What did it all started with?

[dlamberth]

," and not the other way around: "importing physics into religious concepts"?

This is exactly what many of us do with the Creation model where God creates through change as exemplified by the Evolution of both the geology of the Earth and the birth of new life forms. The starting point is God.

 

[AV1611VET]

This is exactly what many of us do with the Creation model where God creates through change as exemplified by the Evolution of both the geology of the Earth and the birth of new life forms. The starting point is God.

Then why are they complaining?

 

[dlamberth]

Then why are they complaining?

Who is "they"?

 

[sjastro]

(Wikipedia)
[Hoyle] found the idea that the universe had a beginning to be pseudoscience, resembling arguments for a creator, "for it's an irrational process, and can't be described in scientific terms"

In the 1920s and 1930s, almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady-state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady-state theory.[56] This perception was enhanced by the fact that the originator of the Big Bang theory, Lemaître, was a Roman Catholic priest.

The flaw in your argument is conflating scientists as individuals with science in a collective sense.
Hoyle was wrong about the Steady State theory as he was in claiming the Big Bang was pseudoscience.
Scientists as human beings are vulnerable to confirmation bias like Hoyle but science is not about formulating theories based on confirmation bias or in your own words pseudoscience until it is proven true.

Here the metrics for the Big Bang and Steady State theories as formulated by Hoyle, Bondi and Gold in Cartesian coordinates.
Big Bang metric;

Steady State metric;

Since you are Hoyle’s representative explain how the Big Bang metric is pseudoscience and the Steady Stare theory is not given both are based on metric expansion.

 

[SelfSim]

... Argue that assertion with an archeologist or forensic scientist! Motivation of an intelligent agent, plays a great part in many lines of scientific investigation.

So? What would you think might happen if those folk reverted to invoking supernatural agent explanations, then? Would their investigations ever reach closure?

Nature is the executor of God's laws as Galileo said. Along with Lemaitre and Planck, I do not think it is a coincidence either, that some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs came from noted skeptics of atheism. They were not restricted by such arbitrary tenets of materialism as you cite, but free to follow the evidence wherever it pointed

Why don't you cite present day scientists who are not constrained by religious indoctrination principles of the past?
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say present day scientists prefer to be constrained by objectively testable ideas .. rather than being constrained by untestable beliefs(?) Its not so much about philosophical materialism (as you imply there).

 

[sjastro]

It's an extremely improbable occurrence, note that the other inner rocky planets have no moons to speak of (a couple of irregular rocks orbit Mars) and the other large moons in our system belong to gas giants/ are multiple, having little effect on the stability of their orbits

- the Earth-Moon is practically a binary system, very difficult to reproduce in a model, and essential to the stability and development of life on Earth.

You are all over the place.
Let me remind you of your original claim it apparently requires some divine intervention to have the moon which is about 400 times smaller than the Sun but 400 times closer to Earth so their angular diameters are roughly the same.
I use the term roughly as the eccentricities of the Earth’s and Moon’s orbit do not always end up as total eclipses but as annular eclipses.
This indicates a fundamental failure to understand the difference between correlation and causation.

To add to @Ophiolite rebuttal of your post, if you had bothered to research the subject instead of making ill informed comments of binary systems being rare and difficult to reproduce in the solar system there is apart from the Earth-Moon system, Pluto-Charon, 62930 Hermes, 90 Antiope, 79360 Sia-Nunam and 1998 WW₃₁ are those that we know of.

Argue that assertion with an archeologist or forensic scientist! Motivation of an intelligent agent, plays a great part in many lines of scientific investigation.

Archeologists and forensic scientists work with evidence not preconceived ideas.

Nature is the executor of God's laws as Galileo said. Along with Lemaitre and Planck, I do not think it is a coincidence either, that some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs came from noted skeptics of atheism. They were not restricted by such arbitrary tenets of materialism as you cite, but free to follow the evidence wherever it pointed

Suggesting following the evidence leads to ID is the very principle of confirmation bias and is therefore pseudoscience.
Experiments and observations are designed to test theories not confirm them.

 

[AV1611VET]

Who is "they"?

Whomever "several" is in this comment:

In the 1920s and 1930s, almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady-state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics;

 

[dlamberth]

Whomever "several" is in this comment:

I was referring to a completely different group, one where it all starts with God. And as you suggested are then "importing physics into religious concepts". So they have a way of finding the sciences like Evolution and Geology in how God Creates.

 

[Astrophile]

Oh sure, after only 40 years of basing human evolution on a single dodgy fraud, exhibited in natural history museums all over the world- even using it as evidence in court to have it taught in schools.

Piltdown man was exposed as a fake nearly 20 years before you were born. Why do you think that it is relevant or important? Also, there were other hominid fossils; the book Evolution and its Modern Critics by A. Morley Davies (published in 1937) mentions Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, Homo rhodesiensis, Sivapithecus, Australopithecus, Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus [Java man and Peking man, now reclassified as Homo erectus], and Dryopithecus. Human evolution was not based only on Piltdown man; indeed, if one accepted the evolutionary arguments of Darwin and Wallace, it followed that we are as much the products of evolution as any other animal.

While at the same time the primeval atom, or 'big bang' was declared 'religious pseudoscience' until proven beyond most reasonable doubt when Lemaitre was on his deathbed.

A slight double standard depending on the implications of the theory is it not?

I first became interested in astronomy in 1957 (nine years before Lemaître's death), and during my time at secondary school (1959-1967) I read all the books about astronomy that I could find in the local public library and in the school library. So far as I can remember, most of these books described Lemaître's 'primeval atom' and treated it with respect; even Fred Hoyle, in Frontiers of Astronomy (published 1955), discussed the 'superdense singular explosive origin of the Universe' as a serious scientific hypothesis and did not dismiss it as pseudoscience.

Furthermore, my school library had a copy of The Creation of the Universe (published 1952) by George Gamow, the chief advocate of Big Bang cosmology (and an agnostic), and nobody told me that I should not read the book because the Big Bang was 'religious pseudoscience'.

 

[sjastro]

As a human interest story I dug out a very old book from my collection "Astronomy" by Fred Hoyle published in 1962.
In 1962 the Steady State theory was mainstream science.

​

Hoyle also gave a description of the Big Bang theory which he referred to as 'Lemaitres finite origin theory' avoiding the pejorative term and certainly no references to it as pseudoscience.

In fact he treated this rival theory with great respect in his book.
He probably went off the rails from 1964 when the CMB was discovered and destroyed the Steady State theory.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I take your point, but I think theirs goes beyond that. As above, the moon's disk perfectly masking the sun's- is an apparently arbitrary coincidence regarding our ability to function and contemplate nature here on Earth to practical ends. But in terms of advancing our knowledge of the larger universe through observation of the sun's corona- it is an extremely convenient coincidence- particularly when bearing in mind, that the moon is receding from the earth, this coincidence is occurring at the time it can be made use of.

Similarly the age of exploration by sail, occurred when it did through various circumstances of technology, politics, etc- it was not driven by the remarkable coincidence of a bright guiding star drifting into place at the precise time that could be taken advantage of, but it certainly helped speed progress enormously.

Dawkins again remarks on how 'uncannily similar' the machine code of DNA is to our own digital information systems. This did not cause our invention of digital information- but it helps us understand not just biological mechanisms, but how to advance our own information technology.

You can only put so much down to coincidence, at some point, when the die keeps rolling a 6, you have to suspect it is loaded, however profound the implications of that may be.

Those who say DNA is like our computer systems are over-egging the pudding - it is a translational code of sorts, but the resemblance ends there; computer code is simply the closest analogy we have, and it's no better than the analogy of the brain and a telephone network.

Things get pretty gnarly at the macro end also.. yes the challenges get tougher, and so without all the preceding stepping stones, placed just within our leap, we would not have come this far this fast. Again none of this was necessary for our mere 'evolutionary fitness' as a species, it guides us to an understanding far beyond ourselves and our planet.

As sjastro says (#147) this is a classic example of apophenia, and hyper-active agency detection. As well as making connections between unrelated events and seeing patterns in random data, we're predisposed to give agent-based interpretations for the unusual, coincidental, and unexplained.

When agency imputed to an entity, it is described in terms of spirits, ghosts, fairies, angels, devils, gods, gremlins, little people, etc. When it is not imputed to an entity, it is described as fate, fortune, karma, luck, etc., i.e. superstitious thinking. We also ascribe non-physical agency to ourselves or others, known as 'magical thinking' and psychic phenomena.

This is something even children do from an early age; it helps relieve the anxiety & discomfort of experiencing uncertain, random, and coincidental events by providing a meaningful and interesting narrative.

This kind of thinking is also at the core of many conspiracy theories, where people feel that mundane explanations are inadequate to match the scale of major (often traumatic) events, and so invoke an appropriately complex and tangled web of conspiracy to provide a satisfying explanatory narrative.

 

[Neogaia777]

"Random"...

Lol...

"Merely coincidental instead of providential"...

Lol...

"Chance", etc...

Lol...

The very same things you accuse us of doing, is the very same things you yourselves are doing with those kinds of words, etc...

Cause it's hardly a scientific explanation by a long shot, etc...

God Bless!

 

[SelfSim]

"Random"...
Lol...
"Merely coincidental instead of providential"...
Lol...
"Chance", etc...
Lol...

The very same things you accuse us of doing, is the very same things you yourselves are doing with those kinds of words, etc...

Cause it's hardly a scientific explanation by a long shot, etc...

Are you capable of finishing a sentence without using 'etc'?

 

[Neogaia777]

Are you capable of finishing a sentence without using 'etc'?

It saves me from having to be writing out "all the other words", etc...

Sorry if it gets a bit annoying though...

God Bless!

 

[Ophiolite]

As well as making connections between unrelated events and seeing patterns in random data, we're predisposed to give agent-based interpretations for the unusual, coincidental, and unexplained.

Absolutely. You may have noticed that if you throw three darts at a dart board they nearly always land so as to form the points of a triangle. Coincidence? I think not, but clear proof that aliens from the constellation of Triangulum have been controlling the affairs of men since the time of Ptolemy!

 

[Neogaia777]

Absolutely. You may have noticed that if you throw three darts at a dart board they nearly always land so as to form the points of a triangle. Coincidence? I think not, but clear proof that aliens from the constellation of Triangulum have been controlling the affairs of men since the time of Ptolemy!

A coincidence, by definition, has to be something that doesn't happen or occur all the time, and especially not "every single time", etc...

But happens enough, that it can't just be mere coincidence, etc...

Or is that providence, etc...?

I forget...?

Anyway,

God Bless!

 

[Neogaia777]

Absolutely. You may have noticed that if you throw three darts at a dart board they nearly always land so as to form the points of a triangle. Coincidence? I think not, but clear proof that aliens from the constellation of Triangulum have been controlling the affairs of men since the time of Ptolemy!

Good joke though, ha, ha, very funny...

God Bless!

 

[Neogaia777]

Absolutely. You may have noticed that if you throw three darts at a dart board they nearly always land so as to form the points of a triangle. Coincidence? I think not, but clear proof that aliens from the constellation of Triangulum have been controlling the affairs of men since the time of Ptolemy!

I think what you are describing though is when people actually go looking for coincidences when there maybe just isn't any, etc...?

And I will admit that there are certainly those types or kinds, etc...

Then we get into the area or arena or way out there, wakco, looney conspiracy theories and the like, etc...

Excessive paranoia, etc...

A lot of the time "self-caused", etc...

Anyway,

God Bless!

 

[Neogaia777]

A coincidence, by definition, has to be something that doesn't happen or occur all the time, and especially not "every single time", etc...

But happens enough, that it can't just be mere coincidence, etc...

Or is that providence, etc...?

I forget...?

Anyway,

God Bless!

Or it's just so off the scale mathematically impossible, or so extremely highly improbable, but it's happening to you, and with you, and around you, so often and so very much, and quite literally all the time, that it can't be just mere coincidence, because that is quite literally mathematically impossible as well, etc, so it leaves you in a bit of pickle, etc...

Anyway,

God Bless!

 

[Ophiolite]

I think what you are describing though is when people actually go looking for coincidences when there maybe just isn't any, etc...?

That rather misses the point that @FrumiousBandersnatch made and I complemented. This perception of patterns is a strong, natural, automatic process of the human mind. We may consciously choose to look for patterns, but our subconscious does so routinely and constantly. We are very good at it, detecting subtle patterns that benefit our welfare and support our survival. However, it is so persistent that we detect patterns that are not real. And we make interpretations based upon those imagined patterns that are false.