What holds the Atom together?

Yesterday at 02:27 PM tacoman528 said this in Post #103

What exactly do you think this nuclear force is. When the big bang happened, what caused neutrons to want to come together and form some nuclear force, huh? I have told you many times that this nuclear force is Jesus.

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Why do you attribute consciousness to neutrons? You do this when you say "to want ot come together and form some nuclear force".  There is no "desire" among neutrons.

All the forces are inherent within the properties of the universe. Once you have a universe like the one we have here, the strong nuclear force is inevitable.  Other people have already pointed out the fallacy of trying to equate Jesus with the strong nuclear force.  Once again you are trying to make God/Jesus a creature within the universe.  Where in the Bible does it say this?

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/universe/b_bang.html 

Today at 08:19 AM lucaspa said this in Post #119

Your "eternal and unchanging" is a reflection of Plato's philosophy of eternal forms, of which supposedly all forms on earth are just a shadow.

However, if you test your idea that entities are eternal and unchanging then you will quickly falsify it.  In fact, you did so even in terms of God. 

The "I don't know" for First Cause (why the universe exists at all) applies to everyone -- theist, agnostic, and atheist.

However, there are a number of hypotheses as possible answers.  Just so that you are aware of them, in no particular order, the five I am aware of are:

1. Logical and mathematical necessity. This is summed up by Hawking as "Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?  Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? "

2. Quantum fluctuation -- the universe is essentially uncaused and a result of the fluctuations at the quantum level.  That the net energy of the universe is zero is often used as support for this hypothesis.

3. Deity created the universe.

4. No boundary.  This is Hawking's proposal. If the parameters of the BB are such that there is what Hawking labels "imaginary time" or time times the square root of -1, then the universe simply IS.

5. Ekpyrotic. This is a new theory that has the universe be infinitely cyclic due to the actions of two "membranes" in 11 dimensions.  It is close to quantum fluctuation.

This is a classic case of multiple competing hypotheses with insufficient data to choose between them.

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I didn't say it was true, just that it seemed like the most logical thing to expect if there weren't nothing.

As for the possible hypotheses, I simply think that it's more likely for something as simple and powerful as God to exist as opposed to something which is complexly limited in the way that the universe is.

Today at 08:24 AM lucaspa said this in Post #120

   You apparently didn't notice that the quote came from Diogenes Allen, a very respected Christian theologian.

Since it is so "ridiculous", why don't you walk us through what you think you know about God and the Bible and demonstrate why Allen is wrong?  Also please demonstrate how your original post isn't god-of-the-gaps while you are at it.

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It is my opinion that anything which happens on a consistant basis (gravity) most certainly has a "natural" cause behind it.  I would only seek to invoke God as a cause if something is extradordinary and uncommon (if not completely unheard of).

Yesterday at 11:32 PM DNAunion said this in Post #112

DNAunion: It's not like a neutron is actually made up of a proton and an electron. For example, during beta decay, it's not that a preexisting electron gets set free; an electron (beta particle) gets created. And during K capture, the opposite happens: the electron doesn't get put inside the neutron, it (and a proton and an anti-electron neutrino, IIRC) "disappears" during the conversion process.

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I knew that much. My point is that things are fricking complicated... Our good Taco wouldn't look into it anyway (and if he did would he find out that physics have gone much further than why things are held together) so the answer was enough for him.