A proper understanding of logical fallacies will improve the quality of debate

I'm curious: did you actually read the book, come to this analysis from it, and then quote it here? Or did you find this quote on another website and then copy and paste it over here?To me it looks like you've been reading a website about quotes from physicist that look like they support a belief in god, rather than actually reading the book and comming to your own conclusions. If that's the case, you should be providing links to the websites you're pulling from (and its real easy to go ahead and C&P the address bar right afterwards).Further, using quotes is not a good way to argue in the first place. Rather than having an interesting discussion about what's what, it ends up being a discussion about what other people meant from a few words that are attributed to them.

Because when the quote is read in its context, it doesn't imply what you claim. But that's not what ends up happening... it turns into a discussion about what somebody else meant. We're here to discuss what each other thinks, not what we think other people think. I don't think the Big Band smacks of divine intervention, and I don't think Hawking's thinks that either.There isn't really a better place at this point in time to put the disagreement.

Ah, I see. That's not what the Big Bang has to be. Even without a beginning of time that started with a singularity, you can still have a Big Bang. That's what the analogy of the North Pole is showing... with a smoothing out of the dimension that is time as you approach the big bang, you can get away from a special creation "point" in time without having to get rid of the Big Bang, which is the expansion immediately after where that point would have been.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

Yes you can: two branes collide and cause a big bang. The Big Bounce also has a big bang that doesn't have a beginning of time there. To paraphrase: "Many people don't like the big bang because they think it smacks of divine intervention (but I don't think it does)." An unbounded universe can still be finite...The surface of a globe is finite, yet unbounded. The North Pole analogy explains this too.

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Don't forget the the singularity is not some "thing" that was proposed to have "existed"... it was just a consequence of the mathematics that explained the observations. A rejection of the singularity is not a rejection of something that was onece thought to exist.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

Yup, lets say there's guy who wants the Big Bang to support the concept of a creator. He stumble's across this quote:

quote:

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Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

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Through Confirmation Bias, he would think that the author was describing his own reason for disliking the idea, rather than the many people's reason.

Okay, yeah... we've got a lot to clear up here. Your conception of the Big Bang, the singularity, and time itself has a lot of improvement to be made. We really need to get another topic going where we can discuss just that. And hopefully we can do it without quoting other people...