6 ms·

Can you prove the Big Bang occurred? If so, can you prove that nothing preceded a Big Bang? If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious an

by ken47 4y ago

Can you prove the Big Bang occurred? If so, can you prove that nothing preceded a Big Bang? If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no. Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.

eps 4y ago
Big Bang is the best available explanation of observed facts. This doesn't mean it's the right one, but other explanations are inferior. Especially those provided by religions.
- ken47 4y ago
  The superiority to which you refer is questionable. If the goal of these explanations is to prove the origin of the universe in some kind of mathematical sense, they all fail. They all belong to the same category. The inferior tier is one where an explanation can be proven false with the limited tools of the 2022 version of humanity. Perhaps some religions' explanations fall into this category, but not all.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > Big Bang is the best available explanation of observed facts. Best available is not proof. The sun rotating around the Earth was also the best explanation for a long time in Human history. Traditional physics theory was the best until we started to observe things at the atomic level. Certitudes in Science don't age well, and should teach humility more than absurd dogma.
  - wruza 4y ago
    Is your last sentence applicable to religion?
    - ken47 4y ago
      I think it applies to humanity as a whole. There's a certain obsession with a false sense of control.
  - quantified 4y ago
    Big bang has a lot more supporting evidence than a magical seven-day wishing-into-existence spree 6400 years ago. Closer to home, it makes a lot more sense that animals lived, died and were fossilized over millions of years than that they were added as hidden sculpture during the creation. Come on. And that particular god is very good at being useless since the Enlightenment. One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence. Or prove useful to human existence. The Abrahamic God is a father who shot his wad, abandoned the child, but still demands tribute.
    - ken47 4y ago
      And that evidence is the state of the cosmos today? Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time. Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T. Well, you do the latter of course. So do the events at t0 need to occur for you to observe state T?
      - quantified 4y ago
        And I can verify the software to some degree there, or (more usually) find the bugs. So this is the bug-free simulation? It's easier to run the simulation and see what happens, so much state to initialize. Without evidence, that's why it's called faith. There are thousands of unfalsifiable possible starting points, the Judeo-Christian one is laughable.
        ken47 4y ago
        I have no desire to discuss particular religions. As I said elsewhere, some religions provide explanations which are provably false.
        azth 4y ago
        > Without evidence, that's why it's called faith No one said faith should be based on blind belief. You can most certainly have faith based in evidence. It's not a dichotomy.
- azth 4y ago
  Which religions? The major monotheistic religions state that God created and initiated our universe, which does not contradict that a Big Bang happened.
  - teekert 4y ago
    It's just that stating "God created the universe." immediately leads to the question "Who created God?". And if you answer "God always was.", then you can also say "The Universe always was." (And 'it bounces between expansion/contraction' or 'new Big Bangs occur inside this Universe al ultra low probability according to Quantum Mechanics', or whatever.) In any case, saying "The Universe always was." or "Time did not exist before the Universe so 'before' is only a term that makes sense inside the Universe, after its creation, and we cannot fathom what is beyond these limits.", is a more satisfying stance for looking at the Universe than first requiring a seemingly infinitely complex being that then created this universe to look like the being is not even required, according to Occam's razor. And it leaves some nice things to be discovered for us too. I mean, why would I imagine a god building the Himalayas when I have plate tectonics to explain it? Plate tectonics explain it well, and it explains other phenomena, and we can experimentally verify the process. The god hypothesis just leads to infinity more questions, and as such is scientifically unsatisfying. The god hypothesis generates a huge amount of un-testable hypotheses and suggests that we can simply give up our search for explanations whenever we can use god to explain things. Religion as such demotivates scientific inquiry, and I think it is not far fetched to assume that that was its original intention. Just read some Yuval Noah Harari, we began the scientific revolution when we no longer accepted what the priests told us. In short, we indeed have no need for the god hypothesis. At least we never have so far, it has never been the simplest explanation for phenomena. God is simply placed into gaps in our knowledge until we fill the gaps (and answer questions), like: "Why lightning?" or "An Eye can never evolve [is irreducibly complex]." or "Why is earth at the center of the universe?". I therefor prefer to extrapolate the solved to the unsolved and believe that questions like "What is consciousness exactly?" and "Can a machine be conscious as we can be?" will also be answerable without invoking any god.
    - azth 4y ago
LinAGKar 4y ago
No one is trying to prove that nothing happened before the big bang. What may or may not have happened before (or even whether there was a before) is unknown. The big bang is as far as we can extrapolate cosmology backwards in time.
lamontcg 4y ago
Uh yes on the first one. The Big Bang definitely happened and all the details of the study of the CMBR (for one thing -- there's many others like the Lyman Alpha Forest) show that it did. The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma. You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence behind that theory. It is more arrogant to reject the past 100 years of work on cosmology by thousands of scientists.
- azth 4y ago
  What happened before the Big Bang, and who or what initiated it?
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    That question isn't relevant to my life.
    - azth 4y ago
      Of course it is, because of the implications that come out of it. Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters. Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions. There's no evidence of a creator, no evidence the creator is a "He" and no evidence that it is remotely human with human concerns and that it cares about what we do one way or the other, or that it has any involvement after creation. You're projecting a creator that looks and thinks like you with absolutely zero evidence, which is alternatively your own lack of imagination or too much imagination depending on how you slice it. And we can go around and around on this argument, which after 50 years on this planet I can reassure you that I've seen it before. Even if I grant you a Creator (which I don't, we can always assume an infinite multiverse instead or just that cosmology allows for a causeless effect) then there's nothing that falls out of that other than the existence of a Creator. You then wind up with something like Spinoza/Einstein's God or the Prime Mover that agnostics like to consider. There's no evidence of any of it though.

by ken47 4y ago

eps 4y ago

Big Bang is the best available explanation of observed facts. This doesn't mean it's the right one, but other explanations are inferior. Especially those provided by religions.

ken47 4y ago
The superiority to which you refer is questionable. If the goal of these explanations is to prove the origin of the universe in some kind of mathematical sense, they all fail. They all belong to the same category. The inferior tier is one where an explanation can be proven false with the limited tools of the 2022 version of humanity. Perhaps some religions' explanations fall into this category, but not all.
ekianjo 4y ago
> Big Bang is the best available explanation of observed facts. Best available is not proof. The sun rotating around the Earth was also the best explanation for a long time in Human history. Traditional physics theory was the best until we started to observe things at the atomic level. Certitudes in Science don't age well, and should teach humility more than absurd dogma.
- wruza 4y ago
  Is your last sentence applicable to religion?
  - ken47 4y ago
    I think it applies to humanity as a whole. There's a certain obsession with a false sense of control.
- quantified 4y ago
  Big bang has a lot more supporting evidence than a magical seven-day wishing-into-existence spree 6400 years ago. Closer to home, it makes a lot more sense that animals lived, died and were fossilized over millions of years than that they were added as hidden sculpture during the creation. Come on. And that particular god is very good at being useless since the Enlightenment. One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence. Or prove useful to human existence. The Abrahamic God is a father who shot his wad, abandoned the child, but still demands tribute.
  - ken47 4y ago
    And that evidence is the state of the cosmos today? Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time. Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T. Well, you do the latter of course. So do the events at t0 need to occur for you to observe state T?
    - quantified 4y ago
      And I can verify the software to some degree there, or (more usually) find the bugs. So this is the bug-free simulation? It's easier to run the simulation and see what happens, so much state to initialize. Without evidence, that's why it's called faith. There are thousands of unfalsifiable possible starting points, the Judeo-Christian one is laughable.
      - ken47 4y ago
        I have no desire to discuss particular religions. As I said elsewhere, some religions provide explanations which are provably false.
      - azth 4y ago
        > Without evidence, that's why it's called faith No one said faith should be based on blind belief. You can most certainly have faith based in evidence. It's not a dichotomy.
azth 4y ago
Which religions? The major monotheistic religions state that God created and initiated our universe, which does not contradict that a Big Bang happened.
- teekert 4y ago
  It's just that stating "God created the universe." immediately leads to the question "Who created God?". And if you answer "God always was.", then you can also say "The Universe always was." (And 'it bounces between expansion/contraction' or 'new Big Bangs occur inside this Universe al ultra low probability according to Quantum Mechanics', or whatever.) In any case, saying "The Universe always was." or "Time did not exist before the Universe so 'before' is only a term that makes sense inside the Universe, after its creation, and we cannot fathom what is beyond these limits.", is a more satisfying stance for looking at the Universe than first requiring a seemingly infinitely complex being that then created this universe to look like the being is not even required, according to Occam's razor. And it leaves some nice things to be discovered for us too. I mean, why would I imagine a god building the Himalayas when I have plate tectonics to explain it? Plate tectonics explain it well, and it explains other phenomena, and we can experimentally verify the process. The god hypothesis just leads to infinity more questions, and as such is scientifically unsatisfying. The god hypothesis generates a huge amount of un-testable hypotheses and suggests that we can simply give up our search for explanations whenever we can use god to explain things. Religion as such demotivates scientific inquiry, and I think it is not far fetched to assume that that was its original intention. Just read some Yuval Noah Harari, we began the scientific revolution when we no longer accepted what the priests told us. In short, we indeed have no need for the god hypothesis. At least we never have so far, it has never been the simplest explanation for phenomena. God is simply placed into gaps in our knowledge until we fill the gaps (and answer questions), like: "Why lightning?" or "An Eye can never evolve [is irreducibly complex]." or "Why is earth at the center of the universe?". I therefor prefer to extrapolate the solved to the unsolved and believe that questions like "What is consciousness exactly?" and "Can a machine be conscious as we can be?" will also be answerable without invoking any god.
  - azth 4y ago

LinAGKar 4y ago

No one is trying to prove that nothing happened before the big bang. What may or may not have happened before (or even whether there was a before) is unknown. The big bang is as far as we can extrapolate cosmology backwards in time.

lamontcg 4y ago

Uh yes on the first one. The Big Bang definitely happened and all the details of the study of the CMBR (for one thing -- there's many others like the Lyman Alpha Forest) show that it did. The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma. You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence behind that theory. It is more arrogant to reject the past 100 years of work on cosmology by thousands of scientists.

azth 4y ago
What happened before the Big Bang, and who or what initiated it?
- lamontcg 4y ago
  That question isn't relevant to my life.
  - azth 4y ago
    Of course it is, because of the implications that come out of it. Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters. Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions. There's no evidence of a creator, no evidence the creator is a "He" and no evidence that it is remotely human with human concerns and that it cares about what we do one way or the other, or that it has any involvement after creation. You're projecting a creator that looks and thinks like you with absolutely zero evidence, which is alternatively your own lack of imagination or too much imagination depending on how you slice it. And we can go around and around on this argument, which after 50 years on this planet I can reassure you that I've seen it before. Even if I grant you a Creator (which I don't, we can always assume an infinite multiverse instead or just that cosmology allows for a causeless effect) then there's nothing that falls out of that other than the existence of a Creator. You then wind up with something like Spinoza/Einstein's God or the Prime Mover that agnostics like to consider. There's no evidence of any of it though.