Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

Why should I or any rational being accept your god hypothesis over scientific evidence?

Why god?

FBM wrote:

Why should I or any rational being accept your god hypothesis over scientific evidence?

     Because you don't have any scientific evidence ... of any kind ... and at all.

FBM wrote:

Why god?

     ... and why not? O.K., just calm down & try to reconsider the whole issue as an impartial observer. What is more plausible: for the Universe and Life to have been created by some hyper-intelligence or by some hyper-space on auto-pilot? Try to assess the things as if you are not an active participant in the issue.

     Because you don't have any scientific evidence ... of any kind ... and at all.

Why god?

O.K., just calm down

& try to reconsider the whole issue as an impartial observer.

What is more plausible: for the Universe and Life to have been created by some hyper-intelligence or by some hyper-space on auto-pilot? Try to assess the things as if you are not an active participant in the issue.

Swimming in it. Red shift, cosmic background radiation, particle acceleration experiments, radioactive decay, bubble and vacuum chamber experiments, the fossil record, genetic mapping, virology, chemistry, geology, etc etc. The fact that your delusion blinds you to the strength of this empirical approach in no way impacts the strengths of the evidential approach.

The current success of the big bang model relies on several key areas of observational evidence and predictions. These are discussed briefly below.

Evidence for the Big Bang Model

There are several key areas of observational support for the big bang model. These are:

Observed recession of galaxies: The consensus among astronomers is that Hubble's relationship between the distance to galaxies and their recession velocity is due to the expansion of space. More distant galaxies or clusters of galaxies exhibit higher redshift of their spectral lines than closer galaxies. This is then interpreted as more distant galaxies receding from us faster than closer ones. Note it is important to realise that it is the space between galaxies that is expanding. Galaxies themselves do not appear to expand as the local effects of gravity dominate over any space expansion.



Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation: In 1965 two scientists working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were adapting a horn-shaped antenna near New York for use in radio astronomy. They encountered noise in the system and despite repeated and thorough attempts were unable to remove it or find its cause. They eventually realised that this "noise" was in fact remnant radiation from the big bang. Such radiation had been predicted by Gamow in the late 1940s. As the Universe expanded it cooled so that today the background radiation corresponds to a temperature of 2.725 K and has a black body spectrum.

Over the last 15 years observations of this cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) from space-based missions such as COBE and WMAP and balloon-based missions such as BOOMERanG that operated in the Antarctic have provided a wealth of details. We can now view the slight fluctuations or anisotropies in the CMBR with unprecedented detail and compare observations with theory more thoroughly. The image below shows how the resolution of the CMBR has improved since its discovery in the 1960s. These slight fluctuations in the CMBR intensity are thought to provide information about slight variations in density in the early Universe.



Ratios of primordial elements. Astronomers are able to measure the relative amounts of the light nuclei hydrogen, deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron), helium-3, helium-4 and lithium-7 in distant, unmixed clouds of primordial gas. The relative abundances of these nuclei correspond with the calculated predicted ratios from the Big Bang model.

Observed evolution of extragalactic objects over cosmic time. Evidence for this initially came from radio surveys which showed that the more distant (hence older) parts of the Universe appeared to contain stronger radio sources than the local region. Quasars, for instance, are not found in our local region but are far more common at redshifts of 2 or 3.
Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes have provided our deepest ever views of the Universe and clearly show evidence of galactic evolution and earlier stages in their formation.


...

Red shift

Never-Before-Seen Particles Discovered at Swiss Collider
by Calla Cofield, Staff Writer | November 20, 2014 11:07am ET

LHCb detector at CERN

Two new subatomic particles have popped up at the world's largest atom smasher. The never-before-seen particles could help physicists glean key information about the building blocks of matter in the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, is a veritable particle piñata: The massive underground machine accelerates two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light and smashes them together. Breaking the protons apart with so much energy creates a shower of new particles for scientists to study.

One of the experiments at the LHC, called LHCb, identified two never-before-seen baryon particles in their most recent particle cache. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

“Nature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one," Matthew Charles of the CNRS's LPNHE laboratory at Paris VI University, said in a statement.

The new particles are known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-, and are each made up of three quarks. Quarks are believed to be truly fundamental particles, meaning they are not made up of smaller particles. Protons, a key ingredient in atoms, are also made up of three quarks.

Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- consist of one down quark, one strange quark and one bottom quark (also known as a beauty quark). Other particles consisting of this same quark combination were seen at the LHC in 2012, and by experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 2007.

So what makes Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- unique? The quarks contained in them have different "spins," — an important property of particles that includes a number and a direction. Differences in the quark spins can make two particles unique, even if they contain the same combination of quark types.

The differences in spin also give Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- slightly different masses, which is crucial to detecting them. In fact, "if [Xi_b'-] had been just a little lighter, we wouldn't have seen it at all," with the approach the scientists used, Charles said.

So far, the new particles appear to be behaving the way scientists predicted they would. Physicists have mapped out all the particles that should come from different quark combinations. This is part of the Standard Model — the reigning theory of particle physics that outlines how the universe should behave. Scientists say that confirming the existence of all the particles in the Standard Model is the first step in looking for physics that goes beyond the Standard Model — that breaks the rules.

“If we want to find new physics beyond the Standard Model, we need first to have a sharp picture,” said LHCb’s physics coordinator Patrick Koppenburg from Nikhef Institute in Amsterdam. “Such high-precision studies will help us to differentiate between Standard Model effects and anything new or unexpected in the future.”

On July 4, 2012, scientists at the LHC announced they had found an elementary particle called the Higgs boson, which could help scientists understand how matter has mass. The Higgs is thought to be associated with a field that can impart mass on particles that pass through it. The discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson also represented the final piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model.

The new baryon particles were detected from data collected from 2011 to 2012. After a long shutdown for upgrades, scientists are preparing the LHC to once again start colliding particles, but at higher energies and with more intense beams than ever before, according to CERN, the research organization that operates the LHC. The collider is scheduled to restart by the spring of 2015.

The new work appears online and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

cosmic background radiation

particle acceleration experiments

Common misconceptions about science I: “Scientific proof”
Why there is no such thing as a scientific proof.

Misconceptions about the nature and practice of science abound, and are sometimes even held by otherwise respectable practicing scientists themselves. I have dispelled some of them (misconceptions, not scientists) in earlier posts (for example, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, beauty is only skin-deep, and you can’t judge a book by its cover). Unfortunately, there are many other misconceptions about science. One of the most common misconceptions concerns the so-called “scientific proofs.” Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a scientific proof.

Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science. Mathematics and logic are both closed, self-contained systems of propositions, whereas science is empirical and deals with nature as it exists. The primary criterion and standard of evaluation of scientific theory is evidence, not proof. All else equal (such as internal logical consistency and parsimony), scientists prefer theories for which there is more and better evidence to theories for which there is less and worse evidence. Proofs are not the currency of science.

Proofs have two features that do not exist in science: They are final, and they are binary. Once a theorem is proven, it will forever be true and there will be nothing in the future that will threaten its status as a proven theorem (unless a flaw is discovered in the proof). Apart from a discovery of an error, a proven theorem will forever and always be a proven theorem.

In contrast, all scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives. Its status as the accepted theory is contingent on what other theories are available and might suddenly change tomorrow if there appears a better theory or new evidence that might challenge the accepted theory. No knowledge or theory (which embodies scientific knowledge) is final. That, by the way, is why science is so much fun.

Further, proofs, like pregnancy, are binary; a mathematical proposition is either proven (in which case it becomes a theorem) or not (in which case it remains a conjecture until it is proven). There is nothing in between. A theorem cannot be kind of proven or almost proven. These are the same as unproven.

In contrast, there is no such binary evaluation of scientific theories. Scientific theories are neither absolutely false nor absolutely true. They are always somewhere in between. Some theories are better, more credible, and more accepted than others. There is always more, more credible, and better evidence for some theories than others. It is a matter of more or less, not either/or. For example, experimental evidence is better and more credible than correlational evidence, but even the former cannot prove a theory; it only provides very strong evidence for the theory and against its alternatives.

The knowledge that there is no such thing as a scientific proof should give you a very easy way to tell real scientists from hacks and wannabes. Real scientists never use the words “scientific proofs,” because they know no such thing exists. Anyone who uses the words “proof,” “prove” and “proven” in their discussion of science is not a real scientist.

The creationists and other critics of evolution are absolutely correct when they point out that evolution is “just a theory” and it is not “proven.” What they neglect to mention is that everything in science is just a theory and is never proven. Unlike the Prime Number Theorem, which will absolutely and forever be true, it is still possible, albeit very, very, very, very, very unlikely, that the theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection may one day turn out to be false. But then again, it is also possible, albeit very, very, very, very, very unlikely, that monkeys will fly out of my ass tomorrow. In my judgment, both events are about equally likely.