Show Me How The Big Bang Theory Is Not A Leap Of Faith

[C C]

Without taking the Christian point of view of a 6000 years old universe serious, it could still be that the so-called evidence for a big bang is a mis-interpretation of the observations, in which case the universe could also be incredibly much older than the current hypothesized 13.8 billion years, let's say almost infinitely much older.

Sure, the current status of an _X_ is open to revision in science (that's why the latter is an epistemological process rather than closed dogma). For instance, former conceptions of the Big Bang have already been "slightly" adjusted by the introduction of cosmological inflation.[1]

But indeed, such potential modifications do nothing for the belief that the world is only 6,000 years old (which is the actual motivation for these spurious attacks on BB). The only way the latter could even be possible is via some version of the Omphalos hypothesis, where the universe was created "in progress" with the built-in appearance of a history stretching back billions of years, and the light from distant galaxies already having advanced. Even that view concedes that the empirical evidence supports items like evolution and an extremely ancient cosmos. It is only in terms of "ultimate reality" or metaphysics that YEC has any chance -- it can't undermine science being the authority when it comes to what appearances support.

- - - footnote - - -

[1] Was the Universe “timeless” before the Big Bang?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-timeless-before-big-bang/

• EXCERPT: The hot Big Bang — or the notion that the Universe emerged by expanding and cooling from an early hot, dense, nearly-perfectly-uniform state — is no longer considered to be the beginning of the Universe, but rather only arose as the aftermath of an earlier period that preceded it and set it up: a period of cosmic inflation. Inflation is a very different state than anything to do with the hot Big Bang, as instead of being filled with matter and radiation (or any type/species of particle), it was filled with field energy alone: energy inherent to the very fabric of empty space itself.

 

[Kermos]

I'm coming a bit late to the party, but I hope you will engage.

Hi DaveC426913,

I'm glad to engage in an exchange with you!

Lets get this out of the way:

Since it is obviously important to you that we know who you are, and you have made it part of the discussion, it is rather disingenuous of you to then slap responders with an "off topic" claim, no? You made it part of the discussion. So let's not have any more of that.

I presented myself as a known quantity, that is, a Christian, in order to streamline the conversation.

If someone randomly truncates the OP which I perceive as a disingenuous effort to reply in good faith, then I reserve the discretionary power to call foul.

I will attempt to engage you in good faith. I hope you will do the same. It is a very big subject, and part of your good faith engagment will require you to do some basic reading with an open mind.

Big subject? It's not called the Big Bang for nothing.

Seriously, did you read the responses post #19 and post #28 and post #51 to exchemist? You might see me making a good faith response to his first well prepared post along with continued good faith attempts to encourage civil discourse in the follow-on responses to him?

They do not "believe" it. They acknowledge that a preponderance of evidence supports it as one of the best possibles explanations of what we witness with our eyes and telescopes and particle accelerators.

A couple of your peer's admitted that the Big Bang Theory is a leap of faith in post #24 and post #25, and your faith in the Big Bang Theory will be demonstrated to be a leap of faith by the conclusion of this post.

Your eyes have not seen your Big Bang because your time-line places the Big Bang billions of years before you were born; therefore, your "what we witness with our eyes" is a leap of faith.

Setting aside for the moment that the Big Bang was not an explosion (a little reading on the subject will disabuse you of that notion) -

Perhaps you shouldn't call your event horizon "the Big Bang Theory" in order to avoid the descriptive word "exploded". You knew what I meant. Did your explanation make you feel superior to me?

The universe once being in a very hot, very dense state is a logical backwards progression of the physics as we currently understand it (and we understand it pretty well).

We know how atomic and subatomic particles behave at high densities and high temperatures. We can roll back the current state of the universe to an earlier time, just as we can roll back the Earth's orbit to see where it was ten years ago.

Man's ability to model the Earth's solar orbital position 10 years ago is a significantly different thing than a purported cosmic event 13,800,000,000 years ago, and your comparison between the two is disingenuous.

There is no reason why, when we roll it backward in time, it does not shrink to a smaller and smaller volume and get hotter and hotter.

Your statement "There is no reason why, when we roll it backward in time, it does not shrink to a smaller and smaller volume and get hotter and hotter" is a leap of faith because you have not used a repeatable test experiment at scale nor have your philosopher peers repeated such a test experiment at scale.

Atomic and subatomic parrticles do not just vanish as we roll past 6000 years into the past. Nor, we can be sure, did they pop in to existence for no particular reason, 6000 years ago.

Your belief "Nor, we can be sure, did they pop in to existence for no particular reason, 6000 years ago" does not make it true. Again, you were not there, so you are not authoritative.

This evidence, based on known physics, takes us back to a very hot, dense state without involving any unknown assumptions. It is the simplest model that does so.

Your assumption, not evidence, is your physics model "takes us back to a very hot, dense state", so your "without involving any unknown assumptions" is void. You'll find more about your fractured physics model in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) section, below.

Furthermore, what we see in the universe today is strong evidence of how it was a long time ago.

Extrapolation of local conditions across unknown time and unexplored space is another of your assumptions, not evidence.

When we build models, our models tell us what we should expect to see. They are predictive.

Edwin Hubble is largely credited by the scientific community with discovering in 1924 that almost all galaxies are moving away from Earth.

Your Big Bang Theory originated in 1927 with physicist Georges Lemaître according to historians.

This means your Big Bang Theory model was fabricated after the expansion of the universe proposal; therefore, your "They are predictive" regarding your physics models is disingenuous because Hubble's discovery predates Lemaître's physics model.

Man tries to shoehorn what he sees into models, and the flat Earth is another example beyond the Big Bang Theory.

One of the things TBB predicted was a leftover "echo" of the initial very hot state that will have cooled and continued to radiate all over the universe. The predicted temperature, if the models are correct is that, after about 13.7 billion years of cooling, the universe should be about 3 degrees K, everywhere uniformly. That is in the microwave range. That is what TBB predicts.

Do you believe those temperatures were a constantly uniform equal distribution throughout that very hot, dense region followed by matching balanced steady cooling during the upheaval of rapid expansion with a balanced cooling across time to this day? You have an unrealistic model because your Big Bang Theory model lacks temperature variations such as the unpredicted Planck satellite cool region. Tweaking the Big Bang Theory with inflation is not predictive because the human addition is reactive. Man is incapable of obtaining source readings one hundred light years away from Earth, so a homogeneous and isotropic spatial environment is assumed (leap of faith), yet perceived as unlikely per scientists (consider the Planck satellite data and human conclusions).

The negative implications are profound to your One of the things TBB predicted was a leftover "echo" of the initial very hot state that will have cooled and continued to radiate all over the universe and the CMBR which you claim as evidence for the Big Bang Theory, below.

Continued to post #63

 

[Kermos]

Continued from post #62

A few decades ago, scientists studying the sky discovered an unknown phenomenon: the universe seems to be radiating microwave radiation uniformly across the sky in the microwave band. This is now called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), and what we observed fit our models so well that the two curves, plotted on a graph match so perfectly that they cannot be distinguished without a magnifying glass.

Here is the graph. Blue is waht our model predcits. Red is our actual observations.
View attachment 7165

It is a phenomenal example of a predictive theory being born out in data. And that is the Gold Standard of scientific theory.

You wrote of needing a magnifying glass for your gold standard line graph.

Carl Sagan wrote Cosmos, and in Cosmos, Sagan presented his Cosmic Calendar representing 13.8 billion years as a conventional single calendar year with January 1st as the Big Bang and December 31st as the current time.

Sagan's calculations put the birth of Christ on December 31st at 23:59:55. That's mere seconds before the end of the calendar year.

Each second encapsulates 438 years on the Cosmic Calendar, so the past hundred years since Hubble is one-quarter second at the end of that Cosmic Calendar year.

You believe you philosophers observe the Big Bang in such a negligibly small window that your vaunted magnifying glass for your gold standard line graph would of no value for the Cosmic Calendar printed across a single 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper.

You philosophers built a speculative model on a foundation of values generated by you to fit a point in time (now) imposing upon another point in time (13.8 billion years ago).

What you believe is not relevant here. That is why this is a science forum and not a religion forum. Show us your evidence of a 6000 year old universe. You have many many, many things to explain, from continental drift to carbon dating to CMBR and ah dner other distin ct, hyet ocrroborative lines of evidence.

I wasn't there. It's called faith. I admit believing the Earth is about 6,000 years old is belief in the Word of God.

If you want evidence, then look in the mirror because, believe it or not, you are made in the image and likeness of God. Your optic nerve did not randomly occur bridging your eye to your brain.

The only question here is what objective evidence do you have that the Earth is only 6000 years old? How do you explain the vast trove of evidence we have of things far, far older than 6000 years? We have evidence of creatures, trees and even bedrock that is billions of years old. What is your model of a 6000 year old Earth that is made of materials and creatures five hundred thousand times olrder?

Proposed galaxy HDI is promoted as a view to the time very near the location of the Big Bang by Big Bang philosophers, yet the Big Bang CMB map observed structure correlates to the Earth's orbital plane around the Sun thus indicating non-uniformity which is a breach of CMBR even putting the Milky Way solar system at the center of the universe instead of instead of proposed galaxy HDI - 13.5 billion light years from Earth. That's a huge dilemma.

God "stretches out the heavens like a curtain" (Psalm 104:2), yet you believe in a Big Bang.

Did you know that a single wooly mammoth was carbon dated at 40,000 years old with it's hind quarters carbon dated at 13,000 years old? Either that was a very slow death or carbon dating is not a gold standard.

Evidence. That's all we care about. That's what separates your faith from science.



It objectively is. Whether or not you accept the evidence, the evidence is available, in a preponderance, and the theory of the Big Bang is founded on that evidence. That is what makes it science.



I can. What makes science is evidence. The evidence precedes the theory. For most of human history we thought that the heavens were changing and eternal (bwucses he has no datam and therefore took it on faith).

Even after evidence started pouring in of an ever-changing, expanding universe, the world was not convinced. It was not until the evidence was overwhelming - until falsifying the Big Bang origin became more complex, fragile and falsiable than acknowledging TBB explained all our data, accumulated over a century.

Faith is belief without evidence.
Science is built upon evidence, not belief.

You need "Evidence" because you claim "That's all we care about".

You claim that telescopes provides evidence for you. Telescopes enable you to determine the distance from Earth to celestial bodies many light years away.

If you take a first measurement to a particular object in space from a telescope on Earth on June 21 and a second reading on December 21 of the same year, then you can use the angle-side-angle geometric formula to determine the distance to the object. For the purposes of this example, the object is one light year away from Earth.

I want to give you an idea of just how narrow that triangle is by way of a scale model.

A first person uses a red marking pen to put a dot on the TransAmerica building in San Francisco.

A second person sets up two street survey instruments on tripods 800 miles away on the Space Needle in Seattle, and the survey instruments are set sixteen inches apart.

Now, the second person finds the red dot and collects the angle-side-angle data for calculating the distance to the red dot.

That is one NARROW triangle, and that is a one light year scale model.

Imagine how much narrower that triangle is with respect to the nearest solar system, Andromeda, at 4 light years away.

DaveC426913, if you don't perceive your evidence disappearing, then that's a shame.

Astronomers claim VY Canis Majoris, are approximately 3,900 light-years away from Earth.

From Earth, that triangulation has the appearance of being parallel lines.

A galaxy candidate named HDI is pegged at 13.5 billion light years from Earth by astronomers who put HDI in the early universe.

The astronomers cannot use parallax because that requires knowing the brightness at the source or the distance.

Astronomers already claim to know the distance without visiting the source to determine the brightness.

This leaves telescopes to determine the distance.

The resulting triangle using telescopes on Earth to arrive at 13.5 billion light years from Earth is a leap of faith.

 

[Kermos]

ill stick with it all the same.

Not unlike sticking with the leap of faith you have invested in the Big Bang Theory.

 

[DaveC426913]

Not unlike sticking with the leap of faith you have invested in the Big Bang Theory.

We've just made it very clear that there is a mountain of evidence that the universe is billions of years old. We have the evidence in our corner.

Whether or not you quibble with what the evidence tells us, it does exist, and it is what TBBT is founded on. Therefore, by definition of "faith", your claim has been falsified.

We could go into it in more detail but it looks like that is premature. Based on your responses in post 62, you don't seem to know what the Cosmic Distance Ladder is. That makes it pretty clear you have formed your opinion about cosmology in a vacuum of knowledge.

Earlier you said: "Big subject? It's not called the Big Bang for nothing."

But you do a disservise to your own words, having not done some required reading on TBBT. How are we supposed to take your opinion seriously?

 

[DaveC426913]

Hi DaveC426913,

I'm glad to engage in an exchange with you!



I presented myself as a known quantity, that is, a Christian, in order to streamline the conversation.

If someone randomly truncates the OP which I perceive as a disingenuous effort to reply in good faith, then I reserve the discretionary power to call foul.

Except you're already telling revealing your agenda to promote your Young Earth idea. i'm; farid you forfeit the privilege of telling others they must adhere strictly to the topic of thread as written.

Big subject? It's not called the Big Bang for nothing.

Big enough that you have not studied it. You are operating in a vacuum. this becoems apparent shortly.

Seriously, did you read the responses post #19 and post #28 and post #51 to exchemist? You might see me making a good faith response to his first well prepared post along with continued good faith attempts to encourage civil discourse in the follow-on responses to him?

Post 19 is a lecture about God and the Ten Commandments. That's off-topic by your own claim. How is that good faith? How is i t topical?
Post 28 is not by you; it's a post by Honest Joe.
Psot 51 is four words, saying someone provided no analysis.
Seriously.

A couple of your peer's admitted that the Big Bang Theory is a leap of faith in post #24 and post #25, and your faith in the Big Bang Theory will be demonstrated to be a leap of faith by the conclusion of this post.

Your eyes have not seen your Big Bang because your time-line places the Big Bang billions of years before you were born; therefore, your "what we witness with our eyes" is a leap of faith.

You seem to be confused about what a leap of faith means versus what evidence means.

I was not born when the steam engine was popular. Woud you say it is a leap of faith that I think steam engines did work? Or would you say there is a mountain of evidence that steam power works.

I have never seen a steam engine operate with my own eyes, yet I am confident they are not magic, becaue I understand physics inlolved.

We ahve particle accelerators that can reach in to the Tera-electron-volt range. While we re not reacxtin g the BB itself, we cerntyialy have a lot of knowledge about high temperatures and high energies.

Perhaps you shouldn't call your event horizon "the Big Bang Theory" in order to avoid the descriptive word "exploded". You knew what I meant.

It is important that we re talking about the right things and using the right terminology, do you agree?

I cannot know what you meant unless you say so. If you did think the BB was an explosion, that could have been easily corrected, and for all we know you mighth have said "Thanks! I understand now!"

Did your explanation make you feel superior to me?

That is unexpectedly defensive.
I'm not here to feel superior.

Man's ability to model the Earth's solar orbital position 10 years ago is a significantly different thing than a purported cosmic event 13,800,000,000 years ago, and your comparison between the two is disingenuous.

How?
What about 100 years ago?
Neither of us were born then. By your own criteria, since we did not witness it with our own eyeballs, and we cannot repeat the test, it is a leap of faith that the Earth has been orbiting the sun for 100 years.

The comparison is not disingenuous. It strikes at the heart of your frequent broad decrees about what constitutes this idea of faith you like.

Your statement "There is no reason why, when we roll it backward in time, it does not shrink to a smaller and smaller volume and get hotter and hotter" is a leap of faith because you have not used a repeatable test experiment at scale nor have your philosopher peers repeated such a test experiment at scale.

As above. By your accounting, anything that happened before your birth and anyting that happened that you did not witness with your own eyeballs can be considered a leap of faith.

You will have to update your defintion of leap of faith.

Your belief "Nor, we can be sure, did they pop in to existence for no particular reason, 6000 years ago" does not make it true.

We are not talking about what is "true". We are talking about science. Science's job is to make predictive models.

Our high energy science theories predicted the Higgs Boson.
Huzzah! The Higgs Boson was found.
That is a good ndiction that we areon the right track. And tha tmeans we can use our newfohnd knowledge to advance our ssicne further.

Again, you were not there, so you are not authoritative.

You were not there in 1925. We are confident tha the Earth was still orbiting the sun. It does not require a leap faith.v. Update your definition.

Your assumption, not evidence, is your physics model "takes us back to a very hot, dense state", so your "without involving any unknown assumptions" is void.

It is not an assumption. We have evidence.

Likewise, it is not an assumptipn that the Earth revolved around the sun 100 years ago. Nor is it an assumption that steam engones worked back then.

Extrapolation of local conditions across unknown time and unexplored space is another of your assumptions, not evidence.

You're kind of saying "How do we know the whether on the other end of this lake is wet? What if it's boiling steam, or made of jello?"
Well, it could be, sure. Got any evidence to think that? no?

Edwin Hubble is largely credited by the scientific community with discovering in 1924 that almost all galaxies are moving away from Earth.

Your Big Bang Theory originated in 1927 with physicist Georges Lemaître according to historians.

This means your Big Bang Theory model was fabricated after the expansion of the universe proposal; therefore, your "They are predictive" regarding your physics models is disingenuous because Hubble's discovery predates Lemaître's physics model.

Why is that disingeuous?
Somene said "Everytihng is moving away from everything else"
A few years alter, someone said "Say, what happens if we project that backwards?"

Man tries to shoehorn what he sees into models,

Shoehorn is an odd choce of word.

I see a cloud overhead. Now it is raining. After repeated test,s I conlcude that water vapour gathers in the sky and bnegins to fall.
Am I "shoehorning what I see into a model"?
Is that a bad thing?

and the flat Earth is another example beyond the Big Bang Theory.

What does flat Earth have to do with anything?
There is zero evidence for it, and an overwhelming mountain of evidence for a spherical Earth, including direct photographs

Do you believe those temperatures were a constantly uniform equal distribution throughout that very hot, dense region followed by matching balanced steady cooling during the upheaval of rapid expansion with a balanced cooling across time to this day?

What I believe is irrelevant. The question is what does the evidence say?

You have an unrealistic model because your Big Bang Theory model lacks temperature variations such as the unpredicted Planck satellite cool region. Tweaking the Big Bang Theory with inflation is not predictive because the human addition is reactive.

What??

 

[DaveC426913]

Man is incapable of obtaining source readings one hundred light years away from Earth,

Why do you say this? We have reading across the entire spectrum. If the space 100 light years away were significantly different, we would see it evidenced in a hundred different ways.

And in fact we do, because there are places 100 light years that are miiliond of degreed hotter than here. They happen to be at the core of stars - which we see, with our telescopes. The fact that we can see stars means that we certainly can get reading of conditions very far way.

so a homogeneous and isotropic spatial environment is assumed (leap of faith), yet perceived as unlikely per scientists (consider the Planck satellite data and human conclusions).

The fact that there are conditions assumed in our models does not mean the models themselves are an assumption.

Again, that's tantamont to saying "it's a leap of faith that ethane moleceules are not passing freely through the aluminum engine block, therefore the fact that internal combustion engines work at all is a leap of faith." No. It's not.

 

[Pinball1970]

We've just made it very clear

And yet....

Either, this guy is not so quick on the uptake OR he is another YEC liar.

Carry on.

 

[Pinball1970]

Your eyes have not seen your Big Bang because your time-line places the Big Bang billions of years before you were born

And you didn't see Jesus of Nazareth being born, walk on water, calm the storm or call himself god, so it is probably best you do not use this idiotic tactic.

 

[DaveC426913]

You claim that telescopes provides evidence for you. Telescopes enable you to determine the distance from Earth to celestial bodies many light years away.

If you take a first measurement to a particular object in space from a telescope on Earth on June 21 and a second reading on December 21 of the same year, then you can use the angle-side-angle geometric formula to determine the distance to the object. For the purposes of this example, the object is one light year away from Earth.

I want to give you an idea of just how narrow that triangle is by way of a scale model.

A first person uses a red marking pen to put a dot on the TransAmerica building in San Francisco.

A second person sets up two street survey instruments on tripods 800 miles away on the Space Needle in Seattle, and the survey instruments are set sixteen inches apart.

Now, the second person finds the red dot and collects the angle-side-angle data for calculating the distance to the red dot.

That is one NARROW triangle, and that is a one light year scale model.

Imagine how much narrower that triangle is with respect to the nearest solar system, Andromeda, at 4 light years away.

DaveC426913, if you don't perceive your evidence disappearing, then that's a shame.

Astronomers claim VY Canis Majoris, are approximately 3,900 light-years away from Earth.

From Earth, that triangulation has the appearance of being parallel lines.

A galaxy candidate named HDI is pegged at 13.5 billion light years from Earth by astronomers who put HDI in the early universe.

The astronomers cannot use parallax because that requires knowing the brightness at the source or the distance.

Astronomers already claim to know the distance without visiting the source to determine the brightness.

This leaves telescopes to determine the distance.

The resulting triangle using telescopes on Earth to arrive at 13.5 billion light years from Earth is a leap of faith.

As an amateur astronomer, knowing fields of view, parallax and stellar distance is kind of familiar. I don't really need a primer.

But your impression of how astronomy works is revealing.

You seem to think there is one and only one way to calcuate distances. You seem to think that "parallax of distant objects = X, therefore Big Bang equals 13.8By".

This is astonishingly naive for someone who tries to argue the point.

There is absolutely no way that a forum discussion can teach you the basics of astronomy - let alone cosmology - to get you where you have the slightest idea what you're arguing about.

I don't think you're a troll. I do think you are profoundly uninformed on the subject. As I said, you apparently don't even know what the cosmic ladder is. That's like arguing about highway traffic control without having encountered a speedometer. Or arguing about baking, whiole thinking the only way to bake a cake is over hot coals, having enver head of a modern oven.

Please, until you've done quie a bit of reading, stay in your lane.

 

[DaveC426913]

And yet....

He thinks we determined the age of the universe based on the visual parallax angle of distant objects.

He's never even heard of the Cosmic Distance Ladder, or apparently, the last four centuries of science.

This is a profound case of the Dunning-Krueger Effect.

 

[Pinball1970]

Not unlike sticking with the leap of faith you have invested in the Big Bang Theory.

No, over 100 years of published literature in reputable scientific journals. Repeatable, testable verified science. The stuff that provides the technology for the world you live in, the science that you have zero understanding of. Of course you know that though right? Because you are not interested in the actual science, please stop lying.

 

[Pinball1970]

This is a profound case of the Dunning-Krueger Effect.

Simpler than that, YEC creationist liar.

 

[Kermos]

Scientists stop predicting the conditions existing at early times in the universe when the equations go nuts.
The scientists then start looking for new mathematical ways to get further backwards in time.
At no point do scientists say the equations prove the universe started from nothing.
That’s your misunderstanding of things.

I wrote "For scientists (truly philosophers) who believe the Big Bang started from nothing", but you morphed it into the unrelated "At no point do scientists say the equations prove the universe started from nothing". You Big Bang philosophers keep misrepresenting this "Show Me How The Big Bang Theory Is Not A Leap Of Faith" as if I mentioned proof anywhere in the original post.

The following preemptively identifies a professor of Big Bang from nothing for you to be clear that such people people are around.

Former Arizona State University Professor Lawrence M. Krauss authored a book titled "A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing".

Krauss' 2009 lecture, the basis of the book, captured on

, went sensationally viral, during which he addressed how the universe could develop from nothing.

Krauss taught at the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Department of Physics in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

 

[Pinball1970]

I wrote "For scientists (truly philosophers) who believe the Big Bang started from nothing", but you morphed it into the unrelated "At no point do scientists say the equations prove the universe started from nothing". You Big Bang philosophers keep misrepresenting this "Show Me How The Big Bang Theory Is Not A Leap Of Faith" as if I mentioned proof anywhere in the original post.

The following preemptively identifies a professor of Big Bang from nothing for you to be clear that such people people are around.

Former Arizona State University Professor Lawrence M. Krauss authored a book titled "A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing".

Krauss' 2009 lecture, the basis of the book, captured on

, went sensationally viral, during which he addressed how the universe could develop from nothing.

Krauss taught at the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Department of Physics in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

At what point did he say the universe is 6000 years old?

This is a science website for everyone to ask about the universe.

STOP being a YEC creationist liar.

 

[Pinball1970]

The following preemptively identifies a professor of Big Bang from nothing for you to be clear that such people people are around.

Why are you being a liar?

 

[DaveC426913]

Krauss' 2009 lecture, the basis of the book ... went sensationally viral, during which he addressed how the universe could develop from nothing.

Did he?

'...his definition of "nothing" is not a void but the quantum vacuum, a state of empty space that is teeming with fluctuating virtual particles and governed by the laws of physics, leading some to argue that this "something" isn't a true "nothing". '

 

[exchemist]

I wrote "For scientists (truly philosophers) who believe the Big Bang started from nothing", but you morphed it into the unrelated "At no point do scientists say the equations prove the universe started from nothing". You Big Bang philosophers keep misrepresenting this "Show Me How The Big Bang Theory Is Not A Leap Of Faith" as if I mentioned proof anywhere in the original post.

The following preemptively identifies a professor of Big Bang from nothing for you to be clear that such people people are around.

Former Arizona State University Professor Lawrence M. Krauss authored a book titled "A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing".

Krauss' 2009 lecture, the basis of the book, captured on

, went sensationally viral, during which he addressed how the universe could develop from nothing.

Krauss taught at the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Department of Physics in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

So what? He can speculate, sure. That doesn’t make his speculations part of the Big Bang theory. He is speculating beyond the limits of the theory.

Do you really not understand this?

 

[DaveC426913]

So what? He can speculate, sure. That doesn’t make his speculations part of the Big Bang theory. He is speculating beyond the limits of the theory.

Nor does it seem to inform the thread topic much. So some scieintists speculate about things for which there is unconvincing evidence. They get to do that. How does that, in any way, weaken the evidence for the Big Bang?

That is a rhetorical question. The OP has armed themselves with a few specious bits of speculations about cosmology. What a shock that they aren't convinced.

Unfortunately, it is very apparent that, to have a meaningful conversation with the OP, they would have take some courses - first in basic astronomy - and then in cosmology to even begin to understand the vast store of knowledge we have accumulated.

In addition to reading up on the Cosmic Distance Ladder, be sure to read up on Cepheid Variables. And maybe about fifty other things that would - if you had a desire to learn - be very illuminating.


Kermos You are welcome but not be convinced about the Big Bang. That is your personal belief. But you are not knowledgeable enough as-yet to argue that it is insufficiently supported. That's a fact.

 

[James R]

Kermos:

Hi DaveC426913,

I'm glad to engage in an exchange with you!

And what about with me?

It seems quite rude of you not to even acknowledge the response that I posted to your earlier posts.

You're not ignoring me, are you? Did I, perhaps, say something you found a bit too challenging to deal with? If so, you'd be better off being honest and just admitting you don't know about it, or that you have no answer. It's what a good Christian should do. Right?

While I wait for your considered reply to my earlier posts, I will try to help you to correct some new errors and misconceptions that have appeared in your more recent posts.

Your eyes have not seen your Big Bang because your time-line places the Big Bang billions of years before you were born; therefore, your "what we witness with our eyes" is a leap of faith.

This seems to be the main point you want to make: that we can't know anything about the past unless we were personally there to witness it. But that suggests to me that, maybe, you don't understand how science (or history!) is done.

Do you believe that Alexander the Great was a real person? He was born in 356 BCE and he died around the age of 30, having established an empire in the interim.

Now - obviously - you weren't there to see Alexander or his empire. Neither was I. Neither was anybody who is alive today. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted by scholars that Alexander the Great was as real an ancient Macedonian king as you can get, and that he really did conquer lots of nations (Israel included, if you're interested in that).

Why do you think that historians accept that Alexander the Great was a real person? Do you believe he was real? Why - or why not?

Turning to a different topic, do you believe that the Grand Canyon is real?

How long ago do you think the Grand Canyon was formed? And how do you think it was formed? And why do you believe it was formed that way?

Hint: the scientific consensus is that the oldest parts of the Grand Canyon were formed about 50-70 million years ago and not (in case you're interested) in a global flood that happened less than 6000 years ago. Do you know why that is the scientific consensus? As in the case of Alexander the Great, you will note that nobody was around to see it happen. Nevertheless, we can be confident that the consensus age range is accurate.

To summarise: it is a mistake to think that no historical event can be verified unless there are eyewitnesses alive today.

I know that you do believe that at least some historical events occurred, even though you weren't there to see them. We'll get to one of them a little later.

Man's ability to model the Earth's solar orbital position 10 years ago is a significantly different thing than a purported cosmic event 13,800,000,000 years ago, and your comparison between the two is disingenuous.

You are correct that the later is more complicated than the former. That doesn't mean it can't be done and, as a matter of fact, it has been done.

Your statement "There is no reason why, when we roll it backward in time, it does not shrink to a smaller and smaller volume and get hotter and hotter" is a leap of faith because you have not used a repeatable test experiment at scale nor have your philosopher peers repeated such a test experiment at scale.

Physics - not to mention common experience - can confirm that when you compress a gas, it gets hotter, and when it expands it gets cooler.

Please take a moment to think about that.

Extrapolation of local conditions across unknown time and unexplored space is another of your assumptions, not evidence.

Science, in general, assumes uniformity and regularity, both in time and space, unless there is evidence that suggests something different.

You're correct that, in principle, the galaxy next door to the Milky Way might be made of weird, exotic matter that is completely different to the matter our galaxy is made of and which obeys completely different laws of physics. However, there's no evidence that supports that hypothesis, and quite a lot of evidence against it.

Please take a moment to think about that.

This means your Big Bang Theory model was fabricated after the expansion of the universe proposal; therefore, your "They are predictive" regarding your physics models is disingenuous because Hubble's discovery predates Lemaître's physics model.

It sounds like you don't understand what is meant when we talk about a "predictive" scientific model. What it means is that the model says, in effect, "If you measure X, you ought to find Y." The most respected scientific theories make predictions not just about things that we already know, but about things we have yet to test, and get both of them right.

In the case of the big bang theory, it doesn't just predict the expansion of the universe. It doesn't just predict the existence of the observed cosmic microwave background radiation (which, by the way, it predicted before the CMBR was first measured). It also makes numerous other predictions. For example, it predicts the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium in the universe as a whole, and the observations agree with those predictions. That's just a few examples. There are many more.

Man tries to shoehorn what he sees into models, and the flat Earth is another example beyond the Big Bang Theory.

You are correct that the flat earthers try to shoehorn what they see into their model. They fail because their model is not predictive of what we observe (for instance, they fail at trying to explain where the sun goes at night time).

Similarly, Creationists try to shoehorn their model of a 6000 year old Earth into their model of special creation by a deity, but - as with the flat earth model - their model is not predictive when it comes to scientific observations in the fields of geology, biology, physics and such.

When theories such as flat earth and Creationism fail so badly at making correct predictions, science dispenses with them - which is what it has done with both the mentioned models. Instead, science uses models that are predictive in the sense I explained.