From Ray Cavanaugh at Salvo:
After his ordination [to the priesthood], Lemaître won a scholarship to study abroad and headed to Cambridge University, where he worked with the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He then migrated from Cambridge in the U.K. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he could study at Harvard and M.I.T., where he earned a doctoral degree. Returning to Belgium (at least for a while), he was appointed professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. Right around this time, he published the formidably titled paper, “A Homogenous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radiation, Taking Account of the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae,” which questioned Einstein’s idea of a static universe.
…
By the latter half of the 1920s, Lemaître had taken the concept further than Friedmann or anyone else. His contention was that, if the universe is expanding, then it must have been smaller in the past—increasingly so the farther back in time it went, all the way back to a point when everything was packed together into a spectacularly dense particle—labeled a “primeval atom”—which, by exploding, created time, space, and this ever-expanding universe.
Lemaître presented this theory in writing to Einstein in October 1927, when the two first met at a conference in Brussels. As the priest later recalled, Einstein’s response was, “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.” Lemaître’s work was more or less dismissed by the New York Times, which called his theory “highly romantic.” The encyclopedia Notable Scientists said that Lemaître’s main problem was that his theory “lacked sufficient mathematical backing for widespread acceptance.” Such backing would arrive in the fullness of time. More.
Actually, the principal reason so many pundits hate the Big Bang is its theistic implications. And how dare evidence matter if it isn’t giving them what they need in order to promote their Cool views to their media courtiers?
See also: Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train
and
How naturalism rots science from the head down
Follow UD News at Twitter!
Robert Jastrow was the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, which established the scientific goals for the exploration of the moon during the Apollo lunar landings. At the same time he was also the Chief of the Theoretical Division at NASA (1958–61). He became the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961, and served until his retirement from NASA in 1981. Concurrently he was also a Professor of Geophysics at Columbia University. In his book God and the Astronomers he sums up the reaction of science to the ever-increasing corroboration of the Big Bang theory:
Yes, “the principal reason so many pundits hate the Big Bang is its theistic implications.”
Hmmm. Can you name a “pundit” who “hates the Big Bang”?
I think it’s pretty much broadly accepted throughout the scientific world. Who is someone who hates it?
jdk at 2, See Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train for an initial list of resources. It’s harder to attack the Big Bang today because the attackers generally need to align themselves with crackpot cosmology Many seem willing to pay the price.
One word, jdk :
‘Lewontin’
…and here is something else for you to chew on, and for the rest of us to savour, particularly bornagain :
http://spiritdaily.org/blog/af.....xperiences
Hmm. Lewontin doesn’t accept a theistic explanation of the Big Bang, but does he actually resist accepting the Big Bang explanation of the start of the universe? I don’t know hardly anything about him, so I don’t know whether he “hates the Big Bang” or not.
Are you kidding?
A fact based person disputing Fr. Lemaitre’s Big Bang? In 2017?
Good luck finding one.
But once upon a time top Atheist activists, like Dr. Fred Hoyle, campaigned against the big Bang. In fact, Its very name was their attempt to kill it by mockery. Unfortunately, the facts prevailed.
Today, its even worse for our Atheist friends. The basic concept of the Big Bang is not even their big problem. Instead they are desperate to give a non-Creationist, but still rational, explanation for the Fine Tuning of the Big Bang.
Dr.Lee Smolin has summarized the 3 explanations for Fine Tuning:
1) The Fine Tuning is due to Unknown Phenomena governed by Unknown Laws.
2) The Multiverse Theory
3) Creationism
No 1 seems a bit vague.
No 2 is untestable, and without supporting evidence. It is, howver, good for laughs.
In fact, leading Multiverse proponents, such as MIT’s Dr. Alan Guth, say it makes important predictions.
One of these is that Sarah Palin has won the Nobel Prize, infinitely many times.
Kid you not.
No 3, of course, is against the Constitution.
Federal Judges have say that you cant teach about Creationist Fine Tuning because of the First Amendment which is Freedom of Speech.
Chris, I have never been too convinced by the fine tuning argument. Yes, if any of these constants were slightly different, the universe would be a very different place. If it existed at all. But I have always thought that the fine tuning argument depends on the possibility that any of these constants could be different than what they are. And there is no evidence for that.
HP, do you understand the second-level implication of the fine-tuned cluster of constants, laws, parameters, initial values etc being forced to hold the values they have — as you just suggested? Yup, higher order fine-tuning through a super-law of our cosmos that would have in effect programmed C-Chemistry, aqueous medium, terrestrial-planet, cell-based life into the “dna” of the physics of our cosmos. In short, as is so common with attempts to drive out fine tuning, you pushed it out the door one way, only to have it come back with redoubled force from another direction. And BTW, the degree of fine tuning of that super-law will compound that of the individual factors. KF
PS: Note this, from Walker and Davies, on just how robust this sort of issue is, from fundamental insights of statistical thermodynamics and the study of dynamic-stochastic systems and their phase spaces:
PPS: Wiki (cited as a handy reference speaking from a known secularist ideology) gives a summary definition of phase space:
(A configuration space, roughly, is a cut-down version where the issue is not path of motion but particular states from fields of possible states, e.g. a digital memory space.)
Kairosfocus:
Yes I do. But by the same rationale, you and I are also finely tuned for our existence. Any other sperm cell or any other ovum and we would not exist. The probabilities are immensely small. Take it back a few hundred generations and the probability that the exact assemblage of DNA that makes you and I would stagger belief. But the probability of you and I existing are 1. Because we exist.
Arguing fine tuning of the universe follows the same flawed logic as I used above. The universe exists so arguing it’s probability, which is all the fine tuning argument is, is pointless.
HP,
but of course, close, coherent adaptation of parts and their information-rich functional organisation towards an evident end is a strong hallmark of design as cause.
Something, Paley pointed out 200+ years ago when he discussed stumbling over a watch in a field vs a stone. But what is not so well known — too often, in haste to knock over a strawman caricature of his design argument — is that in Ch 2 [only a few pp. away] he put up the thought exercise of discovering that the watch was not only time-keeping but had the additional capacity of self-replication:
He goes on to discuss the implication of even a quasi- infinite chain of succession of that process, it still does not explain the contrivance. So, our being biologically unique as individuals is a red herring. The issue is, the whole system of our life from a fertilised ovum in the Fallopian tubes on, is that we are part of a system of cell based life that is riddled with FSCO/I, including in the very process of reproduction. Indeed the genetics involved are a complex information based system.
And so, we are contingent beings who happen to manifest responsible, rational, self-moved freedom involving rational contemplation. That capability simply does not have an adequate cause in the dynamic-stochastic behaviour of a computational substrate. Indeed, nor can a material substrate account for responsibility.
All of this cries out for radical rethinking, but this is an astonishingly sheeple-ish age of millions who have been conditioned to blindly follow the decrees of the lab coat clad evo mat scientism driven new magisterium:
Arise, ye wretched of the earth, ye indoctrinated sheeple, then throw off your ideological blinkers and chains, and think, really freely and responsibly think!
As we think, let us ponder the import of FSCO/I, fine tuning, irreducible complexity, the architecture of communication and cybernetic systems, and more.
Starting, with OoL and cosmology fine tuned towards cell based life, even through the suggestion what if all the fine tuned parameters are forced to that value by unifying super laws.
(Fine tuning ratcheting up on setting up the cosmos bakery to produce well tempered cosmi not the equivalent of half baked messes or burned hockey pucks is itself telling us something.)
KF
hammaspeikko @ 10,
Roger Penrose has calculated the exceedingly small probability of a pure chance occurrence of our low–entropy universe as one in 10^10^123. The double exponent makes that number huge. It is so huge that we can be certain that the Universe coming into being with low enough entropy to allow the emergence, development, and complexification of life forms was not a mindless accident. We can be just as certain of that as we can be that the laws of physics will continue to consistently apply to nature. So except for, I suppose, those who have all their possessions tied down just in case gravity stops working, it is apparent that the Universe was no mindless accident.
One thinks of an explosion as something that creates entropy, not order. So Big Bang is a misnomer. What happened was more like an “explosion” in a lumber yard constructing a house. It would be obvious that such an event was not a mindless accident. So it is with the creation of the Universe.