Why Bertrand Russel is not a Christian

[Carl]

alec

Christian tradition which, institutionally, has held back the developing understanding of the natural world at every turn, and even today demands of its adherents that they believe things that any competent scienist can see cannot be true.

Still waiting for specifics. Or do you just toss out ideas like this one, hoping some will stick?

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

from Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian”

I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made God?’ That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.

More quivering gobs of sophistry from Russell, I’m afraid.

Let’s see

In the first place, if God created the universe, God would also have created the principle of causality. Having created that principle, why would God be subject to the principle? That is, why would God have to have a Creator?

There are several fallacies in these few lines. First of all, the common fallacy of Begging the Question makes its appearance in line 1: “if God created the Universe”. This assumes the existence of God which is the very point at issue. The rest of the paragraph continues to assume the existence of God, and, not surprisingly, implicitly concludes that God exists. Second, a non-sequitur appears: “if God created the universe, God would also have created the principle of causality” This intermediate conclusion does not follow from its premise. Third, False Premise, because appeals to the ‘principle’ of causality ignores the fact that, at the level of quantum phenomena, strict causality does not apply. Fourth, Slippery Slope: having arrived at the fallaciously derived conclusion that God created the principle of causality, you deduce the conclusion that God himself need not have a cause. What we have here is scenario for which there is not the slightest evidence and which, even given its question begging, does not logically follow. You can see that, by replacing the opening statement with: “If there was no God to create the Universe”.

The notion that if something must be eternal, it might as well be the universe as God, is handily defeated by the Big Bang. The universe is neither infinite nor eternal. The substance of that knowledge, which is supported by scientific evidence, tends to support a First Cause, rather than defeat it.

The OBSERVABLE universe is not infinite either temporally or spatially. However we do not know that the entire universe is finite either in time or space. There is evidence based on the flatness of the universe that it could be infinite in spatial extent, although the lack of power in the largest scales of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy as measured by WMAP have led some cosmologists to propose a universe finite in spatial extent with the shape of various Poincare solids (with Luminet et al suggesting deliciously that a spherical dodecahedron best fits the CMB data). Similarly, because the Big Bang is a barrier to information, we do not know whether anything preceded the Big Bang or whether the concept of ‘before’ means anything until after the Big Bang. Hawking and Hartle pointed out, building on Feynman’s concept of multiple histories that the history of the universe in imaginary time can be a closed surface which means that the universe has no temporal or spatial boundary or need for boundary conditions. Physicists work in imaginary time anyway, using the Wick rotation, while solving the Feynman path integrals, because the solutions converge in imaginary time but not in real time. That situation would, in Hawking’s own words, lead to the conclusion: ‘The universe would be entirely self-contained, it wouldn’t need anything to wind up the clockwork and set it going.’

continued

 

[hecd2]

continuation

Russell’s essay, as I recall, was written around 1928. This was, perhaps, a little before the emergence of the first scientific evidence for the Big Bang. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, Russell never recanted any part of that essay. The discovery of the Big Bang must now be viewed as a vindication of the notion that a First Cause set the universe in motion. It must also be viewed as evidence for Russell’s persistence in the sophistry (read supreme wisdom

) of his eighteen year old self.

None of this is so, based on what I have pointed out above. The undoubted existence of the Big Bang (see my article here defending the evidence for existence of the Big Bang against Big Bang nay-sayers, that is also a good introductory article to modern cosmology: evolutionpages.com/big_bang_no_myth.htm )

does not necessarily lead to the conclusion of the existence of God as a First Cause or any ‘First Cause’ at all.

Come now, Alec, rise above your master sophist.

Carl

Your repeated accusations of sophistry directed at Russell are wearing thin and you are yet to produce good evidence to justify this slander.

Alec

http://ww.evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

Several problems here …

Your assumption is that there was never before in the history of the world potential for a decent and fulfilling life … utterly absurd.

This particular fallacy is called a strawman - I never said that ‘there was never before in the history of the world potential for a decent and fulfilling life’ . What I said was: ‘The fact that a majority of the earth’s now huge population have the potential for a decent and fulfilling life is the consequence of the Enlightenment’. Spot the difference.

Likewise, to assert that the Enlightenment, not the Church, made possible decent and fulfilling lives is likewise absurd. More comic strip history. Several consequences of the Enlightenment: overpopulation, unprecedented pollution of the environment, nuclear weapons sufficient to anihilate humanity, etc. The Vatican cannot be blamed for these.

Is the world overpopulated? True, the increase in the world’s population is a consequence of reduced infant mortality, better hygiene, greater food yield and nutrition, better medicine, all consequences of the Enlightenment. Are these bad things then? Surely you don’t think so. The Vatican, meanwhile, would deny believers the simple means to control population size which taken to its logical extreme will lead to overpopulation. Is the pollution of the environment a consequence of the Enlightenment? It’s a consequence of the vastly increased human population and solutions to environmental problems are generally based on technological rather than mythical bases. It’s hypocrisy to complain about the environmental consequences of modern technology whilst enjoying a car, modern medicine and a computer.

*not of the Establishment of a Christian tradition which, institutionally, has held back the developing understanding of the natural world at every turn, *

Every turn?

I suppose you mean that the Church of England held back Isaac Newton from his discoveries

Or that Gregor Mendel, a Catholic monk, was instructed not to dabble in genetic research.

Or that George LeMaitre, a Jesuit, was prevented from discerning the roots of the Big Bang theory and scooping Einstein himself.

Ok, not every turn. I give you that and apologise for my exaggeration. The church just opposed the non-geocentric cosmology, the Theory of Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, natural theories of consciousness, scientific theories of human origins, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics…

You might note that Isaac Newton’s theology was extremely unconventional, even heretical. He rejected the concept of the Trinity, he himself believed that the Church Fathers who introduced the doctrine of the Trinity were themselves heretics. He hated both the Roman and the Anglican Catholic institutional churches with a vitriolic passion, so your comment is a little off-beam.

Gregor Mendel and Georges LeMaitre were however great scientists and good catholics; and there are many others that we could both quote. My admittedly exaggerated comment was about the insitutional church, not about its children. The fact remains that it was the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason that unleashed the power of science to reveal truths about the natural world, not the church in its mediaeval garb, or the philosophy of the Churchmen and the Thomists.

Nevertheless my comment was an exaggeration for which I apologise. The Church did not hold back the Enlightenment at every turn - just at many turns; and it just did not promote the concept of Reason on which science and the richness of our modern lives is based.

Did you get beaten at school for raising valid questions about the natural world that called Church doctrine into doubt?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Carl]

alec

Posts # 42 and 43 are humbug.

You haven’t the foggiest notion of what you are talking about. Keep those posts in your drawer. Take them out in a few years and have a good chuckle.

Christian tradition which, institutionally, has held back the developing understanding of the natural world at every turn, and even today demands of its adherents that they believe things that any competent scienist can see cannot be true.

I repeat: still waiting for specifics. Or do you just toss out ideas like this one, hoping some will stick?

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

alec

Christian tradition which, institutionally, has held back the developing understanding of the natural world at every turn, and even today demands of its adherents that they believe things that any competent scienist can see cannot be true.

Still waiting for specifics. Or do you just toss out ideas like this one, hoping some will stick?

I was working through replies in order as I had time.

The specific example that I had in mind here was the example of the doctrine of monogenism. In Humani Generis, Pius XII states:

“When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own”

However there are multiple lines of scientific evidence that make it impossible to hold that in the 125,000 years since the appearance of anatomically modern man (and indeed in the 6 - 7 million years since the divergence of man and chimpanzee from their common ancestor) that the population of the human lineage was at any stage less than about 10,000 individuals.
the key finding here is that analysis of common alleles in highly polymorphic loci in human and chimpanzee indicate no severe bottleneck since the divergence of human and chimpanzee lineages.

This is supported by:

1. analysis of the major histocompatibility complex - specifically the human leucocyte antigen - DRB1:
   Ayala, ‘The myth of Eve, Molecular biology and human origins’, Science 270, 1930 - 1936
2. Beta-globin:
   Harding et al, ‘Archaic African and Asian lineages in the genetic ancestry of modern humans’, Am J Hum Genet 60, 772 - 789
3. Apolipoprotein C II:
   Xiong et al, ‘No severe bottleneck during human evolution; evidence from two apolipoprotein C II alleles’, Am J Hum Genet 48, 383 -389

Rogers and Jorde, ‘Genetic evidence on the origin of modern humans’, Hum Biol 67, 1 - 36, show that a modest bottleneck of 10,000 individuals is consistent with the data.

This minimum population size of 10,000 individuals throughout hominid history is also supported by mitochondrial genetic diversity:
Takahata, ‘Allelic genealogy and human evolution’, Mol Biol Evol 10, 2 - 22;

By Y-chromosome data:
Hammer, ’ A recent common ancestry for human Y-chromosomes’, Nature 378, 376 - 378

By nuclear DNA:
Takahata et al, ‘Diversion time and population size in the lineage leading to modern humans’, Theor Popul Biol 48, 198 - 221

All of this evidence refutes the possibility that humans derive genetically from two individuals within the last 6 million years.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

To be continued

 

[hecd2]

Continued

Focusing on the DRB1 data:
At its absolute simplest, if we consider a highly polymorphic locus like DRB-1 in the Human Leucocyte Antigen complex we find 58 human alleles. By carrying out analyses of the pan-speciific alleles we can determine the likely coalescence dates of alleles, by derivation of a phylogenetic tree from pan-specific divergence of individual alleles. That indicates that all 58 alleles persisted through the last 500,000 years of human evolution. The 58 alleles coalesce to 44 lineages by 1.7 Myr BP and to 21 lineages by 6 Myr BP (the apptroximate date of divergence of human and chimpanzee ancestors). Since anatomically modern humans emerge at 125,000 years BP and culturally modern humans at 60,000 years BP, and the human lineage polymorphism at this locus is 58 alleles during this period, this puts a mathematically logical lower limit on the minimum human populatrion size during culturally modern human existence of 29 individuals which in itself destroys the concept of monogeny.

Formal population genetics demands a much larger population than 29 individuals for the maintenanence of 58 alleles in a situation of neutral drift and balanced evolution (where heterozygosity has more fitness than any homozygosity), and the conclusion from these quantitative evolutionary analyses is that the minimum human population bottlemneck was around 10,000 individuals.

I’ve posted this evidence and the evidence in the previous post before (word for word) on this board, but post it here again for convenience.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

alec

Posts # 42 and 43 are humbug.

You haven’t the foggiest notion of what you are talking about. Keep those posts in your drawer. Take them out in a few years and have a good chuckle.

Thank you for this ‘valuable’ criticism which is 100% content free. You started with gratuitous name-calling and that’s how you are ending. What shall we all conclude?

Do have any substantial argument to support the idea that I don’t know what I’m talking about or is that just sour grapes? I am sorry that you fail to understand the arguments, but that’s your problem, not mine.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Carl]

Alec,

and the conclusion from these quantitative evolutionary analyses is that the minimum human population bottlemneck was around 10,000 individuals.

Hang on to your seat. Try not to tremble or bite your lips.

“Quantitative evolutionary analyses” are just that and no more. They are purely theoretical. Alec, no observer was present at the start of the human race. It is therefore pure conjecture that says 10,000 human beings appeared all at once. It’s true that 10,000 may have appeared within a short time of the start of the human race. But the dogmatic assertion of fact that 10,000 humans appeared all at once, and therefore there could have been no Adam and Eve, is pure hogwash.

Try another angle of attack and please make it more interesting.

By the way, what you accuse the Church of doing could be turned right back on science.

Einstein postulated the existence of an infinite and eternal universe. He was found to be in error by the mathematical equations of George LeMaitre, a Belgian Jesuit who postulated the existence of a moment in which the universe began to exist. Later, the Big Bang supported LeMaitre’s hypothesis against Einstein’s. Einstein admitted his error and nominated LeMaitre for a prestigious scientific award, which he won.

My point is that the Church through Genesis provided LeMaitre, a priest, with a clue to the real origin of the universe that a world famous scientist had refused to concede because he also happened to be an atheist.

So when you said earlier that the Church had opposed science at every turn, you were talking comic strip nonsense.

Please stop it.

 

[transfinitum]

You write:

1. In case you have forgotten, the proposition that was on the table to which I objected, was that Cardinal Newman would have ‘reduced Russell to a quivering blob with a few strokes of the pen.’

In case you had forgotten, my post was about your assertion regarding that cataclysmically incompetent failure Russell as a mathematician.

---

since Goedel is not Newman, and not a theologian (he was a brilliant mathematician and, along with Russell, one of the two most brilliant logicians of the 20th century; his incompleteness theorems are about formal systems of mathematics and not about theology).

Quite to the contrary. The incompleteness theorems are primarily about epistemology, a subsidiary of metaphysics. The logical-positivist epistemology of Bertrand Russell is utterly demolished by Kurt Godel. There is nothing left of Russell’s life work. It is demolished, upon its own ground. That is what makes Godel, the superior mathematician, also a superior epistemologist.

---

1. You might be an exception, but I have come to realise that almost no-one who pontificates about Goedel has the slightest notion about what his Incompleteness theorems say or how he proved them.

I am an exception.

---

1. The fact that you claim Goedel turned Russell into a ‘quivering blob’ does not bode well for your understanding of Russell’s lasting legacy to mathematics and logics,

Russell was demolished by Godel. Period. Russell’s primary legacy is his useful idiocy in asserting a logical positivist epistemology.

---

Goedel’s own debt to Russell, what Goedel actually showed in his incompleteness theorems or, in progressive subjects, how the thinking of each person builds on earlier work.

No. It showed how a Platonist can reduce an Aristotelian to a quivering blob, when the lastter insists upon the logical-positivist epistemology.

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

“Quantitative evolutionary analyses” are just that and no more. They are purely theoretical. Alec, no observer was present at the start of the human race. It is therefore pure conjecture that says 10,000 human beings appeared all at once. It’s true that 10,000 may have appeared within a short time of the start of the human race. But the dogmatic assertion of fact that 10,000 humans appeared all at once, and therefore there could have been no Adam and Eve, is pure hogwash.

My dear chap, keep calm. Why are you descending into crude invective? You must know that ‘humbug’, ‘hogwash’ and ‘You haven’t the foggiest notion of what you are talking about’ are not rational arguments.

You state that my argument demonstrating the polygenic origins of humans, that is based on **empirical evidence, **is ‘purely theoretical’. That is plainly not so. Might I suggest you read and try to understand posts # 46 and # 47 again.

Let me summarise. The **evidence **does not say that 10,000 humans appeared all at once. It says that that minimum population in the lineage leading to modern humans was 10,000. That evidence is based on observations of highly polymorphic genomic loci. Such loci include DRB1 in the major histocompatibility complex, beta-globin and Apolipoprotein C II. For example humans have 58 alleles at DRB-1, and phylogenetic analysis shows that the there is no coalescence in the last 500,000 years. So 58 alleles at DRB-1 have existed in the human population throughout the time when anatomically and behaviourally modern humans have been on earth, and this, in the context of neutral drift and balanced evolution gives a minimum population size of 10,000 individuals. There is no *physical *way that 58 alleles can be transmitted through less than 29 individuals. Additional **evidence **is available from mitochondrial genetic diversity, Y-chromosome diversity and nuclear DNA data.

What all of this means is that human ancestry cannot have passed through a single pair of parents. Any competent molecular biologist can see that the doctrine of monogeny cannot be supported by the evidence. References to the primary literature are in post # 46 - you are welcome to read them and post reasoned discussions of them, should you feel so inclined.

Try another angle of attack and please make it more interesting.

Don’t you think that that is a rather immature and superficial argument? The fact that you fail to find the evidence of molecular biology interesting does nothing to undermine its force.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Carl]

alec

Don’t you think that that is a rather immature and superficial argument?

Well, old man, if you want other people to use polite language, you must use it yourself. That is to say, you must be an example of what you preach.

No one called you immature or superficial. Your arguments were called hogwash. But they aren’t even your arguments since you did not invent them. So why are you personally offended?

The fact remains: you have no direct proof, only conjecture, that Adam and Eve did not exist as two people who committed the first sin. And since you appear not to be of any Bible persuasion that I can detect, you don’t even believe in the idea of sin … an offense against God. Science certainly cannot answer this claim that Genesis makes regarding original sin. It has no interest in the matter.

Why is it of the highest importance for you to say that Pope Pius XII obstructed modern science by pronouncing a view that any competent scientist can debunk, when science does not even interest itself in the business of whether the first two people were created with a soul, as opposed to all the hominids who might not have had one?

Also Pius XII in Humani Generis encouraged scientists to explore all possible opposing views on evolution and said nothing to denounce the theory of evolution so long as the theory did not attempt to discredit the teachings of the Church, which ultimately trump the teachings of science so far as the origin and destiny of man are concerned.

Finally, you do not answer my point about LeMaitre versus Einstein … a clear case of two mathematicians, one working from Genesis, the other from atheism, the former guided by Genesis to the possibility of a Big Bang while the latter, with a closed mind, fought the possibility of the BB until the evidence was too great for him to resist.

I’ll say it again, this time in reference to your own point of view. It’s hogwash that the insitutional Church teaches doctrines any competent scientist can easily debunk.

We’re still waiting for you to show us one.

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

My point is that the Church through Genesis provided LeMaitre, a priest, with a clue to the real origin of the universe that a world famous scientist had refused to concede because he also happened to be an atheist.

First of all let me repeat that I entirely accept the Big Bang as an origin for the *observable *universe. Other, plausible hypotheses, such as Hoyle, Bondi and Gold’s Steady State model were fatally undermined by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Penzias and Wilson. However, you must know that, although the basic hypothesis of Georges LeMaitre of a Big Bang has proven to be correct and now forms the foundation of modern cosmology, LeMaitre’s own theoretical formulation for the expansion of the universe was very incomplete and flawed in a number of respects, and the current cosmology depends on the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric. He thought cosmic rays were evidence for an expnding universe (which they are not). In addition, he had no idea how to solve the Horizon and Homogeneity problems. This is not to belittle LeMaitre’s achievements in any way - simply to point out that there are many others who have built the concordance model of cosmology.

However, we started talking about this when you suggested the existence of the Big Bang necessitates a first cause.

I pointed out then that Hawking has developed solutions of the Feynman path integrals, using the Wick rotation, that yield histories in imaginary time (that can be analytically transformed back to real time) that yield a history of the universe without the need for boundary conditions.

There is more: Linde’s development of chaotic inflation has, as a consequence, a multiverse in which our universe is one bubble in a temporally and spatially infinite sea of bubbles. See for example Max Tegmark’s (Max Tegmark, by the way, has recently published powerful evidence based on observations from the Sloane Digtal Sky Survey that independently confirm findings from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe about the basic cosmological parameters) excellent article on multiverses here:
wintersteel.homestead.com/files/ShanaArticles/multiverse.pdf

The fact is that, looking back in time, decoupling of radiation and matter occurs at 379,000 years after Big Bang which means that the universe is opaque to sight before that. Nevertheless, we can derive information about the earlier history of the universe from acoustic data condensed in the CMB anisotropy as a consequence of the early Sachs-Wolfe effect. However, at the Big Bang itself, space-time and the laws of physics break down at the singularity of the Big Bang, and, assuming that in future findings, the Big Bang remains a strict singularity, there is no way to probe beyond it. This does not logically lead to the need for a First Cause deity, because of the Hawking, Hartle, Linde and Guth hypotheses.

The impossibility of logically proving the finiteness or the infinity of the universe was shown by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, and in the absence of empirical evidence, the finiteness or infinity of the multiverse is indeterminate.

What does this mean? In the absence of the ability to garner evidence, whether the ultimate multiverse is finite or infinite is an open question. It is possible that evidence could support either finite or infinite hypotheses, but so far it doesn’t. There is no logical necessity, today, to accede to a finite multiverse and no need for the postulate of a first cause. Even if the universe is shown to be absolutely finite in real time, there are situations that require no boundary conditions.

In short, the argument of a temporally finite universe does not support the existence of a First Cause (and a deity)

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Carl]

In short, the argument of a temporally finite universe does not support the existence of a First Cause (and a deity)

“In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased. … As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum --from gamma rays to x-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation emanating from all parts of the sky, can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.” from Carl Sagan’s account of the Big Bang in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Let there be Light!” God begins the creation of the universe, from Genesis, 1000 B.C.

 

[hecd2]

Carl:

The fact remains: you have no direct proof, only conjecture, that Adam and Eve did not exist as two people who committed the first sin. And since you appear not to be of any Bible persuasion that I can detect, you don’t even believe in the idea of sin … an offense against God. Science certainly cannot answer this claim that Genesis makes regarding original sin. It has no interest in the matter.

Your method of argument by deletion of evidence is noted. I took the trouble to post the evidence that demonstrates the impossibility of there being two individuals who are the sole ancestors of the human species in their generation (the doctrine of monogenism as propounded by PiusXII). You have not dealt with a single element of this evidence, and in fact you show no hint of understanding it. Your tactic is the delete key and the repitition of a bald and false assertion that what I have presented is ‘conjecture’. Your assertion might carry more weight if you were to point out exactly how the conclusions of science in this matter are flawed, but you choose instead to argue by the mere repitition of a false categorisation of the scientific case.

Indeed science has nothing to say on the matter of original sin; but science is authoritative on the biological origins of the human species and the scientific conclusion does not allow the possibility of the existence of an Adam and an Eve as sole genetic ancestors of the human race, for the reasons I have posted and that you have not even attempted to address.

Why is it of the highest importance for you to say that Pope Pius XII obstructed modern science by pronouncing a view that any competent scientist can debunk, when science does not even interest itself in the business of whether the first two people were created with a soul, as opposed to all the hominids who might not have had one?

Because there were no two human beings who are the sole ancestors of the human species - it is the doctrine of monogenism that is shown to be flawed, not the doctrine of Original Sin which science has no opinion on.

Also Pius XII in Humani Generis encouraged scientists to explore all possible opposing views on evolution and said nothing to denounce the theory of evolution so long as the theory did not attempt to discredit the teachings of the Church, which ultimately trump the teachings of science so far as the origin and destiny of man are concerned.

But the scientific evidence does discredit the teaching of monogenism as propounded by PiusXII. The doctrine is observed to be wrong. That’s simply a fact and so in this respect science does ‘trump’ the teaching of the Church.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

In short, the argument of a temporally finite universe does not support the existence of a First Cause (and a deity)

“In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased. … As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum --from gamma rays to x-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation emanating from all parts of the sky, can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.” from Carl Sagan’s account of the Big Bang in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Let there be Light!” God begins the creation of the universe, from Genesis, 1000 B.C.

Well here is more argument by deletion. In post # 53, I pointed out why the Big Bang is not good evidence for the existence of a First Cause. You have chosen not to respond to a single one of those points. There is nothing wrong with Sagan’s description of the origins of the observable universe but they are not evidence or proof of a First Cause. I don’t say this lightly - I can back this up with references to the world’s leading cosmologists. Do you think you can actually discuss the arguments this time rather than just deleting? In this post I plan to present my case by referencing and quoting leading cosmologists. You’ll have to show that their arguments are flawed to present a credible argumen yourself:

First of all the ‘no boundary condition’ hypothesis of Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle was first proposed in this paper: Hartle and Hawking, ‘Wave Function of the Universe’, Phys Rev D, 28, 2960 (1983). Note that Hawking, as I do, fully accepts the Big Bang origin of the observable universe. Hawking himself comments on this work in ‘A Brief History of Time’ as follows: ‘The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behaviour at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of physics broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.’
TO BE CONTINUED

 

[hecd2]

Continued/

Another area of fruitful work is in inflationary theory that is needed to explain the homogeneity and flatness of the universe. So let’'s see what leading cosmologists say about that

First Max Tegmark, ‘Parallel Universes’ in ‘Science and Ultimate Reality; From Quantum to Cosmos’, Cambridge University Press, (2003) on-line here: wintersteel.homestead.com/files/ShanaArticles/multiverse.pdf

He says: ‘Inflation is a general phenomenon that occurs in a wide class of theories of elementary particles. In the popular model known as chaotic inflation, inflation ends in some regions of space allowing life as we know it, whereas quantum fluctuations cause other regions of space to inflate even faster. In essence, one inflating bubble sprouts other inflationary bubbles, which in turn produce others in a never-ending chain reaction. The bubbles where inflation has ended are the elements of the Level II multiverse. Each such bubble is infinite in size, yet there are infinitely many bubbles since the chain reaction never ends. Indeed, if this exponential growth of the number of bubbles has been going on forever, there will be an uncountable infinity of such parallel universes (the same infinity as that assigned to the set of real numbers, say, which is larger than that of the [countably infinite] set of integers). In this case, there is also no beginning of time and no absolute Big Bang: there is, was and always will be an infinite number of inflating bubbles and post-inflationary regions like the one we inhabit, forming a fractal pattern.’

Andrei Linde, ‘Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle’ on line here:

arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0211/0211048.pdf

writes: 'Consider a universe which initially consisted of many domains with chaotically distributed scalar field - (or if one considers different universes with different values of the field). Those domains where the scalar field was too small never inflated, so they do not contribute much to the total volume of the universe. The main contribution to the total volume of the universe will be given by those domains which originally contained large scalar field -. Inflation of such domains creates huge homogeneous islands out of the initial chaos, each homogeneous domain being much greater than the size of the observable part of the universe. That is why I called this scenario ‘chaotic inflation’.

There is a big difference between this scenario and the old idea that the whole universe was created at the same moment of time (Big Bang), in a nearly uniform state with indefinitely large temperature. In the new theory, the condition of uniformity and thermal equilibrium is no longer required. Each part of the universe could have a singular beginning (see (Borde et al, 2001) for a recent discussion of this issue). However, in the context of chaotic inflation, this does not mean that the universe as a whole had a single beginning. Different parts of the universe could come to existence at different moments of time, and then grow up to the size much greater than the total size of the universe. The existence of initial singularity (or singularities) does not imply that the whole universe was created simultaneously in a single Big Bang explosion. In other words, we cannot tell anymore that the whole universe was born at some time t = 0 before which it did not exist. This conclusion is valid for all versions of chaotic inflation’

To be continued

 

[hecd2]

continued/

In the same article, Linde points out that for the model known as Eternal Chaotic Inflation where the scalar field wanders for an indefinitely long time at a density approaching the Planck density: ‘One does not need anymore to assume that some supernatural cause created our universe with the properties specifically fine-tuned to make our existence possible. Inflationary universe itself, without any external intervention, may produce exponentially large domains with all possible laws of low-energy physics.’

I could post a vast quantity more that demonstrates that the Big Bang is no evidence for an First Cause, but I’ll finish with a paper by Linde, Linde and Mezhlumian, Phys Rev D 49, 1783 (1994), ‘From the Big Bang to the theory of a stationary universe’, on-line here:

arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9306/9306035.pdf

‘The first models of inflation were formulated in the context of the Big Bang theory. Their success in solving internal problems of this theory apparently removed the last doubts concerning the Big Bang cosmology. It remained almost unnoticed that during the last ten years inflationary theory changed considerably. It has broken an umbilical cord connecting it with the old Big Bang theory, and acquired an independent life of its own. For the practical purposes of describing the observable part of our Universe one may still speak about the Big Bang, just as one can still use Newtonian gravity theory to describe the Solar system with very high precision. However, if one tries to understand the beginning of the Universe, or its end, or its global structure, then some of the notions of the Big Bang theory become inadequate… So far, inflation remains the only theory which explains why the observable part of the Universe is almost homogeneous. However, almost all versions of inflationary cosmology predict that on a much larger scale the Universe should be extremely inhomogeneous, with energy density varying from the Planck density to almost zero. Instead of one single Big Bang producing a single-bubble Universe, we are speaking now about inflationary bubbles producing new bubbles, producing new bubbles, ad infinitum.’

and

‘Surprisingly enough, after the dramatic development of the Big Bang theory during the last ten years, we are coming now to a new formulation of the stationary cosmology, on a new level of understanding and without losing a single achievement of our predecessors. The observable part of the Universe can be very well described by the homogeneous isotropic Big Bang model. However, on extremely large scales (far beyond the visible horizon) the Universe is very inhomogeneous. On even larger scales this inhomogeneity produces a kind of fractal structure, repeating itself on larger and larger time and length scales. The statistical properties of this structure are what we have found to be stationary.’

The bottom line is that the Big Bang model is a wonderfully accurate representation of the origin and evolution of the observable universe but it does not rule out the probability of a universe without beginning. The physics is in the links. I can help, with relatively simple explanations, anyone who has trouble understanding any of it . You have only to ask.

Alec

evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

transfinitum:

You write:
In case you had forgotten, my post was about your assertion regarding that cataclysmically incompetent failure Russell as a mathematician…
The incompleteness theorems are primarily about epistemology, a subsidiary of metaphysics. The logical-positivist epistemology of Bertrand Russell is utterly demolished by Kurt Godel. There is nothing left of Russell’s life work. It is demolished, upon its own ground. That is what makes Godel, the superior mathematician, also a superior epistemologist…
Russell was demolished by Godel. Period. Russell’s primary legacy is his useful idiocy in asserting a logical positivist epistemology…
It showed how a Platonist can reduce an Aristotelian to a quivering blob, when the lastter insists upon the logical-positivist epistemology.

Well, my first impression was correct - from what you say here it is quite obvious that you don’t know what Goedel’s propositions VI and XI state. By referring to Russell as a logical positivist you also demonstrate your limp grasp of the history of philosophy, and your claims that all of Russell’s life’s work is destroyed (and I suppose you would say the same of Hilbert) is unsophisticated pastiche.

Finally, your attitude to Russell is slander of the grossest kind. Not content with characterising him, falsely and facetiously, as the ‘quintessence of evil’, you now claim that he was cataclysmically incompetent and an idiot. It doesn’t require much of an acquaintance with Russell’s work to realise how ridiculous that is. Thinking people, genuinely interested in discovering the truth, even those who disagree profoundly with Russell’s agnosticism, are not likely to be persuaded by such childish histrionics.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Carl]

As another measure of Russell’s infantile sarcasm, let’s quote from “Why I Am Not a Christian.” This is from his reply to the argument from design:

“Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omnicience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?”

Well, I should think Russell might at least have thought he was better than the Ku Klux Klan and the Fascists. This notion that God cannot exist because the world is not perfect strikes me as a typically childish reaction to the existence of evil in the world. The only perfect world would be the world in which it is impossible to sin. But such a world would render us slaves to utopia rather than creatures who are free to do good or evil.

As Pascal put it, we are not just capable of nobility, we are capable of understanding how noble or ignoble we could be. In a sense, we are greater than the universe, because the universe does not understand itself, nor does it understand us, but we have begun to understand it.