What the Creation Museum did to me

[Aractus]

Exactly my point, although chemistry would still like a word with you. However, now you've switched gears; you began this point by stating that "The size of the universe is necessary, it's not an accident or chance"; in other words you didn't mention life. I repeat, nobody apart from creationists insist that it had to be either of those things.

The Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, while the universe itself was still too hot to support life. Its formation occured at exactly the right time to allow life to start, life started and began evolving 3 billion years ago. If the universe is 13.7 billion years old, this means that for the first 10 billion years, while it couldn't support life, it was expanding - ultimatly to the size it is now. Thus, the size of the universe is a direct side-effect of its ability to support life.

Nope; Occam's Razor is a principle of parsimony, that one should not multiply the number of entities more than necessary; or given competing hypotheses, the one more likely to be correct is the one making the fewer assumptions. It's by no means a fundamental law of nature, more a labour-saving guideline for sorting the potentially fruitful wheat from the potentially inconsequential chaff, and it's hardly infallible.

My point is that it isn't infallible, in fact sometimes it's downright detrimental. The problem though is that there is an infinite number of theories which you could "simplify" into any current theory. You can create exactly the same predictions as general relativity, for instance, by complicating the theory further, and further, and further. You may be on the correct path, or you may just be creating unnecessary complications where simplicity should reside, it's difficult to know. You could just be finding interesting coincidences.

My example on Pi is that you can't derive the number from physics - despite the fact that it is used in physics. What if you had something else absolutely essential in physics, that can be derived no other way except through physics - how would you ever know if your theory on it is actually correct, or, if it is simply a good approximation?

So mischaracterising a reliance and a knowledge of the workings of physics as "blind faith" doesn't prevent you from accepting what astrophysicists have to say, then?

It's blind faith because it shows belief in a certain unproven scientific discipline. Thus it is perfectly logical for people to reject the notion that life can self-start if they don't have my world-view, and they can still derive their position from physics.

Why would you even need to do that? What Georges Lemaître and others before, and contemporary with, him did is take the state of the Universe as we see it today, apply the knowledge that the Universe is expanding, then extrapolate backwards to investigate what the early Universe must have been like and how long ago it was like that. The whole of the rest of the science in that area is based on examining varous aspects of that early state experimentally. For instance, by examining the Universe with a microwave detector, Bell lab technicians Penzias and Wilson discovered - completely accidentally - the long-sought-after cosmic microwave background, essentially the glow from the Big Bang now Doppler shifted down into microwave region of the spectrum. This CMB radiation has since been mapped and can be, in fact has been, investigated by anyone with an interest in it.

Bottom line, for now, would be: while it would be extremely difficult to recreate the Big Bang, though not impossible given the technology and a colossal amount of energy (remember the fuss about the LHC from the perennial doomsayers?), we don't need to.

Okay, why don't you forget everything you just wrote there. Think about this. Supposedly, the laws of quantum mechanics give rise to the laws of chemistry which themselves give rise to the laws of biology which give rise to the laws of evolution. Typical reductionism 101. So what if the big bang is an event which gives rise to the laws of quantum mechanics? That would mean there's something more fundamental to nature upon which the laws of quantum mechanics work. Now, clearly, nobody can work backwards from the laws of chemistry to get the laws of quantum mechanics, so nor can they work backwards from the laws of quantum mechanics to arrive at the fundamental law of nature.