[article]The "Big Bang" is just religion disguised as science.

I found an interesting article and would like to hear some thoughts on it. PLease read this all the way through before responding.

THE "BIG BANG" IS JUST RELIGION DISGUISED AS SCIENCE
by Michael Rivero

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was this guy named Aristotle. Pretty sharp fellow; he thought up a lot of good things. But, occasionally he made a mistake.

One mistake he made was to toss an orange up in the air and watch it come straight back down to his hand. Aristotle reasoned that if he was moving, the orange would have flown off to one side as soon as it left his hand. Because the orange did not do so, Aristotle concluded he was not moving. On the basis of this one observed fact, and the assumption that there was no other explanation for what he observed, Aristotle concluded that the Earth does not move and that therefore the rest of the universe had to move around it.

Aristotle was a very sharp guy, but the fact is that there was another explanation for why the orange fell back into his hand, and it would wait about another 2000 years before another smart man, Sir Isaac Newton, explained just what it was Aristotle had overlooked, set forth in Newton's laws of motion.

But for the early church, Aristotle's conclusions fit in rather well with their theology, which had the Earth created as the center of the universe, unmoving, with the rest of the cosmos spinning about it.

Of course, there was empirical evidence available to all that cast doubt on the church-approved version of the Cosmos. One could see during eclipses that the Earth was not flat. The curved shape of the Earth's shadow as it crossed the moon was the same no matter which place in the sky the eclipse took place. A spherical Earth was the only shape that could produce such a result. Ships sailing over the horizon clearly vanished over a subtle curve ( an observation which eventually inspired Columbus' voyages). Nobody could explain the behavior of a Foucault's Pendulum other than by the Earth spinning beneath it.

But by far the most troubling problem for the geocentric (earth centered) universe was the strange behavior of the planets. In an age before TV, or even books, the night sky was something every person was quite familiar with, even those who were not sailors or fortune tellers. Watching the night sky over time, the paths of the planets were easily seen to occasionally pause, move in reverse for a time, then proceed forward. This behavior was called retrograde motion. Ah, but this was a problem. The church did not have an explanation for this behavior. Indeed in the King James Version of the Bible, the word "planet" appears only once, and then only as an object to be sacrificed to.

There is a very simple explanation for retrograde motion. As the Earth, moving in its inner orbit, overtakes an outer planet, it will appear to hesitate, reverse its path across the sky, then resume its normal path. But the idea that the Earth moved was contrary to Church Dogma and to Aristotle. What education was tolerated by the church was "encouraged" to find some way to explain retrograde motion in a way that did not conflict with the religious needs for a universe centered on an unmoving Earth. Rather than re-examine Aristotle's basic claim, the learned men of the day grabbed onto a suggestion made by Claudius Ptolemy called "epicycles". This theory explained retrograde motion around a motionless Earth by suggesting that the planets moved in large orbits called deferents, upon which were superimposed smaller orbits called epicycles which produced a "wobble" as seen from Earth.

Epicycles were extremely popular with the church, and scholars at universities with religious affiliations were "encouraged" to refine this theory. And it needed refinement, badly, because the epicycle theory did not accurately predict what was being seen in the sky. Generations of effort was expended trying to figure out why the models did not predict the actual motions of the planets. At one point, it was even suggested that the epicycles had epicycles. No matter how many times the observed results did not match the predictions, the approved course of action was to refine the theory, but never to question the basic assumption. Those who dared point to the evidence suggesting that Aristotle (and by extension the church) were in error in postulating a geocentric universe were "discouraged". Galileo was tortured into recanting his conclusions that the Earth moved. Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake for suggesting that the sun was really just another star, only close up, and that the other stars had their own planets.

In recent times, our expanding technology has confirmed that Galileo and Bruno were right, and Aristotle and the church were flat out wrong. The Earth does move. There are no deferents or epicycles, or even epicycles on the epicycles. The models of the universe which are based on a moving Earth are quite accurate and able to predict the behaviors of the planets as evidence by the fact that we send spacecraft to those planets on a regular basis.

The theory of a geocentric universe and the theory of epicycles were not science. It was religious doctrine masked as science.

The church has never really dealt with the reality of the universe very well. They only apologized for their treatment of Galileo recently and still refuse to discuss Bruno. The Bible, presumed to be the perfect word of a perfect God, still teaches that the Earth is flat, rests on pillars (Job 26:11), and does not move (Psalms 19:5-6 93:1 96:10 104:5).

It seems that some mistakes are destined to be repeated again, despite our technological prowess.

In 1929, a Cal-Tech astronomer named Edwin Hubble observed that objects which appeared to be much further away showed a more pronounced shift towards the red end of the spectrum. Scientists building on Hubble's discovery concluded that the farther an object was away from Earth, the faster it was receding, and calculated the relationship between distance and velocity, called the "Hubble Constant" and concluded on the basis of this one observed fact and the assumption that there was no other explanation for that observed fact that the universe was expanding.

Religious circles embraced the idea of an expanding universe because for the universe to be expanding, then at some point in the past it had to originate from a single point, called the "Big Bang". Indeed, the concept of the Big Bang did not originate with Edwin Hubble but was proposed by a Catholic Monk, Georges Lemaître in 1927, two years before Hubble published his observations of the Red Shift. The "Big Bang" coincided nicely with religious doctrine and just as had been the case with epicycles (and despite the embarrassment thereof) religious institutions sought to encourage this new model of the universe over all others, including the then prevalent "steady state" theory.

Then history repeated itself. Evidence surfaced that the "Big Bang" might not really be a workable theory in the form of General Relativity, and its postulation that super massive objects would have gravity fields so strong that even light could not escape, nor would matter be able to differentiate. Since the entire universe existing in just one spot would be the most super massive object of all, the universe could not be born.

Needless to say, this suggestion that the Big Bang could not happen provoked the same exact reaction as the suggestion that the Earth might not be the center of everything. Instead of questioning the basic assumption, great effort was made to find a way to evolve the new data in terms acceptable to the assumption of a universe spawned in a single moment of creation. A complex Cosmology theory sprang up, encouraged by those invested in the "Big Bang" to explain why the basic foundational principles of physics behaved differently in the first few milliseconds of time. The math work is impressive, as impressive as that which supported the theory of the epicycles, but it is really just a polite way of saying "The rules just didn't apply when we need them not to apply".

An attempt was made to prove the Big Bang by searching for the "Cosmic Background Radiation", the presumed energy echo from the primordial explosion. and indeed a radio noise signal was picked up. Like Aristotle, and like Hubble, the discoverers of the Cosmic Background Radiation assumed the signal meant what they thought it did and could have no alternative explanation. The discovery of the Cosmic Background Radiation was then heralded as final proof of the Big Bang theory, and those institutions invested in that theory celebrated.

But just as the theory of epicycles did not accurately predict the observed motion of the planets, the Big Bang Theory turned out to be less than accurate about the radiation signal detected in space.

For one thing, there is the "Horizon Problem". At present, the known universe spans 28 billion light years and is assumed to be 14 billion years old. (Obviously unless we actually ARE the center of the universe, it may be assumed that the universe probably extends even further in at least one direction). Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have traveled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

SOURCE
Continued on next post.........

Continued...........

When the satellite COBE was sent up to analyze the Cosmic Background Radiation, it discovered instead of the smooth featureless glow predicted by the cosmologists a highly complex and detailed structure. Yet again, rather than question the prime assumption that the signal being analyzed was actually from a supposed "Big Bang", research was encouraged to find a way to fit the data into the existing theory, again on the assumption that the signal detected could not be from any other source. And yet, an alternative explanation for the signal was right at hand, indeed literally on all sides.

Our Solar System and planets have heavy elements (without which you would not be here) because at some time prior to the creation of our Solar System another star in the immediate vicinity exploded, creating the heavy elements and scattering them into the universe. Every star that explodes creates a planetary nebula, such as the one easily seen with amateur telescopes in the constellation Lyra. A planetary nebula is a bubble of debris in space, and given the presence of heavy elements in our own Solar System, then somewhere out in space there must be the tenuous remains of a billions of years old planetary nebula, the result of the not-so-very-big bang, viewable from our unique point of view near the center. This model of Earth lying at the center of the remains of a supernova predicts exactly the sort of structure that COBE found in the presumed Cosmic Background Radiation. But as was the case with Galileo and Bruno, challengers to the "approved" creation myths face a tough time, albeit funding cuts have replaced torture and being burned alive at the stake.

So pervasive is this bias to see the universe as created in a Biblical-consistent "Big Bang" that when William G. Tifft submitted his first article on the quantization of the observed Red Shift to Astrophysical Journal, the Journal published it because they could not find errors in it, yet still felt compelled to editorially distance themselves from the conclusions.

The conclusions derived from quantized red shift are devastating to the conventional view of the universe created in a single Big Bang, as devastating as Galileo's first telescope was to the theory that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Georges Lemaître (like Aristotle) assumed there was no other explanation for the red shift he observed than the motion of the observed objects relative to Earth. But given the theory that the universe is expanding uniformly, the amount of red shifts would have to be uniformly and randomly distributed.

But they aren't.

The observed red shifts in the sky are quantized, falling into discreet intervals. This is not explained by the theory that the red shift is produced solely by relative velocity. Some other effect is at work. And that means that the assumption that the universe is expanding based solely on the red shift is invalidated. Some other effect IS at work that explains the observations, quite possibly one that triggers a quantized red shift over vast distances without respect to relative velocity.

Which means the universe is not expanding. Which means there was no moment of creation, no "Big Bang" with an epicycle-esque cosmology to explain why the greatest black hole of all didn't behave like a black hole. Which means that the background radiation mapped by COBE which didn't quite fit the Big Bang model is probably the remnant of the stellar explosion that created the heavy elements making up that computer you are reading this on.

But the lesson for our time of just how much our society remains dominated by religious superstitions is revealed by the fact that the quantized red-shift is NOT a new discovery. The first article regarding the observed data appeared in 1976, a quarter of a century ago. Since then, scientists as much in the service of superstition as were those scientists who "studied" epicycles have repeatedly tried to disprove the observations of Tifft and Cocke, only to confirm and re-confirm the truth, that there is a quantized red-shift, which casts doubt on the theory of an expanding universe and a "Big bang" creation.

Yet even though hard evidence exists to warrant a full re-examination of the basic assumption of the expanding universe, our science classes and TV programs still promote the "Big Bang" view, just as the erroneous theory of Aristotle continued to be promoted even after Galileo proved it wrong, because one theory fits into a theology, and the other does not.

Man's progress is not measured by the reaches of his science but by the limits of his superstition. The truth is known. But the truth is unpopular.

The assumption that there must be a beginning to the universe is merely a human invention. We believe that we see things have beginnings and ends before us, but in truth we are seeing matter change form. A particular configuration may have a beginning and an end, but that the actual matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed is an axiom pf physics. Miss April may be only 20 years old, but the atoms in her heavenly body are indeed heavenly bodies, being the remains of ancient exploded stars, and in THAT form for billions of years.

Ancients believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. But while we grudgingly admit that Earth orbits the sun and that our sun is nowhere near the center of the milky way, the idea that Earth is the center of all remains at the heart of the assumptions of the Big Bang theory. The "Bangers" describe the furthest objects we can detect (currently 13 billion light years) and from that calculate the age of the universe (currently set at 14 billion years).

But that only works if we ASSUME that the Earth is the center for all the cosmos that we can see. It is true that we are seeing objects out to the edge of our technological limits
and we are seeing them in all directions. We do not see an obvious end to the universe. Logically, the odds are far greater than what we can actually see is really just a tiny bubble in a truly
infinite universe, rather than we just happen to be that one in trillions of worlds that wound up at the center of the expanding field of debris from the Big Bang. And if we abandon the assumption that we see most of the the universe from a fortunate position near the center, then we cannot really know how large the universe really is, and the mathematics by which we claim to know the age based on the size break down completely. We truly are trying to calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Continued............

So, how to explain the Population II stars?

Population II stars are stars with no heavy elements in them. When they explode at the end of their life cycles, heavy elements are created. These are swept up by stars that form afterwards creating Population I stars, usually with planets around them. Population I stars have heavy elements. Population II stars do not.

If the Big Bang had happened, the universe would be filled with heavy elements created in those first few moments the universe started to operate under the rules of physics we know today. There should not be any stars in existence devoid of those heavy elements. And yet there are.

The existence of Population II stars, devoid of heavy elements, directly contradicts the theory of the Big Bang.

YET ANOTHER PROOF THE BIG BANG DID NOT HAPPEN

The Big Bang is currently imagined to have occurred 14 billion years ago.

The farthest object seen in the sky by the Hubble and Keck Telescopes is 13 billion light-years distant, and is assumed to have been created when the universe was just 750 million years old. It would take at least that long (if not longer) for the material form the theorized Big Bang to coalesce into stars and for those stars to form a rotating galaxy.

But here is the problem. We are seeing that object 13 billion light-years distant not as it is today and where it is today but as it was and where it was, 13 billion years ago, 13 billion light-years distant from earth.

In other words, for this galaxy to lie 13 billion light-years away from Earth only 750 million years after the Big Bang, it would have had to travel 13 billion light years in just 750 million years' time. That requires the galaxy in question to travel more than 17 times faster than the speed of light, a speed limit which according to the Big Bang supporters was in effect from the moment the universe was 3 seconds old.

SOURCE

Thank you for reading I look forward to all responses, pro or con.

Yes an interesting article.

I'm not convinced the BB theory is just a religion disguised as science. Maybe it's a bit of both, but there's definitely some science in there.

The thing is the BB is just a theory and not a fact until science proves it. The other thing is, many scientists have devoted most of their lives trying to prove this theory so it's not surprising if they are a little reluctant to dismiss it just because some things don't quite add up. I guess that's why they have to invent things like dark energy/matter lol maybe the LHC will shed some light.

Anyway s&f for the bang up job on the cut & paste effort.

very good post, definitely interesting.
I agree with the poster above, with the fact maybe it could be a bit of both rather than JUST a religion!

good post!

The big bang theory just came from male ejaculation. Thats where they got the idea from. Plus what are they using to prove this, a massive penis under europe, lol.

I will read the post later.

Like so many of the truths that supposedly science has found, the occult scince behind the scenes, gave us this idea, and we will never know where it truly came from.

[edit on 11/28/2009 by andy1033]

Well, thanks OP, you just broke all my physics.

There is just a little flaw with the reasonning of the galaxy 13 billions light years away from us.
It did not move away from us, we both moved away from the so said original point. So theorically, we both moved 6,5 billions light years. But that's not that bad, since it still needs moving WAY FASTER than the speed of light.

There are a few basic misconceptions in the article:

that super massive objects would have gravity fields so strong that even light could not escape, nor would matter be able to differentiate. Since the entire universe existing in just one spot would be the most super massive object of all, the universe could not be born.

Wrong. To create a gravitational singularity, you need not only lots of mass concentrated in small space, you also need EMPTY SPACE around it to have gravitational gradient.

This is not the case of big bang, where the space itself was compacted, so the average density of the universe was higher, but there was no gradient of density - no gravitational singularity.

Also, the expansion of space would easily prevent any gravitational singularity.


2.

But while we grudgingly admit that Earth orbits the sun and that our sun is nowhere near the center of the milky way, the idea that Earth is the center of all remains at the heart of the assumptions of the Big Bang theory.

The big bang theory does not assume that.
The expansion is like blowing up a balloon with the universe being the surface of this balloon. For any observer on this surface, any other point would recede, with no center of this expansion. The expansion would be proportional to distance between two points.

3.

We already know that in the cataclysm of a supernova, the heavier elements are created.

Wrong. The heavier elements are created before supernova, during millions of years of burning lighter elements. Also, supernova and big bang are quite different things.


If someone wants to argue against any theory, he has to understand it first. The author of this article obviously doesnt.

[edit on 28-11-2009 by Maslo]

There are a lot of problems with the articles interpretations. To start I recommend googling to see just how many competing versions of the BB Theory there are. The evidence cited only addresses a couple of them. Though the most damning is the last couple of paragraphs:

The last line implies there was nothing and then the galaxy we see popped into being I find this ironic given the nature of the article. The matter would have been travelling and formed into what we see today en route.

The techniques employed could be equated to the following: "Religion X is false, therefore there is no God." Regardless of ones feelings on "God", this argument is deeply flawed in a similar manner as saying "There is no dog in my living room, therefore dogs do not exist."

The flaws cited in the article are known and addressed in many different ways, this is why so many competing ones have sprung up. As new evidence comes about they ALWAYS test it against existing ideas. This is a good thing, not bad as the article implies. It gives a confirmation of the idea or shows flaws to be addressed. Science evolves with each new generation of scientists. It is constantly vetted. Constantly weighed.

The article seems to have an awkward agenda to me.

The observed red shifts in the sky are quantized, falling into discreet intervals. This is not explained by the theory that the red shift is produced solely by relative velocity.

This is partially true, but is expected. The galaxies are not randomly distributed, but are gravitationaly bound into thin filaments, with large voids between them. This results in some quantization of redshifts, because the distances of these galaxies are "quantized".

Galaxy redshift survey results:
www2.aao.gov.au...

reply to post by yizzel


The more I think I about it, I disagree with even associating it with religion *also because I am not one who scapegoat's religion for all of mankind's bonheadedness and silliness*. Except that the pathology may be at least a little simular. And what I mean by that it's an idea upon which they have no real proof and will bend "evidence" to support it. BB has been repeatedly proven wrong in that the predictions it makes have been repeatedly proven wrong by observation or the evidence lands in a "could be this or could be that" type situation where there are plausable alternative explainations.

reply to post by Watcher-In-The-Shadows


Yes, BB has some weak points, but it also has quite a few strong points. Do we have better hypothesis? Currently I think not.

No it isn't.

You cannot question a religion. It is right. Period.

If some repeatable experiments could show that the elements of the Big Bang theory were incorrect, those elements, or even the entire theory, could be set aside. And yet, science would continue on.

Now all you need to do is find some verifiable proofs that make the current theory incorrect. So get out your mathematics pencil, or find yourself some testable hypothesis and get on it.

It is true, science is a type of religion.

By definition, religion is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe".

Science is a study with the ultimate goal to find out the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe.

So anything found by science is technically a religion.

Here is a weird fact.... A lot of religions were created based on the science of their day.

Some religions believe that the entire Universe and all energy in it is God's body. That same idea created the idea of God being omnipresent, and omnipotent.

When you use science to figure out what the entire Universe is made out of, you find that everything is made of the same energy, just in different combinations, and all of it is connected. All of the things IN the Universe help create ONE large thing that some people refer to as God. In a way you can say science is helping prove some religions.

reply to post by Aeons


I don't know, I've done a pretty decent job on questioning a few religions.

I think you're getting at the "faith" issue. Because religion is faith, you have to have faith in all of the parts of religion that aren't proven or understood.

And that's just where I don't agree.

reply to post by Maslo


A better hypothesis is not required for another hypothesis to be incorrect.

reply to post by ravenshadow13


Um, everything is "faith". If you trust what someone tells you, you have "faith" in their ability to disern and tell you "the truth".

Main Entry: 1faith
Pronunciation: \ˈfāth\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural faiths \ˈfāths, sometimes ˈfāthz\
Etymology: Middle English feith, from Anglo-French feid, fei, from Latin fides; akin to Latin fidere to trust — more at bide
Date: 13th century
1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs

synonyms see belief

— on faith : without question

SOURCE

The basis is the word belief. When you get right down to it all "knowledge" is nothing but strongly held belief. With enough semantics thrown in to muddy the issue.


[edit on 1-12-2009 by Watcher-In-The-Shadows]

Originally posted by Watcher-In-The-Shadows
reply to post by Maslo

 

A better hypothesis is not required for another hypothesis to be incorrect.

I agree. All it reqiures for a hypothesis to be incorrect is observation which proves it incorrect. Do we have any observation which proves Big Bang didnt happen? I dont know about any. All points in the article were just misunderstandings of the theory. Even if there is something not known with certainty, it doesnt mean BB is falsified.

reply to post by Maslo


Considering that the predicted observations have repeatedly been falsified I would call the theory falsified.

Originally posted by Watcher-In-The-Shadows
reply to post by Maslo

 

Considering that the predicted observations have repeatedly been falsified I would call the theory falsified.

...which ones?