Bloom County 2019 by Berkeley Breathed for April 07, 2017

If they are accelerating, it only means that the scientists have more studying to do. After all, science is all about finding the truth, which means recognizing mistakes and correcting them.

Stop banging your head, Oliver — it makes you look religious.

The moment I learned that the expansion of the universe was accellerating, I knew the answer. All of space is in fact a cosmic party balloon, which someone, let’s say The Great Green Arkleseizure, is inflating and inflating. You know how it gets easier to blow the larger it gets. And then…

So, Spinal Tap is playing the Atheist’s Headbanger Ball??

God expelled gas from his rectum; thus the ever expanding universe. (This will be the basis of my new religion.)

Nature is never wrong, only our understanding of it is…

What makes us think we can “calculate” the movement of “billions and billions” of stars in one galaxy. Then “assume” we can “see” all of the normal matter that is there. Finally we “conclude” there must be some DARK MATTER!

How arrogant do you have to be to #1) think you got that many calculations correct when we can’t accurately calculate the weather 14 days from now, and #2) think you can see all of the normal matter?

Anyone else felt that Oliver had it coming? Who knew it would come from Opus?

Ready to feel really small? Our ‘universe’ is only one of countless Big-Bang clusters. While they are too far away to see with our telescopes the pull of their gravity is speeding up the expansion of our cluster.

Each meatball is its own big bang event with spaghetti and tomato sauce connectivity. Grate the cheesy blessing and say ramen.

It’s interesting that all the secular posters here have pretty much the same reaction: it’s okay that we don’t understand. We just know there’s no God. There’s nothing in any of Oliver’s explanations this week that actually either proves or disproves God’s existence. The point this week is and has been that some people get more joy out of being condescending than actually conversing. It’s certainly true on the religious side of the fence. But it’s also very true on the scientific side of the fence. Don’t believe me? Go back and re-read Sherlock Watson or Say What Now?‘s comments and compare them to Varnes simple yet fairly eloquent statement. The first two are about scoring points while Varnes is about stating a position. Of course the best comment is Yngvar’s. But that’s beside the point I guess.

Opus, stop teasing that poor, young wannabe atheistic materialist. His head may explode (at an ever-accelerating rate)!

What do you mean, THEY’re accelerating? As part of the universe, we’re accelerating, too. As the other stars approach light speed, we do too. But the universe isn’t supposed to have enough energy for everything to accelerate toward light speed. So there’s something wrong with the universe, or something wrong with our understanding of it, or Something intends for either or both. One way I know that would allow for such contradictions is through programming.

Science is fascinating, if not always comprehensible to me. But as we learn, we also learn how much MORE we do not know. Sometimes we have to learn enough to ask a decent question.

Religion is about faith. No proof is needed, nor is it even possible. We cannot know for a certainty that God exists, or doesn’t exist, or that God created or did not create the universe we experience. Science tries to give us answers to explain reality. Religion tries to give us answers to explain the inexplicable.

I’d be more inclined to be less “condescending” if religionists were more inclined to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs.

A ball rolling along a table top moves at a uniform speed. It then goes off the edge of the table and falls with an acceleration. The local space-time environment changed. No deity required.

A nice discussion of the large scale issue of why the universe is as it is can be found in Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape.

I am amused by the assumption of some here that even if there is a deity, it is going to create a life after death so that you can determine that there is a deity. Some day, we may be able to map a mind to silicon (don’t hold your breath waiting for that). So there could be an afterlife without a deity. Of course, if you read Iain Banks’ Surface Matter he posits that some civilizations might create “afterlifes” in the local version of Hell. Pretty sickening, really.

It’s the “dark matter” that was the first to expand and cool off, and occupies the invisible* outer perimeter of the sphere that we call the universe, pulling things towards it as it slows down under gravitational pull, at some point collapsing again to a singularity to continue the cycling at the next big bang.*on the other side of the post-bang plasma we can’t see through, the light from which is just reaching us.