Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Somthing From Nothing

The friendly local creationist keeps trying to get me to look at cleaver videos on youtube and such. I do look at them. However, they are not good science. The something from nothing argument for god and creation is not science. First there was a priest by the name of Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest, who also a trained astronomer and cosmologist who put forth the idea of the big bang. He thought everything came from a primeval atom as he called it. The explosive idea is just a description, and a poor one at that, that is sometimes used. This word is also used in biology to describe the cambrian explosion of life. It wasn't really as it took place over millions and years and it just looks like a sudden appearance in the fossil record. So to with the big bang. It has been estimated that it took place approximately 13.7 billion years ago. And that is working backwards with calculations knowing the speed of light and our observations from astronomy. Hubble himself proved that all the galaxies are moving away from each other which confirmed Lemaitre hypothesis. Was it really a bang literally, no one knows. Now to say that someone started that, like god, implies that there was time before the big bang. A lot of physicists say that is a meaningless question because time itself started then. That is only one idea. Theoretically, if the super string theory is right and there a multiple universes that are spawned by "branes" of different demensions bumping into each other and causing a big bang then the number of universes, or the multiverse hypothesis, then by shear statistics then there has to be some universes that have the right mix of fundamental constants for life to exist, hence us. Another argument is that the fundamental constants prove that god exists because they are all such finely tuned that could only be. That may be so, but another more likely explanation other than the multiverse one is that there may be a fundamental relationship between those constants that changing one changes them all, in other words they are all related and we haven't figured out that basic fundamental law of physics yet. Another arguement is that how could all the matter in the universe come from such a small point of energy. That is simple E=mc2 is the answer to that one. And that is proved experimentally in nuclear bombs. A very small amount of matter has a very large amount of energy and vice versa. I may not have touched on all the creationists arguments, and I bet I haven't, because they are very good at coming up with an infinite number of arguements from ignorance, but I have explained the major ones. All one has to do is go to some credible science books in physics and cosmology to get the answers. But creationist don't want to do that because it might kill their ideaology and their warm and fuzzies.

Peace
Skeptical DoDo

1 comment:

Heidi said...

Talk Origins http://www.talkorigins.org/ is the go-to place for answers to any of the commonly overused arguments made by creationists. I keep it bookmarked and it always comes in handy, as the creationists actually have very few arguments that are just repackaged as something new.

Have any of the local friendly creationists sent you the "Atheists Nightmare" banana-as-proof-of-God video? Look it up if you haven't seen it. It's a gas.

Glad to see Minot has a Skeptical Society, finally! Keep up the good work!