Overview

II.Argument from Big Bang Cosmology.

   
   

A. Universe is not Etenral--Begins with Big Bang (Page 1)

   

B. Failure of models that posit no cause for universe.(p2)

Part 2

   

C. More Reasonable to Posit Eternal Cause(p.3)

   

D. God is the most resaonable Explaination(p4)

   

E. Objections Answered:Why doesn't God need cause?(page 5)

   

F. How can God create Outside of Time? (also Page 5)

   

II. Argument from Big Bang Cosmology

   

A.The Universe is not Eternal--Begins with Big bang.

"Science and religion" Chris Stamper, from World Magazine, quoted from Origns http://www.origins.org/science/stamper.html (june of 99)

Quote:

"Scientific evidence for the "Big Bang" becomes more and more theological. According to "cosmic inflation" cosmology, as Mr. Easterbrook explains it, "the entire universe popped out of a point with no content and no dimensions, essentially expanding instantaneously to cosmological size. Now being taught at Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other top schools, this explanation of the beginning of the universe bears haunting similarity to the traditional theological notion of creation ex nihilo, 'out of nothing.'"

Mr. Easterbrook quotes one of the world's top astronomers, Allan Sandage of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution, as saying that the Big Bang can only be understood as "a miracle." One might add that science and religion have in common a belief in objective truth, and thus are natural allies in the intellectual battle against the radical subjectivity of postmodernism.

Quote:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story [of the big bang] ends like a bad dream. For the past three hundred years, scientists have scaled the mountain of ignorance and as they pull themselves over the final rock, they are greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."[Jastrow, R. 1978. God and the Astronomers. NewYork, W.W. Norton, p. 116.]

      

1) Steady State Ruled out

This notion can take two forms, either steady state, that it has just always been here, the energy converting into matter sustained by the vast amounts of Hydrogin that are everywhere in the Universe. Or the second alternative dealt with in 2, cyclical universe.

         

a) No experimental verifaction--aurthors motivated by anti-Theological bias

According to astronomer S. L. Jaki, the steady state theory had not "a single piece of experimental verification." Jaki states that proponents of this model were motivated by "openly anti-theological, or rather anti-Christian motivations."[Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974), p. 347.]

Christepher Southgate, God Humanity and The Cosmos, (T and T Clark 1999)

"Interestingly, one of Hoyle's motivations was aversion to the Genesis-like connotations of the Big Bang. He wrote: 'Unlike the modern school of cosmologists, who in conformity with Judaeo-Christian theologians believe the whole universe to have been created out of nothing, my beliefs accord with those of Democritus who remarked "Nothing is created out of nothing"' Here, then, we have an important example, albeit a negative one, of theory selection in science being influenced by theological stance!"

      

b) Empirical Data Rules out Steady State

According to Ivan King, "The steady state theory has now been laid to rest, as a result of clearcut observations of how things have changed systematically with time." It serves now as "an example of the lengths to which a philosophical system can stretch itself, in the absence of a sufficiently clear factual picture."[Ivan R. King, "The Universe Unfolding" (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976), 462]

Christepher Southgate, God Humanity and The Cosmos, (T and T Clark 1999)

"One popular way to evade the suggestion of an absolute beginning has been to argue that the universe must be closed. If it will eventually return to a singular point, why should it not then 'bounce'? This is the so-called cyclic universe. Other astronomers opposed to the Big Bang, proposed instead a steady state theory. Fred Hoyle took a lead in this proposal. ...The steady-state theory argued that, in spite of appearances, the universe was infinitely old and did not evolve over time. Although defended by some very able scientists, this theory suffered a number of major setbacks which led to its demise.In order to maintain a steady state in the face of universal expansion it was necessary to postulate the continuous creation of matter from negative energy - ingenious, but contrived. ...There was the embarrassment of Hoyle's failed attempt to show that the Big Bang could not account for the chemical composition of the universe....Finally, the steady state theory was not able to accommodate the new data that appeared - on the microwave background. See evidence for a Big Bang?"

Astronomer Robert Wilson, in an interview with science writer Fred Heeren, writes: "Over the years, there were several attempts to reconcile this--the existence of the background radiation in the steady state universe--all of which failed...If you ask Fred Hoyle, he would probably say right now that, no, there's an easy explanation, because he still believes--I think he has come back to believing the steady state and that he knows how to generate microwave background radiation...no one believes that his mechanism can match the precise thermal spectrum that COBE observed. He may still, but I don't think anyone else who has seriously looked at it does."[ Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 233.]

According to Hawking in his most recent book, "almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang." [Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, The Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 20]

      

c) Holye's Own data supports Big Bang

Stars convert hydrogen into helium by means of nuclear fusion. Hoyle himself demonstrated that the amount of excess helium in the universe bolsters the idea of an initial explosion in which converted all that hydrogen, and this became one of the best evidences for the BB:

"We found ourselves convinced that all the matter in the Universe must have emerged from a state of high density and high pressure....Our results, together with further developments by William Fowler, Robert Wagoner and myself, became what even to this day is pretty well the strongest evidence for the big bang, particularly as the arguments were produced by members of what was seen as the steady state camp."[Fred Hoyle, "The Intelligent Universe" (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1983), p. 176.]

      

d) superiority of Big Bang

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11688.html Dr. Sten Odenwald, Goddard, NASA

"I think it's [Big Bang Cosmology] an astonishingly good theory! I consider myself very supportive of the general framework of the theory and its 'Inflationary' extension. I have seen many many challenges come and go; they come with great fanfare and are heralded in the newspapers, but when they vanish, they do so in silence. The Steady State Theory is one such example. Chronometric Cosmology is another. Only big bang cosmology remains the best idea we have that satisfies the observational constraints with out violating what we understand about physics...which is considerable! I think that 21st century cosmology will fill in the details very rapidly, and there are many exciting findings just around the corner in the next decade or so. If you define the essential message of big bang cosmology as 1) The origin of our universe a finite number of years ago; 2) Its current expansion from a much smaller, hotter and denser state in the past; 3)The creation of hydrogen, helium, deuterium and lithium from this primeval fireball; 4)The creation of the cosmic background radiation from this fireball, then only the big bang theory seems capable of explaining these 'cosmological' features. I think it will be a very long time before we find a better theory that doesn't look a lot like big bang cosmology. We should not be embarrassed that we landed upon this comprehensive theory so quickly after telescope technology let us see the distant galaxies more clearly. Newton had even less to work from, but we still use his basic 'mechanics' 300 years later because they work...and nothing else seems to!

2) Cyclial Universe

The concept that the universe is eternallay ocillating between big bangs and big crunches. When the matter from the explosion of a Big Bang reaches a certain point the gravitational pull draws it back, it callapses into superdense black hole and pops back out again. This notion does not require an initial cause, the cyclical universe is just always there always going through its cycles.

a) Universe continuing to expand

Evidence from three recent studies reveals that the final fate of the universe will be to drift apart and cease all useful functions capable of supporting life due to missing mass, which can't produce gravitational pull to bring it all back together and start again, and heat death in which case energy is useless for work. Several major studies show this to be the case.

[New Scientist Magazine, archive 11, April 98, archive; originally Oct. 96] you should be able to click here, but here's the url just in case) [http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980411/features1.html

"ON THE night of 5 March last year, the huge telescope of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile intercepted a message from deepest space. Transmitted a billion years before the Earth was born, its contents have proved to be of truly cosmic significance. The message was barely readable after its journey halfway across the Universe, and an international team of experts laboured for months to decode it. In January, Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California and his colleagues revealed to the world what they believe to be its gist: "The Universe will never end." A month later, a team led by Brian Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories near Canberra in Australia published the decoded contents of more of these cosmic missives, which arrive as bursts of light from supernova explosions in far-flung galaxies. The message was the same. Now Chris Kochanek and his colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are about to publish more evidence, this time from light that has been bent and sculpted by the gravity of unseen galaxies."

* Omega force = Continued expansion forever (no Big Cruch)

"These three sets of cosmic missives all suggest that instead of collapsing in on itself in a big crunch, our Universe will go on expanding forever. And that's not all. They also hint that the expanding Universe is in the grip of a mysterious force that is fighting against gravity--a force that pervades the entire cosmos and springs literally from nothing."(Ibid.)

[mysterious force = "omega" ie the equasion of gravitational force vs. mass needed to close the universe; omega must = 1 to close]

* Missing Mass.

[New Scinentist article April 1999] "If it [the universe] contains enough matter, gravity will eventually slow its expansion, stop it, and reverse it--producing a cataclysmic big crunch billions of years hence. But if there is too little matter--or if there is an extra source of "oomph" at work in the cosmos--then the Universe will expand forever.... Cosmologists call the ratio of the actual density of matter in our Universe to this critical density 'Omega.' And whole armies of astronomers have spent decades trying to work out if Omega is less than, more than or equal to 1.,... "Studies of the gravitational effects of clusters of galaxies have revealed that there must be at least 10 times as much mass tied up in invisible "dark matter" in the Universe as there is in the familiar form of luminous stars and gas. Yet even when all this dark matter is thrown into the equation, it still doesn't make the theorists happy. Despite searching every cosmic nook and cranny, astronomers have never found anything like the amount needed to make Omega equal to 1."

"So the take-home message looks the same as that now emerging from the supernova and quasar surveys: the Universe is going to expand forever, and it may yet prove to be flat. Certainly the idea of the big crunch seems to have gone for good, but the exact values of Lambda and Omega, and the fate of the cosmologists' theories, are still up for grabs. These values may finally be nailed early in the next century, with the launch of NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and the European Space Agency's PLANCK missions. These will use the heat left over from the big bang to try yet another way of measuring Omega and Lambda, which may lay the question to rest for good ("Genesis to Exodus", New Scientist," 19 October 1996, p 30).

Flat Universe means no contraction

Andre Linde, Scientific American, Sept 1997

"A second trouble spot is the flatness of space. General relativity suggests that space may be very curved, with a typical radius on the order of the Planck length, or 10^-33 centimeter. We see however, that our universe is just about flat on a scale of 10^28 centimeters, the radius of the observable part of the universe. This result of our observation differs from theoretical expectations by more than 60 orders of magnitude." [Messuer is a leading physicist and one of the first to invent the inflationary universe theory]

ABC News.com: Scientists: Universe is Flat another link Physics. ucsb.edu

Wayne Hu of the Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Natural Sciences in New Jersey said "temperature maps of the CMB form a snapshot image of the Universe when it was extremely young." "The...result supports a flat universe, which means that the total mass and energy density of the universe is equal to the so-called critical density," Wu wrote. "A perfectly flat universe will remain at the critical density and keep on expanding forever, because there is not enough matter to make it recollapse in a 'big crunch.'"

c) End of Universe reveals begining--universe would have already ceased.

Energy of the universe is being expended, as it burns up,it becomes useless for work. The fate of the universe will be eventual death in ciy darkness as all of its suns burn out and their energy disipates][New Scientist, April 1999, oct. 96

"But even if the Universe lives forever, its inhabitants will not be so lucky. A mere thousand billion years from now, all the stars will have used up their fuel and fizzled out. There will still be occasional flashes in the perpetual night: the death throes of stars so large that they have collapsed in on themselves to form black holes. Even these will eventually evaporate in a blast of radiation. For the next 10122 years, this Hawking radiation will be the only show in town. By then even the most massive black holes will evaporate, leaving the Universe with nothing to do for an unimaginable 10 to the power of 1026 years. Quantum theory then predicts that atoms of iron--the most stable of all elements--will undergo "tunnelling" and disappear into tiny black holes, which will themselves end in a final fizz of Hawking radiation. In the beginning there may have been light, but in the end, it seems, there will be nothing but darkness. ".[New Scientist April 1999]

Given infintie time and possibility all potentialities would have already come to fruition, the chain would have already been broken before our universe came into being. This just illustrates the impossibility of an infinte series of events. (being a series of events it would be "in time" so it's really redundant to say "an infinite series of events in time.") In other words, if this universe drifts apart because it lacks mass to produce omega, than the last universe would have too because energy and matter would be the same amount, just formulated differenlty (energy cannot be created or destroyed). The absurdity of the notion of an infinite series of big bang/cruches is driven home; how could there be an "infinite" series if one of the links in the chain can't make it? It can't "already be infifinte" and then stop because infinite means no begining and no end.

Note: If the Skeptic does not agree to this principle, that given infinite time every possibility comes to fruition than he can neither argue infinite chances nor multiple universes against the Antrhopic argument.

d) Universe contains finite stock of order, connot be eternal (because it would have burned out by now)

*Scientific conesnsus:

Paul Davies, in his article, "Space-time Singularities and Cosmology," says,"If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme,we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of space-time, through such an extremity. For this reason, most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view, the Big Bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the MATTER and ENERGY in the universe, but also of space-time itself."[ P. C. W.Davies, "Space-time Singularities in Cosmology," in The Study of Time III, ed. J. T. Fraser (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1978), pp. 78-79.]

* Laws of Physics break down at singularity

The laws of physics break down at the singularity. 1st Thermo. would apply after the Big Bang, then the fixed amount of energy that is "put in" to the universe (as Davies puts it) would be finite (in quantity) and subject to 1st and 2nd Thermo.


* 1 LTD applies to matter also. Thirdly, the 1st Law of Thermo. applies to matter ALSO. If you argue that energy is eternal, you've got to argue that matter is eternal, which goes against all the empirical evidence we have for the Big Bang.

* 2 LTD Energy burn to heat death

Fourthly, if you opt for 1st Thermo. before the Big Bang, try being consistent and applying 2nd Thermo. as well. If the energy (AND matter) of the universe is eternal, it would have reached MAXIMUM heat death an INFINITE amount of time ago.

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies, in his book God and the New Physics, states:

"If the universe has a finite stock of order, and is changing irreversibly towards disorder - ultimately to thermodynamic equilibrium - two very deep inferences follow immediately. The first is that the universe will eventually die, wallowing, as it were, in its own entropy. This is known among physicists as the 'heat death' of the universe. The second is that the universe cannot have existed forever, otherwise it would have reached its equilibrium end state an infinite time ago. Conclusion: the universe did not always exist."

If you deny that the universe has a finite stock of order, you are essentially denying the 1st law of thermodynmics, as it requires a fixed finite amount of matter and energy. (check your Encyc. Britannica)

In your wider universe, does the 1st law of Thermodynamics apply WITHOUT the second? What reversed the entropy of this eternally existent universe? As we saw above, a universe containing eternal matter and energy would have reached maximum entropy an INFINITE amount of time ago. What organizing principle intervened 11-15 billion years ago and organized all that energy and matter that was no longer available for work? What or who (or Who) woundthe universe up?

Fifthly, we observe that the universe is expanding uniformly in all directions. Had the universe existed for an infinite period of time, the density of matter would have become zero. (Koons) How do you explain the observable expansion of the universe? We measure the recession velocity of distant galaxies by using Cepheid variables, type Ia supernovas, and now Red Clumps as standard candles. And the microwave background radiation and redshift (doppler effect that skews the red portion of thespectrum of starlight in proportion to the distance of the star) confirm this expansion also. Futhermore, within the very field equations of General Relativity, is embedded the fact of the expansion and decceleration of the universe. There are now 19 proofs of General Relativity in 12 isolated areas of Physics,making it the most exhaustively proven principle. Are you saying that General Relativity does not apply to our universe as a whole?!! It is accurate to better than a trillionth of a percent precision. Where is your scientific evidence for A) seperate portions of the universe which General Relativity does not describe B) seperate universes? If its not falsifiable, and there's no evidence for it, then its just not a threat to the standardBB model as it is not scientific.


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