From: George Cooper <georgecooper@sbcglobal.net>
Mike wrote:? All this trying to force the semantics of so sacred a work as the Bible into the rational specifics of our current cosmology is doing a disservice, in my estimate, to its real message.? What happens if you wangle yourselves a beautiful new interpretation of Genesis that is one to one concurrent with everything we think we know right down to the big bang and then we find out the same thing we
always find out about the largest structure we can see (IT AIN'T THE LARGEST STRUCTURE)
?
There is no reason the Bible should have to do that as it is clearly not Gods way of teaching us advanced cosmolgoy.? The Genesis story?may have simply begun with our Solar system.? Why not? Once our star began forming, the rest of the universe is of little importance to the development of mankind.??
I didn't say the Bible should do anything!? I said people shouldn't try to make the Bible fit the current cosmology.?
M: Every time we look hard enough, we find out that what we thought was the largest structure was neither the largest structure nor the only one of it's kind.? From a Bayesian perspective, it is nearly inevitable that the Big Bang will turn out to be a little pop (Local Monster Black Hole Goes Bang) in a broad field of little pops that in turn combine to form a bigger structure
just like every material object/system we ever examined from Quarks to Galaxy Cluster in all 40 orders of spatial magnitude we have discovered so far.? No exceptions.?
That is now unlikely as the observable universe is finite.? It is very likely to be ~ 13.3 billion lightyears radius from us.? It is likely larger, but beyond hope of direct observation.?
?
Just because we can only see so much of it does not detract in the slightest from the probability that what we can't see conforms to the same continuous hierarchical progression as all of the rest of it that we can see.? And to say it is beyond hope of direct observation is premature.? We always seem to find a way observer ever further.? (and direct is a relative term.? we don't see anything directly, we see the light, or in some cases particles like electrons that are emitted or reflected by the objects we observe)
M: Every human cosmology we ever devised was in fact refuted in exactly this the same way.? What we thought was everything there was to see, turned out time and again to be just one of many of the same class of
object forming bigger structures in a yet larger context.
When has science ever stated that everything had been observed?? The end of the 19th century claimed to have had things almost wrapped-up.? Planck's father advised his son not to get in physics for this reason, but admitted that there were two minor issues outstanding: light and gravity.? :)
Even now, no decent cosmologist will claim that the Big Bang contains the whole universe, but that is precisely the presumption that they labor under.? It's called the cosmological principle and it states that the whole universe is homogeneous, isotropic and all the laws behave the same everywhere.?? The cosmological principle is highly unlikely in the first two aspects and not all that tidy in the third (just imaging how some of the laws might behave behind the veil of an event horizon).
?
M: The flat earth was one of may objects in a much larger Ptolemaic structure.
?
It was well known by Aristotle that the Earth was spherical based on their seeing stars slide south as they traveled north, and the round?shape of Earth's umbra as?the Moon traveled through it during a lunar eclipse.?
?
Why do you say flat?
Before the Greeks most every civilization modeled the universe as a flat earth on the back of some earthly entity (like a turtle) and the sun ferried across the sky by the favored God of the time.? I actually shouldn't have used the word round in my next comparison below suggesting that the Ptolemaic model was not round.? I should have said Ptolemaic instead.
?
I don't think any philospher ever claimed to know the distance to the stars, so it was always
an open question.? Admittedly, it was inconceivable by many that no parallax was observable if one took Copernicus seriously.? It was perhaps more inconceivable to those who opposed it for religious reasons, of course.
By Ptolemy's time they had calculated a number of guesses about the size of the earth that put and the Sun well beyond the prior true flat-earth models notions of distance.
?
M: The round Earth turned out to be one of many smaller structures orbiting a much larger Copernican Sun.? The Copernican Soloar System turned out to be many star systems in a much larger galaxy.? The Milky Way Galaxy turned out to be one of many galaxies in a much larger expanding Big Bang system.? Get some Vegas odds maker to give you the spread and let your grandkids go to college on it, the big bang is not the end of the line.?
The Greeks?2000+ years ago?knew
the Sun was larger than the Earth.?
But Aristarchus was way off on just how much bigger. Still, my general thesis holds.? The estimate of the overall size of the Ptolemaic model was considerably smaller than the estimates of the Copernican model 500 years later.
Big Bang is not on the same theoritcal level as Ptolemy or Copernicus.? It must be judged on its many tested merits.? It's close to jam-up, jelly tight, armor platted, and bullet proof.? But, there is a chance you are right.?? Science hopes you are, but they understand the objective evidence better than many realize.
I'm not saying that the whole Big Bang is full of crap. I'm saying it doesn't describe the whole universe. Science initially based the Big Bang estimate of universal coverage on the cosmological principle and corroborated that with the cosmic microwave background radiation data.? It is only the notion that we cannot see any evidence of asymmetry in the clustering of galaxies from one side of the universe to the other that they presume there is none.? Even the cosmic microwave background radiation is only homogeneous across the sky to one part in 100,000 or so.? If the Big Bang turns out to be a million times as large as the visible universe it would be impossible for us to determine with our current instruments.
?They interpret the data just like every human has for the last two thousand years.? We see something and we try to make an answer that is comprehensive.? We love a complete answer and we HATE an open ended presumption.? So we take whatever symmetry we see at the largest scale we can identify and we project that symmetry to whatever extent it takes to make a complete and sufficient answer for the whole enchilada.? Whether it is a closed system like the Copernican spheres, an open system like the "Island Universe" of the Milky Way or an infinite model like the Big Bang, we devise a model that does whatever it takes to make a complete description of all of Creation.? Sooner or later we're going to have to stop that silliness and admit that Creation is a LOT bigger than we will ever know.
?
M: So after you get your new interpretations of Genesis all hammer into place, you'll just have to start all over again trying to torture the beautiful prose of Genesis that lets us know that God is the beginning and the end of all things as well as you will ever see it written, to fit YET ANOTHER cosmological attempt to describe all of infinite Creation as some tidy new finite model (this time for SURE).? It ain't gonna happen.? This is the new, open ended
Bayesian data profile facing modern humans, which we need to formalize in lieu of constantly thinking we have it all but figured out.? Science is not transcendent.? Science is a finite set of local relationships couched in an infinite and infinitesimal context the full extent in either direction of which we will never figure out.? Humans cannot rationally describe Creation EVER.? We can only describe spatially local relationships over a finite span of time, nothing more.? That's the best fit the data shows. ? (www.thegodofreason.com)
Seeking the truth is all we can do.? Certainly, it is laughable to presume we can reach some level on a par with God who any meaning we can give to the word infinite.? But there are finites we can work with.?? Oceans must have looked near infinite to the earliest sailors, but it is obvious today how finite they really are.
Seeking the truth is the same as presuming that what we know at any given time is a finite segment of what shows every sign of being an infinite ongoing hierarchical context.? Admitting that prospect actually helps us predict the nature of the universe just beyond our range of data, helps us seek the truth.? Instead of expecting homogeneity infinitely beyond our view, we should imagine that we just can't yet discern the change in homogeneity just like we couldn't at first detect the concentration of stars in the Milky Way from the smooth homogeneous distribution of stars all around us.?
M: You can interpret the Bible just fine for how you should live your life without trying to mangle it into some specific, rational compliance with our constantly changing, eternally provisional, rational world view.?
?
Yes, since the Bible is not about science.? However, allowing the Bible to be seen as silly or equivalent to Greek myths, and faith will suffer.? Genesis makes strong statements that suggest scientific scrutiny has some say in its credibility.? Seeking the truth is what must be continued, and not ignored in hopes science will leave it alone.?
"Allowing it to be seen as silly?"? What are you going to do, change it?? change science?? It is your interpretation of the purpose of the Bible that puts that weight, that suggestion of strong scientific scrutiny in pursuit of its credibility, onto writings that may be over 5000 years old.? How could the Bible have been written in terms that could hold up for 5 millennia of scientific progress and still be comprehensible to the people of the time in which it was written?? That's an awfully big burden to place on what is predominately an account of the relationship between man and God, the likes of which is virtually timeless compared to the relationship between man and science.
?
-Mike (Friend of ASA)
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Received on Wed Dec 5 01:47:33 2007
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