Slashdot Mirror
Higgs Data Could Spell Trouble For Leading Big Bang Theory
ananyo writes "Paul Steinhardt, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and colleagues have posted a controversial paper on ArXiv arguing, based on the latest Higgs data and the cosmic microwave background map from the Planck mission, that the leading theory explaining the first moments of the Big Bang ('inflation') is fatally flawed. In short, Steinhardt says that the models that best fit the Planck data — known as 'plateau models' because their potential-energy profiles level off at relatively low energies — are far less likely to occur naturally than the models that Planck ruled out. Secondly, he says, the news for these plateau models gets dramatically worse when the results are analyzed in conjunction with the latest results about the Higgs field coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Particle physicists working at the LHC have calculated that the Higgs field is likely to have started out in a high-energy, 'metastable' state rather than in a stable, low-energy configuration. Steinhardt likens the odds of the Higgs field initially being perched in the precarious metastable state as to those of dropping out of the sky over the Matterhorn and conveniently landing in a 'dimple near the top,' rather than crashing down to the mountain's base."
That sounds like a cosmic catastrophe in the making. Or has it already happened?
Ezekiel 23:20
....we just don't know.
It wasn't a Big Bang, but a Medium Bang!
gotta get out my papers, nobel prize for fizziks here I come!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Any theory of the origin of everything has to start with nothing. Absolutely nothing. Otherwise, you're not talking about an origin, you're talking about something that already existed, and that means that you now have to figure out the origin of that thing before you can find the origin of everything. Both the current Big Bang theory and God follow this same origin story, and neither one explains an origin for itself.
In science, the Big Bang = God. It is a religion based on faith, just like any other...
There was no "kablooey" in the sense of something exploding into space. There was no space. The universe didn't come from nothing, it came from everything. Then it changed state.
OK, so I'll confess my ignorance on this one, and maybe someone can clarify it.
Does this have anything to do with if the universe will go through a big crunch? Or is this more about the models about the mechanics of the big bang?
I have no idea what this summary is saying since it's outside of my field, so I have no idea if this is good news, bad news, or a different in understanding something which is pretty abstract anyway. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hideki!
A: Other variations of the big bang theory are safe, just the 'main' version is in trouble
or....
B: The big bang theory itself is in trouble, including any of its variations. 'Leading' here would mean big bang theory over say, a steady state universe.
From what I can tell, the Slashdot title means B due to this quote in the story:
But if you take the data we’ve been given and just follow your nose, then inflation and the whole Big Bang paradigm seem to be in big trouble,” Steinhardt says.
Emphasis on "whole".
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
It's more like intelligent design.
Completely based on the anthropic principle and in violation of the fundamental premise of quantum theory. In QT you can't make any other Bayes statistical conclusion other than 50/50 when you only have one data point. Since you can't resimulate the universe, cosmology as a science is currently bogus.
..but I have always been skeptical of "inflation"
It seemed like a mathematical "band-aid", applied in desperation to a flawed theory
The old ways are best:
This finding is relevant because it suggests the existence of a limited number of ephemeral particles per unit volume in a vacuum.
In other words, there is no nothingness; everything is something. Thus we're looking at vacuums being a variation of type of substrate of matter, not an absence of matter. Mind-blowing. Be sure to drop acid before reading this.
Please. Pretty Please...
Years ago, this was a significant debate, but in recent years the debate was "settled" - the universe's expansion is actually increasing in rate.
I have always felt that it was wrong to call this settled. The increased rate of expansion of the universe is explained by "Dark Energy", a completely unknown entity with unknown properties. There is no reason why the effects of Dark Energy might change (or even reverse) over time. So, is the universe expanding at an increasing rate? Apparently. Will it continue to do so? I don't think that is even close to answered.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
A wizard did it.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because some atheists act in a religious manner.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God. We can use our observations of the world around us and logic to come to a refusal to believe the fairy tales we're taught as children, and this is all in the realm of reason. But those of us who claim to know without doubt that there is no deity have crossed into the realm of faith.
... the most idiotic paper I have read all year. It's a silly collection of straw-man arguments, with no actual science in it at all.
What they claim is "universally accepted" (actually, they claim it is almost "universally accepted", quotes theirs), isn't. Which is why they have to use the silly quotation marks.
Plateau-like models are not the only ones consistent with Planck. See: the Planck paper on inflationary constraints
Inflation has always had a problem with initial conditions. Guess what? It's still there.
"A challenge for the inflationary paradigm in light of the Planck2013 data is to explain why no significant multiverse effects have been observed" Wuh? Maybe, um, because there might not be a multiverse at all?
It's not a cosmic catastrophe so much as a physics one, although I'd prefer to call it a physics "opportunity"! Having found the Higgs we already know that there is now an incredible precarious balance even within the Standard Model. The Higgs is a fundamental scalar particle which is a radically different beast from any other fundamental particle we know of. One of the strange properties of the Higgs is that there are corrections to its mass which scale with energy squared.
This might not sound like a big deal but quantum mechanics means that even at low energies these high energy corrections to the Higgs mass are important. The question then becomes "what energy is our current knowledge of physics good to". Well if we look at the Standard Model of particle physics it is missing gravity so, at the scale where gravity becomes important (about a million billion times higher in energy than the LHC) we know the SM breaks down.
The problem is that this means the Higgs mass is corrected by a series of terms each of which is ~32+ orders of magnitude larger than the mass itself. This means that you need a cancellation to better than one part in ~10^32 by chance. This is about the same chance as winning the UK national lottery every week for 4-5 weeks in a row or tossing a coin and having it come up heads over 100 times in a row. If either of these events actually happened nobody would believe they happened by chance - there would be investigations into how someone managed to cheat the lottery or you would want to inspect the coin to make sure it did not have two heads.
There are solutions to this conundrum: Supersymmetry makes all the corrections to the Higgs mass cancel precisely (above some energy scale) and Large Extra Dimensions lowers the scale where gravity becomes important considerably. What would be interesting to know is whether these solutions to the fine tuning problem we have in the Standard Model also solve the fine tuning which this paper suggests that cosmology also has.
Such anger.
The assertion AC made (along with other "religious" types) is based on the the acceptance that the singularity was "just there", and that abiogenesis "just happened". Many call this acceptance faith.
I don't think I would actually call it faith, but something more along the lines of, "We don't know. We're fine with that right now. Some day, we hope to discover the answers for the origin of the singularity and the facility of abiogenesis. But, whatever the case, we're sure it's not God."
sig: sauer
Sensationalism posting again. Why can't you people who want to post science, especially physics, articles, wait until there's been time to *peer review* the controversial claims? Otherwise, you're giving credence to (don't know if it's junk science, that's the point) unproven statements.
I can put an article up in ArXiv that the universe is full of purple elephants. Slashdot article pops up the next day, "Ooh, big controversy, the universe could/might/almost/maybe is full of purple elephants. What will that mean?" Get my point?
Well said... But Carl Sagan said it best: An atheist has to know a lot more than I do. Sagan certainly didn't believe in a god, but he just treated nonexistence as the default, and was willing to listen if someone actually came up with real non-faith-based evidence that nonexistence was wrong.
Why is this called Steinhardt's paper? Anna Ijjas is first author and she's a post-doc at Harvard.
Sheldon will be not happy...
You are so right, there is no difference at all, I worship the big bang with all my heart and if it were proven 100% wrong by scientists I would still keep worshipping it.
Wait, no, it's not like that at all. How is believing in one small detail about the origin of the universe (because that's what the data currently tells us) even remotely like religious faith?
It's like those people that claim that believing in evolution is like religious faith. It's like religious faith except with a mountain of verifiable evidence, which means that it's nothing like religious faith at all.
The Big Bang theory and expanding universe theory was postulated by, Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest.
There was no "kablooey" in the sense of something exploding into space. There was no space. The universe didn't come from nothing, it came from everything. Then it changed state.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I think the language excellently demonstrates the tremendous challenge scientists have explaining the origin of the universe to non-scientists - Particularly religious-inclined non-scientists. I think most people would just write it off as incomprehensible gibberish, and really, there's no 'easy' way to write it.
Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part. I have no direct personal proof that the sun is a giant ball of nuclear fire, i have to take it on faith that the scientific consensus is 'right'. It is easier to accept this consensus when they show me how they came to their conclusions and how i can repeat their experiments and see it for myself. Even easier when they invite to prove them wrong using the similar methods.
Good-bye
But wouldn't something like the quantum immortality effect come into play here? In other words, to steal the Matterhorn analogy, we are guaranteed to have fallen into the dimple at the top instead of falling down the sides because we live in this universe and all the other possible universes never formed because they did fall down the sides.
Granted, occams razor and all that, but it is at least interesting to think about.
That's pushing it. I KNOW there is no flying spaghetti monster. No proof against it. There COULD be a flying spaghetti monster. But I KNOW there isn't one. That is not faith. That's just not being silly. Not the same.
Therefore the singularity that existed at the time of the Big Bang hadn't "come" from anywhere.
"Where exactly is it, in some infinite void?"
Where is the past, exactly? Another meaningless question. It isn't there any more since we are AFTER the singularity stopped being a singularity.
"Are there more like it"
There could be, but it depends on what you model the reality as.
" all oscillating between Exapansion and Collapse throughout eternity"
Not possible because of the second law of thermodynamics. You'd have to explain why it doesn't apply here.
Chicken that laid a very large egg.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Maybe it is a good indication that the inflation theory is bogus, and that we should look at alternatives such as the big bounce theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce
We have yet to see how the latest Planck results agree with that one.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
This is a dead horse that's been beaten to death so many times we've hardly got a carcass. Yes, actually, you can.
Let's take the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's made of spaghetti and two meatballs. We know that these two components neither have sentience or the ability to fly. If you change their molecular configuration such that the material involved should become sentient and capable of flight, you no longer have spaghetti and meatballs. Put another way, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is, in fact, the equivalent of a square circle. He's a logical contradiction that can't possibly be real. We can apply the same reasoning to Invisible Pink Unicorns. Something that's invisible can't also be pink, and visa versa.
The gods dreamed up by all our fanciful imaginations are equally contradictory. Take the Christian god. It's omniscient, omnipotent, yet has human form. It's described as one god, but is made up of three entities. Preordains everything, but simultaneously possesses free will. Perfect good, but created evil.
In other words, Christians worship a square circle.
I know you want to be kind to your intellectually inferior friends, but there are no contradictions in the universe. Sure, there are infinite possibilities, but gods aren't possibilities. They're pure fantasies, as the moment you eliminate properties that eliminate the contradictions, they cease to be gods.
In science, the Big Bang = God. It is a religion based on faith, just like any other...
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
I would guess for the same reason that you imply that science is atheism.
As Bertrand Russell said it:
I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
Good. This means scientists had a theory, and they've been testing the hell out of it. As they find data that contradicts the theory, they will rework the theory to match what is observed. This is exactly what we want. We should be celebrating because the scientific process works.
Just like they "invented" the force of gravity to explain why the planets didn't just go flying off?
You forgot option C: Neilsen ratings for the CBS comedy are going down the tubes.
and even if it did athiests would still not believe in God, so what's the point?
Do you know that Santa Claus doesn't exist? If your answer to that is "yes", then there you go, you can know that gods don't exist too. If your answer to that is "no", then your definition of "know" is useless and has no relevance to reality. Either way, you can know that gods don't exist in the same way that you can know that Santa Claus doesn't exist. That of course doesn't imply that gods don't exist, but making a big stink about the philosophy of not being able to know it when the same arguments would apply to Santa Claus is plainly ridiculous.
The universe starting out in an unlikely high-energy state? isn't that just what the Big Bang theory says anyway?
The term religion is confusing the issue, people should be using the term "Orthodoxy".
What people really mean isn't that atheism is a religion (that makes no sense) but that atheists act in conformist fashion with the leading minds of capital-A Atheism (the usual New Atheist crowd). And they absolutely do! Many of the New Atheists conclusions do not follow from having an atheist belief, and many of their opinions are hateful, fear mongering tripe that deserves to be roundly criticized and dismissed. Many Atheists can't get accept this, because they have an emotional attachment to certain writers who had a huge impact on their life. That's all well and good, but dismissing one form of Orthodoxy for another seems like missing the entire point, doesn't it?
for a minute there I thought they were talking about the TV show...
In science, the Big Bang = God. It is a religion based on faith, just like any other...
No. It simply is not. The Big Bang theory is science, not religion. To equivocate it with religion is to say you either a) don't understand science, b) don't understand religion, or c) don't understand either.
The Big Bang theory and expanding universe theory was postulated by, Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest.
This statement is also correct.
"The Big Bang theory and expanding universe theory was postulated by, Georges Lemaître, an astronomer."
Now, tell me what was operative in his formulation of the theory; his background in astronomy, or his Catholicism?
Nope, that's an agnostic.
Nope, that's an atheist. "agnostic" just means "I don't know". One can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion? Are you afraid of letting go of your god-illusion and living without your mind-crutch? Perhaps even to the point of denying that other people don't need the same comfort in order to live their lives?
A better question: Why do these types of articles always spawn off into a battle between the hardline theistic and atheistic evangelicals? At what point does the idea of the big bang, evolution, AI, or (insert your own topic here) either prove or disprove the existence of God? From a true scientific standpoint, is simply doesnt do either.
The difference is that nobody makes not believing in Santa Claus their primary character trait.
The thing that bugs me about a Big Bang Theory is where did this singularity come from?
I am not a physicist. My limited understanding is that under M-Theory the universe may be a higher-dimensional membrane, a "brane". Furthermore, the universe is not unique, there are numerous branes, a multiverse. Its been suggested that when two branes collide a new one is formed ... a new brane, a new universe, a big bang.
So being of human form, it's impossible to attain omniscience or omnipotence? What's so limiting about human form that prevents such characteristics?
This is just silly. For omniscience, the brain would have to both contain as many atoms as there are in the universe in order to know everything, and multiplied for temporal states. That's a really big brain. For omnipotence, well, I'm wondering about skeletal loading and muscular strength. Then I guess this god has telekinetic powers, or something? Gee, see how quickly this starts to look like something out of a Dungeons and Dragons playbook?
To be fair, not every Christian denomination believes this, or at least in the way that you're implying.
You're suggesting some Christians then believe that Jesus isn't god? If not, then what was Jesus? Just a really good human by their standards?
Preordination is not a necessary characteristic of God; omniscience and preordination can be easily confused.
Sigh. Isaiah 46:10, Acts 2:23, Revelations 1:8.
No; created free-acting agents that of their own will chose evil.
See previous Bible verses. He created so-called free-acting agents while simultaneously knowing the outcome. Can't have it both ways. Pick one.
Could it be that the contradictions you see in God are of your own misunderstanding of others' beliefs?
The contradictions come from the Bible, which is the source of others' beliefs.
Um, that's exactly what an atheist is. They don't accept the god hypothesis without proof.
Every atheist thread seems to degenerates into semantic hair-splitting over the terms atheist and agnostic and what varying degree of confidence/belief/doubt they are suppose to represent. In my experience, this does not yield productive/interesting discussions.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
And this guy proved it. Real existence would be unbearable.
What you describe is a belief, an assumption, but not a religion. Even when some atheist DO make the statement they are 100% sure there is no gods, they still have no credo, no ceremony, no priest or priesthood, no leitmotiv, no church, no chants, no holy books, nothing BUT that belief in 100% surety non existence of gods. That does not make it a religon. Otherwise 9/11 truther , Alien landing believer, and other believer in woo stuff would be religion. They are not. It needs much much more than that to have a religion. Thus the assertion atheist are religious even pertaining to the 100% sure atheist , is false.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You can be an agnostic atheist, you know.
If the evolution of a stable universe requires the Higgs field to start out at a metastable point, and if variations in those initial conditions lead to universes which collapse rather than inflating, then "the amplitude" (i.e. the probability that they are the outcome that we turn up in) for those other states is zero. Why? Because those universes all collapse long before we could show up.
On the other hand, if Steinhardt is correct, then his result shows there is a path to here-and-now through the metastable point, and if that's what it takes to get here, then that's enough: that's what it takes. The amplitude of the entire wave function for the Steinhardt path is non-zero, unlike the functions for the ones that collapsed.
http://www.cosmologystatement.org/
Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part. I have no direct personal proof that the sun is a giant ball of nuclear fire, i have to take it on faith that the scientific consensus is 'right'. It is easier to accept this consensus when they show me how they came to their conclusions and how i can repeat their experiments and see it for myself. Even easier when they invite to prove them wrong using the similar methods.
That's faith in the unknown (your limited time an energy to learn everything), as opposed to the unknowable.
Here's the three things that I need to accept philosophically to 'believe' in science.
1) That there is an objective shared reality
2) That that reality is governed by laws
3) that those laws are discoverable by observation
Everything else is web of trust.
This is the most complex argument I've heard that the universe is only 6000 years old.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
One definition of religion is a group of people with a shared belief, in particular a belief that can not be proven. Given that a deity can be neither proven nor disproven, people who believe or disbelieve in a deity are both operating in a religious manner.
An agnostic is a person who has formed no conclusion, who does not know whether or not a deity exists because there is no evidence either way.
It would seem that the agnostic is the person operating on a non-religious manner.
Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part.
Yes, everyone has beliefs, biases, and a worldview. But the term religion is a little bit more precise, and atheism in the general sense does not seem to have the dogma, strictures, rites, and communal/identity implications that we normally associate with religion. Perhaps more militant atheists groups would qualify for the label, but your general, everyday I-don't-believe-in-god type would not.
Incidentally, I would argue that your burning-ball-of-nuclear-fire hypothesis regarding the sun is not "faith" in the religious sense. Yes, you extend faith/credit to certain authorities and institutions in choosing to believe that claim, but if the question were ever to come into doubt, you could opt to mentally reexamine the issue without feeling that your identity was being ripped out. In my mind, religious faith implies having a certain feeling that you ought to believe something and resist challenging it, even when your natural mind wants to doubt it.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
I cannot know there is no God. I cannot know that China exists, either.
I cannot know for sure that there is no God. I can know that I interpret the the evidence as clearly in favor of the people believing in God misinterpreting standard psychologicial-neurological effects.
I cannot know for sure that the body of land described as China exists - I can know that I interpret the evidence as clearly in favor of it existing, but I can't know - everybody I encounter that talk about it could be conspiring against me, and all the material I read could be fake, or I could be insane and be misinterpreting it.
Now, I have a weave of knowledge that points at each of these being true. To describe something as "knowing", I'll look at that weave, and see if it is strong enough.
With regards to God, I can say that I know that most variants of God are false - when a Christian describe "God" to me, I can usually say what that Christian believes in is false - it contradict things I know to be true (in the form of having concrete evidence). However, "God" is a pliable term. It doesn't really say much. However, I can say that I know that the source of the Christians belief is incorrect - that their religion comes has been manipulated over time, and that their "evidence" is incorrect. As a such, I can say that they do not *know* that God exists, even if God should happen to exist - because they don't have a justified true belief.
I don't use the term "know" about God - I say "I believe there is no God" - but that's mostly by convention. To use Russell's example, I am as justified in saying "I know there is no God" as in saying "I know there is no red teapot made by random chance in orbit around the sun".
I sincerely doubt you are an atheist because you capitalize god and are speaking about proving a negative is impossible. Instead you speak of proving a negative, something to which theists always resort. You speak of logic yet forget that the burden of proof lies on the claimant, which would be the one claiming there is a "god" and that such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. Said proof should be easy to provide yet, after thousands of years, has never been found.
I know that every single claimed deity does not exist. I don't know this from faith. I know this because all one must do is examine the properties of said deity to see the contradictions and impossibilities.
Successful troll is successful
I'm not going to sleep well tonight knowing my understanding of the Universe has changed from one form of utter nonsense to another.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Citing Scripture isn't helpful here because the majority of Christians worldwide do not believe in the principle of sola Scriptura.
You're saying it isn't helpful to cite what Christians call the word of God (i.e., the authoritative text on the nature of god and their religion)?
They look to a Tradition which draws upon the Bible, but only in combination with an extrabiblical rule of interpretation.
Let me reword that: Christians reserve the right to dispense with the perfect, unchanging word of God when it suits them. A god they claim is also perfect and unchanging, but one that is self-evidently imperfect in the first half of the Bible then changes into something slight more perfect in the latter half, and, well, whose nature is subject to interpretation and speculations and so forth.
This brings us back to my original point. This god is a square circle. But some interpret it to be a square triangle, too. Entirely flexible to interpretation, with opinions ranging so wildly in contradiction about what this god supposedly is--even by the most strict reading of the holy book that's used to define it. Every definition here is so loose and fungible so as to be utterly useless in practice.
Bottom line? When something is either real or factual, the specification of that thing becomes more narrow and more precise as scrutiny continues. When held up to honest inspection, a thing's definition becomes more rigid and more exacting. When it comes to gods and religions, we see the exact opposite. As time passes, the number of sects, interpretations, opinions, authorities, and dogmas only increases. Everything about religion becomes more and more vague as it's studied. That's how we know it's false. That's how we know people are chasing their imaginations and not something which actually exists.
Because some atheists act in a religious manner.
My favorite distinguishing behaviour of atheists is summarized in a comedian's quote.
"You never hear in the news, '200 killed today when Atheist rebels took heavy shelling from the Agnostic stronghold in the north'" - Doug Stanhope
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God
You might be an atheist using a charitable definition of the term, but you're lumping yourself in with the knowing without a doubt crowd too. You might want to self identify as agnostic, in the sense that both theism and atheism are unknowable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism
No, it is the claim that there is no God that is "extraordinary", because of what the word in fact, actually, means. It does not mean "things I want to consider implausible". The majority of people throughout history have been theist, therefore it is -that- that is "ordinary", and it is your claim that is "extra-" to that, and therefore it is your claim that (per your Judge Judy level of understanding of epistemology) requires "extraordinary proof".
There is no reason to say "said proof should be easy to provide". Why should it be? Because you say so? Even if there is very good reason to suppose it should -not- be "easy" due to a requirement that people preferably make free personal decisions on such a core issue, rather than their decision being forced by overwhelming "proof", and thus allowing them no real decision at all?
Well then, since "proof" is so easy to provide and expectable in a general sense, I have a couple you can provide "proof" for me on, that I've been curious about. Go ahead and prove what political party out of all those that have existed is provably correct, it'll save me a lot of time on considering political debates. Go ahead and prove what the best rock group ever is, so I won't need to waste time listening to the others.
As for the realistic expectation (that you already know is the realistic expectation, which is why you won't use it)--"evidence", lots and lots of evidence exists both in general (cf. NDE, Shroud of Turin, prophecy probabilities) and in terms of people's personal experiences. And no, you have in fact no way whatsoever to psychically review the brains and experience of all -other- people on earth and conclude an absence of such validating experiences, as you claim you can.
As for the "contradictions and impossibilities", were it actually "all one must do", theism would have ended long ago. In fact, however, you are simply proclaiming these in the absence of any supporting argument, and in fact, it is not the case that because you opine that something is "impossible", that it in any way actually is.
With Christianity, the fact that this religion existed for several decades before the compilation of any texts makes it pretty clear that calling the Bible--and not the tradition that predates it--the ultimate source of Christian belief is inaccurate.
Meaning an entire system of beliefs and stories about the nature of the universe was based on word-of-mouth testimony by people who lived in an era when superstition ran rampant. I'll let Neil deGrasse Tyson answer to that.
http://youtu.be/NSJElZwEI8o?t=2m50s
Cheers.
That would make the term "atheist" mostly useless.
"Agnostic" implies a value judgement that there is enough chance of there being a God that it is premature to draw a conclusion.
"Atheist" implies that there's a conclusion drawn.
The majority of those of us that define ourselves as "atheist" would be willing to accept there being a God if there was some evidence. However, we choose the label "atheist" because we consider the likelihood of there ever being any evidence to be so low that we believe there is no God. Many of us (me included) also believes it is easily possible to define some kind of "God" that wouldn't create any kind of evidence - and that there obviously is no evidence either way for or against that God as a such - and in this way we're agnostic. However, at least I also think that there is relatively clear evidence that such beliefs in God are "hacks" on our psychology (and where they've originated) - and I consider it extremely unlikely that there will be evidence in the opposite direction.
To use a different example than God: If evidence appeared that showed that man existed before dinosaurs, I would change my belief about this. That don't mean that I don't believe that man came after dinosaurs - it just means that I'm willing to accept evidence and change my mind if it turns out that I am wrong. I am unwilling to accept the "man before dinosaurs" hypothesis without evidence. In the same way, I believe there is no God; I am unwilling to accept the "God exists" hypothesis without evidence. That I can change my mind don't make me an agnostic - it just shows that I'm sometimes a rational person.
[Different AC here]
That's true, and atheist zealots are just as annoying as religious zealots, and probably just as annoying someone who insists all the time to disparage or make fun of Santa Claus (I say probably because I've never met such a person).
But that's completely irrelevant to the discussion of whether "atheism is a religion because it's belief without proof that God doesn't exist", which is a silly argument (like the Santa Claus example shows).
What's sad(dest) are those in each camp who take the position, essentially, that any evidence of X (X being a substantive difference from their assumption Y) can just be explained away.
Man existed before dinosaurs? Well... they must have gotten the tests wrong. Or it's a fraud by Bible-thumpers/Bible-haters, so I can dismiss it. Or it doesn't matter, because man didn't exist alongside the dinosaurs, just before and after.
I think at that point it is more about Linguistics, Philosophy, Neuroscience than actual physics.
Other than in Math which can get very conceptual, human thought likes to deal with discrete things. Stuff like Infinite, Everything, Nothing, or anything that is an absolute is very difficult to process. We like to label things, we like to describe things. In describing something you are by nature encapsulating it into a known value. In many cases we describe things in absolute terms, even those things rarely are. Anytime you do this you are describing a barrier, and when we think of barriers, one of the defining elements is that there are two sides, one is separated from the other. You can't have a barrier with something on one side, and nothing on the other, there is always something on the other side. Hence if everything is contained within the big bang, where does the big bang reside, ad nauseam. My favorite example is that of a simple apple. We define an apple by its apparent observable boundary, of its skin. When in in reality, it is comprised of particles that are constantly in a state of flux vibrating and moving. At best we might be able to describe it in an equation that describes the movements of the particles in relation to each other within the apple, and visually we simply apply a threshold of what we can observe to define it more easily. However if you delve smaller and smaller, you have more to describe, much as I expect as with the Higgs. Who is to say what is beyond that to further describe to have a better understanding of the physics involved. We are limited by what we can observe. When it comes down to it, everything is everything, but that is hardly really useful information.
On top of all that there is the question of why we are limited in this way to labeling and describing things, that do not translate very well to these kinds of debates. Why can we not think in such a matter to understand these principles better. There is the debate which is a bit of a chicken or the egg argument, does how we think define our language, or does our manner of communication and language define how we think. One might argue that our ability to reason (or even basic communication of anything) is an evolutionary trait designed to pass information from one to another for the purposes of survival (and by extension procreation). This seems to be mostly the facilitation of the brain processing abstract ideas to discrete descriptions and vice versa. However as mentioned earlier there is some difficulty with that likely mostly dependent on what we can physically observe. Perhaps an apt example (maybe) might be the translation between digital and analog. It is not always exact, and is done using accepted thresholds of meaning.
Anyway one of the larger problems as I see it, is that we have disciplines like physics that generally speaking use observation and highly conceptual mathematics to try and describe the universe around us. However the further we get away from what we can physically observe, we are left with trying to use reason to explain what we cannot observe, and when trying to do so translating conceptual ideas of infinite, etc... generated by mathematics into rational arguments it is impossible to do so.
So until we are able to breach this linguistic/Neuroscience barrier of how we communicate/think, I think we will have a very hard time describing the universe past a certain point both at a macro and a micro level using physics (other than to say that math is telling us stuff we don't understand and we build physical constructs to try to explain it away).
At this point I probably need some weed or a lobotomy or something.
We have no way of assigning probability to initial conditions of the universe because we don't anything about the space of possible universes. We can't even say that probability was involved. We already know that the universe began in a low entropy state, so a naive estimate of the probability of our universe is vanishingly small. So there must be some reason for the universe to start in a low entropy state, and until we understand that reason, we can't make any sense of initial probabilities.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
This may be technically true, but is entirely unhelpful: there is already an infinite number of things whose existence cannot be disproved, of which the Judeo-Christian God is merely one utterly unremarkable instance.
Either you start from the position that no claim is true until proven[1] otherwise, or else you start from the position that all claims are true until proven false. You cannot pick and choose which unfounded claims are true and which are false simply according to personal preference (c.f. religion, alt med, truthers, and every other irrational belief system in existence) - or rather you can, but by indulging in such special pleading you're just being intellectually dishonest and grossly hypocritical about it.
Hence science's definition of the Null Hypothesis, where its base position is that no claim is true until proven otherwise. "Evidence or GTFO!", in other words. Which, if you bother to think about it (instead of plain silly smug word games), is the only starting point available from which all reasoning and investigation can subsequently proceed from that is both sane and logically consistent.
To illustrate, let's use 'God' as an example. Humans already have hundreds of different gods and origin accounts and may well invent more in future, so if you wish to assert that one of these stories in particular is True then you must fulfill one of the following requirements:
1. Provide a convincing amount of high-quality hard evidence[2] to back up your own claim.
2. Accept all the other past, current and future such stories are equally True as well.
3. Resort to special pleading wherein your story is True and everyone else's is False just because you say it is.
Since #2 is a Logical Fail (i.e. they can't all be true since many such stories are mutually contradictory) and #3 is blatant double standards and general bullshittery, that leaves #1 as the only credible option.
Though hey, if you can't stomach the basic logic behind the Null Hypothesis and all it implies for your own beliefs, I will be happy to declare that it is an inviolable Truth that you have tiny invisible cancer-inducing monkeys flying out your ass - after which is should not be hard to rustle up my own Evangelical Church of Death to the Cancer-Monkeys to shove a couple giant corks in you just to reinforce the point. [3] :p
--
[1] Where the word 'proof' is used in the layman's view of science sense: i.e. lots and lots of good hard evidence and a mature, well tested scientific theory that explains all of it. As opposed to the formal mathematical sense (the workings are sound and the numbers all add up) or the applied religious sense (believing in something really really really hard therefore makes it true).
[2] A lot, in this case, as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
[3] Which, you know, is one of the risks you run by throwing open that ol' spinelessly equivocating postmodernist Pandora's box where all claims must be accepted as Truth (no matter how self-contradictory or mutually incompatible with other similarly unfounded claims and/or observed reality), just because you're too frightened to bruise anyone's precious feelings (not least your own). It's all fun and games till someone gets burnt at a stake for heresy...
I think you need to add one more key component to your scientific philosophy to distinguish it from similar religious claims:
4) laws discovered by observation are easily communicable to other people
Many religions will claim that through "religious observation" (participation in the rites, prayers, behaviors, etc. of the religious community), the "laws of God governing the universe" are "discovered". Many individual religious adherents will claim that, through their "spiritual development" and "mystical experience" from "religious observance," they personally see with ever greater clarity proofs of the divine power ordering the cosmos. However, such "proofs" remain intensely personal, and the only way for another person to "be enlightened" is to embark on their own life-long "spiritual journey" ("I know the truth... but I can't just explain it; you have to experience it for yourself").
The "communication component" of "scientific philosophy" is a key distinction from the "personal discovery of objective Truth" in religious practice. Perhaps I personally have to become as "pure and spiritual" as a great religious guru to "discover" the truths evident to him; however, I don't have to be as smart as Einstein to see how Einstein's relativistic theories describe observable features of the universe. Over time, scientific concepts that once could only be understood by the few most enlightened scientific minds become communicable and accessible to an ever greater range of people --- a high school student today can learn Newton's orbital mechanics.
"Orthodoxy" is not fair, either. According to Wikipedia, "[Orthodoxy] is generally used to mean the adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds". So, to be part of an orthodoxy, you adhere to it -- you have a choice.
So, for example, even if you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God you can still choose to not adhere to the Catholic Church (you can simply found another Church; that's how Protestantism was born).
If I don't believe in God, on the other hand, I'm an atheist by definition: even if I cared enough to denounce capital-A Atheists, I'd still be an atheist.
Likely primarily his Catholicism. The prevailing "scientific" model of the time, the Steady State theory, would have been much less "harmonious" with the "creation event" notion presented by Christianity. This would naturally motivate him to investigate to reconcile his belief with the scientific facts.
And so, we now have the correct science, harmonious with the religious framework, as accepted, and the erroneous model forwarded previously by "scientific consensus" refuted. Seems like a straightforward progression to me, and probably more work than its worth in this case for you to try the standard attempt to twist the two into opposition.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The Tardis exploded!
I sincerely doubt you are an atheist because you capitalize god [...]
That's very silly. It's a convention to write "God" when you're talking about the the supreme being (like the Christian God, as opposed to other gods like Zeus, where "god" is usually not capitalized), even if you don't believe in it.
See for instance Wikipedia: in "God"
In theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe. In deism, God is the creator (but not the sustainer) of the universe.
But in "Zeus"
He is the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology.
Perhaps instead if the energy/mass concentration of massive black holes reaches a critical point an event similar to a big bang can occur.
For one this would readily explain the lumpy nature of the cosmic background radiation and the tendency for energy while cooling into matter to clump in the first place. Caused by the tremendous gravities effecting areas of space from individual non explosive black holes. Perhaps regional black holes create the clumping by effecting the propagation of energy cooling after an expansion event from a black hole explosion.
The first method perhaps to test for this possibility is to look for differentiation in the background radiation within a single region of space where a suspected black hole explosion might of taken place.
Perhaps assuming that all matter originated from a single explosive event was indeed flawed.
Thus the "Little Pop" theory has some merit after all. It came to me in about 1976, Initials ECR from Embro Ontario Canada at the time. With the help of a professor of logic who taught at the University of Western Ontario and who helped me learn to fly fish.
So yes I am a layman but the vision of a universe which has many origins has given me this vision.
How many elephants in the room can fit through the eye of the needle?
You might want to self identify as agnostic when it comes to belief in Thor, the Tooth Fairy, etc as well, because these are also unknowable. Or you could just use common sense.
This is one area where science, or the scientific method, simply can not be used to prove or disprove God given that God is not simply an observable data set. It's like the brazilian ant determining polar bears don't exist simply b/c no ant is capable of observing the bear.
So God stops in every few thousand years, each time leaving a mark that's recorded as best as is capable by people at the time. For example, the Jewish claim in the Torah that God spoke to millions from Mount Sinai.
The Null Hypothesis is not relevant. You need not even look at the conundrum of God to see this as evident. Consider any situation where you would proceed with extreme caution or suffer loss of life. One would make use of data derived from science while simultaneously resolving phenomena for which they have no current answers (or access to at the time).
The notion that God does not exist is a sound scientific claim considering the basis of science, but that does not in turn nullify God no more so than the polar bear from the ant's mind.
Likely primarily his Catholicism. The prevailing "scientific" model of the time, the Steady State theory, would have been much less "harmonious" with the "creation event" notion presented by Christianity. This would naturally motivate him to investigate to reconcile his belief with the scientific facts.
Except it wasn't this lack of 'harmony' that motivated him to propose it; it was quite explicitly the measurements of the radial velocities of what were than called nebulae away from our point of reference that confounded the cosmology of the day, that led to his proposal. His personal faith probably found the hypothesis quite pleasing, but LeMaitre was quite honest enough to use the evidence before him to drive the work, rather than his faith.
Let me be more explicit; he did not wait for God to reveal the theory to him, he did the work himself, as an astronomer. Pope Pious XII tried to do exactly what you're doing, and Lemaitre told him to stop.
And so, we now have the correct science, harmonious with the religious framework, as accepted, and the erroneous model forwarded previously by "scientific consensus" refuted. Seems like a straightforward progression to me, and probably more work than its worth in this case for you to try the standard attempt to twist the two into opposition.
Not opposition. My point is that it was irrelevant. You cannot hypothesize that scientific discovery is driven by faith, when there have been a plurality of faiths, including none at all, involved in making discoveries major and minor over the years. That is a nonsense conclusion to make. Lemaitre understood this.
Jesus fucking christ, calm the fuck down already, or explain precisely what "dangerous" means.
Many people seem to think the not believing something exists is the same as outright denying its existence hence the reason so many hairs have to be split.
You cannot hypothesize that scientific discovery is driven by faith, when there have been a plurality of faiths, including none at all, involved in making discoveries major and minor over the years.
"I think Thy thoughts after Thee, O God!" -- Johannes Kepler
I'm not really interested in chasing your particular equivocation of "faith", as based on your rationale here, I have the sense that would be quite a semantic chase.
That there have been a plurality of faiths has nothing to do with whether a particular scientific discovery is facilitated or informed by faith. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto--insofar as the individual's motivation or overall metaphysical axioms (one of which being the quite-unprovable notion science is quite thoroughly dependent on, that of identity, that things consistently are what they are and continue to behave as they are) structure or guide an individual's process of discovery in any sense, the science is to that degree "driven" by that.
One may, indeed, propose that -all hypotheses-, and by extension, -all scientific progress-, is driven by faith, in that -by definition- a hypothesis is unproven, indeed, untested at the point of proposal. I'm not sure what notion of "faith" you are using, and I suspect we'd quite disagree on it, but if it means "provisional acceptance based on limited information", as actual theists would use it, rather that it being used as no theists actually do to semantically fit a pre-built argument (cf. Dawkins) it is essential to all scientific progress.
You will find many other referenced first-hand positions on how faith had facilitated the science of scientists, by the scientists themselves, here.
Perhaps you can indeed project into their brains a more-accurate recounting of their thoughts than they know themselves, and then inform us of it, but I quite doubt it. I suggest starting with your better-known-by-you-then-they-themselves rendering of the cognitive processes of Planck, Heisenberg, and Maxwell, as listed.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
Is that so? Can we disprove "the god that is continuously pouring jam on our heads" with a degree of certainty that would reach the high 99.x% mark? Yes we can!
I'd say it's reasonable to say we know this god concept does not exist.
Indeed is is harder to disproof god concept with no defined attributes, but this also means that we have no need for this concept to explain reality. This is the god that lives outside reality and does not interact at all. I'd ask why call it a god.
Then we have the earthly gods. These are the concepts that are riddled with attributes. Their influence, action and testimonials can be tested. It turns out that we can dismiss those god concepts with almost the same level of certainty as we did the jam pouring one.
If reality was so utterly strange that it seems to us to be without a god, but that this reality was so utterly obfuscated to hide this "truth", then you can automatically rule out the gods of the Abrahamic tradition.
uptil I saw the paycheck for $9084, I be certain ...that...my brothers friend was truly earning money part time online.. there neighbor has been doing this for only about 1 year and just cleard the loans on there mini mansion and bourt a brand new Bugatti Veyron. we looked here, FAB33.COM
I sincerely doubt you are an atheist because you capitalize god
Even if you don't believe time lords are real, it is still proper to capitalize The Doctor, because it is being used as a name for a specific fictional character (as opposed to just being "a doctor").
The same is true for the god character in Christian mythology, which is commonly known as God.
It is grammar. Not belief.
A theory can be invalidated by fact and field observation? This is the end of science as we believe it.... Wait, wait, wait... But this IS real SCIENCE...
If that is all your god does, then why are you worshipping him? Indeed what difference has he other than you've given it a name? Call it tapioca rather than god. Makes no difference.
If your god is just the "thing that set it all off", then there's nothing to worship, and no need of worship. Indeed, such a god gives no reason for an afterlife, soul or anything else that religions give to humans. Life is not given meaning by such a god, nor purpose.
So whenever a godbotherer goes all the way back to this level of god to finally eke out an honest and accurate "that could be true", you screw it all up because though you've finally said that this is the "god" you were talking about, you are definitely lying about that.
It isn't the god you were talking about.
It's the only one that could possibly be true, and the one you DO believe in has been shown untenable.
So rather than admit error, you lie.