Why do you say the BB is a "Biblical" creation story?

[Brigit Bara]

"If there is a loss of energy in the universe, where does the energy go?"

The electricity which powers the galaxies is delivered in the form of Birkeland currents, where the galaxies are loads on a wire. There is loss as the Birkeland current transmits the electricity; these are not frozen in fields, but an electric current flow.

Each of the galaxies do the following work with the electrical energy input:
rotational motion
shine in the visible light spectrum
radiate in the radio and infra-red wavelengths
radiate in uv, euv, x- and sometimes gamma
and some galaxies have active centers that release quasars along the axis of the galaxy, in pairs

That is the work the electrical energy does. Is it not reasonable to say that if all of this work is done with the electricity supplied to each galaxy (which do occur in strings), then the input of energy must be greater than the expenditures at all points in the system?

I appreciate the talks about finite and infinite universes. But we are just talking about a circuit. And not very much of it is even visible: "The[Birkeland currents] flow in a cosmic circuit that comes into our field of view and then back out into the void, with long-range attraction between them."

[Brigit Bara]

Now I know I oversimplified.

But I think those are all fine upstanding scientific claims, and they are supported by the data from the telescopes in those frequencies.

What is not a rational or scientific claim to make is that the circuit continues to run for eternity, because there are substantial parts of the circuit which cannot be detected.

[webolife]

The reason it is difficult to answer a question like <where does the energy go?> is that energy isn't a thing, it is a happening, Force operating across space, Work. When we measure energy, we measure an action, not an object.
If there is an answer it is found in the second law of thermodynamics, which reminds us that the net result of every energy transaction is condensation, aggregation, a potential drop, often associated with heat, always an increase in entropy. The BB is not possible under thermodynamics, hence the ad hoc assertions of DE, DM, BHs, WIMPS and the like. On the other hand the prevalence of natural pattern(s) in the universe, what we observe as the "physical laws", the minutely narrow range of variance of the physical constants, and the pervasive equilibrium that led Sir Fred Hoyle to propose the Steady State, all attest to and agree with the action of an ID. Atheists say this is merely the "appearance" of design, something created in the mind of humans... hardly a scientifically tenable claim considering their wholesale disbelief in the necessity of our race. That order exists only in our mind is a huge pile of denial.
IMHO

[Brigit Bara]

Actually I am not trying to disturb the Steady State Universe (:

I am just trying to show that the criticism of the BB is valid, but by the same measure (thermodynamics) the Steady State model requires a bit of special pleading because it is entropy-free.

It does not mean that the heat death of the universe is certain, or that there are not finely tuned conditions and less entropy than we might expect as webolife has pointed out, but that there is still a rational problem with the model. Would it be too much to ask that the critics of the BB stop foisting the failures of the materialistic scientists to respect known physics on people who believe Genesis? After all, between the BB singularity and the Perpetual State model, you just trade one conundrum for another.

My objection is that to say that the BB is "a religion" is just wild analogizing, because materialistic scientists do not believe that there are spirits, spiritual law, an afterlife, angels, or God, while at minimum a religion does affirm all of them. So to call the BB, evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest (and its nasty corollaries), or the horrors of historicism in Communism -- all of which are materialistic science -- "a religion" when they fail is totally inaccurate, a denial of history, and a failure to accept bad results in science.

[webolife]

Since this is topic about an interplay of science and religion, I don't mind disputing spurious scientific claims on the basis of religion, for this reason, which I have spelled out repeated before:
There is no scientist who does not operate from a set of presuppositions, which I claim is a "Faith Base."
For a post-modern atheist scientist to exclude the supernatural as an a priori condition for doing science, this is a religious exclusion; ie. to assert there is no operative Designer is a religious belief, to be included in the list of things which constitute religion. On a different path, if there is a scientist who is 1) agnostic and 2)works from a materialistic framework, but 3) admits (perhaps to her or himself, without believing one way or the other) that there are scientific unanswerables in the universe that may be attributable to non-materialistic causes, then maybe I would allow that this is an un-religious scientist. However that allowance does seem inconsistent with my highlighted statement...

[Brigit Bara]

One moment.
Correction: "My objection is that to say that the BB is "a religion" is just wild analogizing, because materialistic scientists do not believe that there are spirits, spiritual law, an afterlife, angels, or God, while at minimum a religion does affirm [some or] all of them."
Thank you.

[Brigit Bara]

webolife » Sat Dec 01, 2018 4:42 pm wrote,

There is no scientist who does not operate from a set of presuppositions, which I claim is a "Faith Base."

I share your view that scientists all have a set of presuppositions, whether they are aware of it or acknowledge it
to others, or not. I think this is natural and expected, and acceptable. While there are some groups of scientists and scientific unions who might claim to rely completely on sensory data to make "careful generalizations from observation," this is more an image projected to the public of perfect objectivity. And the public does like to trust experts. This image of the positivist knowing only what the instruments tell him and following evidence where ever it leads neither fits the real history of scientific discovery, nor does the perfect objectivity ever survive even the slightest little scratch on the surface. (: So I am in almost complete agreement with you, webolife, that scientists all work from a set of presuppositions.

[Brigit Bara]

webolife » Sat Dec 01, 2018 4:42 pm wrote,

There is no scientist who does not operate from a set of presuppositions, which I claim is a "Faith Base."

.

I would certainly not call just any set of "presuppositions" a "faith base." Now webolife has in his favor the fact that in court of law and in some legal codes, both atheism and secular humanism have received status as "a religion."

In the 20th century, atheism was the official belief of all countries that adopted the system of communism. I think it was not the "official religion," but the official belief. I see that there is an argument to be made that extreme anti-religion is a religion, but you could also say it is an official state doctrine and a central concept of a certain political philosophy which was presented to the world as a scientific truth. 70 million people were killed in China alone. (Remember this, if you are young and have not heard: communists wanted to destroy the "Four Olds" as part of the "cultural revolution" of the Great Leap. They did not tell me that in high school, so imagine my sense of complete betrayal when I found out on my own.) (The Boomers at the time were "Dancin to the Jailhouse Rock.") (To this day, it is taught in that country that those deaths were from "natural disasters.")(And that was but one of the empirical results of the meterialistic scientific theory of historicism.) In the US this doctrine has not yet played out, because using schools and governments to make definitive statements about the non-existence of the soul, the afterlife, angels, or God would be "the establishment of a religion, and the prohibition of the free exercise thereof."

Or as webolife put it,

For a post-modern atheist scientist to exclude the supernatural as an a priori condition for doing science, this is a religious exclusion; ie. to assert there is no operative Designer is a religious belief, to be included in the list of things which constitute religion.

So all that is in webolife's favor for calling many metaphysical presuppositions by scientists a "religious" belief. A strong case. But this has the disadvantage of making the colleges and universities, where these presuppositions are usually passed on whole cloth to students, religious or faith-based institutions, doesn't it?

No, all presuppositions and conclusions that academics and scientists hold are not a "faith base"; I will make the case that the English language has far more accurate terms and phrases to describe them. (Some of them you can even print, ha ha! ) (:

[Brigit Bara]

2 disclaimers

• Nothing I posted earlier was meant to be disrespectful of Rupert Sheldrake or any of his research. I read Presence of the Past and thought it was a wonderful book, and I enjoy his perspectives on science. I don't consider psychic abilities to be necessarily occult, but imo are based on bonds or spiritual similarities, and are usually unconsciously done.

• I of course agree that the objectivity I described above is possible for individual experimental scientists, but it is definitely not a professional trait in the theoretical or "pure" sciences.

[Brigit Bara]

I think I see a pattern here. I will show it in three examples.

So we see that because all of the soft sciences of the 1900s began masquerading as physical science, we had claims by collectivists that their theories were as scientific as chemistry, only rather than atoms, molecules and chemical reactions, they were describing masses of men interacting with materials to form culture. As they say all of the social sciences had "physics envy." These theories had the quality of explaining any and all phenomena in the past and present in terms of the theory. There was nothing that didn't fit! This meant that all of the intellectual revolutionaries were proceeding with the grand social experiments of the 20th c. as smug as a materialistic bug in a scientific rug. --This, by the way, was the context in which Karl Popper developed the standard of falsifiability in science, in order to show that a theory could not fit all outcomes and still be scientific.

Then we saw what happened in countries that adopted these scientific theories, where millions of people were killed by their own governments as they carried out collectivist policies (democide). I note also briefly that another materialistic scientific theory, Darwin's evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest race, had deadly consequences when it was decided that the human race could be improved by breeding the best genetic carriers and eliminating the inferior ones as errors.

In addition materialistic scientists developed the Big Bang theory, which explains how all of the materials and forces we now see in the universe emerged from nothing in the form of an egg.

Lemaître himself...described his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation"; it became better known as the "Big Bang theory," a pejorative term coined during a BBC radio broadcast by Fred Hoyle who was an obstinate proponent of the steady state universe, even until his death in 2001. ~wik

Wouldn't it be safe to say that you can easily recognize the handiwork of materialistic scientists because they always have to break a few eggs to make an omelette? And then when failures become obvious to every one, they say it was "religion."

[webolife]

Brigit P. Bara,
I think we agree in concept almost entirely. Application of the words "religion" and "faith" is tricky at best, since there are many connotations of the two. For now, I will use "religion" in referring to an organized system of belief that attracts many adherents, and "faith" as an individual choice [not necessarily conscious or openly avowed] that guides one's perspective, the "colored lenses" through which one sees the universe, and interprets that data collected thereby.
Thus some adherents of the system may yet have individual viewpoints that "stray" from the system. Hence, lumping all "materialists" together in their religion of the non-supernatural may not take into account the spectrum of agnosticism among the adherents. Choice is a key factor in these distinctions, but I would distinguish choice based on deeply entrenched personal value, from decisions made after careful [or not] consideration of divergent sides of an issue. These conscious constructs, while touted as "beliefs" or perhaps "philosophies", sometimes cover closeted presuppositions that prevent the scientist, writer or speaker from recognizing the underlying driver[s] of their scientific pursuit. In other words, they are unacknowledging of the underlying reasons they have come to the conclusions they have, and may be quite insistent that their claims are based strictly on the evidence. I was watching some Bill Nye interviews recently, and he seems to be a prime case of this position. They are quick to point out the a priori positions of their opponents, but either don't realize their own "faith base", or simply are arrogant that their beliefs are superior to their opponent. This works both ways of course, hence my signature statement, which I have persisted to use since joining this forum years ago.

[Brigit Bara]

These conscious constructs, while touted as "beliefs" or perhaps "philosophies", sometimes cover closeted presuppositions that prevent the scientist, writer or speaker from recognizing the underlying driver[s] of their scientific pursuit. In other words, they are unacknowledging of the underlying reasons they have come to the conclusions they have, and may be quite insistent that their claims are based strictly on the evidence.

So webolife's prognosis is this, that the scientists, writers or speakers:
1. are prevented from recognizing the underlying drivers of their own scientific pursuit
2. are aware of, but do not acknowledge, the underlying reasons they favor the conclusions they have reached
3. may be quite insistent that their every claim is based strictly on evidence

Agreed! Done! (:

What I would like to put forward is this. That since some empirical scientists -- and all scientific materialists -- strongly believe and assert to others that they have reached logical conclusions about every subject in life based solely on available physically tangible evidence, that their underlying respective philosophies cannot be termed a faith base.

The reason for this is that a person who says that they know something by faith is not claiming to have all available evidence and extensive physical proof. When we say, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen are not made of things which are visible," we are not announcing to the world that we have a telescope that has detected the extraordinary generative power of which we speak. Or, when we understand -- by faith -- that "God is not mocked, whatsoever a man sows, that he shall also reap," we do not claim to be able to show that in every instance in history this has been demonstrably true; on the contrary, any one looking at history can come to the opposite conclusion, that a man rarely or even never reaps what he sows, depending on how rich or clever he is. But faith is a decision to believe, despite the appearances and rationalizations and emotions that would militate otherwise. Faith is the title deed of things hoped for. It will come later. Finally, when we ask in faith to be forgiven, we also must receive it by faith, joyfully, knowing the promise and character of the one we have asked.

So there is the problem with using the term faith base to describe the philosophies of scientists. Terms that would be better adapted to the prognosis would be ideologies, philosophies, frameworks, beliefs, and other phrases you already applied. (If it's an extra large and extremely well-organized gaggle of practitioners, it is their Scientific Paradigm!) To test this, I think the main obstacle to using "faith base" for the intellectual framework of scientists would be found in a simple test of self-reporting. "Do you consider yourself to be a deeply religious person since you hold "an organized system of belief that attracts many adherents"? Do you consider yourself to have exercised faith in constructing your scientific world view?"

[webolife]

Those are great questions.
But I am proposing (perhaps contrary to your 2nd point of acquiescence?) that materialists believe that as long as their presuppositions [beliefs] are material, this sufficiently qualifies them as scientific vs. religious. Their presumption is that any ridiculous claim, provided it does not invoke the supernatural, is valid for scientific pursuit. I am challenging that.
I further propose that the claim of "NO FAITH" is a denial, which at this time I will set forth as a "null belief", ergo a belief to the contrary.
Am I overstepping the bounds of the topic?

[Brigit Bara]

No of course not!

Actually, when you discuss "materialists" in "their religion of the non-supernatural" and "the spectrum of agnosticism among the adherents", no one will bat an eye. Coming from you, that is simply a factual statement. In fact, it's axiomatic! (:
Again, if you personally refer to the "faith base" making up the implicit assumptions underlying a scientist's world view, there is not much to argue against, because you are making an observation about the sociology of science that we have all experienced.

But the problem is that the actual scientists and scientific materialists do not ever refer to their beliefs as religion or faith going in. They only recatagorize failed materialistic science as religion after the damage has been done. And I object, based on the wreckage. Bad science is bad science. And the adherents of almost every modern ideology tend to insist that their ideological revolutions are as scientific as the periodic table of elements, when in fact the century is littered with the dead from such intellectual conceit.

You can't change bad science to religion. That's alchemy.

[Brigit Bara]

Materialism

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