Though I reject all religions and named man-made gods, I don't consider myself to be an atheist, and recently have been increasingly inclined toward deistic beliefs, though I don't believe in a "God" in the sense that most people think of "God." The purpose of this post is to express my issue with atheism, particularly strong atheism, and how it is difficult to reconcile a fully atheistic position with Big Bang cosmology. I recognize that many people who describe themselves as atheists will probably agree with most of what I say here, so I hope I'm not straw-manning the atheist position here.
In any case, strong atheism, at least the way I understand it, asserts that there are no intelligent or creative forces in the universe beyond the natural universe as we see it. Additionally, most atheists believe that the universe began as an inconceivably small particle that exploded and rapidly expanded to produce the universe that we know today. I believe this as well, however I find it problematic to assert with confidence that there was no intelligent or supernatural agent involved in this process. Think about it this way: Have you ever seen an explosion produce order? Every example of an explosion that I can think of produces chaos, not order. Yet somehow, according to atheists, this infinitely tiny particle exploded in such a way as to produce an orderly universe (more or less) built upon fundamental particles whose interactions are dictated by specific physical laws. All of the matter and energy in this tiny particle that exploded somehow just re-arranged itself to form galaxies, stars, planets, and the conditions for life, and then life evolved and here we are, along with everything we know and love. Ultimately, according to this perspective, everything and everyone we know and love are ultimately the product of an entirely un-directed explosion that just happened to produce these conditions that would give rise to everything and everyone in existence, and ultimately, it's all meaningless, and the big bang was just a convenient accident that just happened to produce all the necessary conditions for the physical laws of the universe to cause atoms to re-arrange in such a way as to produce the universe as we know it, and to produce all of the wonders and beauties of it all. This is hard for me to believe. Bear in mind that if the initial conditions of the universe were even slightly different, there is no way that life, or even physical structures like galaxies, would exist.
Of course I'm not asserting that any specific god of any religion orchestrated the whole process, nor am I trying to create my own magic genie-god of the gaps to deal with this problem. It's even more ridiculous to believe a magical anthropomorphic immortal genie created it all with an incantation spell. My purpose for this post is just to encourage atheists to keep an open mind. Maybe there's something greater than us out there that is behind the whole thing. Maybe we'll never know what it is, or if it exists. In any case, it's interesting to speculate about, though many (though certainly not all) atheists tend to pooh-pooh any suggestion of a possible intelligent agent or creative force involved in the origin of the universe. Some of them also mock the idea that there could possibly be a purpose for all of this. I think that's a closed-minded mistake.
Yes, I agree, and that's an interesting article. And as I said, I'm not criticizing all atheists. From what I've seen of your posts, you seem to be very reasonable and open-minded.
The Big Bang have nothing to with atheism, theism, agnosticism, deism, pantheism, or any other “-ism”, or the other ways around.
You can be atheist or theist and still understand and accept the concept of and evidences for the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is a -ism-neutral theory, just like theories of gravity and evolution.
Did you know that 3 theoretical astrophysicists independently formulate 3 hypotheses on the expanding universe model, during the 1920s?
The expanding universe model or inflationary universe model what was it called during 20s, 30s and most of the 40s; that’s what it was called before the “Big Bang” was coined in 1948 or 49.
All 3 were pioneers to this model and each independently wrote papers on the expanding universe model (EUM):
- Alexander Friedmann, Russian, 1922
- Howard Percy Robertson, American, 1924-25
- Georges Lemaître, Belgian, 1927
Both Friedmann and Robertson may have been atheists, Lemaître was a theist.
Lemaître was actually a Roman Catholic priest, as well as a physicist. He wrote the
Hypothesis of the primeval atom in 1927, and most considered him the Father of the Big Bang model, even though Friedmann and Robertson wrote their papers on the same model earlier than he did.
Albert Einstein have met all 3 of them, and he read all 3 of their papers. And all 3 of them apply Einstein’s General Relativity to their respective EUM models.
Although Lemaître’s maths was correct, Einstein actually rejected and criticised Lemaître’s concept that the universe was expanding, preferring his own cosmology of static eternal universe (known as Static Universe model), but his concept didn’t work well with his recently published General Relativity (1917), unless he applied his Cosmological Constant to his GR’s field equation.
Einstein would go on to reject his own cosmology model for 2 reasons.
Robertson, whom Einstein met at Georg-August University of Göttingen in Germany, had predicted the Redshift as a mean of observing and measuring how the universe is expanding, which Edwin Hubble would prove from 1929 to 1931.
My point is that the Big Bang is not a religion, nor a philosophy. It is a working scientific theory. They are still trying to investigate the Big Bang more, with space observatories.
Hopefully the new James Webb Space Telescope (unfortunately won’t be launched until 2020) we will see more further back in time than the Hubble, WMAP and Planck missions.
