Thanks again for taking the time to help me out here. I understand what you have written about the power of these modern theories of science to explain and predict things. Your examples of what the big bang, for example, has been able to successfully predict about the universe (or at least, able to successfully predict about what we would consistently observe with our senses), is powerful indeed.

Of course, I always think that Kepler’s original theory (with the 5 solids) was able to predict things pretty well to – but of course the theory was indeed off (and wacky), as further experiment was able to show.

What I really don’t get is how making successful predictions in areas like this, necessarily ties in with comments like this:

“Modern science has brought you all the technology you take for granted: radio, television, airplanes, rockets to the moon, MRI and PET scans, lasers, semiconductors, nuclear reactors, DNA testing, antibiotics, and a thousand other marvels. To be fair, you ought to include those things in your “same old, same old.”

It seems to me that all of these very practical matters could just as easily be accomplished by persons whether they believe in the big bang, billions of years of geologic time (radioisotope dating), or the modern evolutionary theory, or not? As a matter of fact, when it comes to these three theories in particular, what kinds of practical inventions (that harness the laws of nature that have been observed and imperfectly mapped) have resulted from them?

I, in my ignorance, don’t really know of any. All of the inventions you listed above would seem (in my mind at least) to be possible without all of these “big theories”… Are there, among the “thousand other marvels” you mention above, any very practical (beneficial) inventions that have clearly and unambiguously derived from these three theories above?

Thank you again for your time.

~Nathan

Thanks for the kind words. I was aware of the argument of Brandon Carter but the counter-idea of Cirkovic is new to me. For those who haven’t read these links, the Carter argument says that life is rare in the universe. His point is that there are two time scales involved: (a) the typical time it would take life to evolve on a planet, and (b) the time that a typical star lasts. Carter argued that the first time is likely to be much longer than the latter. There are many kinds of processes in nature, and their typical time scales span a vast range. For example, nuclear processes typically take about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, and stars burn typically for several billion years. So if one considers any two highly dissimilar processes, such as the evolution of complex life and the history of a star, one would expect, a priori, that their typical time scales would be very different from each other. One process would likely be much much slower than the other. It would be a remarkable coincidence if they happened to have similar times scales. Now it is highly unlikely that the typical time for life to evolve is much LESS than the lifetime of a star (which is about 10 billion years) since on earth it actually took many millions of years for life to evolve. So, most likely, the typical time for life to evolve is much GREATER than the lifetime of a typical star. But that would mean that very few stars would have complex life on their planets. Most of them burn out before such life manages to evolve.

This is a good argument, but it is not a proof, just an argument for what is most plausible. Cirkovic counters that various astrophysical processes (such as supernovae) whose frequency is tied to the lifetimes of stars, not only affect but may even control the pace of the evolution of life. In that case, it would not be such a coincidence for the two timescales
to be similar. For this to weaken Carter’s argument, one would have to accept the following picture: The key evolutionary steps would have to take place very fast (compared to the lifespan of the sun) once given a chance, but would be unable to proceed unless triggered by some astrophysical event. Then the pace of major evolutionary changes would be closely controlled by astrophysical events.
Carter’s picture seems more realistic to me.

In any event, even if Cirkovic is right, there are arguments to the effect that planets having all the conditions needed to allow complex life to evolve are very rare. (cf. the books Rare Earth and Privileged Planet).

Steve Barr

Last Christmas, my son, an alumni of Thomas Aquinas College, gave me a present: “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.” It truly was a marvelous gift. I am reading and re-reading it underlined with many notations of my own. I have been following your contribution in these pages of FT since 2001, Anthropic Coincidences.
It is clear from your replies to comments that you are a great and a patient teacher.

I have a question unrelated to the topic we are discussing; a friend sent me a link
On Antropic Coincidences:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32403430/ns/technology_and_science-space

I am very curious to your reaction.

Thank you,
Frans Monnereau
ffmonner@aol.com

I don’t like the APS statement. It can be found here: http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm

If one parses its sentences very carefully, it contains no actual errors.

The first sentence says, “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

That is a trivial observation. Obviously there is an effect, the question is how big the effect is.

Then it claims, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.”

Without specifying what time scale they are talking about in saying warming “is occurring”, this statement is vacuous. Do they mean it has been warming over the last few months, the last ten years, the last 30 years, the last 1,000 years? If they mean in the last few decades, or last several centuries, then no one denies that — no one is “controverting” that.

Then they say, “If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”

Here they protect themselves by using the somewhat vague word “likely”. How likely? Likely could mean 20% chance or 99% chance. If I say, “if you do that, you are likely to hurt yourself”, that could mean a 1% chance.
And what (in quantitative terms) do they mean by “significant”?

Then they urge, “We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

Not in ten years, when we might understand the problem better, but NOW! One sees here careful hedging of scientific claims (as befits people trained to be careful with evidence) combined with a breathless tone of alarm.

The last paragraph begins quite reasonably:

“Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms.”

Then it gets frankly political and activist, and makes policy prescriptions that it makes no attempt to justify: “The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Any and all policies and actions? Is any cost-benefit analysis to be done? Might some policies that would reduce greenhouse emissions have negative effects that would make them on balance harmful to human welfare?

On the whole, this is a bad statement — overly political. I agree with you that the APS should undertake a serious and balanced review of the issue.

Thanks so much for getting back to me. I will read and digest. May comment again here later, but now am busy, busy.

Best regards,
Nathan

You could start by reading the last pope on the subject. But wait, no, I’m sure he was just conned, too. Poor sap.

That said,I am of the opinion that there is much evidence for a young earth, all life created at once and a global flood.

I think their are big problems with big bang theory which can only be explained by making stuff up (dark matter, energy and inflation).
Also I find it hard to understand how evolution can be believed by anyone who has thought seriously about it. I mean how does hydrogen gas turn into a human being after 14 billion years? Answer: by “Natural Selection” Come on now, admit you’ve been conned.

Back to Climate Change: What is your opinion on the American Physical Society’s statement re climate change? Don’t you think APS could do a “first principles” analysis on the phenomenon and a critique of the science?

Cheers,
Jim

There is strong evidence for the existence of dark energy that does not depend on the there having been a Big Bang (e.g. galactic rotation curves and gravitational lensing); and there is strong evidence that there was a Big Bang that does not depend of dark matter (e.g. the primordial helium abundance).

As for inflation, it is indeed needed to explain the isotropy of the microwave background. But without the Big Bang there would be no microwave background radiation at all! That is, the Big Bang is needed to explain the very existence of the microwave background, to explain its temperature, and to explain that it has a virtually perfect black-body spectrum. If one ALSO wants to explain its isotropy (without just making that an initial condition) one needs inflation or some other additional hypothesis.

For the audience out there, let me use an analogy. No one would say that the existence of Neptune “underpins” Newton’s theory of gravity. Newton’s theory was proposed long before Neptune was discovered. It successfully explained many of the gross features of planetary motion: e.g. the fact that planets go in elliptical orbits with the Sun at the foci of the ellipses, that planets speed up in a certain way as they get closer to the sun, the relation between planets orbital periods and their distance from the Sun, and so on. Laplace later showed that Newton’s theory also beautifully explained very many of the finer details of the motions in the solar system.

Eventually, however, it was found that some planets deviated from the orbits predicted for them, and to make their motions conform to Newton’s theory it was postulated that there must be other, hitherto unseen, objects whose gravitation was perturbing the orbits of the known planets. Later, such objects were indeed found with telescopes. (This is how Neptune was discovered: it was predicted to exist in order to rectify the discrepancy of Uranus’s orbit, and later found).

That is how things work in science: As a theory is compared to ever more accurate data, small discrepancies or anomalies inevitably appear. Usually, these are simply the result of additional effects that require no modification of the basic theory. The existence of Neptune, for example, does not entail any change in Newton’s laws of gravity or mechanics or his explanation of planetary motion .

In the same way, the Big Bang theory explained many things (some of which it predicted before they were seen) very simply and successfully, including the recession of galaxies, abundances of certain elements, the
existence of a cosmic background radiation, the fact that that radiation has a black-body spectrum, the temperature of that radiation, and more recently the spectrum of density perturbations (which show acoustic modes that are consistent with the idea of “recombination” after an early period where matter was ionized).

Later, indeed, some relatively small effects were found that did not fit the simplest picture of an expanding universe filled only with ordinary matter. To explain these discrepancies required no change in the basic outlines of the Big Bang theory. As in the case of Neptune, it just meant that there is some stuff out there whose gravitation had been previously neglected: dark matter and dark energy. As for the dark matter, there are various independent pieces of confirmatory evidence that it exists (such as galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing).

But what all this has to do with YEC is beyond me. It is one thing to have a spectacularly successful theory that needs to be refined (like Newton’s explanation of planetary motion or the Big Bang theory) and a theory that is so spectacularly in DISagreement with everything 9like YEC) that it is an intellectual scandal that anyone even talks about it.

The existence of dark matter affects calculations of the age of the universe at the roughly 10% level. YEC says that the age of the universe is off by a factor of one million. So because of 10% effects that are easily accounted for one rejects a theory and embraces one that is off by 100,000,000% My goodness! Speak of straining out gnats and swallowing camels!!

Mr. hobart appears to be a Catholic, both because he mentions his priest, and because of statements he has made earlier on this site. I would note that Pope Pius XII was quite enthusiastic about the Big Bang theory, and gave a famous address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951 said that several independent and converging lines of evidence point to the fact that the universe is billions of years old. On a scientific level, what he said has held up extremely well. Yes, a Catholic can believe in YEC. A Catholic is free to believe all sorts of things about all sorts of subjects. A Catholic can believe that the moon is made of green cheese — a much more sensible theory than young earth creationism.
A Catholic cannot say, however, that believing in the Big Bang is contrary to Scripture, unless he wants to accuse Pope Pius XII of heresy.

You say that YEC makes no difference to one’s faith. That is not quite the position you seemed
to take in an earlier post this year on Firstthoughts, when you said that you believed that Genesis teaches Creationism. If the divine Author of Genesis meant to teach us YEC there, it certainly DOES make a difference to one’s faith!