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[alfie275]

ICE cannot be used to disprove evolution, as can be seen here (cool animations etc):
http://www.stellaralchemy.com/ice/index.php
Granted it is rather simpler than an eye but it proves a point.

I believe in science, that is, stuff that has been proven and makes sense.

Also, where do bhuddists stand on the aithiesm .v. religion argument, them being both aithiest and religious?

How are we defining aithiesm?
Belief there is no god or no belief there is god?

[FuzzyZergling]

No belief in God(s), as opposed to a belief in no God(s), would be agnostics.

[Leafsnail]

No belief in God(s), as opposed to a belief in no God(s), would be agnostics.

Well... atheist is an umbrella term.  A strong, explicit atheist would be a nontheist.

Weak explicit is the more generally accepted one.  Agnostics go into weak implicit.

[ECrownofFire]

I'd like to point people to the Watchmaker Argument, as told in a comic. Not particularly related now, but people were getting very close to it earlier.

By the way, trying to prove or disprove religion as a whole is fruitless. Prove or disprove elements of a particular religion? Sure. People in general seem to be convinced that disproving Christianity will disprove all religions. Christianity is not the only religion, and many people (myself included) would rather not have Christianity "representing" religion as a whole. I'm not seeing as much of this as I do in other places, but there's still enough that it gets annoying.

[scriver]

Also, where do bhuddists stand on the aithiesm .v. religion argument, them being both aithiest and religious?

How are we defining aithiesm?
Belief there is no god or no belief there is god?

Atheism, as we know it (belief in God/s), is a fairly western thought, in the sense that it focuses mostly on the the Christian God and his existence. Some religions/mythologies have an easier time being fit into this template than others, mostly depending on the prevalence of god-figures. If there is no gods or god-likes, the equivalent "atheist" statement would be something like: "I don't believe in unfounded superstition" (something already implied/incorporated with the "don't believe in God"-statement, by the way).

At least, this is my layman's explanation.

And lastly; Buddhism totally has gods. It may be in it's branches, but those branches are part of the tree as well.

[Criptfeind]

ICE cannot be used to disprove evolution, as can be seen here (cool animations etc):
http://www.stellaralchemy.com/ice/index.php
Granted it is rather simpler than an eye but it proves a point.

I believe in science, that is, stuff that has been proven and makes sense.

Also, where do bhuddists stand on the aithiesm .v. religion argument, them being both aithiest and religious?

How are we defining aithiesm?
Belief there is no god or no belief there is god?

That would be the best screen saver ever.

[Leafsnail]

ICE cannot be used to disprove evolution, as can be seen here (cool animations etc):
http://www.stellaralchemy.com/ice/index.php
Granted it is rather simpler than an eye but it proves a point.

I believe in science, that is, stuff that has been proven and makes sense.

Wow... after many generations of very slow improvements, and nothing really going beyond 51 or 52 before triggering the threshold:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

SUPERMUTATION

In fact, it broke the threshold four times in a row.

[Criptfeind]

Yeah, mine got up to 82 then it started dropping them down for some reason by lowering the starting points until it got to around 40. Then I had to close it.

[Leafsnail]

Mine did fine until the ball got to -4.  There, the programme's big flaw kicked in - everything was killed off at once (there weren't enough A's to counteract the -4) and since negative numbers aren't tracked, the mutations then became completely and utterly random, with all the good stuff that happened in previous generations destroyed.

[Sergius]

I think I could say that there was always something in existence. Why CAN'T there be something as eternity?

I think the consensus amongst people knowledgeable in physics necessary to explain the big bang is that Time is meaningless without a Universe. Just like mass, or speed, or any other measurements. Time is relative, it didn't exist without the universe. How can something exist "before" time? That would require the concept of time to exist before time exists.
For all intents and purposes the beginning of the universe is exactly that: THE beginning. Time 0 if you will.

[Sergius]

I'd like to point people to the Watchmaker Argument, as told in a comic. Not particularly related now, but people were getting very close to it earlier.

By the way, trying to prove or disprove religion as a whole is fruitless. Prove or disprove elements of a particular religion? Sure. People in general seem to be convinced that disproving Christianity will disprove all religions. Christianity is not the only religion, and many people (myself included) would rather not have Christianity "representing" religion as a whole. I'm not seeing as much of this as I do in other places, but there's still enough that it gets annoying.

You can't disprove religion. Religion definitely exists, there's plenty of evidence of that.

[Makbeth]

@MSH: Does infinitely small mean anything to you? It does to me, it means so small that, essentially, it doesn't exist. And there's no way that you could even fit one person into an infinitely small point, never mind the entire universe. Fitting anything more than an equally small amount of matter into such a space would break the law of conservation of mass.

   I didn't see this before, and I wish I hadn't.  This statement requires more *facepalms* to be performed than can be performed in a lifetime.

Omegastick, you truly have no idea what you are talking about.  Please stop telling people about physics if you don't understand it. You are only spreading misinformation, and it's only a matter of time before someone takes you at your word.  That is a terrible thing to do to a person.  It's not as bad as the news media telling people that sheltering from tornadoes under overpasses is a good idea (it isn't), but that kind of thing starts with people doing what you're doing.  People didn't understand the physics of the Large Hadron Collider, but that didn't stop them from spreading the myth that it would create black holes that will destroy the earth.  At least one person committed suicide because they didn't want to die by black hole.  Well, the LHC is running, and we're still here, which means that the people who started that myth killed more people than the LHC.  I don't expect anyone to die as a result of what you're saying here, but please, knock it off.  There's enough ignorance in the world, we don't need you making more of it.

And there's no way that you could even fit one person into an infinitely small point, never mind the entire universe.

Why, at the beginning of the universe, would there be people to fit into an infinitely small point?  We are talking about a time before even subatomic particles existed.  The only thing I've ever heard that is supposed to exist at the big bang is energy, and as far as I know, there is no minimum size for that.  Secondly, conservation of mass is a misnomer, and I'm fairly sure it's not even a law, but a simplification taught to entry-level students.  Mass and energy are interchangeable.  There was no mass and no particles at the big bang.  There couldn't have been, partly for the reasons you said above.  Physicists know this.  They don't need you to tell them that.  It's their job to understand not just the obvious, but to figure out that which isn't obvious.  They are currently working on finding out exactly how mass first appeared.  That's part of what the LHC is for, to see which, if any, of their hypotheses on the subject is right.

[Micro102]

I think I could say that there was always something in existence. Why CAN'T there be something as eternity?

I think the consensus amongst people knowledgeable in physics necessary to explain the big bang is that Time is meaningless without a Universe. Just like mass, or speed, or any other measurements. Time is relative, it didn't exist without the universe. How can something exist "before" time? That would require the concept of time to exist before time exists.
For all intents and purposes the beginning of the universe is exactly that: THE beginning. Time 0 if you will.

Why does there have to be a time 0? We gave time a value. Just as we did numbers. 1,2,3. But that doesn't end. It goes on forever. The universe simply always existed.

Also, who's to say there was only one big bang? Since there seems to be a limit to how far light can go, doesn't that mean that beyond that could be another big bang? There are solar systems that make up a galaxy, and galaxies that make up a local group (a bunch of galaxies), a bunch of local groups make up the "universe", so why can't there be more then one "universes", just outside our observable range? The big bang is just a large mass with a chain reaction that shot everything randomly around. It could of happened several times. It might happen again.

[Il Palazzo]

Why does there have to be a time 0? We gave time a value. Just as we did numbers. 1,2,3. But that doesn't end. It goes on forever. The universe simply always existed.

It's nice that you have your own point of view on the matter of cosmogenesis, but the currently accepted theories do not allow for the separately existing time frame.
See, that guy Einstein thought up his General Relativity theory, which among other things require the time to form a 4-dimensional space-time with the three spatial dimensions. The time is tied to the space, and neither can exist separatedly.
It's a weird concept, true, but the theory seems so far quite good at making predictions, and no experimental evidence exist so far that would disprove it, so it's only sensible to assume that all of it's assumptions about the stuff of the Universe are at least not terribly far off the target.

For your view to gain weight, you'd have to disprove the GR, or form a brand new theory, involving separate temporal and spatial frames, which would be at least as good at predicting "stuff" as the old man Einstein's one.

[Areyar]

I'm agnostic about cosmologies I'm not smart enough for to understand, those that I can understand generally fall under the spamfilter of my atheism though. :p

Some concepts of religious cosmology could be true, with antropomorphic weirdness taken out and the rest interpreted as a a version dumbed down (and embelished) to preschool understanding levels. Like how interesting science papers are dumbed down and made 'interesting' eventually leaving only a meaningless blurb. If any part of a religious cosmology turns out to be correct than it would be a rather fat coincidence though. As most of it is soporific anthropocentrism.
Scientific cosmologies that give 'the observer' a special value are just a cover for solipsism in my view. . . hence my animosity towards them I think. ...hmm though if aliens like a universal constant at something else than us that would nicely explain the data, without the hard questions....Doesn't explain why we would see their (perseived) universe though. Don't like it smacks of first cause controversies: We certainly have evolved to fit this universe, but what observed the universe into being. =>religion.

Buddism is more a worldview than a true worship demanding religion IIRC, in any case it needs a new Buddha for an update.*
Problem with continuing to update old theorems though is that the accretion of addendums and exceptions to keep the data fitting in the end will fall to the sharp edge of Occams razor. Eventually a revolutionary will come along.

*In my view all religions suffer from dogma rigidity and are in dire need of a refresher in concepts and human values, not just B. that is actually one of the less malwareous religions.