Georges Lemaître died fifty years ago today, on 20 June 1966. If anyone deserves the title “Father of the Big Bang,” it would be him. Both because he investigated and popularized the Big Bang model, and because he was an actual Father, in the sense of being a Roman Catholic priest. (Which presumably excludes him from being an actual small-f father, but okay.)
John Farrell, author of a biography of Lemaître, has put together a nice video commemoration: “The Greatest Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.” I of course have heard of him, but I agree that Lemaître isn’t as famous as he deserves.
The Greatest Scientist You've Never Heard Of from Farrellmedia on Vimeo.
Ben:
“Sean explicitly gives the example of the degrees of freedom for fundamental particles…we’ve measured and accounted for all such, with no room left over for consciousness or anything similar.”
I personally, wouldn’t attribute consciousness to fundamental particles. I agree, that’s taking panpsychism too far. I would place the first appearance of consciousness as being the point where the ‘arrow of time’ appears (where the notion of ‘causation’ becomes meaningful). That would be slightly above the level of fundamental particles, and then panpsychism can work – most things would still have a little bit of consciousness.
OK, so in that case, consciousness would not be totally fundamental, but see my last post – neither is the physical world. Materialism also reaches a point where it breaks down.
Ben:
“If you can get Sean on the record as agreeing that the wave functions are fundamental to all reality, not simply fundamental to the expression of the particles we observe; and also agreeing that the wave functions are themselves Platonically reified information…”
Sean’s latest paper is out: ‘Space from Hilbert Space: Recovering Geometry from Bulk Entanglement’:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08444
Good stuff! Just what I’ve been saying all along! 😉
Ben
I’m not sure how far to take this and at some point soon I’ll probably have to let you have the last word. Which is not to say I will be agreeing or cannot see holes in your discussion…
Religion
There is a really big difference in relational nuance between ideas like ‘sentencing the guilty’, ‘disciplining a son’ and ‘abusing a spouse’. Some of this atheist stuff is a little too categorically coarse-grained at times. The first two can be good if done in a framework of cosmic love (sounds vaguely Woodstock, I know). Now abuse can be a hard thing to get disentangled (emotionally and perceptually) from; it colours our outlook fundamentally. The Biblical picture of the relationship man is invited to with God is Father/Son, with Jesus; brotherhood following redemption, and with the Holy Spirit; indwelling helper and comforter. In all three, thankfulness and friendship.
Science
QM conceptualization operates in n-dimensional conceptual space (Hilbert Space) not to be confused with euclidean (everyday experience/Newtonian/classical) geometry. It uses complex vectors with imaginary number components, which have no meaning in everyday space. It could only be called ‘geometry’ in the mathematical abstract sense. While QM calculations have been reconciled (to some degree) with SR, by Paul Dirac and others, and the results vindicated (to some degree), they have not been reconciled in any meaningful sense with GR. QM calculations have out workings in classical space and evolve in classical time.
Antone:
Now you’re contradicting your original claim that your Creator Created Creation so as to ensure the proliferation of life.
Either you’re trying to hint that we’re not alone or that enjoyment is not part of what your Creator had in mind for life. The latter would mean your Creator is a rather horrid and petty lowlife, and the former I already addressed.
To put it in numbers…the volume of the observable universe is about 4E80 m^3, and the volume of human-inhabitable land on Earth is about 5E7 m^3. That works out to about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the observable universe being habitable, so far as we have actual observational evidence. And if you want to go overboard and claim that there’re a billion inhabited planets in each of the hundred billion galaxies, that still leaves you with a mere 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the observable universe that’s habitable. You could toss quite a few Sagans worth of billions of billions at that and still not end up with anything more than a rounding error. I mean, we’re talking homeopathic levels of dilution here!
Cheers,
b&
zarzuelazen:
Erm…I’m confused. You’ve been writing that physics isn’t geometry, can’t possibly be geometry, yet you’re in perfect agreement with Sean’s latest paper demonstrating the geometric nature of physics?
Let me break it down. Hopefully, you’ll agree with me that both Quantum and Relativistic Mechanics “reduce” to Newtonian Mechanics at human scales. Use any of the three to plot the trajectory of a baseball, and you’ll get the same answer within measurement limits. You’ll do an insanely greater amount of calculation in the case of Quantum and Relativistic Mechanics, which is why nobody bothers using them for human-scale phenomena…but, if you’ve got the time and patience, all give the same answer that matches observation.
And now use Newton to describe a static and flat two-dimensional system and, hey-presto, it, too, “reduces” to Euclidean geometry.
Sean’s paper, though decidedly above my pay grade, is simply adding more detail to the picture of how you get from the far-from-everyday-experience-and-intuition universe “resolves” into the familiar.
So objecting that the world described by Quantum Mechanics is strange and nothing like Euclid…well, yes. But that’s also true of Lorentzian Contraction and all the other weirdness of Relativistic Mechanics. And Newton is as much advanced over Euclid as modern physics is over Newton.
…and, just as Euclid doesn’t actually describe reality, neither do all the modern refinements. And just as you can invent all sorts of fanciful Euclid-like geometries that’re radically different from realty, you can invent all sorts of fanciful sophisticated physics just as far divorced from reality.
The obvious conclusion is, again, that the math is just a description of reality, the best we’ve invented yet, and people like Sean are working very hard to invent new math that’s an ever-better description.
But that’s after the Big Bang, sometime in or perhaps at the end of the Inflationary Epoch. At which point you’ve unquestionably got all of physics completely baked into the observable universe.
And if you’re willing to grant that consciousness didn’t appear until t=0.???0s, why not add a baker’s dozen billion years and recognize that consciousness only appeared when thinking animals arrived on the scene?
Again, consciousness is an inextricable element of your experience of the Universe and suffuses all of everything from your perspective. But the Universe doesn’t need your consciousness or any other consciousness to function. When you die, as far as you’re concerned, the Universe will disappear along with you yourself. But that’s just your own parochial perspective; the rest of the Universe aside from your friends and family and any other sort of legacy won’t even notice.
I’ve repeatedly and emphatically made the point that nothing is “totally” fundamental. But “we don’t know what, if anything, underlies the Core Theory” does not translate into, “ergo, it must be this-or-that.” And I’d generally reject your dismissal of materialism. At its most fundamental, reality is rather different from our perception of cats sitting in windowsills. But, if we’re comfortable continuing to describe molecules, atoms, and electrons and quarks as material, we shouldn’t have any more trouble describing what electrons and quarks are made of as material as well. Yes, it’s very unfamiliar and bizarre…but, again again, so is Lorentzian contraction.
Cheers,
b&
Simon Packer:
Fathers and brothers don’t threaten to send their families to torture camps — and never mind that I’ve already got a perfectly wonderful and real family whom I love, nor that your imaginary family is evidenced in an incredibly fanciful ancient text and nowhere else.
When you understand why you’re not interested in a relationship with Zeus (“Deus”), the Father of the Olympians, nor with Wotan, the all-father, nor with Luke’s father Darth Vader, nor with any other father figure in any other work of fiction, you’ll understand why I’m not interested in a relationship with YHWH, the father who loved sons so much that he killed all the Egyptian ones.
Your points about physics I think I addressed with my response to zarzuelazen. No, of course we don’t have a Grand Unified Theory, and, obviously, the actual “shape” (used very loosely) of the universe is radically different from how Euclid described it. But it’s also quite clear that Euclid (and cohorts) was the founder of physics and that all physicists since have built upon and refined his work — as evidenced, again, by the fact that all modern physics ultimately “reduces” to Euclid when you strip away all the added complexity and dimensions (of whatever flavor).
Cheers,
b&
Ben:
“I’ve repeatedly and emphatically made the point that nothing is “totally” fundamental. ”
I agree. But I think there are modes of explanation that are ‘almost’ fundamental. They do all break-down somewhere though I think.
Ben:
“But “we don’t know what, if anything, underlies the Core Theory” does not translate into, “ergo, it must be this-or-that.” And I’d generally reject your dismissal of materialism. ”
I don’t ‘dismiss’ materialism – it’s obviously a very powerful mode of explanation with very broad applicability. However, in my view, it fails to capture important elements of reality, so it needs to be supplemented with other modes of explanation.
Ben:
“At its most fundamental, reality is rather different from our perception of cats sitting in windowsills. But, if we’re comfortable continuing to describe molecules, atoms, and electrons and quarks as material, we shouldn’t have any more trouble describing what electrons and quarks are made of as material as well.”
Perhaps this is really just an argument over definitions, but as myself and Simon point out, the ‘Hilbert Space’ of QM bears no resemblance to anything physical, and really, at that point you’re pushing the definition of ‘physical’ so far outside it’s normal usage, you may as well just admit you’ve switched to a different mode of explanation….one based on ‘information’ rather than anything physical or geometrical. Look up ‘quantum information theory’, where treating ‘information’ as something objectively real seems to be a perfectly respectable usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information
Ben
Religion…(continuing under the pretext of Lemaitre) …you presumably see it as a spurious very high level emergent phenomenon and I see mine as the relational reality ultimately requiring a physics backdrop. Quite a paradigm shift, no wonder people argue. I argue from a hypothesis; that the Bible is divine revelation. I frequently test my hypothesis across various spheres of knowledge.
To be not interested in a relationship with Yahweh is rather a shame since I believe we are examining his handiwork. I think you already have a relationship with him, albeit rather distant and mechanical. This is because he knows you by creation, but not yet by adoption.
The Christian Gospel message is that you can be adopted into the family of God through faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sin. Once you are, I don’t believe he will send you to hell unless you actually want out.
Otherwise, yes, you remain under his wrath. You are his by creation and always will be, there’s nothing you can do but try and deny it. But it is a very good idea to become his by redemption and adoption. My own natural family has shown me a lot about how God sees us and relates to us. And great though they are, I only see complete purity of intent toward me from God himself. I just checked that with my wife…she said ‘Fine. It’s true. Me too.’
Science….
It would be interesting to know if Prof. Carroll sees his co-authored paper as speculative or stronger than that. He said a while ago that his greatest interest was in emergent phenomena. I had a quick look. It is also above my pay grade, not that intellect is awarded proportionately in our wonderful countries. My own thoughts are that either we are missing something simple or the maths and conceptual models are fragmenting as we try to go deeper into a full reality equation/model. Regarding a core equation and exhaustive predictive powers in the everyday, both QM and GR are pretty complex already and very hard on their own to solve except for simple situations. That is a logistical constraint only. However, the outcomes of small uncertainty in starting state are highly uncertain for a realistically complex situation within the ‘everyday’ context, because we simply don’t model these events from this type of equation. The potential of an ultimate intellect and power to inject undetectable inputs with profound results is there; these inputs might even be consistent with uncertainty. I also hold that field theory itself is a working simplification implying something underlying it because it doesn’t work without assumptions/normalization/measured values. A projection, from an intentionally well hidden realm, in other words. Can we really rule this out? And who knows who could have access there…how do we know that most of the time he doesn’t perturb things so it looks like it holds up as exhaustive?
zarzuelazen:
If that’s your perspective, we should take a step back and have a look at the common dictionary definitions for the terms, “material,” and “information.” I’m on a Mac which comes with a built-in dictionary, so that’s the one I’ll use — but I doubt you’ll find any significant disagreement with other dictionaries.
The adjective definition explicitly contrasts it with anything mental, so one should take great care to conflate the two concepts. And the former clearly supports the position that quantum fields are material; materials are made of atoms which are made of electrons and quarks which are fluctuations in the electron and quark fields.
Clearly, by either of those definitions, information is descriptive of a system, and not something fundamental from which it can be constructed or reduced to.
So…if you have a problem with those definitions, you should start by providing better ones…but I’d also urge extreme caution in redefining such basic terms to mean the opposite of the common usage.
Cheers,
b&
Maybe Ben has the answer. I speak as a layman, when it comes to Physics I’m at a loss, but since math is the language of Physics and how the world and universe works, could someone come up with a formula for people willing to commit suicide, blow up airplanes, air terminals, beating and killing a wife, neighbor any other such sundry misdeeds. Why would God make such a huge universe? Because He is larger than you or anyone else can imagine. Much larger, this universe is a small thing. There was a saint who saw Jesus holding in His hand a small thing about the size of a hazelnut when she asked what it was He said “all that was made”. Why is their so much evil in the world? Because, look in the mirror, people put their own self interests above those of others. Because we are its cause, small or large. And why do I believe in Him? Because I saw Him, amongst other reasons.
Simon Packer:
Then your testing has been a complete and utter failure. The Bible contains all sorts of absurdly naïve misunderstandings of the natural world that were common at the time it was written but have long since been remedied. You might argue that it’s not a science text, but that ignores the fact that you wouldn’t even take seriously a newspaper article that got its facts about the mundane so blatantly and weirdly wrong. Nothing about the Bible is unusual for the ignorant superstition of the period. Indeed, even the Christian theology was lifted wholesale from Philo of Alexandria who himself was doing nothing more than syncretically integrating Hellenistic theology into Judaism.
Were the Bible actually divinely inspired, there wouldn’t be any such whoppers, and it’d be full of revelations that would continue to blow our minds to this day Just imagine if there had been a casual oh-by-the-way mention of a field that gives mass to most stuff which is associated with a particle whose own mass is ~125 GeV. A modern author of even very modest intelligence and knowledge will casually drop such tidbits into discussions of Life, the Universe, and Everything — as I myself just did. So why would’t the most ultimately knowledgeable ever author do so with the most important book he was ever going to write (or dictate or “inspire” or whatever)?
Yeah…no. Parents don’t own their children and mere parenthood doesn’t give them the right, moral or legal or otherwise, to exercise wrath upon them. Indeed, wrath is itself the very antithesis of civilized, moral behavior; any individual whose list of character traits includes it needs to be removed from society so as to protect the rest of society from him.
Oh, we know perfectly well how to model such stuff; Sean’s Big Equation is all you need. But the practical limit is that you need more computer than you have “stuff” that you’re modeling, for reasons that should be obvious. And if you’re going to expand that to a desire to model more than half the entire observable universe, you’ve really got a problem. But modeling small pieces of reality is very straightforward, as is building up models of models.
…and here we’re very firmly back in Sean’s favored territory.
You have put forth a claim that is equivalent to one that YHWH or some other member of your pantheon can, for example, push a proton. And we know all the ways that you can push protons, with electromagnetism and gravity being the only ones relevant at human scales. You might propose some other force by which YHWH reaches across spacetime to push protons; call it, as Sean likes to do, the zilbot force. But Feynman tells us that that also means that you can smash two protons together at a certain energy and produce the zilbot particle that carries the zilbot force. We have smashed protons together at all relevant energies and ruled out the possibility of any zilbot particles or forces. Taken empirically, your claim is every bit as disproven as the Luminiferous Aether, Calorific, Humors, and all other now-discredited scientific theories.
Sean would also be quick to point out that it could simply be the case that science is worng, and one way for that to be the case is if we are the victims of some vast conspiracy. It could well be, for example, that we are subroutines of the Matrix, and YHWH tweaks the source code as he pleases. Yet there is no evidence to support such a claim…and, more importantly, there’re an infinite number of such claims which cannot be disproven. For example, even if YHWH is the programmer of the Matrix, he himself can’t disprove a similar conspiracy that says he’s just a character on the Holodeck. And if that’s the case, why are you yourself wasting your time begging YHWH for mercy when you should really be asking Picard to reenable the morality subroutines?
At this point, I’m left really feeling sorry for you. Quite clearly, you’re so overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the Universe in all its mind-boggling vast splendor as well as your own life within it that you feel compelled to retreat into a particularly brutish and nasty pre-scientific imaginary fantasy world. To me, that seems a rather futile waste of what Sean would call your three billion heartbeats. Doesn’t it make more sense to spend some of those heartbeats actually smelling the roses, figuring out what makes them grow, and using that knowledge to plant more of them for everybody to enjoy? You know…living life?
Like it or not, even (especially!) if your paranoid conspiracy theory about gods hiding in the gaps of random chance holds true…all the world really is a stage, and we but merely players. As such, does it not make sense to play your part with all your heart, now you’ve made your entrance and ere you exit?
Cheers,
b&
Antone
Sean would rightly point out that you’re improperly mixing languages from different descriptive perspectives. As he would put it, you can describe the contents of a balloon as either a collection of particles with a set of vectors or as a gas with temperature, pressure, number, and volume…but mixing the two descriptions at once will only leave you hopelessly confused.
We know a lot about human psychology and sociology and what drives people to do horrific things, but it’s a very messy and complicated intermix of phenomena compared with elementary physics. It’s going to take much more work to untangle human interactions than it has to untangle the interactions of elementary particles and forces. And while math is an incredibly useful tool in all sorts of analytical situations, I don’t think anybody today would pretend to have a meaningful formula with well-defined variables that you could use to calculate the likelihood that somebody will commit an atrocity. Experts in those fields have their own jargon that’s much better suited to that sort of analysis.
It may come as a surprise to you, but modern cosmology has evolved to the point that we have some very solid speculation about what’s “beyond” the observable universe (including the Big Bang). Some of those theories are approaching the point of testability. And not an one of them includes anything even vaguely remotely anthropomorphic or intelligent. If there are any deities, they’re literally beyond space and time — but that cuts both ways, meaning that they’re as unable to interact with us and our universe as we’re distanced from them. And, indeed, the imagination is as apt a term for such existence as any, for it’s indistinguishable in practice.
Granting you your premise of the existence of Jesus, just for the sake of discussion, you have but named the form of his malevolence and / or incompetence, as Epicurus would have put it centuries before Paul plagiarized Christian theology from Philo of Alexandria.
More succinctly: why doesn’t Jesus today ever call 9-1-1? Countless examples of people who are ostensibly his official agents here on Earth have committed seemingly-endless lists of atrocities in Jesus’s name, with the priestly child rape scandal but the most recent widespread example. If you were the CEO of an organization and you knew one of your PR representatives had done that sort of thing, you’d have called the police, waited for them to arrive and arrest him, and fired him the moment the handcuffs were in place. Similar deal if it was an imposter falsely claiming to be one of your official representatives.
So what’s Jesus’s excuse? He’ll answer the priest’s prayers to find lost keys but not his victim’s prayers to be spared the agony? He values the priest’s free will to rape over the victim’s free will not to be raped? Maybe he’d really like to help but he hasn’t yet figured out how to make an anonymous phone call to 9-1-1? Maybe he’s blissfully unaware of everything, or simply too busy helping Tebow throw footballs to bother with anything else?
Remember, I’m not suggesting any sort of impossible miracle here — simply the most basic level of mundane action that even most children have the wherewithal and moral integrity to perform. It takes practically nothing to make an anonymous call to 9-1-1…and yet Jesus has never, ever, ever done so.
Most damning, when it comes right down to it.
Cheers,
b&
Ben
Yes the Bible would seem to be absurdly naive by modern standards when it comes to physical sciences. But it was honest to the paradigms of its day, and it was written by people of their day and ‘God breathed’. And see my opening quote by Lemaitre and look up Heisenberg on religion. I think our own science as it now stands when combined with the presumptions some are making about it will turn out to be hopelessly naive as a picture of reality. More than that, they will miss the whole relational context of reality. So the atheistic naturalist perspective to me is fundamentally both naive and misguided. Feynman I have read a bit and he talks somewhere I seem to remember about how hopelessly unlikely he sees the claims of faith healing. I don’t see why when he tells us elsewhere I think in the same book that we must believe the counter intuitive for QM. Also he does not explain why we switch high-level narrative. We just don’t understand almost all big picture paradigms at an equation level and we don’t truly have the equation. Whether the narrative is time, or evolution, or behavioural psychology, or faith, or unexpected healing, or even natural healing.
What is the difference between poetic naturalism and pragmatism? They seem the same to me.. I sent an email and then realized I should have posted it here.. Sorry. Thanks!
@Ben Goren
The fact that anesthetics or beer(!) which make physical changes in the brain make also changes or destroys consciousness does not mean that consciousness is less fundamental than brain. It only means that for us to perceive consciousness , existence of brain is necessary. A simple example would be water kept in a man made pot. With a leaky or broken pot or simply by evaporation water will go away! That does not mean pot is more fundamental than water!
zarauelazen and Simon Packer:
As much as I enjoy reading Ben’s persistent and eloquent refutation of everything that you have thus far managed to propose in this (and the previous thread), why don’t you take a small time out and actually read Sean’s book.
And zarauelazen, why are you so hung up on needing to describe QM in something you vaguely define as “physical” terms? QM is what it is. Nothing has broken down. There is no dilemma there except in your own imagination. We have ways of describing QM which gives amazingly good predictive power. Hence, at that level of granularity that’s how the world works. The fact that it’s awkward to wrap your head around what that level of the physical world is like, gives you absolutely no basis for claiming that QM isn’t “physical”. Why aren’t quantum fields physical? By what rationale is there a need to set a line of demarcation? Why make a silly leap into pseudoscience? That seems like the most ridculous of all possible options.
Simen S
I might well read the book, at least in part, but I think I probably have the gist of Sean’s stance, and, as I said, I don’t think I’ll agree with it.
There are some hackneyed phrases which populate popular science material and are not that hard to see through.
Pseudo-science might be defined as ‘that which exceeds the legitimate bounds of the scientific method’. It has become a highly politicized phrase and we would have to take a little time to define it. If it means ‘that which is not part of the mainstream conclusions of the scientific community’ then I am one of the practitioners. But I think that would be a presumptuous definition.
We need to define ‘physical’. If by ‘physical’ we mean ‘descriptive of matter as it appears in the day-to-day for humans’ then QM would not be ‘physical’. Even its out workings into the day-to-day are not thoroughly understood or anything close; Sean’s new paper is seeking answers along those lines.
There is a lot of triumphalistic stuff out there on science. “This Idea Must Die’ is a good book to restore some realism and balance.
@Simon Packer:
You wrote: I argue from a hypothesis; that the Bible is divine revelation. I frequently test my hypothesis across various spheres of knowledge.
Yet earlier you wrote: Was the Flood global? I don’t know.
Wouldn’t “testing your hypothesis” involve reading up on geology enough to satisfy you on the point that there was never a global flood?
And why would it be the case that you wouldn’t consider the hypothesis (that the bible is a divine revelation) disproven, based on the evidence that there was never a global flood?
@Owlmirror, if only he would listen. He appears to argue from a hypothesis that the Bible is divine inspiration, test against various spheres of knowledge, and then inject ex post justifications for keeping the hypothesis whenever the facts disagree with the hypothesis.
Any true hypothesis testing (regardless of dicipline) has to be approached with an initial willingness to let go of the hypothesis if it fails in confrontation with the empirical facts. Simon hasn’t yet opened his mind to this approach.
Sadly, I assume that it’s very difficult to do for someone deeply invested in religion, as the religion itself has plenty of “thought control” mechanisms embedded to prevent such openmindedness. The biggest hurdle being the elevated concept of “faith”, and all the bad feelings you’re indoctrinated to feel once you start flirting with it’s evil counterpart “doubt”.
Hi Simen, it is definitely impossible to give a physical explanation of wave-functions that is consistent with known laws of physics. This is because of what is known as the ‘Bell theorem’ (from Wikipedia):
“Bell’s theorem is a ‘no-go theorem’ that draws an important distinction between quantum mechanics (QM) and the world as described by classical mechanics. This theorem is named after John Stewart Bell.”
In its simplest form, Bell’s theorem states:
“No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.”
You can actually clearly see why wave-functions can’t be physical by looking at the famous double-slit experiment, where particles are fired towards a screen and have to pass through a pair of slits. You could use photons (particles of light) for this experiment and turn down the emitter so that only *one* particle at a time is sent. According to QM, there is a ‘wave function’ associated with that particle.
Now you might think that the ‘wave’ is physical. In that case, it would have to pass through both slits (left and right say) in order to reproduce the ‘interference patterns’ that build up on the screen over time as the particles hit it . But the particle itself can only pass through one slit – so the wave would have to ‘instantly’ collapse to a definite point as soon as the particle is measured to be a definite place. Worse, the wave would have to *instantly* influence the particle. All of this is a violation of Einstein’s relativity , which says that influences cannot be instantaneous.
What this proves is that quantum waves can’t be things that exist in our ordinary physical space.
zarzuelazen
Tennis balls thrown at a garden fence won’t replicate a double slit experiment. So what? The only problem here is that you insist on mixing the descriptive “languages” appropriate at different levels of emergence.
Owlmirror/Simen S
I am not a geologist and there are geologists and geophysicists who hold YEC views, believing among other things that isometric dating is hopelessly inaccurate, pointing out things like K/Ar or similar dating giving much younger figures at the bottom of the Grand Canyon than the top. You could read ‘In Six Days’ (Ed. John F. Ashton) for YEC perspectives from 50 PhD scientists, most of whom were practicing as of 2001. There are several geologists and a geophysicist in there, John Baumgardner, who worked at Los Alamos on hydrodynamic modelling. This is used for plutonium core analysis in weapons. My deduction: you can have sound confidence in engineering models and still doubt the prevailing long-range hypotheses in science. So much is subjective, judgement calls, with a lot of slack. So much is poorly modeled with many known assumptions and probably truckloads of unknown ones. For me, Isometric is the main anchor for old (as in older than 6000 years) earth, along with what little geology I know and some aspects of mainstream cosmology.
Moving to the not- unrelated, some of these guys point out the speed of recession of the moon from the earth implies quite a young solar system. According to NASA, the moon is heading away at a substantial rate. Apollo put reflectors on the moon which are still being used.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.html
Using (overly) simple linear recession, using the NASA figures, you would get the moon and earth as an entity about 10 million years ago. Now I have found very wordy dismissal of young earth creationist use of this at
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html
but not much substance other than the fact that the dynamics are very complex and the usual insinuation that the mainstream scientific community has had this one under control for some time. If so, why don’t they nail their colours to the mast and tell us what is happening?
From my perspective, which is one of limited knowledge (like yours), we construct these long time range worldviews too presumptuously on uncertain or ambiguous evidence. Approached from the other angle of Biblical theology, I have already conceded that I am not a hard line literalist when it comes to early Genesis. Hebrew ‘yom’ for ‘day’ (H3117 from Strong’s Hebrew Concordance) is used for ‘epoch’ even in the Old Testament. The Solar System appears not until at day 4 and is our original time marker. ‘Yom’ is used differently as early as Genesis Ch 2v4. The accounts are accurate when it comes to the character of God and man but very much subject to the perceptions of man at the time regarding nature. The purpose of the Bible is for man to understand his spiritual condition before God. If God told you even today how physics actually worked you wouldn’t understand it and neither would I and neither I suspect would Profs. Carroll, Einstein if he was around or Stephen Hawking. (No particular order of intellect implied except perhaps a broad distinction between first and second halves)
So I believe the truth lies in this zone of overlap between Biblical, relationally representative allegory and scientific uncertainty. Exactly where I do not claim to know. I believe in the Biblical flood. Whether the Hebrew truly necessitates a worldwide one I am not sure. Baumgardner the geophysicist I mentioned above attempted to model the flood numerically. I certainly do not consider myself to be someone who has adopted Christianity as purely a faith tenet with no intellectual evidence. One major persuading factor for me was the solidity of the evidence for Christ and the resurrection. Another was human behaviour including my own. Although I was studying physics at the time, I did not get that hung up on the issue of the age of the universe. I have continued to examine evidence which I consider to be meaningful, and realistically, I do have periods of doubt from time to time, usually when a lot of things seem to be going wrong around me.
I am heavily invested in my worldview but I expect you are too if you think about it honestly. The scientific mainstream has a lot to loose too if it is very wrong about origins. The methods of Science, as done by mankind, are, as religion may be, given to cultural context, fashion, emotional, personal and financial investment and security, pride, desire for authority/credibility/peer approval and other factors.
@Simon Packer:
Nothing in your post addresses my original question.
1) The evidence that there was never a global flood was discovered before the age of the earth (based on radiometric dating) and of the universe (based on the analysis of the cosmic background radiation) was known, and is not directly based on those measurements. That having been said: Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective
2) You don’t need to be a geologist to read up on geology.
3) The fact that there are YEC geologists does not prove that actual geology is false. YECs start out with the assumption that real geology must be wrong, and reject the findings of real geology that contradict them; real geologists start out with the assumption that the evidence in the earth is not a deliberately constructed falsehood, and must therefore be considered paramount. YEC geologists have nothing that proves that real geology is false — they just try to confuse the issue. In fact, they are so confused that they can’t even agree on their own stories. Case in point: The Defeat of Flood Geology by Flood Geology
Owlmirror
1) Yes, some people decided they thought that was the case
2) Yes
3) ‘The fact that’….obviously. And obviously, they differ on what ‘real geology’ means’. And yes, Christians with some sort of ID and creationist perspective differ very widely indeed on how we see many things, geology included. My own inclination is along the lines of the Genesis Gap theory, i.e. other stuff has gone on on this planet before Genesis 1v2. The earth became void. This I’m told is legitimate use of Hebrew. Look at the moon up close for one possible population scenario clearing process.
My opinions remain as my last comment.
Simon Packer
How can you even begin to consider Genesis as having any translation into the actual development of the universe, the solar system, the earth and life? It doesn’t work at all! Not even figuratively.
Genesis presupposes the validity of a cosmology (common at the time) which involves a firmament through which stars are tiny peepholes (v 14) into heaven. Even if the timeline is interpreted extremely flexibly, the chronology (with all the celestial objects including the sun and the moon appearing in verse 14) is ridiculous. The creation of the sun AFTER the creation plants bearing seed (v.12) is just wrong.