not all. Unles, of course, your sample consisted only of people who are already believers and thus, predisposed to "observe" God's influence.

Also, your idea of science seems to me highly idyosincratic. Science is not a set of beliefs. Granted, scientists are human and sometimes are reluctant to abandon a theory, especially if they have dedicated their whole life to it. But, as a rule, they are much more rational than religionists. There have been plenty of wars of religion, but no blood has ever been spilled to settle scientific disputes. Michael Servetus was not burned alive by John Calvin because of his science, but because of his religious views. Martin Luther, the example you cited, despised reason. Schismatic religious movements are not comparable to new scientific theories. Generally speaking, when two scientists disagree they can turn to some objective source of evidence to back up their claims. Perhaps in a few cases there will be some hard feelings for a while in one of the two camps, but no lives are taken. However, when men of religion disagree, they can't expect some objective evidence to settle their dispute. In the past they felt they had to resort religious violence instead. We are more civilized now (at least in some parts of the world) but this still happens...

And finally, as far as my limited knowledge of physics is concerned, QM does not invalidate all aspects of Einstein's theory, just as Einstein did not invalidate all Newton. Science is cumulative and self-correcting.

So, I honestly don't think you have a case here...

seventil · Post by **seventil** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 6:43 am

I've yet to read past the first page of posts, but I had to comment on this one!

First off, I believe in black holes and God for the exact same reason - believing in them helps make sense of the universe around us. While I may not love black holes like I do God, it is because they are merely a byproduct of His creation.

potwalloper. wrote: ...and the existence of the universe and the content of the bible are not measurable or observable "effects" in a scientific sense.

The effects of the content of the Bible are easily observable using the First Law of Thermodynamics. That is, something cannot be made from nothing. Period, end of point, all other arguments are null and void. Abiogenesis theories are interesting, yet I know of no evolutionist who will embrace them as empirical or truth. The same for the big bang theory; it's an idea, but it's not evidence. The only thing to adequately explain how anything is even in existance today is that it was created by a Higher Power.

Perhaps in the future science will uncover a way to solve this problem, but I don't think it will. Science is the pursuit of truth; and in my mind, when science reveals the truth, it will reveal God.

...but then science is logical - religion is not...

So says you; many say different. By my logic above, it would seem those who do not believe in divine intervention to be the ones lacking logic.

Interesting. How have we observed him/her/it? What effects are these exactly? I know of no observable effects from which the existence of god can be inferred - indeed there is no objective evidence and never has been throughout the history of mankind that god exists in any sense other than conceptual.

Such proofs would negate the need for faith, and turn what is holy into what is tangible.

When I say this you need to remember that references to bibilical scripts to me have no more weighting than references to Peter Pan stories or tales of Robin Hood. Unverifiable texts are not objective evidence...

I do hope you use this same mindset and logic when reading history books, scientific findings, or for that matter - anything you haven't seen first hand. I find it frustrating that you can take an alarmist approach on one thing, yet not on others, merely because it doesn't fit well with your life philosophy.