Hi Scottness,
I'm going to respond to several of your messages in a single post, beginning with your
Message 257:
scottness writes:
I conceded already that the peices may look like a big bang. But a collage may look like planet... until you step back and see that it is a picture of God holding the whole thing in his hand.
You're walking by a pond and hear a "plop". You look out onto the pond and see circular ripples spreading away from a center. You conclude that the ripples began at that center point, perhaps when a pebble, fish or frog disturbed the surface.
Now you look out into the universe. Every galactic group is retreating from every other galactic group, the faster with increasing distance, just like raisins separating in dough as bread rises. You conclude that these galactic groups must once have been much closer together, and as better data accumulates finally conclude they were once long ago in the past all at the precise same place.
In other words, building scientific theories isn't just a matter of looking at pieces and thinking they look like a Big Bang. Before we had the data no one even imagined that there had been a Big Bang. The Big Bang is an ancient event that unexpectedly fell out of the data.
You are coming from the position that facts are the only thing that matters. Am I correct? Is that the essential scientific concept wrapped up in the clearest terms?
If so, I think the problem with that is that Stalin obliterated 15 million people. It's just a fact. But without meaning, it is useless.
Science is not the search for meaning. Finding meaning is the domain of religion. Science is only how we understand the material universe. It has nothing to do with meaning and other spiritual matters.
I can gather all kinds of facts about the meteorological conditions today in my region. All the best data! but can I tell you what the wheather was a month ago based on those mathematical models?
No! Nor can I tell you what it will be in a week. A close guess at best. There are forces at work too complex to pin down, and that's just the atmosphere on one planet out of untold hundreds of billions.
Some things are simple and open to analysis, like the Big Bang, and other things are complicated and chaotic, like the weather. I'll give you a better example than the weather. Take a look at the swirls in cooking soup, preferably in a glass pot. Now calculate what the swirls looked like 10 seconds ago. Pretty complicated, and not something we can do at the current time.
But compared to boiling soup the universe is simple. Of course, complexity depends upon the questions you're asking, as the answer to your next statement will make clear.
Yet, I am expected to believe that we have the ability to look into the past and calculate the entire universe's position and attitude.
If you're only asking if the universe if expanding, contracting or static, that's simple. But if you pick up a rock in your yard and ask, "Precisely when, where and how in the universe were the elements in this rock formed," then that's a question we're unlikely to ever be able to answer. All we can say is that the higher elements above lithium were cooked in the centers of stars, and the elements above iron were created during supernova explosions. But which stars and when? We'll likely never know.
The extreme disproportion in the differences in difficulty between the two problems is not even fathomable.
What you're expressing here is your belief that analyzing the weather is simpler than figuring out where all the matter in the universe was 13.7 million years ago. As I've tried to make clear, weather is the more complicated of the two. Accurate weather predictions require incredibly detailed knowledge and incredibly powerful analysis techniques that are lacking at present, at least if you're goal is to be able to tell whether it will be raining in Duluth a week from today. General trends are much easier.
And that's why analyzing where all the matter in the universe was billions of years ago is so easy. We don't need to know the exact position of every star in every galaxy and every molecule in every gas cloud throughout time. We only need to make observations that allow us to calculate the velocity of entire galaxies and groups of galaxies. This is a much easier problem than the weather.
And amazingly, and fortunately for Big Bang theory, the general theory of relativity yields the same results as observations, an amazing confirmation. One of the predictions of theory is that the universe should be filled with background radiation at a certain frequency, and Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel prize for being the first to detect this radiation back in the 1960's. Many other confirmations followed, and it is the harmony between just such observations and theory that makes our confidence in Big Bang theory so strong.
I do not deny science and collection of facts. I just think we are way ahead of ourselves and a tiny little tad bit arrogant.
When astronomers look out into space and calculate a couple years in advance just where Mars and an approaching space probe will be so that the space probe can land safely on the planet's surface, is that way ahead of themselves and "a tiny little tad bit arrogant." Or when Halley looked at old observations of comets and deduced that a certain set of observations were actually of the same comet returning every 76 years, was he way ahead of himself and "a tiny little tad bit arrogant." When Copernicus took observations of the planets and deduced a sun-centered solar system, was he way ahead of himself and "a tiny little tad bit arrogant." When you get in your car and calculate that if you drive 60 miles/hour for 5 hours that you'll travel 300 miles, are you way ahead of himself and "a tiny little tad bit arrogant." All any of these people are doing is taking observations and plugging them into equations. If you're careful in your measurements and calculations you can do this.
I think your characterization has more to do with you not liking the theory than with any arrogance of cosmologists.
I think the belief in the Big bang and other naturalistic theories is motivated much more by individual meaning be it subconscious or not.
There is no meaning in the Big Bang. It is an event that simply fell out of the data.
Now, moving on to your comments about science in your
Message 260:
scottness writes:
If you don't mind me saying, I don't think that science can even be considered a consensus.
On the contrary, this is precisely what science is. The biases of individuals are cancelled out by requiring that science be very much a consensus activity. Only when lots of scientists repeat the same experiments, obtain the same results, and reach the same conclusions, can consensus ever be reached. The current consensus of the major fields of science is what is taught in public school science classrooms.
What they are actually doing, is projecting meaning from the facts at hand.
Once again, science is not the search for meaning. That is the province of religion.
The BB is a perfect example of this. There is simply no reason (or meaning) to infer, if one is operating from a position of actual neutrality.
Yes, precisely right. The Big Bang has no meaning. Neither does gravity, the aurora borealis or a dinosaur fossil.
I wonder if you're confusing different definitions of the word "mean". When a scientist says, "Our discovery of the red shift
*means* that distant galaxies are retreating from us," he's not saying that the red shift has meaning. This is just one of the many ways people can describe how a conclusion was reached from data. He could as easily have said it another way, e.g., "Our discovery of the red shift helped us understand that distant galaxies are retreating from us."
Since the worldview of a scientist is typically claimed to be one of agnosticism in regards to theism, a pure scientist in that stripe would infer nothing, because we simply cannot ever know all the facts by his own presupposition.
Science is as atheistic as plumbing and automobile repair. When you find your plumber or your mechanic seeking answers to your plumbing or automobile problems in the Bible, my advice would be to take your business elsewhere.
Concerning the people who actually do the science, while many scientists reject a personal God, around 60%, just as many express a belief in some sort of God, also around 60%. So while it would be accurate to characterize science as non-theistic, just like most other secular activities, scientists themselves are a diverse group composed of theists, atheists and agnostics to varying degrees and with diverse perspectives.
Nor do I believe that I am the only one who is promoting a particular meaning onto the evidence.
If you're projecting religious or spiritual meaning onto evidence then you're not thinking scientifically. What you want to bring to science is the same analytic approach you'd use when trying to figure out that funny sound your car is making. If you hear that funny sound and think, "What is God trying to tell me?" instead of "I'd better get to a repair shop," it doesn't take any genius to figure out that your next call will likely be to a tow truck. Religion is not the answer to all problems.
Moving on to your
Message 262:
We end up getting into that fuzzy necessity of ethics and morality.
Not in the science forums we don't. Anyone who while looking at tables of recession velocities of galaxies is analyzing them in terms of ethics and morality can only be described as very confused.
--Percy
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