The idea that there could be another Big Bang and another universe is a theory, but it does not seem to me that it is anything I can be certain of. It just seems to me that it requires a great deal of faith, in fact more faith, to believe in this theory, than it does to believe in God and in the Bible. After all, nobody has ever seen a Big Bang producing a highly organized and complex universe that includes eyes and brains, etc., and there is no proof that it ever did so. Nothing like it has ever been produced in a laboratory or been scientifically verified.

I find it more reasonable to believe in the Bible's explantion of things. I trust the Bible and its views of God and the universe because the Bible has been proven to be trustworthy in many other ways, such as in archeology, prophecy, history, and human experience. For instance, the Bible's analysis of sin and of how God provides power to overcome sin is all in accordance with my own personal experience. Finally, I'm also persuaded of the truth of what the Bible says about Jesus Christ. It would be just incredible to me that its prophecies of Jesus' first advent could have been made up or that the whole history of the rise of Christianity could be a fiction. Therefore, I am faced with a decision whether to believe the Bible or a theory that leads either to the death of this world or perhaps to another Big Bang. In the final analysis, I simply find the Bible's view of God and of the universe more reasonable and, taken all in all, more in line with the weight of evidence.

The fact that some energy is always lost at each step would seem to me to mean that the universe cannot be eternal. That is, there could not be an endless series of Big Bangs followed by another universe because at some point there would not be sufficient energy to bring about a Big Bang.



Could you give an example of a natural increase of order in the universe or in our solar system, that is, apart from what people do in construction?

I think the examples of man's creations are not very good ones because they seem to me to only demonstrate that there must be a Mind, or some sort of planner or sustainer, in order for there to be an increase in order in the universe.

True. Our galaxy is typical in that way, among others. Black holes power galaxies, in a sense. There are also countervailing forces. One scenario is that ultimately, the black hole will overpower those other forces. At the same time, black holes have life cycles. They represent stars which have become so dense that gravity overpowers all other forces, including the emission of light. But they are not static. The process is ongoing. There is no magical moment. They simply continue imploding, and have their ultimate end.

One of the less credible notions which some have speculated. First of all . . . a black hole is simply a star of sufficient mass (greater than 1.44 times the mass of the sun) to avoid the fate of a white dwarf. There would not be a single Black Hole which would swallow up the universe. That is quite simply incredible. The gravitational field of a black hole is finite, and is not such that it would suck in distant galaxies.

Secondly, once matter passes the horizon of a black hole, it loses any form and, if I recall correctly, molecules are stripped of atoms, etc. (We are delving into the realm of quantum mechanics here, inside a Black Hole, in which Einstein's theories do not hold true.) What the black hole spits out the other end, is quite literally rubbish. No Big Bang here!



An interesting statement, and one which requires further explanation and qualification. "Enormous" scale? Hmmmm.



Actually, statistical entropy is a powerful argument against self-organization of matter.



Your example deals with guided processes, so is not on point.

That may be, but what I am concerned with here is the fact that this view of the universe-- that it will run down and run out of energy and come to a screeching halt in about 10 billions years, only to result in perhaps another Big Bang-- is obviously contradicted in some extremely significant ways by the Bible's picture of the future. What we are ultimately left with is that apart from God's intervention, our world and everyone in it is doomed to an eternal death. The contradictions and differences could scarcely be more stark.

It is interesting to note, in view of the modern theory of the repetition of Big Bangs and the creation of multiple universes, that the German philosopher Nietzsche taught something that he called "eternal recurrence" in Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 56, and also in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 4, Chs. 8-11. "All joy wants the eternity of all things," and "God is a vicious cycle," etc. He envisioned that everything, down to the minutest detail, would be eternally repeated. It seems to me that in some sense Nietzsche anticipated the concept of eternally repeating universes.

What evidence is there for either an open or a closed system? Why would one come to the conclusion that it must be open? It seems to me that unless we have good reason to believe it is open, the most reasonable conclusion would be that it is more likely to be closed. For me the only hope of its being an open universe is God's existence.

au contraire - seems identical to me. Apart from God's intervention, our world and everyone in it *is* doomed to an eternal death.

Cloud formation out of water vapor, crystals, the growth of a tree, a bee hive, Wave formation, oil droplets, Cell reproduction, the growth of you

/Bevin

Or, for that matter, a 'system' of any kind for purposes of thermodynamics? We are not here speaking of the solar 'system,' or any planetary system, or of a galaxy, or even of a galactic cluster, but of the universe.

On the one hand, organic evolution, apart from God's intervention in the natural processes, leads to our world's ultimate destruction and everyone's death, without hope of anything but nothingness. On the other, the Bible teaches that millions of people because of their faith will live eternally with God on a new earth that will last forever, and it gives us directions that tell us in clear terms how we can be among them. Those are two very different and contradictory views.