Oh, and I definitely didn't mean that string theory should be taught as dogma. Stupid typo on my part, the part should be "as with anything dealing with science, it *shouldn't* be taught as dogma".

Nope, you just didn't understand it.

It seems that you didn't.

Yes, it really seems that you didn't read the article. For example, steady state theory doesn't explain the CMB, which was observed well before the 80s.

Repeating your rubbish doesn't make it right. How about this: Go to your local university or look up their site for email contact info, find an astronomer or a cosmologist, and ask his/her view on this.

So you think that for example string theorists are/were labelled as creationists for proposing systems that would lead to a Big Bang?

How laughable can you get? Your evidence is two popular accounts of a scientific theory? And the "U of M" site has its latest reference from 1995, do you think that Wiki might have a bit more up-to-date info?

:D This one is a gem. Sure, like winning lottery is a 50/50 shot. You either win, or you don't.

Oops, you did it again. An explosion would require pre-existing space. The explosion description is only an analogy.

You seem to be very confused about what a theory means. I'll give you an analogy: At a time when we didn't have very exact measurements of the speed of light in vacuum, your absurd definition of a theory would mean that there's an infinity of Einsteinian theories of relativity. One has the speed of light value of 299 792 458 m/s, another 299 792 458.1 m/s. That's just plain rubbish. There's one special and one general theory of relativity, with the parameter values we have measured. Other parameter values are ruled out the measurements.

Show me where this was proven. And again, no-one using the abbreviation "EV" should tell you something.

WTF? I even gave you a link to what I think you mean by the U of M site. If it's not the correct, please provide an actual reference.

And while I'm not a cosmologist or an astronomer, I'd say I have a reasonable understanding of the BB theory and its history. Heck, reading about cosmology some 18 years ago was the main reason for me to start studying physics a few years later, and I still closely follow the area of research.

Please provide references. In secular countries the US, teaching religion in this sense in schools is already illegal. But I'd like you to show me where he demands that parents indoctrinating their children with a religion should be made illegal instead of it being morally wrong.

I'm not sure where you got this part, but for once, you are right. Teaching critical thinking is not indoctrination, though.

You are missing the part about teaching them to believe and not question a fairy tale.

Rubbish. Telling children that a fairy tale is true is not comparable to presenting the current scientific knowledge.

Religion is not a theory, it's fantasy.

Well, String Theories have at least some hope of being correct. But, as with anything dealing with science, it should be taught as dogma. You are once again building a straw man, as I've nowhere demanded punishing parents for teaching religious rubbish to their children.

Stalin condemned a big lot of non-religious communists to death, too, while there remained persons in the USSR who were not condemned to death. To blame atheism for the acts done in building up a person cult and a dictatorship is ignorance of historical facts.

While I sort of agree with you (bad people would do bad things with or without religion, and so on), what's your apologist explanation for the wreck that Catholicism has given us in the AIDS situation in Africa?

Yet again, your reading comprehension fails you. The analogy was never about giving children heroin.

I did not miss it, and it's still not rational or logical, at least as long as your creator has any religious context. To believe in someone pressing the button to start our universe is a position that can't be disproved, but the evidence we have is very much against an omniscient and -potent being.

OK, how did you come to your conclusion? What evidence did you use to get there.

Well, that's what religions do. Be gay and want to get married in my country, tough luck, you are a pervert and will go to hell. And that's because the Christians say so.

There were several factual errors, starting from your revisionist claims of BB theory, which I showed wrong. Buy the G. Gamow's book I mentioned, or better yet, find Gamow's BB nucleosynthesis article from 1948 (that's before event there was the rather misleading name "Big Bang theory").

Well, pretty much so. Show me the evidence for your argument, which have absolutely refused to do.

Krauss bases his view on what we can observe (in the scientific sense, in a repeatable way), and speculates on what we can possibly extrapolate from that data. Any religious view can't do that. And yet, the scientific views like Krauss's doesn't say you *must* believe like me, it's rather that you should look at the evidence (or lack of it) we have, and draw your own conclusions, not cram it down your children's throats.

Again, show me where he requires punishment for that. You don't say what your *prime question* is, but I'd guess it has something to do with the beginning of the universe, and Krauss along with others is actually helping a new generation or two to get some handle in perhaps digging into those issues.

Common misunderstanding in these issues, in your part, that is. If I abuse my children by calling them bastards every now and them, while otherwise keeping good care of them, it's not a punishable offence. You just don't want understand underlying issues that may affect the development of a child if he, say, has to always be afraid of going to hell if he does one bad thing.

Did you decide that someone believing that there is a creator is as harmful to society as feeding a child heroin.

And you didn't get it. In the example, I would be just expressing my opinion that heroin is good for you, not feeding or injecting anyone with heroin.

Where did I do that?

Where did Hitler go? Oh, he was shown to have deep religious connections. I'd guess Stalin is the next one to drop off the list with his religious training... Where is the Pope on your list? The body count in Africa is getting pretty good with the prevention of condom usage. Or the Christian God, the worst murderer of all times (at least for the Christians): He invented death.
 

I have no idea of how we got from your atheist bashing and BB theory misconceptions to this point, but very well... Would you endorse an establishment that systematically protects pedophiles? The Catholic Church did, and there's good documentation that the just-retired Pope Ratzi did. These abuse cases have been going on for years and years now. If a system is rotten at the top, why do even bring in the congregations? And sadly, even congregations did want the cases hidden, but I'll let you Google for that. Or.. (I'll loan your next line) Hell no. The congregation, consisting partly of the parents of the abused children, at least created a culture of silence, where the abused couldn't speak out about the abuse. I'll let you Google that.

On the base level of this discussion, I'm asking you to justify that. There is no sign of a creator, so why believing one is rational and logical. And, where did that creator come from?

How did you come to the "answer" of a creator? There is no evidence for it, and, as far as any creators as the religions describe them, our available data rather outrules them. Indoctrinating your child with, say, the Christian creation story is wrong, if it prevents him from understanding scientific theories like the theory of evolution.

To do what? To make speeches? If you think that they are preaching instead of presenting the current scientific theories, perhaps with their own pet hypotheses, you are just plain wrong.

And still no acknowledgements of the factual errors you have presented...

Provide quotation for the requirement of jailing the parents. Saying that religious indoctrination is a form of child abuse doesn't mean claiming that the parents should be jailed for that.

That does not follow at all. The laws in my country say that hard drugs like heroin are illegal, and I wouldn't be a criminal by determining that hard drugs are necessary for people.

OK, please show where this happens in science and atheism. It's pure rubbish, even Krauss, who you so eager to put down, has published a book that clearly establishes the fact that we don't know what happened at the beginning or even if there really was a beginning per se at all, and then goes on to present some of his views on the subject.

You nicely ignore the points showing that you are factually wrong.

Why don't you quote what you actually claimed? Krauss does not say that we are 100 % certain that there isn't a creator and so on, he says that a) we can build hypotheses that don't require a creator, and b) we have no evidence of such an entity. Thus a creator is an unlikely hypothesis.

It's not an ad hominem when the religion's (Christianity I'd guess) holy book exactly describes a bully god. It's not an ad hominem to attack an idea.

People pay public speakers, was that news to you? And drop the "EV" junk.

Science by definition doesn't recognize anything supernatural, including gods.

Well, can you show some scientific work and results done by creationists? The ID folk have tried and tried, and nothing has come out of it. Rubbish like irreducible complexity has been presented, and shown wrong.

There's plenty of private parties like the Templeton Foundation with money to spare on non-scientific studies.

Well, I'm a physicist (in a different field), and I don't think that anyone I know who's working in a related area would agree with you. Why don't you present some of those competing theories that have passed peer review?

That your source doesn't recognize your "EV" should tell you something. Googling for "U of M big bang" produces this: http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm There's nothing to support your claims there. If you are talking about some other site, please give the reference.

Where? What ball of mass? And what's a "massive publication"? There are always fringe hypotheses that may even get published in decent journals, but data is what sorts the incorrect ones out (see below).

Read up on the research. The Planck probe gives our best estimate for the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, and Planck is working at a resolution level that won't get better by improving the detection system. Anything claiming the age to be much more than that is excluded by the data, unless a non-BB universe is proposed too.

I have to say I got a laugh out of this. Bundling math with science in terms of theories is ridiculous; unlike science, in math you have proofs.

Sorry, messed up the last quote.

You simply don't know what you are talking about here. For example, George Gamow describes the essentials of current Big Bang theory in his textbook The Creation of the Universe, written in semi-popular style in 1952, only 3 years after the term Big Bang was coined. The book doesn't include inflation, which came later to explain the smoothness of the high-energy state, and it has some specific details wrong, like the estimate for the CMB temperature is an order of magnitude too high, as at the time the estimate for the age of the universe was an order of magnitude low, and the two are inversely proportional.

Google finds zero hits for that quote. I know Lawrence Krauss, and I even own some of his books. The context is important here; so what if a physicist doesn't want to speculate about multiverse and eternal inflation scenarios to answer questions that we don't know answers for, possibly in some popular interview, and instead answer with a flippant remark? What he says is: "I don't know, but we have some hypotheses that don't require the God of the Old Testament to create the universe."

Who are paid to claim those things? The vocal atheists are saying that in light of the evidence (or lack of it), it seems very unlikely that there is a god or gods, and that we have a framework which does a god job in explaining what we see about our universe at the moment.

You already go wrong here. For example virtual particles just "happen", without anything in particular making them appear at this particular moment.

These questions show that you know very little about the Big Bang (BB) theories. First one: There was no ball of mass. The current prevailing inflationary BB theories suggest that after a period of exponential expansion, the observable universe was formed from the energy released from the inflation field in a phase change, giving rise to a high energy state. Second question is basically just a rephrasing of the first one.

Rubbish. Produce the exact quote in context.

Again, rubbish. The scientific position is that as we have no theory extending to the beginning of our universe, the question is unanswerable. If there is some sort of a specific beginning or a cause, it could be eternal inflation, a guy starting up his computer universe simulator, or Odin. We have no way of differentiating between those options.

No. Anyone asking the question *within BB theory* is ignorant of the theory, in the same way that someone asking about the origin of life on Earth with the theory of evolution is ignorant of the theory.

The rest of your post is just you banging on your straw man.

After the announcement, Nokia stock price has gone down 15 % from yesterday's closing value at OMX Helsinki. So, not the kind of announcement the market was expecting, it seems.

It's still irrelevant in the context of the prize criteria. If the prize would have been given for creating Linux as an operating system, the GGP would have some point, but TFA explicitly says that creating the *kernel* was the achievement that was found laudable.

No, because the prize was awarded for developing just the kernel.