• Question: Do you have a religion, and if so do you believe in the big bang or God creating the world? :)

    Asked by Alishaaa :) to Iain, Hayley, Anna, Rebecca on 15 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by kitkat, Samuel Ford.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hi! Yes, my family is catholic, but I’m not very religious myself. I believe in the big bang as there is strong evidence for it (see, for example, this website: http://www.universetoday.com/106498/what-is-the-evidence-for-the-big-bang/) but I don’t think this necessarily contradicts religious beliefs. I think religion and science can go hand in hand sometimes, and it is not too unlikely that there is a more ‘spiritual’ world which we as humans don’t necessarily understand (yet).

    • Photo: Iain Bethune

      Iain Bethune answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I’m an atheist. As far as I’m aware there is no evidence that would suggest that God exists, and nothing to which ‘God did it’ is a better explanation that the alternatives. Specifically re: the creation of the universe, there is good evidence for a Big Bang (see Sascha’s link), and nothing that would say a being who happens to be somewhat man-like (be that Allah, Yahweh, Bramha…) had to be there to start it all off. There is good evidence to the contrary of the biblical creation story, that the earth and everything in it was created in 6 days around 6 thousand years ago.

      Of course, If an all-powerful God chose to create the world 6000 years ago, in such a state that it looked much older, and set the galaxies in place with just the right velocities that they looked like they had come from a big bang, then we would never be able to tell the difference. But in that case there is no evidence of God. If we can’t choose between two competing explanations, choose the simplest (that’s Occam’s razor), which is that there is no God.

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