Questions the BB proponents have no answers for.

[Polymath257]

In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory.

The following is a quote from @gnostic, made with permission.

Wrong.

Hoyle didn't make his Steady State model public until 1948-49, which was also around the same time he called Lemaître's model - the Big Bang. He was trying to promote SS.

But as I and others have mentioned, Lemaître wasn't a lone wolf as you make out to be.

Friedmann and Robertson had their own Expanding Universe Model, respectively in 1922 and 1925-26, independent of Lemaître's.

Robertson had also predicted the redshift, which Edwin Hubble had confirmed in 1929, and that was the first evidence for the Big Bang theory, 2 decades before Hoyle announced the Steady State model in 1948-49.

Others have worked on it. George Gamow was familiar with his old professor's model, as well as that of Robertson's and Lemaître's.

1948 was a big year, because Gamow, Alpher and Herman took the Big Bang model to the next level, which their predictions paid off in 1964, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, 2 years before Lemaître passed away.

Hoyle only make 1 atheist against Lemaître, where as there are at least atheists who did support Lemaître's theory, while Lemaître was still alive.

 

[Polymath257]

You may know them better, but most theists I know are quite familiar with the concept of a specific creation event for the universe, a literal beginning, a first day, being caused by an intelligent agent who is eternal from our perspective- and have done long before Hoyle or Lemaitre.

Except that they *still* believe in time 'before the creation'. They see the universe as having been created, but that time existed before that.

One aspect of the BB scenario that was (and is) seen as problematic is a literal beginning for time. In the BB scenario, there simply isn't a 'before the BB'. And that was problematic for many people, not just atheists.

As an ex-atheist I understand your position. And likewise I also granted an automatic waiver to the above questions for naturalistic explanations, because in my head those were 'default'.

But there is no default, no precedent for how universes are usually created, every theory must stand on its own merits, regardless of preferences, ideology, can we not agree on this at least?


As for upgrading to a scientific law: how about laws that are so scientific, they are 'immutable' like classical physics used to be? Are we not more interested in what is actually true? rather than merely labeled 'scientific'?

Yes, of course we are interested in what is actually true. But the fact is that *all* measurements have error bars. That means that we never have absolute precision in anything, so we can *never* be absolutely sure that a more refined measurement won't require modifications of our ideas. This was a harsh lesson driven home by the changes required to classical mechanics. So, the fact is that *all* we can hope to do is have ideas that work for everything we have observed and to continue to observe at finer and finer detail while being willing to change our ideas if required.

Science is not religion. It works with the real world, which cannot be absolutely known.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

First, the Steady State theory *was* a perfectly plausible alternative for a long time. But the BB was also being investigated *by atheists* as an alternative to the SST.

The Big Crunch is an *extension* of the BB description (adding a crunch at the end of time--a possibility if the spatial curvature is positive).

Multiverse descriptions are a facet of all known theories of quantum gravity. That is about the *only* reason they are considered.

String theory and M-theory are interesting cases. M-theory is an extension of string theory, so I will focus on string theory.

It was originally proposed as an explanation for certain regularities observed in the mass of subatomic particles. But, when the description was elaborated, it became clear that gravity was a necessary aspect for a consistent theory. This was *huge*. The merger of GR and QM was a goal for almost half a century and it came out *naturally* from the equations of string theory. That was why it was originally taken seriously.

Now, whether or not string theory is an actual description of the universe, there is *another* reason to study it: the AdS/CFT correspondence. Essentially, string theory (or M-thoery) in a higher dimensional space is *mathematically* equivalent to certain quantum field theories. These quantum field theories, such as QED and QCD, are what we have been using since the 1940's to describe subatomic particles (this was prior to the attempts to use string theory as a description). But, in this correspondence, the situations that are 'easy' to deal with in string theory are those that are 'hard' to deal with directly in the QFT (and vice versa).

So, *even if string theory turns out to be false* as a description of the larger universe, it is *still* important mathematically to investigate such things as quark-gluon plasmas. And the prediction derived from this method of calculation have been verified in the real world. String theory and the holographic principle in the AdS/CFT correspondence are useful and valuable for practical solutions of problems that cannot be solved otherwise.

That is a pretty good reason to take them seriously. Theism or atheism has NOTHING to do with it.

Now, this shows how science often proceeds: a theory is proposed for one situation (and fails or becomes too hard to use), is found to merge something completely unexpected, and then mathematically to be equivalent to a different, working description.

I appreciate the involved responses, sorry i don't always have time to give them the replies they deserve, your position again sounds very reasonable to me, that atheism has nothing to do with it, and I think we agree, that this is the way it should be. But again it's something we'd need to try to convince the theories' various founders and proponents of. For them it is absolutely explicitly about the implications at every step of the way.

The larger point here being, that atheists were not so much against just the BB- and not in terms of an expansion, it was always the concept of a specific unique beginning, a creation event, inexplicable by any known natural mechanism, that needed to be avoided one way or another- in order to satisfy the 'makes God redundant' requirement, which you yourself noted is explicitly attached to the theories.


A brief History of atheist cosmogony:

The universe is static, eternal, no beginning, no creation = no creator (static/eternal models)

Okay, so it might sort of look like there was a beginning, but that's just an illusion, it's really still eternal (steady state)

Okay, well maybe it really did have a definitive beginning,...but... that was just one beginning in a continuous cycle of expansion and collapse- so not really a beginning (big crunch)

Okay so it looks like it'll just expand forever and is a one off well.... how about there's this invisible undetectable infinite reality generator, that created this universe accidentally along with an infinite number or other ones? (the multiverse)

^ this last concept was always going to be the last resort after every testable theory failed, there was never any evidence for any of them, only the logical rationale one is forced to follow when a certain conclusion has already been reached.

if it's not eternal, doesn't 'just exist' , has a date of manufacture on it, and can't spontaneously reproduce itself... It is also the exact same process and conclusion you would be forced to go with, if you had to explain the existence of a watch while forbidding creative input at any stage.

in a way it's a pretty good test for any design that is the result of creative intelligence. Simply lift the unwarranted ideological restriction on creative input, and it becomes the least improbable explanation in both cases