Creation

I would have though that the best text to quote if you are a Greek writer, writing a work in Greek to be read and considered persuasive to Greek readers, would be the Greek one. Not sure how this demonstrates which is a more accurate representation of the actual meanings of earlier texts they were translated from.

Correct. They believed it to be the best source to quote in their Greek work. I usually use English Translations for the Bible when discussing the text, this does not mean I think it is the most accurate to the originals or the most reliable. There is utility in using the language of your audience.

Really?Revelation 6:14 It's just the heavens - not the earth.The word to roll up (like a scroll) is εἱλίσσω
Which is actually related to the English word 'evolve'Darwin apparently had some concerns with the world 'evolve' because of its religious connotations of a 'predetermined' history 'unfolding' over time - like a scroll.Just thought the irony was quite amusing.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Same place as you got your information about βιβλίον, I'd wager.Revelation 6:14 - KJV

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And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

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καὶ οὐρανὸς ἀπεχωρίσθη ὡς βιβλίον εἱλισσόμενον καὶ πᾶν ὄρος καὶ νῆσος ἐκ τῶν τόπων αὐτῶν ἐκινήθησαν

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'Scroll', βιβλίον is the noun. The verb is 'rolled together', εἱλίσσω. A variant of this verb, ἑλίσσω, is used in Hebrews 1:12

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And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up....

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εἱλισσόμενον is εἱλισσό and μενονErm, no - that would be ἱδρώς surely? Find me a translation of Rev 6:14 that reads

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And the heaven departed as a scroll when it sweats; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

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Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Any evidence for this whatsoever? Strong's says: heiliss: roll together.

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είλισσόμενον means melting.

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According to whom? Everywhere I look I see είλισσόμενον as a form of εἱλίσσω eg:

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Forms and Transliterations
ελισσόμενον

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Thayer's Greek: 1507. (heiliss) -- roll together. Your translation, unlike all the translators of the Bible would have Revelation 6:14 read

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And the heaven departed as a melting scroll

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Scrolls don't melt. It would make the simile nonsensical. I think you are using your program wrong, or you need a new program.- - Wiktionary Strong's says it contains a form of εἱλίσσω. Every translation out there translates it to mean a form of the verb εἱλίσσω 'to roll up' in a tense that should be translated somewhere along the lines of 'when it is rolled'.

Oh dear - glad you got that sorted.

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εἱλίσσω, Ionic and poetic and occasional in later prose for ἑίσσω (Winer's Grammar, 2, 1 a.): (present passive ἑιλίσσομαι); εἴλω to press close, to roll up (cf. Liddell and Scott, under the word, at the end)), to roll up or together: Revelation 6:14 R G; but L T Tr WH have restored ἑλισσόμομαι. (From Homer down.)

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That's from Thayer's Greek Lexicon.

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εἱλίσσω heilssō, hi-lis'-so; a prolonged form of a primary but defective verb εἵλω helō (of the same meaning); to coil or wrap:roll together. See also G1667.

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From Strong's.

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I find no strong's # for this word nor do I find a definition. It is used in the Textus Receptus, Morphological Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint 1 time in each. So far I haven't found it in early Greek literature.

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Verbs come in many flavours, they conjugate.The verb 'to run' in the past tense is 'ran' and in the present tense is 'running'. Its somewhat irregular, but not as irregular as 'go' which becomes 'went'.είλισσόμενον is the perfect mediopassive form of εἱλίσσω or ελίσσω - that's what the -μενον suffix is telling us. This form doesn't alter verbs in English as it does in Greek. In any event it is translated in the KJV as

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when it is rolled together

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NIV as

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being rolled up

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Douay-Rheims as

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folded up

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Young's as

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rolled up

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So the evidence confirms the verb is as I said. You put a lot of effort into my interesting piece of trivia. Nobody says that word is in the Greek Text in that exact form. It'd be like me saying the sentence 'The evolution of cats is interesting' contains reference to the verb 'evolve' and you arguing that the word 'evolve' is not literally in the sentence. Or 'I went running' and you saying the verb 'go' and 'run' are not in the sentence. It's pretty silly given the triviality of the point, don't you think?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

No.

Like Genesis. Only Genesis is not based on physics that predicts the paths of planets, satellites and light. Assumptions which, if true, predict the existence of things we've seen, phenomena we have observed, anomalies we could not otherwise explain. Time is a dimension. Like all dimensions it measures a distance between two events. With a clock. No. Time is time. In the early universe the geometry of time is, according to Hawking's notion, describable using complex mathematics - ie., imaginary numbers. This notion essentially resolves the singularity problem by 'smoothing' it out.It's an interesting solution, but it isn't considered Truth. It predicts things we see, and other things we have not seen. We may observe those other predictions one day which would strengthen the idea. Quite the opposite, it kind of makes the idea of a beginning to exist more incoherent. As you go further 'back' in time, time itself becomes increasingly space-like. That is, it takes on the properties closer to space than time - thus the notion of a beginning becomes less clear. It's a diagram. 'Forwards' is time. Up and down (and depending on the diagram in and out) represent the three spatial dimensions. Thus as you proceed forwards in time, the diagram shows space expanding in all directions. You can make a diagram which shows the different rates of expansion of the sphere over time, using only a sphere, if you'd like. But I'd wager it'd be more difficult to understand. I can't even imagine how you'd do it.A sphere on its own would, at best, describe the universe at a single point in time.If you like, think of the diagram as a graph with time along the x-axis and the diameter of the sphere on the y-axis. That's not what science teaches. It does not teach the universe did not exist. That may be true, but in any given theory where it is, there is something other than the universe that gives rise to the universe. You just said it. Biological matter of deceased animals explains the oil. It's early conditions and its conditions today are the basis we have and upon which scientists are intelligently exploring avenues for the universe's earliest moments - and before that if such a thing exists. Unless braneworld is in some fashion, eternal. If it just is, it didn't come from - it just is. Or it didn't begin to exist. It just exists. No. They are all travelling through time and space. just as mankind invented length to measure distance between points? It could be different shapes - but a sphere is a reasonable one. Your objections are akin to someone looking at map of the world and arguing it isn't a sphere and thus trying to say that cartogrophers think it is impossible to pass down from Britain and come up in Australia. It's a two dimensional projection of a sphere. It is one dimension. So there is only two possible directions. Just like when considering length. It doesn't have to advance in both directions. His alternative is just multiple big bang expansion events with the one we talk about today being the most recent. It's not a well-respected idea regardless of people's opinions of Penrose. That's a great question! Generally speaking physicists tend to answer by pointing to the necessary directionality of thermodynamics and entropy. But a full discussion is beyond the scope of this, apparently a 'bible' topic. Yes. It isn't expanding into anything. No, that doesn't follow from anything we know. I, for one, practically insist upon it! Naturally you do. There's less basis for that belief than cosmology of course. Just an anonymous author from over two millennia ago.

It depicts the diameter of the sphere and how it changes over time. An atlas depicts a planet that is a rectangle. Projections and diagrams are fine for most people.If General Relativity / BBT is true AND the curvature is positive the universe is a hypersphere: A four dimensional entity. That said, it's not a pure hypersphere as in one direction, the shape gets smaller - like how a circle in three dimensions that gets smaller and smaller is a cone. so really the universe is more like a hypercone - a four dimensional cone. At one 'end' it narrows to a point - a zero dimensional entity. At the other end its a massive four dimension sphere.To locate something in the universe you need 4 dimensions. For instance my wallet is 1 metre north of my cat. It is 2 metres east of my cat. It is 1 metre up from my cat. But that isn't sufficient because tomorrow my wallet and the cat have moved. So I also need to use a fourth dimension - time. If you apply this idea to the mathematics of physics, you describe a reality that matches our own. If you don't - your model of reality is wrong.For instance - the precession of the perihelion of mercury does not make sense if there are only three dimension. Add time as a fourth dimension and then you can predict the precesssion perfectly. Likewise, the behaviour of particles in a particle accelerator makes absolutely zero sense in 3 dimensions alone, satellite navigation fails to operate correctly and ICBM guidance goes to crap. As long as you have more than infinite energy. Which seems tricky to acquire. 'Eternal' and 'beginning to exist from non-existence' are not the only possibilities. What exactly is the dimension you call 'length'? Unless the relative speed between you and the 2x4 varies significantly.For instance, a muon's lifespan means it will not survive the time it takes to get from outside the atmosphere to the earth's surface - even travelling at the speed of light. However, we can observe that muons can survive this time. This observation makes sense in relativity because
a) From our point of view, time has slowed down for the muon so it's lifespan appears to be greater
b) From the muon's point of view, the distance between the atmosphere and the surface is contracted - so it has less distance to travel. Oh that's easy. The dimension that time is is time. Go for it. Show me.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

A) A better summary would be that the Bible is the story of the relationship between God and Man.B) The Bible doesn't predict the paths of planets and light etc etc. The Bible doesn't tell us how, it just tells us that God was responsible. Telling us the course of things is the long way of saying 'predicting'. Then they are false. That's how science works. You make assumptions and then compare the consequences of those assumptions to what we see. There are assumptions made in building the computer you wrote this on, in building the cars we use to travel, the watches we tell the time by, in fact behind all technology. Assuming that Moses was given information by God, and assuming those facts are true and assuming those facts were recorded in a book and assuming those facts were never altered through the transmission of that book - either is not reflected by observations - or assert things which cannot be observed. Yes, it does. Duration is the length of time between two points. Time has different units of measurement than space but that does not mean it is not a dimension.The measurement of length is relative too. Length measures the distance in space.
Duration measures the distance in time. Yes, it does. Just as a tape measure measures distance. A tape measure is a mechanical device to measure the distance between points in space. Hours are a concept of man. Just as metres are.Space and time are not concepts. They exist regardless of man's existence. What kind of statement is 'time is imaginary time'? What does that mean? Replace 'imaginary' with 'complex'. We use complex numbers in many things - from building aeroplanes to computers and more. Hawking didn't create imaginary time. He had the notion that there is a thing called imaginary time which is where the dimension of time is spacelike. Hawking could have been wrong AND the universe does not have to begin out of non-existence. Hawking's idea just presents a way to resolve the existence of a singularity in the equations. Yes, I'm not disputing it. As he says:

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If space and imaginary time are indeed like the surface of the Earth, there wouldn't be any singularities in the imaginary time direction, at which the laws of physics would break down. And there wouldn't be any boundaries, to the imaginary time space-time, just as there aren't any boundaries to the surface of the Earth. This absence of boundaries means that the laws of physics would determine the state of the universe uniquely, in imaginary time. But if one knows the state of the universe in imaginary time, one can calculate the state of the universe in real time. One would still expect some sort of Big Bang singularity in real time. So real time would still have a beginning. But one wouldn't have to appeal to something outside the universe, to determine how the universe began. Instead, the way the universe started out at the Big Bang would be determined by the state of the universe in imaginary time. Thus, the universe would be a completely self-contained system. It would not be determined by anything outside the physical universe, that we observe.
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The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge.

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That is what I mean when I said "makes the idea of a beginning to exist more incoherent." Just because one can say the universe had a beginning - it doesn't mean there was a time when the universe didn't exist and a period where it was 'beginning to exist'. It exists through all time, its just that time is finite in at least one direction...as Hawking puts it - there may be no boundary condition - no beginning to exist. A beginning but not a beginning to exist. Correct. It's a diagram. Imagine you were going walk from the north pole to the equator. And you were going to graph the length of a line of longitude (ie., east-west). At the north pole, there is no East and West. So you start with a point - a zero value. As you travel south, your measurements of the length of longitude increases. The longitude lines are the circumference of a circle cross-section. For whatever reason, you decide to record the diameter of that circle rather than circumference.You represent on your graph two points - the distance between them is the diameter at that given point on your journey south. Every 70 miles you take a measurement and you record them in your graph, with each 70 miles on the y axis and the up-down (x-axis) having the two points representing the diameter. As you approach the equator the diameter of your circle increases. Your graph looks like this:Draw a line between the points. You get a trianglular shape. The earth is not a triangle, but we all know that. It's still a reasonable diagram for how the earth is a sphere - 'bulging' out - becoming 'thicker' as you travel south.That's a reasonable analogy to the diagram you are complaining about. The problem comes when you need to represent time. Like the triangular earth diagram above you can't just draw a circle and say that represents longitude, because it changes depending on your latitude. To represent that change through latitude you draw a triangle where the points diverge.Drawing a sphere that gets smaller through time (ie., a 4D cone) is complex and doesn't serve as an educational tool explaining how things change over time by simplifying the 3d space as a 2d circle (or sometimes a 1d line) so as to make the fourth dimension clearer.See how difficult it is here:Hypercone - WikipediaThat is hardly illuminating to a layman.By projecting the 4d object into a 2d one may lose precision, much like projecting the 3d globe onto a 2d map...it's a useful method for many purposes. You seem to be having difficulty. Here is one of the diagrams you are having difficulty with: Here is a projection of a hypercube: Now as you can see they are different shapes since the universes expansion was significant earlier but the point being that they do represent things as a spherical hypercone of sorts and you are still having trouble with it.Using a more precise representation rather than a simple projection would end up like this: Which seems more difficult to understand to me. So draw me a single picture of a balloon inflating that simultaneously represents its initial condition and smoothly represent every state it takes between that and being fully inflated.And that's easier than doing the same for a baking cake. So show me how easy it is to draw as a single static image. Actually no. There is no centre. Every point in space sees everything expanding away from that point 'as if' it were the centre. All the energy that exists in the universe. It makes no sense to describe the state of that energy. How can describe the distance between two quanta of energy when there is no distance? That's the nature of the problem. But I don't have a belief about the state of the universe at T=0. If so it has also made thousands of predictions that have been proven false and can only be thought of as being proven true by altering the interpretation of the book. Sediments - where other areas of land where eroded, were washed or blown over the dead things. Lava flowed over those. More sediment was deposited on the lava flows, etc etc etc - Geological rock formation occurred basically. Imagination. Your beliefs don't produce results. If we assume geological facts, this explains why oil is not uniformly distributed under the earth and we can use it to predict where we might find more oil. There are people paid a lot of money to do this - because it works and makes people even more money.Nobody makes money by finding oil assuming the earth is growing as you describe. Because it doesn't work. Likely because it isn't true. Yes - relativity helps us go beyond that. And it has been proven time and again to be an accurate way to describe the universe. No it doesn't do away with BBT. It incorporates the big bang theory by positing the universe that began to exist at the big bang is embedded in a larger entity sometimes called 'braneworld'. Nope. It wouldn't. Time can be finite in this model. It is unlikely the quarks are not moving through space. But if we want to imagine such a scenario fair enough. It makes no difference to what I was saying. No. Time is a dimension. Duration is its measure.
Length is a dimension. Distance is its measure. Good. Time is as manmade as space. Eternity is clearly not a measurement so that part is nonsensical. No you are. Duration is a measurement of time. It measures how much time there is between two events."How long will this take?"
"An hour"An hour is a period of duration. It describe how much time passes between the start and end of some specified period."How long is this piece of string?"
"1 metre" His notion is that the Big Bang was not the beginning -not that there was none. Thermodynamics does indeed take place in time, which is measured by mans invention called seconds / hours.But it is directional. That's the starting point as to why an arrow of directionality seems to exist in time No, I'm telling you that explanations of the arrow of time are typically related to the directionality of thermodynamics (in short, that entropy increases). No. I'm saying it is expanding, but not into empty space. That is not necessarily true. That some guy says some other guy wrote something doesn't make it not anonymous. It is an attribution by a third party. Believe what you like. No. You have a book. I have experimental results. Show me the calculation, derived from that Bible, that gives a value for the temperature of the CMBR and that this matches observation...then we'd have something to discuss. The predictions in the Bible are not reliable - and indeed they don't predict how colliding particles will behave and at the same time, how the planet mercury behaves, and how light behaves, and how gravity behaves and....So they aren't comparable in the way you are trying to present.

It represents the diameter of the sphere, and how it changes over time. Sure, if you want to know where it is at this present moment in time. Ie., 0 seconds away. But if you wanted to know where it was yesterday, 24 hours away - you'd have to specify that dimension. Not sure how I changed your words. I after said 'Eternal' as one possibility, you said 'eternal', you said 'how did it begin to exist, if there was non-existence' and I said 'beginning to exist from non-existence' So I guess I'll just repeat myself.It might be the case that the universe is neither eternal nor had a beginning to exist from non-existence. And the distance from your birth to your death is the length of your life. It's measured in years and months. With a clock. I already answered this. You complained that the measurement device was mechanical, and I pointed out that measuring distances involves mechanical devices too. You aren't supposed to go back to the beginning - you are supposed to take into account what I've said and proceed from there. Otherwise...who am I kidding, you've not moved your argument 1 single inch over the last decade Message 152

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The first is the idea of something appearing from nothing and the second is for that something to expand into 'the universe'. The latter is probably sloppy wording since obviously the universe cannot expand into the universe.
Think the universe is a four dimensional entity. We can refer to any part of the universe by giving a spatial and time dimension.

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But now we are at the point there was something before the big bang.
Now we need to know where that something came from.

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The Big Bang does not propose something coming from nothing.

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I drew this diagram:

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time                      space
0                          .
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now                .................

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And said

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Imagine the universe as a collective whole, the past, the present and the future all in one four dimensional bundle of space time. Relativity gives us the tools to begin to describe this four dimensional universe. The first being that as you move in the positive direction of time, space itself expands (not simply the distance between distant things, but space ITSELF).

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It's a wonderment you are still saying the same things, the same way - with little to no advancement whatsoever.

It mentions a few planets in an oblique fashion and observing things is kind of standard. Plenty of people have observed the planets. It doesn't call them wandering stars until the New Testament as far as I'm aware - and this is well after the Greeks gave them the name 'πλανήτης' - planetes.Does it even tell us the morning star and the evening star are the same planet? It certainly does. That's how we send probes to them - by knowing where they'll be by the time our craft gets there. Saying 'the planets move around' is not a prediction. What we don't see in the Bible is any mention of any planet that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Nor does it provide us with any information as to why the perihelion of Mercury precesses the way it does. Given God had some influence in its creation, you'd think Neptune and Mercury would be discussed - that they are world's of rock and or gas, roughly equal in size to our own planet or even bigger. That the earth is essentially the same kind of thing as those planets or that the stars are the same kind of thing as the sun. But nope, no mention of this. It'd be an awesome thing to have put in there too.Relativity gives us the answer to the Mercury problem. I only see the assertion that God did it and it involved him speaking. And I'm agreeing and telling you it represents the changing diameter of a sphere. Since all the information you need to know about a sphere is its radius - it suffices perfectly well to only represent the diameter. 3D.If the sphere increases in size through time - then it would be a sort of hypercone in 4D. Yeah - so hardly informative to non mathematicians - and far from 'easy' as you claimed. That's not a static image.Nope, if the BBT is true then the universe does not have a centre. The big bang happened everywhere - not an explosion from some central point. It is based upon the understanding that energy is neither created nor destroyed. All the energy in the universe has existed throughout the entire existence of the universe. There is nothing that would give rise to the energy not existing at some point, nor is there any indication that energy would suddenly appear. In the big bang theory - all the energy exists at T=0. The singularity problem is that there is also zero space in which to contain all this energy. The resolution seems to be the rejection of the existence of points in reality. That is, the universe never was at zero size - that points of zero dimensions can exist is a mathematical artefact rather than a physical reality. Thus the universe had some size, within which all the energy that exists in it today exists then.Think of it like the difference between a cone as a mathematical/geometric shape, which narrows down to a single point. And a physical cone that has a sort 'rounding' off at the end. The mathematics of General Relativity describe the universe mathematically - and this results in a single point at T=0 like with a cone, or a triangle. But its likely that 'something else' is going on (and we know there is something else going on, quantum physics) and that this something else removes the singularity from the equations. At this point, it is not established how to do this - though there are theories being explored as we speak. Sure, but General Relativity aint the only player. It gives us most of the picture, but not all of it. You cannot use General Relativity to say what the state of the energy at T=0 was. Of course, but you asked about the buried oil, not the surface stuff. The surface stuff is at the surface due to either erosion or geological uplift (such as mountains). I notice your theory about the earth getting bigger also does not explain surface oil or coal. As I said, it was buried - through volcanic lava flows or sedimentary deposits etc. I was talking about the people that wrote them down, not the people that read what was written. Those people certainly did have the ability to produce those thoughts with the knowledge they had. They were as creative and intelligent as we are today. Yes, a process that is basically not happening now. There is some material coming from space, but it is minimal compared with when the earth was being formed. And your theory still doesn't predict where oil will be found - whereas my theory does. I'm not going to give you all of cosmology and astrophysics here. It's too broad. Sorry. Did you try Google?
Well here is a paper on the subject

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the collision of a brane universe and a vacuum bubble coming from the extra-dimension is utilized as a trigger of brane big-bang.

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Or more accessible: Well you brought it up. We both agree it has problems. Yeah, but that's just what some guys said. Well I don't assert there was such a thing as a 'beginning to exist' so I don't need to provide information on that. Life is another topic entirely so let's not get into that here, but we have lots of information and experimental results on that.Our experimental results to verify General Relativity to a sufficient degree for us to conclude the universe was once denser and that time is a dimension. They were predicted, and then observed. In some cases the predictions were made decades before the equipment used to observe them was even designed...indeed the Large Hadron collider was built to test some of those predictions - notably the Higgs Boson, which was predicted to exist back in the 60s.Which gives us confidence in the theories used to make the predictions Which is far too shallow. It does not tell us why they were ordered to do things in the specific way they were or how that happened - it just asserts it, in fact it barely even does that. It's nothing compared with what physics is digging at.

Yes. But the Bible doesn't do that. The discovery that some stars are wanderers was made before the Biblical authors wrote it down. Even if you want to credit them with the observation - they discovered it, not predicted it.They did not claim them as world's that orbited the sun just as earth is. That would have had a better claim to being a prediction. He said nothing I and others haven't said before to you. But nevertheless Relativity does explain the precision of the perihelion of Mercury with remarkable accuracy. I've read the whole book. That's why I know it doesn't say how God did it. Under which conditions it does not show the expansion. There is a force in the universe that is not modelled in the cake - gravity. If the distribution is 'lumpy' then its possible that some of the material attracts one another in such a way to overcome the expansion. It's size changed quite rapidly. The difference in time between it being a pin point and it being pea sized is negligible for most purposes. Nope. Everything expanded, there is no centre.

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Today astronomers believe that there is no centre to the cosmos. You might think that there must be a central point — after all, the Big Bang must have started somewhere? While great explosions of say, a bomb, do start from one point, the Big Bang that is believed to have created our Universe nearly 14 billion years ago was a different matter entirely and appeared to happen everywhere all at once — time and space did not exist before the Big Bang and so there was no point from where it could have erupted from.

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This does not mean that, if we were to see to the very edges of the Universe, that there would be more of it on one side of the Earth in comparison to the other. Imagine if you were small enough to stand on a balloon — small enough to see in a straight line across the balloon’s surface. You’re not able to see into or out of the balloon and, no matter which direction you look, the end of the balloon seems to be at roughly the same distance from you. If you start moving across the balloon’s surface, it would appear that you were at the centre of it. The reality of the matter is, however, that your two-dimensional balloon does not have a centre.

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Now, suppose your balloon is being inflated with air and covered with pen marks around you. As the balloon gets bigger and bigger, these pen marks get further and further away from you and each other — no matter where you are it appears to you that you are at the centre of the expansion. Since space is curved, it is somewhat like the two-dimensional space on a balloon and just like there is no centre to its expansion there is no centre to the expansion of the Universe.

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First, it's important to know that the big bang wasn't an explosion of matter into empty spaceit was the rapid expansion of space itself. This means that every single point in the universe appears to be at the center...In the beginning, the universe was a single point. Where was that? It was, and still is, everywhere.

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The Big Bang happened everywhere at once. It's an expansion of space itself, not the expansion of things in space...We're right here, and we know where "here" is relative to other objects in the universe! But here is not special, like a center would be, and, for that matter, nowhere is special. That is like askingif we had a powerful telescope that could see all the way to the end of the universe, would we find more of the universe on one side of Earth than on the other? No. We would find that it looks the same in all directions...Like the surface of the balloon, there is no center in the universe.

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soureYou can see some excellent diagrams here which explain it further. Or something else. It could be for example, a braneworld. You don't get to assert God is the only possible answer, sorry. Oil and coal needs pressure to form. Pressures that don't exist on the surface. All the land on the planet is open to being eroded and turned into sediment, not just mountains. Go visit some sand dunes during high winds to see it for yourself. You can read about the geology of the tiber oil field at your own leisure. Here is a paper that discusses it in some depth

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The intercalated sand and mud deposits of units c and d are tentatively correlated with Late Pleistocene deposition derived from the western shelf-edge delta/depocenter of the Mississippi River, which was probably most active from 320 ka to 70 ka

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The 'hole' also known as the Gulf of Mexico basin - formed due to continental forces.

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Geologists and other Earth scientists agree in general that the present Gulf of Mexico basin originated in Late Triassic time as the result of rifting within Pangea.[11] The rifting was associated with zones of weakness within Pangea, including sutures where the Laurentia, South American, and African plates collided to create it. First, there was a Late Triassic-Early Jurassic phase of rifting during which rift valleys formed and filled with continental red beds. Second, as rifting progressed through Early and Middle Jurassic time, continental crust was stretched and thinned. This thinning created a broad zone of transitional crust, which displays modest and uneven thinning with block faulting, and a broad zone of uniformly thinned transitional crust, which is half the typical 40 kilometer thickness of normal continental crust. It was at this time that rifting first created a connection to the Pacific Ocean across central Mexico and later eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. This flooded the opening basin to create the Gulf of Mexico as an enclosed marginal sea. While the Gulf of Mexico was a restricted basin, the subsiding transitional crust was blanketed by the widespread deposition of Louann Salt and associated anhydrite evaporites. During the Late Jurassic, continued rifting widened the Gulf of Mexico and progressed to the point that sea-floor spreading and formation of oceanic crust occurred. At this point, sufficient circulation with the Atlantic Ocean was established that the deposition of Louann Salt ceased.[7][8][12][13]. Seafloor spreading stopped at the end of Jurassic time, about 145-150 million ears ago.

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During the Late Jurassic through Early Cretaceous, the basin occupied by the Gulf of Mexico experienced a period of cooling and subsidence of the crust underlying it. The subsidence was the result of a combination of crustal stretching, cooling, and loading. Initially, the combination of crustal stretching and cooling caused about 5—7 km of tectonic subsidence of the central thin transitional and oceanic crust. Because subsidence occurred faster than sediment could fill it, the Gulf of Mexico expanded and deepened.[7][13][14]

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Later, loading of the crust within the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent coastal plain by the accumulation of kilometers of sediments during the rest of the Mesozoic and all of the Cenozoic further depressed the underlying crust to its current position about 10—20 km below sea level. Particularly during the Cenozoic, thick clastic wedges built out the continental shelf along the northwestern and northern margins of the Gulf of Mexico.[7][13][14]

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To the east, the stable Florida platform was not covered by the sea until the latest Jurassic or the beginning of Cretaceous time. The Yucatn platform was emergent until the mid-Cretaceous. After both platforms were submerged, the formation of carbonates and evaporites has characterized the geologic history of these two stable areas. Most of the basin was rimmed during the Early Cretaceous by carbonate platforms, and its western flank was involved during the latest Cretaceous and early Paleogene periods in a compressive deformation episode, the Laramide Orogeny, which created the Sierra Madre Oriental of eastern Mexico.[15]

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Good point! Clearly you are smarter and more creative than Isaac Newton who had none of those things! The extra dimension is eternal. Yes he does. So? I didn't. I put it forwards as evidence that cosmologists don't assert on the whole that the universe has a beginning to exist as you keep claiming. That there are many respectable ideas that involve an eternal universe. You unfortunately have problems with the more simple General Relativity - if you can't grasp that, going further is probably not going to work. But there's nothing in there to suggest why it is this way rather than some other amazing way that would also glorify God. Hrm, clearly God is short sighted since the more we learn about his work the more we, on the whole, are persuaded he wasn't involved in it. So much for the glorification of God.

In order to escape the gravity of the Milky way you need to exceed its escape velocity which is around 500km/s.Space expands at 68 km/s per megaparsec. That means that two objects 3.2 million light years apart experience space expanding between them at a rate of 68km/s. The milky way at its most distant points is around 100,000 light years. So the rate of space expanding between two ends of the Milky way is a small fraction of 68km/s.The influence of gravity - 500km/s required to be pulled out of the Milky Way - is much greater than the rate of expansion - say about 2km/s. That's why.

Quarks appeared very early. It wasn't very long after that (within minutes) that they would have started to bond to form protons and neutrons. The universe was expanding rapidly - but things were very very close together still so things such as the strong nuclear force would be able to overcome the expansion of the universe to form bonds.Within a few hundred thousand years, things had cooled down enough that electrons didn't have the energy to resist being captured by protons and neutrons and thus atoms formed. The rate of expansion depends on distance. There would be some quarks that were too far away from other quarks and thus the space was growing between them faster than the speed of light. But some quarks - and later protons and neutrons, were close enough to one another that the space was not expanding fast enough to keep them apart.Are we ready to move on to the next part of your OP?

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...we can move on to how God might have accomplished that event.

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