Most people believe the present theory of a 'big bang', for the origins of the universe. Here are some points to ponder, about this theory: 1. Who or What initiated this big bang, compressing the universe into a small size, then exploding it into the universe? 2. What is the difference between a 'big bang', and a Creation event from a Creator? 3. How does light appear to us, which would take 'millions of years!' to get to us from the far reaches of the universe? I have been referred to this link, as the most recent authoritative data behind the theory of big bang: https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/ WMAP's "baby picture of the universe" maps the afterglow of the hot, young universe at a time when it was only 375,000 years old, when it was a tiny fraction of its current age of 13.77 billion years. The patterns in this baby picture were used to limit what could have possibly happened earlier, and what happened in the billions of year since that early time. The (mis-named) "big bang" framework of cosmology, which posits that the young universe was hot and dense, and has been expanding and cooling ever since, is now solidly supported, according to WMAP. WMAP observations also support an add-on to the big bang framework to account for the earliest moments of the universe. Called "inflation," the theory says that the universe underwent a dramatic early period of expansion, growing by more than a trillion trillion-fold in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Tiny fluctuations were generated during this expansion that eventually grew to form galaxies. Now, if a godless universe could set aside all laws of physics, and expand 'by more than a trillion trillion-fold in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second', then how is that any different than positing a Creator, who did the same thing? Why the belief in '13.7 billion years!', as the age of the universe, if this phenomenal expansion could do it in 'less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second'? What natural processes could have compressed the universe into a size of a pea, then explode it to the expanses of the universe in 'less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second'? It seems to me, that the faith needed to believe this happened spontaneously, through physical law defying processes, is just as great, if not greater, than believing in a Creator. There is either an unknown, physical law defying natural process that could do this thing, or an unknown, physical law defying Creator Who did it. Which belief is more reasonable? Why would believing in atheistic naturalism be 'Science!', but believing in a Creator is 'Religion!'? Both are leaps of faith, requiring an assumption of some physical law defying Cause.
What i also glean from this, if i may inject some humor, is that progressives LOVE inflation, both in their economics and their cosmology..
We don't know. The big bang is only the expansion of the universe from a very small point. It isn't the creation of the universe. A creator is a cause of the supposed creation of the universe while the big bang doesn't specify a cause or creation. Because it has been travelling for billions of years. How is expanding quickly setting aside the laws of physics when scientists use the laws of physics to formulate how the big bang happened? Scientists use general relativity, newton's laws, and quantum mechanics among others to model how the big bang could have happened. From radiometric dating of asteroids. Nobody is claiming the universe was compressed from a larger size. It may have started that way. Also, the big bang isn't an explosion, its an expansion. Actually there is a lot of evidence it happened. Evidence the stars are moving away, their composition matching exactly what the big bang theory predicts if they formed from the singularity, and the background radiation. The big bang has strong evidence while there is no evidence of a creator (these aren't mutually exclusive though). But there is also no evidence the big bang was caused by a non-creator instead of a creator.
I believe in the Big Bang.. it's right there in Genesis.. "And then God Said . let there be light" So.. if that what His voice can do, it's no wonder He sends messengers and a Book to communicate with us!
[...] Science doesn't have any way ot testing for the existence of a Creator, but there IS evidence of inflation. It's not a matter of attacking god - it's a matter of limiting claims to that for which there is evidence. Again, science has evidence that takes us back to a tiny fraction of a second after the big ban. And, it's still the case that the "creator" version is an addition for which there is no evidence. I agree that science doesn't answer the "first cause" question. But, science can't even answer questions about the environment in which the "big bang" took place. It's fine for religion to postulate gods, heaven, hell, etc. That's all within the rules of how religion works. But, science is experimental and thus just can't do that.[/QUOTE]
Science is based on measurement and facts, not leaps of faith. Religion is nothing but faith and warm fuzzy feelings. In religion, there are no facts at all.
1. There is no official explanation of what happened before there was "creation from nothing," a process accounted for by quantum mechanics. 2. Physics (theoretical) versus Goddidit. 3. Maybe it doesn't spend light-years traveling across the universe if all is virtual reality. The photon pattern of a planet or star as it would have existed millions of years ago is presented instantly by programming. However, programming implies the existence of a Programmer. Einstein and Penrose came up with the idea of Creation originating as a singularity based on the theory of general relativity. Many years later they retracted support for the idea of a singularity when an understanding of quantum mechanics was developed.
Much of contemporary acceptance of authoritative science is a process of belief, faith. Science is rich in theory and popular fashion. For example, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was the preferred choice despite two other options that were just as feasible. In the distant past, bloodletting was considered a worthwhile and legitimate medical practice. The history of science is rich in advances and regressions. Going from wrong to right was no smooth progression, instead is littered with back and forth gains and losses. Examples: Aristotle--Galileo--Lord Kelvin--Copernicus--Newton--Kepler. Most of them were wrong on some points about the workings of the solar system or on other important aspects of human life.
I always chuckle at people who sit there in the church basement thinking that is they can only find some way to shoe-horn their particular god into the Big Bang Theory, then they have proven the god is the one and only. Why couldn’t it be a group of creators? Why couldn’t this universe simply be a by-product if another, more important creation? Why not a series of bangs and collapse of multiverses? Maybe the universe is just left over space dust from a cataclysmic natural even that destroyed the last universe to occupy this space. There are thousands of different possibilities. It isn’t just Big Bang or a god from a book.
In the "age of enlightenment," (the 1800s) the popular mindset was confidence in the power of reasoning, knowledge, and logic. Some pundits went so far as to suggest that there was nothing remarkable left to discover because everything was all figured out except for novel arrangements and obscure effects of known mechanisms. Some of this carried over into the 1900s with the revelations of nuclear physics and has persisted to this day despite the profound implications of subjectivity revealed by quantum mechanics. Such confidence was dulled by the modern realization that science can't address human issues of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, etc. Sometimes we have to make choices based on what we believe is best without sufficient evidence or proof of what really is best. The popular tendency to resort to atheism and scientism is a regression to the flawed age of enlightenment. The presumably firm gound of knowledge and reasoning is preferred over blind faith, especially since the personified God of the 3 major/western religions is too contradictory. Neo-Atheism is just a rehash of past shortcomings.
Exactly. Science is an orderly yet open and inclusive method of moving from wrong to right about how our universe works. Surely nobody thinks Aristotle knew all we know today nor would they dump on Newton for not thinking of the equivalence of mass and energy and effects of relativistic speed. Religion lacks such a process, resulting in no method of determining what is more right. Thus we get gigantic numbers of religions, with more arriving as new ideas are found, thus causing greater division.
I don't see evidence of that. If anything, our recent direction has led toward scoffing at what information science has to offer on almost all topics, and to deride the very idea that lifetimes of study are more than conspiracy.
That assumes a who or what is required. Who or what creates the creator? No, I think you have to have a great deal more faith to believe in an invisible sky daddy that knows everything, is everywhere, is the creator of everything, yet is interested in the personal details of your life and punishing you for your naughty behavior. Oh, and then believing that said sky daddy has always existed, will always exist, is perfect and yet can create imperfect things because reasons.
Ha!! Of course one could also make jokes about people who love debt - both economic in times of growth (such as now) and personal debt for the sin of being human beings. Have you considered that our big bang may be a punctuation in an environment that has always existed in a relatively stable state? That doesn't seem to be particlarly harder to believe than the idea that this universe came from an environment inhabited by a super intelligence that has existed for eternity, and who decided to taylor a big bang in a way so as to resut in humans who must figure out and follow His will or be tortured for eternity. Both posit eternal existence, presumably in a relatively stable state. One of them is just suggesting that the requirement of an eternal superpower intelligence may not be required.
Good point. That is why the big bang theory is primarily religious.. there are no observable, repeatable experiments that corroborate these beliefs. Can you compress all the matter in the universe into a particle? How? Can you then 'inflate' it, 'by more than a trillion trillion-fold in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second!'? ..sounds like a leap of faith, to me..
Your understanding of inflationary cosmology is wrong. All of the matter in the universe was not compressed into a particle prior to inflation; it didn't exist prior to inflation. Here is an explanation from one of the 2 individuals who discovered the inflationary theory, Alan Guth. The information below is from MIT News, "3 Questions: Alan Guth on new insights into the Big Bang". http://news.mit.edu/2014/3-q-alan-guth-on-new-insights-into-the-big-bang Inflation proposes that the expansion of the universe was driven by a repulsive form of gravity. According to Newton, gravity is a purely attractive force, but this changed with Einstein and the discovery of general relativity. General relativity describes gravity as a distortion of spacetime, and allows for the possibility of repulsive gravity. Modern particle theories strongly suggest that at very high energies, there should exist forms of matter that create repulsive gravity. Inflation, in turn, proposes that at least a very small patch of the early universe was filled with this repulsive-gravity material. The initial patch could have been incredibly small, perhaps as small as 10-24 centimeter, about 100 billion times smaller than a single proton. The small patch would then start to exponentially expand under the influence of the repulsive gravity, doubling in size approximately every 10-37 second. To successfully describe our visible universe, the region would need to undergo at least 80 doublings, increasing its size to about 1 centimeter. It could have undergone significantly more doublings, but at least this number is needed. During the period of exponential expansion, any ordinary material would thin out, with the density diminishing to almost nothing. The behavior in this case, however, is very different: The repulsive-gravity material actually maintains a constant density as it expands, no matter how much it expands! While this appears to be a blatant violation of the principle of the conservation of energy, it is actually perfectly consistent. This loophole hinges on a peculiar feature of gravity: The energy of a gravitational field is negative. As the patch expands at constant density, more and more energy, in the form of matter, is created. But at the same time, more and more negative energy appears in the form of the gravitational field that is filling the region. The total energy remains constant, as it must, and therefore remains very small. It is possible that the total energy of the entire universe is exactly zero, with the positive energy of matter completely canceled by the negative energy of gravity. I often say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch, since it actually requires no energy to produce a universe. At some point the inflation ends because the repulsive-gravity material becomes metastable. The repulsive-gravity material decays into ordinary particles, producing a very hot soup of particles that form the starting point of the conventional Big Bang. At this point the repulsive gravity turns off, but the region continues to expand in a coasting pattern for billions of years to come. Thus, inflation is a prequel to the era that cosmologists call the Big Bang, although it of course occurred after the origin of the universe, which is often also called the Big Bang.
There are multiple paths of evidence that lead to the big bang. There is no scientific evidence that this universe was a product of compression or that it came from a point source. There are multiple paths to measuring the inflation that is going on right now. Space itself is expanding! So, it's clear that there CAN be inflation - inflation is not an artificial had wave to cover some lack of knowledge, though there are certainly questions concerning how inflation works. But, the main reason that it is not religious is that it exclusively comes from careful measurement of our natural universe. And, it is not held as an irrefutable truth, as anyone is free to come up with alternatives that are based on careful measurement of our natural universe.
Im going with relativity. I can't imagine time would be anything like what we experience in the vicinity of the 'big bang' particle. Many other aspects of physics likely 'break down' near such an 'object' as well. Presuming all the mass in existance were condensced to the size of a pea, it would essentially be the badass granddaddy of black holes that doesn't have anything left to pull into itself. It may have been subject to an entirely different set of physics than what we have yet observed. Perhaps it took a (unfathomable amount of time) to 'explode' from its perspective... Or maybe such an environment as this particle (it was, essentially, 'the environment') is where/how a God comes to be.
??? Trace the expansion backwards in time and you arrive at a point. I believe it has been expanded from a pure point to a small region, by inflation theory.
Maybe someone has found a way to find evidence from earlier than when it was basketball size. I've not heard any physicist say it came from an actual mathmatical style point. I think one has to be careful in how we extrapolate to earlier times than those for which we have evidence. As for this discussion of begginings, I doubt it really matters. The religious argument is "god did it", with god being able to do absolutely anything, unconstrained within eternity and unbeholding to any laws of physics. And, science is constrained to physical evidence and logic.
I don't accept the notion that it's as simple as projecting back in time, using some inflation factor, until a point of zero dimension is reached. If we're going to say what size it was at the very beginning, we should have to support that with actual evidence. I'm not sure why the starting size as a big deal in terms of religious argument. Science doesn't depend on this universe being the only thing that has ever happened.
Yes, beliefs vary widely, regarding speculations about origins. But empiricism is scarce, so conjecture and speculation is all we have. ..and what evidence do you have, that supports the BELIEF of a particle sized universe, expanding trillions fold, in trillions of a trillionth of a second? That is a physical impossibility, that defies all natural laws. Yet you seem to favor an imagined process via godlessness, over an intelligent designer.. Isn't that just basing your 'science!', on your religious beliefs?
I adhered to the Big Bang, although Hawking had some alternative theories. Wish I understood them (LOL).
