What Are Your Beliefs?

[MoonStarer420]

...Ultimately, we live in a dieing universe. At some point in the future, the Earth will cease to support life, the sun will stop burning, and our universe will collapse.

Youâ??re missing a few major things in this statement. The first is that the Universe is not dieing, it's expanding not contracting. Not to mention that our Universe appears to be flat, exactly flat, not open or closed. (I say appears because it's a recent idea, but so far it is strongly supported by observational data and theoretical ideas.) We don't know the reason for our flat Universe and we probably wonâ??t for a long, long time. There are too many other questions to answer first like what is this dark energy that is causing this expansion? What other influences does it have? What does it consist of? You should be more careful of shooting out "true" statements like that one.

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist the facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." -Sherlock Holmes

Einstein made a satirical comment about the same thing:
"When the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."

Out of curiosity: Where did you get the idea of a collapsing Universe anyway? What was the sources evidence for it?

On to the fate of the Sun and Earth: We have (that is if we don't get destroyed by ourselves or a major natural cataclysmic event first) a little less then 4.5 billion years to prepare for the destruction of the Earth by the Sun. (These are one in the same: "...the Earth will cease to support life, the sun will stop burning...") It only took our species only a few thousand years to go from building spears to building rockets. Cosmic rays are the only major problem holding us back from colonizing other planets and moons. Once we develop a way to stop those from killing us in space, we'll be set not only for Mars but other stars as well. (Well resources may be a problem as well. To make it to other stars we need to build a ship big enough to hold enough people to stop from inbreeding.) It might be possible to solve both the cosmic ray problem and the inbreeding problem through biological technology. That is if we developed a way to repair our damaged or malfunctioning DNA.

I'm sorry that you have no faith in God...

Where science starts is where religion begins.
Science is a combination of skepticism and open mindedness. How can you ask someone to believe in something without any proof it exists? I'll provide an analogy by Carl Sagan (he writes it much more elegantly, but I summed it up to make it shorter):

I tell you that I have a dragon in my garage but you want me to prove it exists. However, when I open the garage door, I reveal nothing but empty space. You ask "where's the dragon?" and I say, "oh it's here, but it's invisible." Your not convinced, so you suggest a few ways of testing it's there; put flour on the floor to look for footprints, throw paint on the dragon to make out it's shape, move around the garage to try and touch it and use an infrared camera to detect his body heat and breath. But for every method you suggest I have an explanation for why it wonâ??t work; the dragon levitates so you won't see the footprints, the paint wonâ??t stick to the dragon, he's ethereal so your arms will go right through him, and he's a heatless dragon so the infrared camera won't detect his signal.

In the end we still have no idea if the dragon is there or not, but whatâ??s the difference does it make if the levitating, ethereal, heatless dragon is there or not? My point is how can you believe (or at least expect others to believe) in an idea if you can't prove it actually exists?

And what is precious about our lifes if there is no God?

How wouldn't it be? We're stellar ash that has the ability to understand and manipulate the Universe and world around us. Our Earth is the only planet known to harbor not only intelligent life, but any life.