Most Cosmologists and Physicists aren't looking for a designer or a prime mover, and I'm certainly not one of those "The Big Bang happened, but I know who banged it" types. Besides, with the developments in Cosmic Inflation, we very well might be making some astronomically large revisions.
Whoever looks into the causes of effects are ultimately looking for a designer or prime mover, or they've stopped their search too early. Every effect we know has a cause, and this certainly does regress infinitely, with no problem to any logic.
No one knows
what banged it, surely.
Who implies and assumes far too much to have a chance to look at the idea of a designer on its own merits. That being said, science has helped the idea of design, with its ever-expanding library showing evidence of cosmic order, more than religion ever could. Religion gave the intuition, science is consistently building the proof.
Even if there was never a centralized point of all matter, matter still had an origin. If there was no origin, herein defined to mean the common origin idea of 'something out of nothing,' and everything simply always
was or is the result of expansion-compression from previous universes, that doesn't remove the essence of whatever it was that placed everything where it is and ordered it to be continuous and inflating and compressing and moving.
We're not even dealing with questions of purpose or "Why?"s yet to invoke a designer. The notion of everything happening because it just happened that way, all while fitting into an established order, and having this quanta of seeming randomness calculated into that order, should make it difficult to look at everything and with intellectual honesty say "the universe is just winging it with no plan."
Holy shit. I just saw this. Really? Does anything I wrote in this thread give you the slightest indication that I believe in God?
I didn't say God(though you probably do more than many religious people, even if you say you don't. hell, maybe it's because you say you don't lol), I said religion.
You wrote "Using String Theory to prove there's a designer (or team of them) is not any better than any of the Abrahamic religions."
Saying there cannot be a designer is a religious conclusion targeting a narrow definition of design, and is not based in science to any degree. It's putting the cart miles ahead of the horse. That's why.
I was being slightly facetious, because you were throwing around what you thought was science, but it read like bible thumpers and their belief of the Earth existing for ~6000 years.
Scientific terms can be in direct line with the thought process layman religious folk use: keywords and buzzwords without knowing much else of it. Buzzword example: cosmological inflation is close to the idea of multiple heavens, or infinitely extending reality, all of which I can almost guarantee are not properly understood by many self-professed scientific or religious people. With buzzwords, the scientist can think and agree existentially with the most blindly religious person. Think about that, the good and bad in that; intuition and proof, religion and science. The religious know the answer without knowing the process, which is useless, but scientific people know the process without knowing the answer, which is uninspiring. Science needs context, wonderment, awe, to progress, and that comes from understanding and explaining discoveries in a way that naturally makes someone look up at a starry sky and smile. That smile is not at all because of the image of many galaxies in Hubble's Deep Field(though some just like da pretty colors), but because of what that image's content means to them, humanity, human thought, connection to what simpler people dreamt about, and all that kind of qualitative stuff that helps inspire scientists to become scientists to discover and create the quantatative stuff(read: boring science work leading to awesome stuff) that feeds more spiritually oriented minds into becoming better than what they are. Science creates a more exact picture of God for the religious, it frees them from bondage.
When you look up at the sky and feel unexplicable wonder, it's the same exact feeling as a religious nut. Everything you have and know is everything they are missing, and everything they have and know is what you are missing; starcrossed lovers and all.
Further, just because someone uses scientific terms does not make them appear any less religious in my eyes until i hear the rest of what they believe. But that might take a while.
People come from the sky and the earth --- Was I just religious or scientific?
P.S. I may be against atheism in debate, but one thing for damn sure they do is fight to keep church and state separated. The Church is not The Religion, it's a politi...you know the rest. Sorry this post expanded on a lot of stuff, i was trying to keep it so short and concise :\ I cut off many paragraphs, but they were touchy-feely warm athesit-theist friendship sing-alongs.