Precision in Nature: Evidence of God or Accidents?

[Cyberman]

---

Right - so all the accumulated evidence, such as the CMB which exactly matches Big Bang predictions, galaxies Doppler-shifted precisely as predicted by Big bang expansion, plus all the masses of mathematical calculations based on that evidence... that's all myth. Right. Got it. As opposed to - what? A timeless, spaceless über-scientist who magically wished the Universe into being and has a personal interest in the bedroom habits of one group of jumped-up apes living on one infinitesimal speck of rock lost in the immense wastes of that Universe, yet made it all appear as though it didn't have or need a Creator?

One of these things is not like the other.

---

ALTER2EGO -to- STIMBO:

STIMBO receiving -- Go ahead ALTER2EGO -- OVER

What you're not willing to acknowledge is that Big Bang is nothing more than a theory aka "a group of hypotheses that can be disproven."

Scientific Theory: a "systematic ideational structure of broad scope, conceived by the human imagination, that encompasses a family of empirical (experiential) laws regarding regularities existing in objects and events, both observed and posited. A scientific theory is a structure suggested by these laws and is devised to explain them in a scientifically rational manner." The whole point of a theory is to disprove the shit out of it again and again until what remains is a diamond-hard kernel of truth.

Basically, saying something is "nothing more than a theory" is precisely the same as dismissing a world-class athlete as "nothing more than a gold-medal winner".

Big Bang theory is simply expansion of space.

From a singularity.

It cannot explain what caused thousands of planets to appear, each with their own gravitational pull that keeps them within their individual orbit so that the planets do not crash into each other.

Thousands, you say? Try millions upon millions upon millions. There may be hundreds of thousands in our Galaxy alone, based on estimates from the sample of almost a thousand exoplanets already confirmed to exist. But you're right; the Big Bang doesn't even try to explain how planets form. Similarly, as egg timer won't give you the date - is the egg timer useless? What does form planets, however, is localised concentration of gravity caused when a dense molecular cloud clumps together to form a protostar. Once the embryo star has accumulated enough matter to initiate nuclear fusion, the resulting ignition blows away most of the lighter elements in the cloud in the star's immediate vicinity. What remains is mostly rocky or metallic particles of dust, which clump together as a result of uncountable numbers of collisions. Once enough mass has accumulated, gravity takes over and the protoplanets increase in mass. Some of them may have enough gravity to trap the gas of the original cloud; Jupiter, for instance, has an unbelievably dense atmosphere formed primarily of the cloud from which the Solar System formed.

As to why the planets are in precise orbits that do not crash into each other: the early Solar System (and by extension, other star systems) was a mass of collisions; many of the moons in our system were in fact destroyed by such collision, then eventually reformed due to gravity. They still bear the scars to this day. So why are the planets in such peaceful orbits today? Simple. The planets and other bodies that were not in stable orbits didn't survive. Either they spiralled into the Sun, collided with other bodies and were destroyed or merged into one, or were flung out of the system altogether.

The beauty of this process is we can see it happening before our eyes and in various stages. All we have to do is look.

The spontaneous expansion of space for no logical reason does not explain the precision in these planets in their relationship to each other. For that matter, no scientist can explain what triggered the Big Bang from the get-go.

This is quite a tangle. You've conflated the Big Bang with planetary formation, both of which I've just gone through. As to what 'triggered' the Big Bang, consider that the entire mass of the Universe was contained in the singularity. That means there was no space or time or anything we would recognise as a Universe, just that (to all intents and purposes) infinitely dense singularity. What reason do we have to expect such a thing to be stable? We know that unstable atomic structures can and do spontaneously break down, releasing as they do so quite insane amounts of energy. Just ask anyone from Hiroshima who was there in 1945.

The evidence that you speak of amounts to speculations as scientists attempt to explain why things are as they are in the universe. They don't know why, so they speculate. If they knew, the term Big Bang would have dropped the word "theory."

The evidence of which I speak is detectable, measurable and predictable using equipment available to anyone. This stuff isn't some vast hidden conspiracy; pick up a textbook, go to your local observatory, open your damn eyes and look at the sky. All of the tools we have at our disposal - telescopes, x-ray satellites, microwave detectors, mathematics, not to mention higly trained and specialsed men and women who dedicate a good portion of their lives to discovering all this stuff - discover masses of data which, by some amazing coincidence [/irony] manages not to contradict all of the other data from all other independent but related fields. Thus, the measured age of the Earth doesn't make it older than the measured age of the Universe - though in point of fact this was not always the case and was, until more careful measurements were made, one of the major stumbling blocks preventing the Big Bang model from being accepted. So it's not like some cabal of scientists got together, made up a story and we liked it so much we decided to throw gods out of the picture and go with this one.

I look forward to joining Napoleon and whoever else is on your ignore list.