Hi Jeanie

More educated in science it seems but more intelligent, who knows, there’s a vast difference between the two. The most intelligent person who has never heard of science is as ignorant of it as the low IQ person with similar lack of education. It’s possible to be very well educated yet have a low IQ and vice versa but you don’t sound like you are on the low IQ end of the bell curve to me.

The main point I was trying to make was that we can’t rely on ‘common sense’ as a guide. We’ve long since proven that that leads to falsehoods. Lightning gods make perfect ‘common sense’ until you understand a bit of the science.

It is hard to ‘buy’ the closed universe idea isn’t it. That’s what I’m talking about. Common sense is out of it’s depth with such concepts. To ‘get it’ you really do need to dig into some profound scientific evidence and maths.

If its ever expanding how can it be closed???

Imagine a balloon with dots drawn on it. The universe is like that balloon. Each point on the surface get’s further away from every other one as the balloon expands with each breath. Now try to imagine that it is a fully three dimensional structure, not just a surface but a solid with dots scattered throughout it. Now as you blow all of the points, not just those on the surface, get further apart.

OK that’s about as far as that analogy can really take you. Next you have to imaging that the balloon has no surface and that there is nothing outside it. Not a vacuum but nothing. The balloon expands as it is blown up but it does not expand into anything, there is nothing outside it for it to expand into. The space inside the balloon get’s more spread out rather than the stars travelling away from each other.

One more wrinkle to the balloon analogy that you need to try to get your head around is the idea that the surface of the balloon (and all the contents when you think about it as a solid) is made up of the field lines of space time itself. The balloon is not made of rubber but space time. When we look at the light from distant stars and we see that it is red shifted what we are seeing is the stretching of the waves of electromagnetic radiation by the stretching of the space time it has passed through since it left the star. The longer ago the light started its journey the more stretched or red shifted it is and so we can measure how far away the original object was. But of course it was not so far away when the light was emitted, the distance has been growing as the light travelled and that stretching of space has red shifted the light as it travelled.

So in short the universe is closed or self contained and it expands by stretching the space time of which it is made rather than pushing into some new place so it does not need somewhere to expand into and, as far as we can tell, there is no such place anyway.

LOL sorry, did that make any sense?

It’s freaky stuff but the theory that describes it makes testable predictions that have been confirmed by observations time and again. There is far more maths to it that help to make sense of that if you are maths minded but that is a start on a visual picture of what happened. If I haven’t explained it properly please tell me where I went wrong and I’ll try to do better.

I can’t really talk about what god may or may not know. If he existed and he was the three omni’s then he would have to know everything which would clearly outstrip our knowledge or even our potential knowledge. Science does not show us that god does not exist but it continues to show that the universe we look at looks exactly how you would expect if there were no god but maybe that’s just how he wanted it. Only god concepts that make specific, scientifically testable statements can be examined by science but the idea of a god can’t be tested.

All the best Jeanie

Russell