From Catholic News Agency: “She also said that belief in God, far from being an impediment to scientific inquiry, actually can be helpful for scientists because of the “sure foundation” that belief in a Creator provides. Öberg herself is a convert from atheism.”
Big Bang
At Evolution News: To Avoid a Cosmic Beginning, Physicist Paul Steinhardt Goes to Extraordinary Lengths
The cyclical cosmological model: “No empirical evidence supports any of the theory’s essential components.”
George Ellis argues: We can’t know if the universe had a beginning
Well, if the universe did not have a start, it must always have existed. And that’s the dreaded territory of Hilbert’s Hotel and infinity apart from mathematics.
At Mind Matters News: A recent Big Bang debate: Sheer politeness underscores shakeup
Such sudden, widespread cosmological doubt is bound to have a major cultural impact.
At Evolution News: Theoretical Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the Deficiency of Alternative Models to Big Bang Cosmology
We observe phenomena in this universe that are beyond the known constraints imposed by the laws of nature, implying that natural explanations are insufficient to explain their existence. The origin of this universe is one of those observed realities that transcend the abilities of nature.
At Mind Matters News: Re the Webb findings uproar: Who owns the Big Bang anyhow?
Takehome: To avoid absurd “infinity” math, we just assume our universe has a beginning. But then the Webb shook up many details, creating distress and anger.
At Reasons.org: Do the James Webb Telescope Images Show the Big Bang Didn’t Happen?
“The latest JWST images don’t justify the enormous attention Lerner’s model has recently received in the public sphere.”
At Mind Matters News: Astrophysicist: Webb finds may bring “revolutionary changes”
It doesn’t disprove the Big Bang, says Brian Koberlein… but read the fine print. Fermilab’s Don Lincoln gets the religious implications all wrong. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder thinks we don’t know what happened and never will — and that the Big Bang is a “creation myth” in the language of math.
At Quanta: How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
At Mind Matters News: 2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning
The absurdities that an infinite past time would create, while not a definitive mathematical proof, are solid evidence that our universe had a beginning.
But isn’t this an argument for divine creation?
At Astronomy Magazine: In less time than it takes to snap your fingers, the universe flashed into existence.
Ethan Siegel on where it all came from…
Siegel: “there is no guarantee that what remains in the Universe, today, gives us sufficient information to find the answers.”
One way of looking at it is that, if we are characters in the story, we can’t meet the author.
The trouble so many brilliant people have gone to in order to refute the Big Bang
Overall, the anti-Big Bang quests tend to make one believe, if nothing else did, that there must be something in the Big Bang. A useful summary by Brian Miller.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks: Will the Big Bang repeat?
Hossenfelder: I am not sure that CCC actually solves the problem it was supposed to solve. Remember we are trying to explain the past hypothesis. But a scientific explanation shouldn’t be more difficult than the thing you’re trying to explain. And CCC requires some assumptions, about the conformal invariance and the erebons, that at least to me don’t seem any better than the past hypothesis.
At Mind Matters News: How easy is it to imagine absolutely nothing?
Takehome: The non-theistic explanations are colorful but it is not clear that they solve problems. Rather, they demonstrate the difficulty we have imagining… absolutely nothing.