Sorry if I'm posting in the wrong forum, I'm not a regular poster.
This is not intended to be a religious discussion, but just curious as to how you would respond .
My soon to be six year old said, while he was laying in bed "looking up in space", he "was thinking", and "wondered" how the world began.
I started with the Big Bang Theory, and everything else I could gather from google and wherever else. He asked where did the "stuff" that did the "big bang" come from? He said someone said "God was on earth some thousands of years ago", but the Discovery channel said "Dinosaurs existed millions of years ago" so "God could not have made Dinosaurs".
Any thoughts? Or how would you answer these questions? and the Why's?
Tell him that it is OK to believe different things, as long as you can see a distinction between what science says and how faith moves us (or doesn't).
He'll work out what's best for him.
...and if that doesn't work, there's always this .
All the mass and energy that came into existance at the big bang is balanced by the energy of the quantum vacuum. Exactly balanced. Add it together and you get zero. There is... no stuff. Well, there is, but it involves a lot of hand waving. Best answer "No one really knows, but scientists have made some pretty shrewd guesses, which so far haven't been shown to be false".
As time began at the Big Bang, to ask "what was before" is really a meaningless question - there was no time to have a "before". That was the answer given by Augustine when asked what existed before God created the universe.
Don't believe everything you see on television or read in newspapers or books... Logically, God could have made the dinosaurs, if the first proposition - that God only appeared on earth a few thousand years ago - is untrue.
Noah - "What, unicorn again? That's the second time this week!".
My daughter, who went through the whole câtechisme, 1st communion etc etc, decided for herself at the age of 10/11 that the whole Creation story was complete nonsense and the Big bang was a far more plausible explanation. . God bless her.
Firstly "son", it's important to know that wisdom is doubt - that we don't know a whole lot more than we do know. When were talking about things that are especially big, especially small or especially far away in the past or future, we're just making a good guess from what we can see around us. Scientists looked up into the sky and saw all the stars and planets moving away from them. Not only that but they saw all the stars and planets moving away from each other too! It looked like someone had tipped a big bucket of marbles onto the road.
So they thought two things - firstly, if things keep going on like this, everything will be really far away from everything else! Secondly, they guessed what it was like in the past. Last week, everything must have been a little bit closer together, and a week before that, even closer together than that. So they guessed that there was a time when all the stars and planets were super close together in one big ball that exploded - like when that bucket of marbles was first tipped on the ground - a moment when the marbles were all together - a split second before they all went all over the road.
Lots of people want to know what made the marbles tip or what happened before that. And there are lots of guesses but no one really knows what happened before the big bang.
Aren't we on the cusp of Singularity? And from there everything in the Universe will eventually be used as part of the Great Intelligence that results from that? Then when it all collapses back in on itself, to re-Bang again one day and start all over, we could imagine that that universal intelligence remains part of every particle in existence. Right?
Makes me think of the old man I used to work with, Mr. Stanley. He had two standard sayings, a greeting,"Isaywhachysay?", and "everything is everything". The latter could be posed as a question in greeting,"Everything is everything?", or in response to a difficult situation,"everything is everything", or sometimes, he just said it out of the blue. Everything is everything. Kind of sums it all up in a compact neat way.
I've a sneaking suspicion that the order we see in the universe is, in fact, just an illusion. Why should the universe be understandable, to a large extent, by humans?
It's a conspiracy, I tells ya!
No. The universe is not only expanding, the expansion is accelerating. It'll never re-collapse.
The *son* of God walked the Earth a little bit over 2000 years ago according to some. God in itself never took a ride down here (though he did possess a burning bush and all). He already existed way before the Big Bang and the Dinossaurs. You can simply say that... You won't betray any possible options your child might embrace in the future (religious or scientific).
When I was a little girl starting with the science books, I had a panick attack because I started imagining our planets were electrons that made part of an atom (the galaxy) that was really part of the iron ingredients from God's watch. And therefore we are insignificant and there are probably worlds living in my own clock.