Your opinion is not real.

Define real.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~ Philip K. Dick

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Perception is reality. If you perceive something a certain way, then that is your reality. If you believe you are a werewolf, then they are real in your reality. Doesn't mean everyone lives in the same reality. Reality is subjective to the observer.

I asked for you to define real.

Many, many people don't believe in religion. It hasn't gone away. Checkmate, atheists. :p

Look, I don't have any real skin in this game, but saying religion isn't real ignores the fact that religion occurs everywhere and at every time. It's like government or mating habits or art and music. They just are. Everyone has them because morality and social living are embedded into our dna. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to get along with each other or organize large groups of people. Religion is one of the natural expressions of that, organization; social structure, morality. Government kind of does the same thing, but the argument exists that religion does that better. Why? I don't know. Like many naturally occurring systems, it is currently in a phase of evolution. Religion isn't going anywhere. It's just changing it's face.

I find this post very strange for some reason.

I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the word "real", if you think you do then by your definition of real you in truth are not real.

I wonder what is your REAL agenda with this, you seem driven by something or someone... but anyway i had a nice laugh tho.

Prove it.

I'm an atheist. I think religion is ridiculous. However, it's irrational to state that "religion isn't real", because it's an untestable hypothesis. Much like other hypotheticals (we're living in a matrix, we're a brain in a vat, everyone else is a zombie) these also can't be disproven.

Although religion looks entirely made up, it's entirely possible that such a weird god does exist, but he made it look like he doesn't exist.

So, by all means disbelieve in religion, but don't go spouting irrational statements that can't be proved. God cannot be proved or disproved.

Atheism is a religion.

If there was no creation, then can be no creator. The universe was not created, therefore there is no creator of the universe, and thus there is no god.

A couple of points...

Religion is very real. I can show you mosques, churches and temples to prove it. I think you meant to say that the supernatural beings and forces the religious believe in aren't real.

Second the "fourth dimension" is time, not "human thought". Calling human thought some sort of physical reality separate from the human brain is itself a form of mumbo-jumbo mysticism.

Scientists believe the human brain is hardwired to have "religious" thoughts because they offered an evolutionary advantage. Personally, I think a "god" is just a mental image of an absent "Alpha Male".

Think of a wolf pack... what stops the lower ranked males taking off with the females when the Alpha is not around? Fear that the Alpha Male will come back and punish them.

Basically, a god is the "Alpha Male" off on a hunt, and we humans are the lower ranked males behaving ourselves in case the Alpha returns and punishes us. It works for the wolves, so why not humans?

If you are admitting that religion is real, but the things the religious believe in are not, then we're not arguing.

There is no doubt at all that religion is real. It is a proven fact that humans have had some form of religion since we evolved, and our evolutionary ancestors probably also had some form of religion.

There is no proof a god exists. There is no proof that supernatural forces exist. They are not real. But the belief in them is very real.

The fourth dimension is time. Thought has nothing to do with time.

Nope. Time is a physical reality. It existed before there was anyone to think it was only a thought.

Bullshit.

Time is a real thing. In fact science tells us that space and time are one, which is why we talk about "spacetime".

Evolution of a brain that thinks could not happen without time. Unless you think fully formed brains were created by some sort of supernatural force, you have to agree that time existed before there were thoughts.

Or maybe you're religious and believe in mumbo-jumbo? shrug...

No, events literally happen one after another. That's how evolution works.

Then why do events unfold in a cause-effect relationship when there is no human around to witness it?

Ingest 5g or more of dried cubensis mushrooms in silent darkness, and dissolve your ego for a bit.

You can transcend religion and culture and experience That which remains...

Various and sundry sky deities may or may not be real, but religion is very real....and tax exempt.

Truth exists.

Truth is light. It is quantifiable.

So how did the big bang happen? If energy cannot be created nor destroyed (only transfers)? Still waiting for an answer on that. I'm not religious, mind you.

So where does thought come from?

So how did the big bang happen?

It didn't. The "Big Bang" is a pseudo-scientific theory of Creation invented by a Catholic Priest to give a "scientific" veneer to Catholic Dogma.

The universe is infinite in all four dimensions. It has always existed and will always exist, regardless of the unproven theories humankind invents to explain it.

I didn't know that Stephen Hawking, the physicist who created the idea of the "Big Bang" was actually a Catholic Priest!! Wow. What else does he do in his spare time. You know, when he's not writing books about time, and stuck in that wheelchair?

I didn't know that Stephen Hawking, the physicist who created the idea of the "Big Bang"

LOL. Maybe you should get an education before you comment on topics you know nothing about.

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (French: [ʒɔʁʒə ləmɛtʁ] ( listen); 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.[1] He proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble.[2][3] He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.[4][5][6][7] Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

Stephen Hawking wasn't even born when the Catholic Priest Georges Lemaitre proposed the "Big Bang" theory.

http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/scientists_schwarzschild.html Proposing the theory, does not count as discovery. Discovery is when you test everything and come to a conclusion. Prior to the proof of the theory, it's a hypothesis, or a postulate. (Hypothesis if it might be proved, postulate if it can not be proven and is simply accepted as truth.)

Though if you REALLY want to go back, the original person who put forth the theory that a black hole may exist, was an amateur named John Michell, in 1783. Which puts him 12 years before Lamaitre, and thus makes him first.

Black holes have nothing to do with the "Big Bang".

Prior to Lemaitre (and during the early years of his theory), the universe was considered to be static and eternal. He was the first to propose that Einstein's theories suggested the universe was expanding, and winding back the clock, that it had expanded from a "Primordial Atom" - the "Big Bang".

The term "Big Bang" was invented by scientists that wanted to mock this theory of "creation from nothing" by calling it a "Big Bang". The very name was an insult directed at the people that believed in it.

Two years after he proposed his hypothesis, Edwin Hubble made observations of red shift and found that red shift increased with distance. Many scientists, but not including Hubble himself, interpreted that observation as a "Doppler shift" meaning the universe was expanding. That was then considered to be proof of Lemaitre's hypothesis, and the "Big Bang Theory" was born. Hubble never agreed with that interpretation of his observations, but that didn't matter to the scientists (many, if not most, of whom were religious) that decided to plaster his name all over the theory.

Actually, they have everything to do with it.

Hawking theorizes that prior to what we know as the "Big Bang" there was a period where matter was compressed into an infinitely small space, with such gravitational pull that even photons could not escape it. That being the typical definition of a black hole. He goes on to theorize that this black hole (though on a much larger scale) reached a critical mass and exploded, thus creating the universe.

Quote Hawking:

The Big Bang is like a black hole but on a much larger scale. By finding out how a black hole creates matter we may understand how the Big Bang created all the matter in the Universe.

It is not actually correct to refer to "the big bang theory." In fact, there have been at least five different theories, each of which has run into trouble. The first, as we have seen, was put forward in 1927 by Lemaître. This was soon refuted on a number of different grounds—incorrect conclusions drawn from general relativity and thermodynamics, a false theory of cosmic rays and stellar evolution, etc. After the Second World War, the discredited theory was revived by George Gamow and others in a new form. A number of calculations were advanced by Gamow and others, (incidentally, not without a certain amount of scientific "creative accountancy") to explain the different phenomena which would flow from the big bang—density of matter, temperature, radiation levels, and so on. George Gamow’s brilliant style of writing ensured that the big bang captured the popular imagination. Once again, the theory ran up against serious problems.

A whole number of discrepancies were found which invalidated, not only Gamow’s model, but the "oscillating universe" model subsequently worked out by Robert Dicke and others, in an attempt to get round the problem of what happened before the big bang, by making the universe oscillate in a never-ending cycle. But Gamow had made one important prediction—that such an immense explosion would leave behind evidence in the form of "background radiation," a kind of echo of the big bang in space. This was used to revive the theory some years later.

From the beginning there was opposition to the idea. In 1928 Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi advanced the "steady state" as an alternative, later popularised by Fred Hoyle. While accepting the expanding universe, it attempted to explain it by the "continuous creation of matter from nothing." This was alleged to be happening all the time, but at a rate too slow to be detected by present-day technology. This means that the universe remains essentially the same for all time, hence the "steady state" theory. Thus matters went from bad to worse. From the "cosmic egg" to matter created out of nothing! The two rival theories slugged it out for over a decade.

The very fact that so many serious scientists were prepared to accept Hoyle’s fantastic notion that matter was being created out of nothing is itself absolutely astonishing. In the event, this theory was shown to be false. The steady state theory assumed the universe to be homogeneous in time and space. If the universe were in a "steady state" for all time, the density of a radio-emitting object ought to be constant, since the further we look out into space, the further back in time we see. However, observations showed that this was not the case; the further they looked out into space, the greater the intensity of the radio waves. This proved conclusively that the universe was in a constant state of change and evolution. It had not always been the same. The steady state theory was wrong.

In 1964, the steady state theory received the coup de grace with the discovery by two young astronomers in the USA, Arnas Penzias and Robert Wilson, of background radiation in space. This was immediately taken to be the "after-echo" of the big bang, predicted by Gamow. Even so, there were inconsistencies. The temperature of the radiation was found to be only 3.5°K, not the 20°K predicted by Gamow, or the 30°K predicted by his successor, P. J. E. Peebles. This result is even worse than it looks. Since the amount of energy in a field is proportional to the 4th power of its temperature, the energy of the observed radiation was actually several thousand times less than that predicted.

Robert Dicke and P. J. E. Peebles took over the theory where Gamow had left off. Dicke realised that there was a handy way of getting round the sticky question of what happened before the big bang, if only they could get back to Einstein’s idea of a closed universe. It could then be argued that the universe would expand for a time, then collapse to a single point (a "singularity"), or something near it, and then bounce back into expansion, in a kind of everlasting cosmic ping-pong game. The trouble was that Gamow had calculated the energy and density of the universe at levels just short of what would be needed to close the universe. The density was about two atoms per cubic meter of space; and the energy density, expressed as the predicted temperature of the background radiation, supposed to represent the remnants of the big bang, 20°K, i.e., 20 degrees above absolute zero. In fact, Gamow had fixed these figures in order to prove that the big bang produced heavy elements, something nobody now accepted. So Dicke unceremoniously ditched them, and selected new and equally arbitrary figures, which would fit in with his theory of a closed universe.

Dicke and Peebles predicted that the universe would be filled with radiation, mainly radio waves, with a temperature of 30°K. Later, Dicke claimed his group had predicted a temperature of 10°K, although this figure does not appear anywhere in his published notes, and is anyway a 100 times more than the observed result. This showed that the universe was more diffuse than Gamow had thought, with less gravity, which aggravated the basic problem of where all the energy for the big bang came from. As Eric Lerner points out:

"Far from confirming the Peebles-Dicke model, the Penzias-Wilson discovery clearly ruled out the closed oscillating model." (55) Thus arose a third version of the big bang—which became known as the standard model—an open universe in a permanent state of expansion.

Fred Hoyle did some detailed calculations, and announced that a big bang would produce only light elements—helium, deuterium and lithium (the latter two are actually quite rare). He calculated that if the density of the universe were about one atom per eight cubic metres, the amounts of these three light elements would be quite close to those actually observed. In this way, a new version of the theory was put forward which was nothing like the older theories. This no longer mentioned the cosmic rays of Lemaître, or the heavy elements of Gamow. Instead, the evidence put forward was the microwave background and three light elements. Yet none of this constitutes conclusive proof for the big bang. A major problem was the extreme smoothness of the background microwave radiation. The so-called irregularities in the background are so small that these fluctuations would not have had time to grow into galaxies—not unless there was a lot more matter (and therefore a lot more gravity) around than appears to be the case.

There were other problems, too. How does it come about that bits of matter flying in opposite directions all managed to reach the same temperature, and all at the same time (the "horizon" problem)? The partisans of the theory present the alleged origins of the universe as a model of mathematical perfection, all perfectly regular, a regular "Eden of symmetry whose characteristics conform to pure reason," as Lerner puts it. But the present universe is anything but perfectly symmetrical. It is irregular, contradictory, "lumpy." Not at all the stuff that well-mannered equations are made of down at Cambridge! One of the problems is why did the big bang not produce a smooth universe? Why did not the original simple material and energy just spread out evenly in space as an immense haze of dust and gas? Why is the present universe so "lumpy"? Where did all these galaxies and stars come from? So how did we get from A to B? How did the pure symmetry of the early universe give rise to the present irregular one we see before our eyes?

Do you want me to continue to prove you wrong?

Actually, they have everything to do with it.

No, they literally have nothing to do with the "Big Bang" theory.

What Hawking now proposes nearly a century after the "Big Bang" theory was invented had literally nothing to do with the creation of that theory. No one even believed in black holes when Lemaitre proposed the "Big Bang" - your own link proved it.

I'm not even going bother to comment on the rest of your reply as it clearly has nothing at all to do with the original proposal and acceptance of the "Big Bang Theory", which is what I was talking about.

The fact is, a Catholic Priest invented it, and despite it being proved wrong several times over, and it being totally unable to explain the universe we see without invoking imaginary forces and matter, it is now "scientific" dogma as well as religious dogma.

Do you want me to continue to prove you wrong?

You haven't done it once. In fact I believe you actually admitted I was right:

The first, as we have seen, was put forward in 1927 by Lemaître.

Yes. I was right. Thanks for admitting it.

Oh bloody hell.

Ok, let's back up here and talk reading comprehension.

Quote: This was soon refuted on a number of different grounds—incorrect conclusions drawn from general relativity and thermodynamics, a false theory of cosmic rays and stellar evolution, etc.

Now what that means is VERY simple. Lemaitre's theory was BUNK, bullshit, wrong, and any manner of other terms for it. It was completely disregarded by the scientific community, and is wrong to suggest he was right, when the scientific community decided "nope, this guy's a nutter who has no clue what he's talking about."

Lemaitre's theory was BUNK, bullshit, wrong, and any manner of other terms for it.

And yet it forms the basis of the currently accepted theory. I know it was bunk, that's what I have been saying. Every modification to it since then has also been bunk.

Right now, scientists admit their theory of the universe can not explain over 90% of the mass-energy of the universe. There is literally no theoretical explanation for "Dark Energy", for example. They simply have no idea. The only reason they even suspect it exists is because their theory was proved wrong by the observations.

They invented a new "Dark Energy" to explain why their theory was wrong, and it wasn't the first time. Every time the "Big Bang" has failed to predict how the universe actually works, the scientists simply claim the universe is wrong, not their theory.

That is literally "dogma".

In the 1970's, the "Big Bang" theory was collapsing. It simply could not explain how the universe we see was formed. One problem was the "Horizon Problem":

The horizon problem is a problem with the standard cosmological model of the Big Bang which was identified in the late 1960s, primarily by Charles Misner. It points out that different regions of the universe have not "contacted" each other because of the great distances between them, but nevertheless they have the same temperature and other physical properties. This should not be possible, given that the transfer of information (or energy, heat, etc.) can occur, at most, at the speed of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem

This was a major problem because it meant that the "Big Bang" theory did not predict the universe we observe. When a theory fails to predict the observations it is wrong.

Then in the early 1980's, along comes Alan Guth. He invents a totally new force - "the Inflation Field" - and claims that it caused the universe to suddenly inflate at a very rapid pace:

The theory of cosmic inflation has attempted to solve the problem[2] (along with several other problems such as the flatness problem) by postulating a short 10−32 second period of exponential expansion (dubbed "inflation") in the first seconds of the history of the universe. During inflation, the universe would have increased in size by an enormous factor. Prior to the inflation the entire universe was small and causally connected; it was during this period that the physical properties evened out. Inflation then expanded the universe rapidly, "locking in" the uniformity at large distances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem#Inflation

This has become the accepted explanation for how the "Big Bang" could have lead to the universe we observe, but:

A recurrent criticism of inflation is that the invoked inflation field does not correspond to any known physical field, and that its potential energy curve seems to be an ad hoc contrivance to accommodate almost any data obtainable. Paul Steinhardt, one of the founding fathers of inflationary cosmology, has recently become one of the sharpest critics of the theory and points out that inflation does not solve the horizon problem, because it actually produces a multiverse that includes an infinite number of patches that are not homogeneous or isotropic. In the multiverse picture, it is an unlikely accident that our universe is as homogeneous and isotropic as it is observed to be.

Alan Guth simply invented a mathematical trick to force the "Big Bang" to skip over one of its major problems. This "inflation field" has never been proved to exist, it is clearly an 'ad hoc' contrivance, and doesn't really solve the problem anyway.

But we are told it is a fact, because without it the "Big Bang" theory is simply wrong.

Time and again, the "Big Bang" theory made a prediction that the observations proved to be wrong, and rather than accepting that the theory is wrong, scientists simply invented magical forces and matter to explain away the observations - forces and matter that have never been proved to exist and themselves are not predicted by the "Big Bang" theory.

And it all comes back to that original pseudo-scientific "creation" myth invented by a Catholic Priest. That's the one thing they will not give up, no matter how much evidence there is against it.

You sir, get it!

-says the religious nihilist, the pessimistic pantheist.