The Intelligent Design creationists had a discombobulating conversation that they thought was brilliant, but just left me wondering what planet they live on. They were discussing when it was a better time to be an atheist, and apparently it was in 1890, when being an atheist would prohibit you from entering a major university.
Jay Richards: The fact that we now talk about the universe as having an age is a significant update from a century and a half ago. It leads to new questions. Is it unique? Was there one beginning? Can we talk about the beginning? But that’s a different sort of situation. And so, I think if you’re thinking in terms of worldviews, I would much rather be a materialist where everyone assumed the universe was eternal than be at a moment in which virtually everyone, whether skeptic or believer, says, “Well, the universe has an age, so it’s got a finite past.”
Peter Robinson: You’d rather be a materialist in the 1890s…
Jay Richards: Exactly.
Peter Robinson: Than today?
Jay Richards: Yes, and I think it’s much easier to be a theist when standard cosmology says “Well, the universe hasn’t always been here.” It’s no longer a good candidate for an ultimate explanation if it had a beginning.
Jay Richards is not an atheist, of course, which makes one wonder about his ability to see the world from the perspective of an atheist. But OK, he considers himself an authority on the godless. That does not surprise me at all.
As an atheist and a materialist, though, I can say pretty definitely that the better time to be a materialist is when we have more information about the material world, which ought to be obvious. The big difference between scientists and the clowns at the Discovery Institute is that we welcome new information and aren’t trying to force-fit the universe into a mold decided upon by ancient civilizations.
So our universe had a beginning? We happily filed that data away with all the other facts about the material nature of the world. There’s nothing in that observation that implies a supernatural or magical origin — in fact, to the contrary, what led to that conclusion is physical observation and measurement, and physicists, not theologians, are exploring the 13.8 billion years of its existence.
News for Jay Richards: the Big Bang is not evidence for Jesus. It’s a bad time to be a theist when your god is getting squeezed into smaller and smaller gaps, and godless science is doing a better job of explaining how the world works than your holy book.
If you can’t get something from absolutely nothing then there must have been something preceding The Big Bang – maybe something like Young Sheldon.
The Universe being created by a neurotic, fussy young man kind of makes sense given its contents.
‘happily’? It took decades from Lemaître to the general acceptance of the BB, due in no small part to the superficial resemblance it has to a religious creation.
Last I heard, the Judeo- part of the JC bible says everything had a beginning, circa the first three words.
Pierce R Butler @4
Nit-picking about number of words.
In latin, it is “fiat lux”, in Swedish “varde ljus”. I do not know what it is in Hebrew, Arameic or old Greek.
If it was just two words it is strenghtening your argument, making the beginning even more beginningny.
…But as we all know, the Universe was dreamed into existence by Azatoth.
There was a recent episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast that went over how the belief of creation ex nihilo was not a belief held by the ancient Hebrews but a later invention of the Christians.
Here’s a link: https://youtu.be/0hfFm0Cc54Y?si=rPro7B2tniF-qvB1
Edit: …how the concept of …
So, just what xtian terrorist was there when the universe was ‘created’?
1974 Billy Preston song: “nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’! Shall we get in to an argument over how many backup singers can dance on the head of a pin?
Physics isn’t my strong suit, but I’ve gathered you can make something from nothing, so long as you’re willing to tolerate producing some anti-something along with it.
Technically Buddhists can be regarded as atheists, although those who worship Bodhisavattas are clearly theists.
The modern Japanese tend to be atheist even if Shintoism survives.
@#5: The first three words of the KJV are “In the beginning”.
Recursive Rabbit @10: I’ve never heard of such a thing.
In our current understanding of the universe, the closest we can get to ‘nothing’ is the ground states of the various matter and radiation fields. They do correspond to the absence of particles, but they are certainly not ‘nothing’.
For example, the ground state of the electromagnetic field causes excited atoms to be unstable. And, AFAIK, there is no notion of ‘anti-fields’ cancelling fields. Particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate each other, but the end result is radiation, not ‘nothing’.
Wikipedia – Big Bang, Singularity
Since it’s extrapolation backward to a weird state, something like “before present” framing would be more accurate, if narratively awkward.
Instead of 1950, 2000 is a popular “now” nowadays—not that the difference matters at that scale.
@Steve Morrison #12:
Wikipedia – Creatio ex nihilo
@ 12
Mistranslation:
https://youtu.be/1MtT2A0Rj78?si=OzbokIRZUOehAiCN
Actually, the writing was on the wall for the steady-state theory well before the 1890s. Work started by Carnot in 1824 and continued by Clausius and others culminated, in the 1850s, in the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, of which the second is particularly pertinent, for it indicates that for the universe not to be long since dead in a changeless thermodynamic equilibrium its past necessarily had to be finite.
Though, one might suppose that in an infinite span of time arbitrarily large deviations from the statistical norm — “rogue waves” of a sort — could be expected to occur, even one large enough to kick a region the size of the Hubble volume well out of thermodynamic equilibrium. One then wonders if the initial kick of the “rogue wave” would look something like a Big Bang.
All rendered moot, though, by 1919’s confirmation of general relativity. A steady state universe is gravitationally unstable — any disturbance will cause parts to collapse and the rest to fly apart at the seams. So unless it is truly steady state, down to the molecules, with nothing at all happening (clearly not the world outside your kitchen window!) then it again has either a finite past, or a finite future. But if you take a patch of space that exists now and extrapolate its past and future light cones, in the direction of the gravitational singularity a sliding spacelike cross-section of that light cone will expand at first, then contract down to a point somewhere on the singularity, whereas it will expand indefinitely the other way if there is not a gravitational singularity in that direction also. All of the causes and consequences of the state of the patch will be contained in that light cone. The entropy in the sliding cross-section must shrink to zero at the gravitational singularity due to, well, my namesake, but may increase indefinitely in the opposite direction. So the thermodynamic arrow of time through that patch has to point away from the singularity (if there are two, then the nearer of them): it is invariably the past that is finite, and there will be a gravitational singularity back there.
There are some weird implications for black holes: for an object falling into one, the nearer singularity is the one in the hole, not the Big Bang, and the thermodynamic arrow of time should probably locally point radially out of the hole. This suggests that thermodynamic time starts running backward for objects falling into a black hole, and probably long before they cross the event horizon … though maybe the ability to dissipate heat by radiation that will miss the hole changes that, probably to reversal right on the horizon. That suggests an answer to the black hole information paradox, which is that the information content of the hole lives on the horizon rather than in the singularity. This fits with black hole entropy being a function of horizon area.
@Rob Grigjanis #13:
Wikipedia lacks a tidy straightforward article to cite, which I took as a challenge. Bits and pieces at Virtual particle, Pair production, Quantum foam, Quantum fluctuation, Vacuum energy, Nothing. Some technical caveats in Quantum vacuum state.
Wikipedia – Nothing
Aether theories, Quantum Vacuum
Wikipedia – Vacuum energy
Wikipedia – Quantum vacuum state
CA7746 @18:
Sorry, but this (and the preceding paragraph from Vacuum energy) are nonsense. You may have noticed that both excerpts end with [citation needed].
There are indeed vacuum bubbles in quantum field theory, but they have nothing to do with “borrowing energy”, and they aren’t “short-lived”, because they have no time dependence. They are static contributions to the vacuum energy density.
Sadly, this nonsense has permeated popularized presentations, because it’s a “pretty picture”. I blame Hawking.
See the last paragraph in the “Vacuum bubbles” section here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram#Vacuum_bubbles
@Rob Grigjanis #19:
Thank you. Don’t be. It looked like you two might’ve talked past each other. I was hoping to tease that out but lacked confidence to say something definitive myself. It was a longer walk than I’d anticipated.
The Vacuum Fluctuation Myth
Introduction: Origin, Use and Interpretation of Feynman Diagrams
Without taking a firm stance on this issue, I will throw this out there:
At one time quarks were considered mere mathematical conveniences and no serious physicist would vouch for their actually physically existing. Then they started turning up in our particle collider experiments …
BB @21:
No, quarks didn’t turn up. What turned up were Δ particles, which violated the Pauli exclusion principle unless an additional degree of freedom (colour) was assigned to quarks.
The quarks themselves have, subsequently, turned up; the last, the top quark, in 1995, just under thirty years ago.
Quarks have never been directly observed. Their existence is inferred from the products of deep inelastic scattering, and the underlying theoretical model (in this case, the Standard Model). The same can be said of most fundamental particles.
See more here
Deep inelastic scattering suffices to prove they are physically there as discrete mass/charge concentrations and not merely mathematical conveniences.
Meanwhile, define “directly observed” in the context of anything too small to see with the naked eye. Or, for that matter, at all, given that the eye, optic nerve, visual cortex, etc. themselves are measuring devices, cables, and information processors that intermediate between conscious awareness and some object. There are never zero layers of indirection between the mind and a subject of observation; the only real question is how many layers, and (though I’m not sure this is very important) whether some are nonbiological in construction.
In the end, “directly observed” is one of those terms that seems to dissolve like a mirage when you get close enough to it, much like the “non-physical things” that came up in that thread about infinite growth.
Sure, we can get into a philosophical discussion of what “directly observed” means. In the context of particle physics, I (and I think most particle physicists) would say “whatever kicks off the detectors in your experimental set-up”. At the LHC, that means photons, electrons, positrons, muons, and hadrons.
Of course there can be compelling evidence for something without direct observation. Data from the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar was convincing evidence of the existence of gravitational waves, 40 years before LIGO.