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"Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust
An anonymous reader writes Scientists have shown that the swirl pattern touted as evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in space and time dating to the universe's explosive birth — could instead all come from magnetically aligned dust. A new analysis of data from the Planck space telescope has concluded that the tiny silicate and carbonate particles spewed into interstellar space by dying stars could account for as much as 100 percent of the signal detected by the BICEP2 telescope and announced to great fanfare this spring. The Planck analysis is "relatively definitive in that we can't exclude that the entirety of our signal is from dust," said Brian Keating, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the BICEP2 collaboration.
So is the Universe coming, or going?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A. The pope, in line with Catholic Orthodoxy, is not creationist. Not in the totally nutter, young earth science denialism sense, anyways.
B. Everyone believes at least a few objectively wrong things. Getting on religion for the grandiosity of the incorrect claims it makes just seems silly. In the end, big things matter less to be wrong about, not more.
C. It doesn't all come from "believing what they're told." It comes from personal feelings, intuition, common sense, and a host of other inputs as well. This is coming from a neurological perspective, not just hypothetical counter-argument. For example, there's a part of the brain responsible for causing religious experiences. Atheists tend to have much smaller brain regions for that.
D. If I should instead appeal to your ego: religiosity and intelligence both predict many of the same positive life outcomes, even though they, themselves, are inversely correlated. That's good reason to believe that religion is filling an important role for people who might be worse off without it. You can imagine yourself getting its benefits elsewhere.
The Catholic Church had a hand in creating the scientific method, you know. And "scientific" names are all Latin for similar reasons. Not to mention setting up the whole university system to begin with. They came up with the theory that a rational God would create a rational universe that obeyed rules that could be understood by humans when those prior had studied things more or less as a long series of special cases of cause and effect.
While people might not agree with the "rational God" part, the "rational universe that obeys rules that can be understood by humans" pretty much sums up the pursuit of science.