Creation?

`Masses Aligning'

Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:01:02 +0100 Subject: What's hiding behind the `creation controversy'
Some of you know that recent questions provoked a bit of research into _that_ controversy (which I've previously avoided like the plague). Was quite surprised by up-front results and more surprised by what might be behind them. Here's some quotes -

Hard Facts - Cosmology

Science can't explain the big bang - there is still scope for a creator
We should not dismiss the concept of intelligent-design lessons in school, says Thomas Crowley:-

"A softer definition of creationism ... . Although science can state a great deal about what followed after the big bang, it cannot in fact explain how "something" (the energy of the universe compressed into a volume the size of a golf ball) arose from nothing beforehand.

This yawning logical gap leaves open the possibility that something else may be going on. The history of life is consistent with Darwinian evolution, although life's increasing complexity - including the very recent appearance of modern man - is also consistent with (but not proof of) the possibility of some special creative agent existing."

Thomas Crowley is a professor of geosciences at the University of Edinburgh

Full article (maybe) at
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/06/controversiesinscience-evolution
or at
www.perceptions.couk.com/creation.txt

Hard Facts - Astrophysics

Astrophysics 1

"We must understand how it came to be that the parameters that govern the elementary particles and their interactions are tuned and balanced in such a way that a universe of such variety and complexity arises.

Of course it is always possible that this is just co-incidence. Perhaps before going further we should ask just how probable is it that a universe created by randomly choosing the parameters will contain stars. Given what we have already said it is simple to estimate this probability ... The answer, in round numbers, comes to about one chance in 10 to the 229th power." [10²²⁹ = 1 followed by 229 zeros]

"It strains credulity to imagine that mathematical consistency could be the sole reason for the parameters to have the extraordinary unlikely values that result in a world with stars and life. If in the end mathematics alone wins us our one chance in [1 followed by 229 zeros] we would have little choice but to become mystics."

Lee Smolin in `The Life of the Cosmos'

Astrophysics 2

"I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars."

Prof. Sir Fred Hoyle, in `Religion and the Scientists'

"If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually found to be ... A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

Prof. Sir Fred Hoyle, in `The Universe: Past and Present Reflections'

Hard Facts - Earth Biology

"The outstanding question ... 2000 or more enzymes are crucial across a wide spectrum of [Earth] life ... the chance of obtaining the necessary total of 2000 enzymes by randomly assembling amino acid chains is ... p to 1 against, with p minimally an enormous superastrononomical number equal to 10^40,000 [1 followed by 40,000 zeros].

The odds we have thus computed are only for the enzymes, and of course correct arrangements with many other important macromolecules - histone-4 and cytochrome-c are two such examples, each with exceedingly small probability of being obtained by chance. If all these other relevant molecules for life are also taken account of in our calculation, the situation for conventional biology becomes doubly worse. The odds of one in 10^40,000 against are horrendous enough, but that would have to be increased to a major degree. Such a number exceeds the total number of fundamental particles through the observed Universe by very, very many orders of magnitude. So great are the odds against life being produced in a purely mechanistic way that the difficulties for an Earthbound, mechanistic biology are in our view intrinsically insuperable."

Prof. Sir Fred Hoyle & Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe in `Cosmic Life-Force'

Discussed in a controversial setting here

Conclusions

"there is a grand design in the Universe that favours the development of intelligent life"

John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler in `The Anthropic Cosmological Principle'

"we must therefore admit the possibility that, if we are not the highest intelligences in the universe, some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed, by means of more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with"

A R Wallace

Considering that most of those folk were/are convinced `materialists' (in a scientific sense), we might see how `earth-shaking' their realizations must have been, to them. And to us?
Ray

follow-up

Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:59:21 +0100 Subject: `Eternalism' - was Re: What's hiding behind the `creation controversy'

Ian **** wrote:
> It's mainly thanks to the influence of Catholic theology upon the history of
> Western science that the presumption that the universe even *had* a beginning
> became so influential. Aristotle's eternalism is no more metaphysically
> demanding (beginning? no beginning?) and dissolves very many problematic
> questions; hence Ockham's Razor might insist that we ditch Big
> Bang/Genesis-style explanations and embrace eternalism.

Hi Ian, that may be right - the early big-bangers thought they'd `won' the debate, with arguments resting mainly on "redshift". That is, taking `redshift' as just meaning `speed' (away from us), that meant the galaxies were spreading out; which in turn `meant' that they must have been bunched closer and closer together going back in the past.

However, several phenomena - some shown by Halton Arp et al - seem to say that `redshift' is a product of distance and `activity' - with `activity' being the major influence (i.e that `redshift' contribution is quantized: something you don't expect from "smooth" processes like distance or motion).

[That's also illustrated by the existence of pairs or triplets of galaxies linked by obvious `ejecta' filaments BUT which have widely different "redshift".]

So that redshift-based `expansion argument' might be false.

In addition, the big-bangers' scenario has to forecast the `heat-death' of the universe resulting from expansion and `exhaustion of fuels for stars [it seems the establishment has always had a politico-religious need for final catastrophe].

But we are now seeing that the most massive galaxies are always linked to increased spin (conservation of angular momentum) and the final ejection of most of their core mass in opposed directions - that is, as "jets" (jets actually exist on _all_ scales, determined by mass and speed of rotation).

So we have re-distribution of matter as the hottest and most intense plasma: ideal building material for new stars (and new galaxies).

The new picture: zero or minimal overall expansion, coupled with re-distribution of matter - looks more like an `eternalist' one to me.
Ray

Maybe see `The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang'

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