My daughter wants to know....

[robvalue]

Even if science had no answers whatsoever, the idea of "God" needs to be properly defined, falsifiable and testable before it can even have any evidence for it. Otherwise it's just an assumption, which is pointless. And that's way before you get into how you pick from the infinite number of possible religions. Or ask why on earth it would require or desire worship. Or punish people for picking the wrong religion, when they all have the same amount of evidence (none).

"God did it" tells us nothing. It is absolutely equivalent to "I don't know". Same amount of words, too. Same amount of explanatory power. (Or "I don't know, and have given up trying to understand. I want quick and easy answers now, even if that means they are made up".)

[Sterben]

Tell her watch some classic Star Trek and pay attention to Mr. Spock. He can give you a lot of the answers that she seeks.

[Alex K]

She's 14 and in advanced and accelerated classes in 8th grade, with one class being Advanced honors algebra One.

And she wanted to clarify that using logic and reason does make sense.

And she's still going on about explosions not creating life. She gave an example of "if this house exploded, would it create life? The answer is no, it wouldn't."

I can't win.

---

Ultimately, we don't know where the energy of the big bang came from or if it even had to come from anywhere. But - it wasn't an explosion, it was more like akin to a vessel of hot water expanding and cooling, and in the course of that, the water condenses and complexice crystals and snow flakes form.  The cooling atoms fused together to form more and more complex matter.

I read this to her. Her question is:

How do we have any proof that this happened?

- We can observe the light that comes from distant nebulae and galaxies and it tells us which kinds of chemical elements they are made of. You can compare that to the numbers you get from the assumption that they were formed in a super hot universe that expanded and cooled quickly, and what you get is that the kinds of elements we observe in space follow the expected pattern - lots and lots of hydrogen which is the simplest, less Helium and Helium3, less Lithium. The pattern matches just to what you'd expect from basic nuclear physics if everything had been made in the crucible of a hot expanding universe. Only with Lithium the numbers are a bit high, though exactly in the right ball park, but that can be accounted for by some physical process. All other elements are super rare and only found to be created by stars - why would we only observe only those chemical elements in space which can be made in a hot big bang, and in the right proportions, and basically nothing else?

- The cosmic microwave radiation that we receive from all directions has the most perfect spectral shape of anything you'd find in nature, and it cannot originate from some recent astrophysical process due to its uniformity and spectrum. It does however perfectly match with what you'd expect if the universe had been a homogeneous hot soup that suddenly cooled below 3000 centigrade 14 billion years ago. The small fluctuations we observe in this microwave radiation can be translated to differences in density of this hot soup 14 billion years ago, and they match neatly with the structures we now observe in how galaxies are distributed in space - so you get a coherent picture how these differences in density would.develop to.amass galaxies and clusters of them.

to be continued...

Edit: And of course the most obvious evidence - the universe is of course expanding!

[I_am_not_mafia]

So the kiddo has a question and has been quite argumentative with me about it. Actually, she has several questions.

1. If god doesn't exist, where did life come from? Her answer is evolution isn't the answer because we had to come from somewhere.

She says logic and reason doesn't make sense. The big bang doesn't make sense and can't explain it because an explosion can't create things when explosions destroy things. That can't explain why there's life.


Her words. Have at it because I tried to tell her that you don't just throw in the excuse that "god did it", when there's no definitive answer to these things.

Quantum irregularities after the Big Bang set up thermodynamic gradients. This allowed for self organisation which is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. Self organisation works by minimising free energy, that is any energy that can perform work as a result of being in a gradient. A crystal is a self organised system for example. Self organisation has given us stars, planets, geology, chemistry, biology, evolution, brains, eco-systems, societies & culture, technology etc. The product of this is an increase in global entropy. Life more effectively reduces the thermodynamic gradient and increases entropy over time than a self organised system that can not reproduce before decaying to nothing.

[robvalue]

But that sounds like I'd have to do some work to understand it!



Can't I just say my magic friend did it? Then I can get on with more important things like worrying about where other people are sticking their penises.

[Alex K]

@Mathilda

Yes, these quantum fluctuations are a nice match to act as a "seed" for the later density differences observed in the microwaves, and ultimately the structures we see today at cosmic scales...

[The Grand Nudger]

They do spend alot of time wondering about other peoples penis, don't they?  Probably not something Nymph wants to muse over with her daughter, ofc.  

@OP Q

I lie to mine.  I tell them horrid, convoluted lies.  Let the little bastards work it out for themselves. As their questions become more sophisticated, the lies become more elaborate. They're starting to get pretty good at answering their own questions by reference to their objections to my lies.

[robvalue]

You sick fucker Maybe you should stop that now they're in their twenties?

Oh wait, were you doing a parody of religious indoctrination?

[Alex K]

Here are some pictures referring to my comment above:

The current distribution of galaxies (every dot is a galaxy) as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey


And here's the structures in the microwave background radiation, as observed by the Planck Satellite


And here's a computer simulation using realistic data showing how the structures we see in the earlier observation, the microwaves, lead to the filament like structures in the distribution of the galaxies above as the universe expands. Note how it starts with a pretty indistinct soup, but by the force of gravity, structures form which look exactly like what we observe today.





What you see in the simulation would correspond to one of those "knots" you see in the galaxy survey.

[Alex K]

And here's a larger scale simulation result