The Big Bang: Why is it still being taught?

[caketastydelish]

I support the big bang because those that advocate halal meat are also against the big bang. The enemies of your enemies are your friends.

 

[Traitorfish]

You are an opponent of communism.

Nazis are also opponents of communism.

Caketastydelish is a friend to National Socialism; let it be proclaimed throughout the Seven Kingdoms.

(See the logical flaw?)

 

[Tahuti]

See the logical flaw?

Your logical flaw is that you presuppose he isn't an enemy of the Nazis. In case both the Nazis and Commies are enemies, it is rather hollow if both are enemies of each other. So the adage 'The enemy of my enemy is a friend' should be viewed with the implicit caveat that 'the enemy of my enemy who is also my enemy is still an enemy'.

 

[caketastydelish]

You are an opponent of communism.

Nazis are also opponents of communism.

Caketastydelish is a friend to National Socialism; let it be proclaimed throughout the Seven Kingdoms.

(See the logical flaw?)

(could you not see that I was joking? I actually have no problem with halal meat.)

 

[Hygro]

I support the big bang because those that advocate halal meat are also against the big bang. The enemies of your enemies are your friends.

That does constitute the kind of argument a lot of people have against scientific knowledge..

 

[Crezth]

Your logical flaw is that you presuppose he isn't an enemy of the Nazis. In case both the Nazis and Commies are enemies, it is rather hollow if both are enemies of each other. So the adage 'The enemy of my enemy is a friend' should be viewed with the implicit caveat that 'the enemy of my enemy who is also my enemy is still an enemy'.

Oh of course, it should be obvious that adages always include a provisional clause that nullifies their premise. You know, implicitly.

 

[Trev]

The planets and moons of our solar system have many features that suggest our solar system is young, not 4 billion years old.
Titan has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Calculations based on solar wind erosion of methane should have caused a complete collapse of the Titan atmosphere within 10 million years.
Also Methane is converted to liquid ethane by the solar wind. This process if it has been active for a long period of time should have left a deep ocean of ethane on Titan's surface. However nothing more than methane soaked sand and a few small lakes have been found. Either physics behaves differently in Titan's atmosphere and on Titan's surface than on earth or Titan is relatively young. I prefer young to strange physics.
The small amount of liquid ethane on Titans surface has resulted in some rivers, these rivers have to the present time resulted in low levels of erosion only, another good reason to give Titan a young age.
Despite the lack of substantial erosion, the number of impact craters from meteorites is relatively small, far less than would be expected for an object 4 billion years old, so this is another reason to date Titan as a young moon of Saturn. I prefer not to believe in strange physics where everything happens differently on Titan compared to what has been observed on earth, but maybe that is your choice.

 

[El_Machinae]

You should link some citations. It would be pretty cool if Titan was young.

 

[bathsheba666]

I prefer not to believe in strange physics where everything happens differently on Titan compared to what has been observed on earth, but maybe that is your choice.

Hummm. So is Physics the only discipline where strangeness would be a barrier to your belief ?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The planets and moons of our solar system have many features that suggest our solar system is young, not 4 billion years old.
Titan has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Calculations based on solar wind erosion of methane should have caused a complete collapse of the Titan atmosphere within 10 million years.
Also Methane is converted to liquid ethane by the solar wind. This process if it has been active for a long period of time should have left a deep ocean of ethane on Titan's surface. However nothing more than methane soaked sand and a few small lakes have been found. Either physics behaves differently in Titan's atmosphere and on Titan's surface than on earth or Titan is relatively young. I prefer young to strange physics.
The small amount of liquid ethane on Titans surface has resulted in some rivers, these rivers have to the present time resulted in low levels of erosion only, another good reason to give Titan a young age.
Despite the lack of substantial erosion, the number of impact craters from meteorites is relatively small, far less than would be expected for an object 4 billion years old, so this is another reason to date Titan as a young moon of Saturn. I prefer not to believe in strange physics where everything happens differently on Titan compared to what has been observed on earth, but maybe that is your choice.

There is of course a third option - Titan is neither young nor posessed of strange physics, but you are incorrect in your assertions. I personally suspect this option is the most likely of the three, but I'll of course reserve judgement as I have no real knowledge either way (I'd guess the "weird physics" answer is the least likely of the three though). But yes, citations would be good.

But even if you're right and Titan is bizarrely young, where does that leave the rest of the solar system? Indeed, some of the very things you bring up in your arguments for Titan being young (erosion, impact craters) give completely the opposite indication everywhere else do they not?

 

[Crezth]

Some people will, but a lot more people will become less moral based on the number of people saying: "I am moral because God". How many people are out there saying: "I am NOT moral because God"? That's the only statistic leading me to this conclusion. Some people will become more moral, some will stay the same, but more people will become less moral, based on the simple premise that if you interviewed all religious people in the world, a lot more would say "I derive my morality from God" than "I derive my lack of morality from God". I don't see how you could argue against that logic.

The bolded is your problem. You have falsely associated morality with mere self-confirmation, based on nothing but the gut intuition that someone self-reporting as moral is, indeed, moral; and someone who doesn't is not. As if there are no humble or deluded people in the world.

As presented, your argument relies on a spurious claim. Sorry, but I can't take that seriously.

It also, and this is not wholly relevant, depends on your personal type of morality. This isn't to suggest that morality is relative, but that moral people can differ enough in the fine print to throw the whole thing into question. One Muslim's morality is killing apostates; another's is doing charity work.

If your argument is that fewer people would act as though guided by a moral compass sans religion, well, I still think that also bears demonstrating. It's one thing for someone to believe that their morality comes from religion, but it's another thing for that to be the case. You might insist that you're only moral because of God, but if you knew there was no God, would that really change your mind about murder, theft, etc? Is just acting morally the same thing as being moral? If more people act immorally because they don't think there's god, have we really increased the total immorality in the world, or just stripped away a false veneer?

You're assuming way too much is what I'm saying here.

What sort of false dichotomy did I present though? I false dichotomy is when you present only 2 possible scenarios as options, usually two extremes, when there exist other obvious scenarios. I think you just threw that out there without thinking or I'm not presenting my position well enough and you're misinterpreting it.

You proposed that either there is religion and a higher-than-average morality, or no religion and a lower-than-average morality, based on the assumption that religion increases morality. See the whole above.

 

[warpus]

The bolded is your problem. You have falsely associated morality with mere self-confirmation, based on nothing but the gut intuition that someone self-reporting as moral is, indeed, moral; and someone who doesn't is not. As if there are no humble or deluded people in the world.

Nah, I just imagined 10 random religious people in edit: (front of) me, people who say that their morality derives from God.

How many of those people are going to become more moral when it turns out that God doesn't exist? I would doubt that any of them would be, if their initial claims are to be believed. How many are going to go on living exactly the same way as before in terms of morality? Probably most of them.

Will 1 or 2 become less moral? Probably. I mean, look at what they're claiming their source of morality is.. and with that source gone.. there's just going to be 1 or 2 people like that out of the 10 at least, there's no way around it.

You proposed that either there is religion and a higher-than-average morality, or no religion and a lower-than-average morality, based on the assumption that religion increases morality. See the whole above.

That's.. not what I said at all. You are way off. So I dunno man, maybe you misread.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Despite the lack of substantial erosion, the number of impact craters from meteorites is relatively small, far less than would be expected for an object 4 billion years old, so this is another reason to date Titan as a young moon of Saturn. I prefer not to believe in strange physics where everything happens differently on Titan compared to what has been observed on earth, but maybe that is your choice.

You mentioned that Titan has fewer impact craters than would be expected. Does this mean that a moon or a planet which has a lot of impact craters such as earth’s moon, Mercury, Mars etc. is therefore old? I would suggest that the reason for the few craters is Saturn, which with its much higher gravity, would draw the various comets, meteors, etc away from Titan.

Going by the claim the Moon is not 4 billion years old, it’s 6000 years old. With the crater population of Titan compared to the moon, that means Titan can only be, oh, around 15-150 years old. Except that it was discovered in 1655.

How is that for strange physics?

 

[peter grimes]

Cassini discovered small lakes and large seas of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbon compounds1. Liquid rains down on the moon’s surface and then evaporates, setting up a complex weather system that includes, presumably, wind patterns.

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/first-hints-of-waves-on-titan-s-seas-1.14889

So how is there methane still around for us to see it? One possibility is that it's just a freak sudden event that released a bunch of methane into Titan's atmosphere at the moment in the solar system's four-billion-year history that we happened to develop the tools to be able to detect methane on Titan. That's possible, but relatively unlikely. Or, there's a reservoir of methane at the surface or inside Titan that resupplies the atmosphere.

Source: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0315-titans-lakes-the-basics.html

Some more stats:
http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/SearchResults?target=TITAN&featureType=Mare, maria

 

[uppi]

Because of last weeks events I would like to go back to the original topic of why the Big Bang is still being taught:

http://www.nature.com/news/telescope-captures-view-of-gravitational-waves-1.14876

Guth’s idea was that the cosmos expanded at an exponential rate for a few tens of trillionths of trillionths of trillionths of seconds after the Big Bang, ballooning from subatomic to football size. Inflation solves several long-standing cosmic conundrums, such as why the observable Universe appears uniform from one end to the other. Although the theory has proved to be consistent with all cosmological data collected so far, conclusive evidence for it has been lacking.

Cosmologists knew, however, that inflation would have a distinctive signature: the brief but violent period of expansion would have generated gravitational waves, which compress space in one direction while stretching it along another (see 'Ripple effect'). Although the primordial waves would still be propagating across the Universe, they would now be too feeble to detect directly. But they would have left a distinctive mark in the CMB: they would have polarized the radiation in a curly, vortex-like pattern known as the B mode (see 'Cosmic curl').

Last year, another telescope in Antarctica — the South Pole Telescope (SPT) — became the first observatory to detect a B-mode polarization in the CMB (see Nature http://doi.org/rwt; 2013). That signal, however, was over angular scales of less than one degree (about twice the apparent size of the Moon in the sky), and was attributed to how galaxies in the foreground curve the space through which the CMB travels (D. Hanson et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 141301; 2013). But the signal from primordial gravitational waves is expected to peak at angular scales between one and five degrees.

And that is exactly what John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues now say they have detected, using an instrument dubbed BICEP2 that is located just metres away from its competitor, the SPT.

It's a beautiful example of the scientific method: There is a problem. Then someone comes up with a hypothesis that if true would solve the problem. And years later someone else finds clear evidence for that hypothesis.

 

[Crezth]

Nah, I just imagined 10 random religious people in edit: (front of) me, people who say that their morality derives from God.

How many of those people are going to become more moral when it turns out that God doesn't exist? I would doubt that any of them would be, if their initial claims are to be believed. How many are going to go on living exactly the same way as before in terms of morality? Probably most of them.

Will 1 or 2 become less moral? Probably. I mean, look at what they're claiming their source of morality is.. and with that source gone.. there's just going to be 1 or 2 people like that out of the 10 at least, there's no way around it.

Probably, probably, probably. You have ignored all my arguments to insist on your poorly contrived scenario. Once again, you have: failed to define morality, failed to recognize the link between acting moral and being moral, and failed to acknowledge the fundamental disconnect between self-reporting as moral and being moral.

The entire situation is contrived because 10 people who all self-report as God-believers and moral are not a representative sample of the population. Where's the accounting for all other permutations of factor? There is none. This is why your assertion is mostly thin air.

 

[Trev]

Rings rotating around a planet are an unstable system that change rapidly and decay in a short space of time. Significant differences have been seen in the appearance of Saturn's rings in the decades since the first spacecraft flew by Saturn and later spacecraft photographed the system. The rotating ring's orbits are significantly perturbed by the gravitational influence of the many moons of Saturn orbiting near them and the distinct separation of the dust into visible rings would not be expected for a planet billions of years old, after a long period of time it should just be a continuous, diffuse disc of dust without individual rings.
The existence of visibly separated rings strongly suggests that Saturn rings formed recently, much less than a million years ago.

Romans 1 : 19, 20 'because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen.'
God's creation reveals its truth to those with open, searching minds, the youth of Titan and the rings of Saturn are just the beginning of objects in the solar system that speak of the creative power and majesty of God

 

[El_Machinae]

Romans 1 : 19, 20 'because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen

You either believe that or you don't. All of nature is arranged to show us that Genesis is not (in any sense) factually true. Can we infer some of God's invisible attributes from that? Well, apparently, He's okay with long-term libel. I keep thinking that the Old Testament is some variant of the Milgram test, that we're prone to failing at.

And, apparently, He enjoys crushing hydrogen into non-existence. The entire Universe is arranged to do so. It is vastly more common that any type of human existence. We very well might be the 'accidental' consequence of what happens when a Creator designs a hydrogen-crushing machine.

 

[warpus]

Probably, probably, probably. You have ignored all my arguments to insist on your poorly contrived scenario. Once again, you have: failed to define morality, failed to recognize the link between acting moral and being moral, and failed to acknowledge the fundamental disconnect between self-reporting as moral and being moral.

The entire situation is contrived because 10 people who all self-report as God-believers and moral are not a representative sample of the population. Where's the accounting for all other permutations of factor? There is none. This is why your assertion is mostly thin air.

Look at it this way:

1. A bunch of people tell you that they derive all of their happiness from apples
2. You wonder what would happen to their happiness levels on average should apples completely disappear from existence.

So..

As a consequence of 1. and 2. it is not that far fetched to assume that on average people who said this will be less happy after 2. happens. In fact, that's what you'd expect to happen. There will be people who will in fact be happier because they messed up when self-identifying, but that will be an exception rather than the rule.

It's just a matter of probability. But we're sofrt of on an inconsequential tangent.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Rings rotating around a planet are an unstable system that change rapidly and decay in a short space of time. Significant differences have been seen in the appearance of Saturn's rings in the decades since the first spacecraft flew by Saturn and later spacecraft photographed the system. The rotating ring's orbits are significantly perturbed by the gravitational influence of the many moons of Saturn orbiting near them and the distinct separation of the dust into visible rings would not be expected for a planet billions of years old, after a long period of time it should just be a continuous, diffuse disc of dust without individual rings.
The existence of visibly separated rings strongly suggests that Saturn rings formed recently, much less than a million years ago.

Romans 1 : 19, 20 'because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen.'
God's creation reveals its truth to those with open, searching minds, the youth of Titan and the rings of Saturn are just the beginning of objects in the solar system that speak of the creative power and majesty of God

Hi Trev

Would you please make up your mind on what you want to discuss? And when you've done that, maybe address some counterarguments?

I trust you will be addressing the replies on your previous post before the good people here waste effort on debunking your latest load of bollocks.

Thanks and best wishes,

Ziggy Stardust.