cuiq said:
1) How was the matter created/formed that caused the big bang?
The Big Bang is a tough concept because it involves physics we don't see everyday. I can say what my favorite (simplified) version is at this point:
You start with nothingness. The only things that can exist are something and anti-something that add to nothingness. A particle and its antiparticle spring into being, but they repel each other (this is before time so it is instant) and push apart to infinity. As they push they spawn matter to form and with gravity to form with it so that the energy added is 0. An infinute universe forms filled with matter that is highly dense. The universe expands further into infinity and cools everthing down until it can form atoms.
2) What/how was the goo/slime put there to form fish/apes whatever? What caused these things to begin to form in the first place?
Once you have stars made out of helium and hydrogen, they undergo fusion to make other elements. When a star explodes early in the life of the universe, it creates the elements higher than lead (up to uranium). Everything settles back down into a new star with many elements that eventually form the Earth.
Early earth atmosphere mixed with lightening creates amino acids. At some point over he earth some chemical reaction became self repeating. We don't know what this was. Maybe some amino acids joined. Maybe a polypeptice. Maybe it formed in the pores of a rock. Maybe near a sulpher vent. Once you get life starting, evolution takes off.
Evolution is not "accident." It is an algorithm. Vary something. Measure it. Select the best. Repeat. This algorithm can describe the diversity of life.
3) How can you really prove that the earth has been here millions of years when after a certain point it would have to be ones best quess? I mean we have records (I think) that prove thousands of years but millions?
There are many ways. We can look at stars and see how stars develop over time and realize it takes a lot of time.
Here is one of the simpliest. We know that our galaxy is about 65,000 light years across and we have found galaxies billions of light years away. That means that light had to travel for billions of years to reach us. If God created the universe 6,000 years ago, he would have to had created the light in flight in the proper spectrum (we can detect the elements inside of another star). That is a lot of work to hide the creation and to make it look old.
Some Creationists have suggested a change in the speed of light. However, that doesn't work. The speed of light is really equal to exactly 1. What "c" does is convert seconds to meters. In other words, we measure time in meters or miles. We can not change "c" any more than we can change "12 inches per foot." But say you could change the speed. This would change distances so that we would not notice. If "c" doubled to be twice as fast, then space would double in size to compensate.
I notice that many arguments usually speak about things after the beginning but not about the beginning itself.
The big answer is we don't have a lot of confidence in the state of the universe right at the big bang. We don't understand gravity and quantum mechanics that well. However, we do know some things. For one, we know that either time started then or time was a quantum dimension (too small to really exist).
One way that may help you understand the debate is by looking at history. Christians did not want to believe that the Earth moved around the sun. The Bible is quite clear that the Earth does not move. God made it fixed and immovable on its foundations. When God wanted to lenghten the day, He stoped the Sun from moving, not the Earth from spinning. So there was a huge resistance to accepting the Earth moved because you would have to say the Bible was wrong.
Yet people reconciled it once the evidence was overwhelming. This is the same problem happening with the Big Bang and Evolution.
The easiest answer I have seen to help people reconcile science and religion is that science is "how" and religion is "why."
Quath
