@FBM,
FBM wrote:My beliefs or lack thereof are just yet another red herring fallacy.
You don understand something - you have a (real)
world, that is existing outside and independently of our conscience, and
our understanding of the world (our knowledge of the world), which is not the ontological world itself - but it is rather some kind of a representation of the world, it is a map, it is a structured concetualization of what the world might look like, of what might exist out there. The
belief value is the accuracy of the mapping - to what extend you believe that the things that you know about the world are actually ontological existence in the real world.
Let's take your favorite example with the
red shift - the photos from the radio telescope of the red shift in the light spectrum that you are showing (without understanding BTW) ... are evidence of red shift in the light beams in all directions. What are they actually evidence of?
These photos are evidence of the
red shift in the light spectrum, only of that, and of nothing else. These photos
are not any evidence about any expansion ... let alone 'with acceleration'. In order to claim that the
red shift is an evidence of expansion of the Universe you will have to prove that the expansion is the
only possible explanation of the
red shift observations.
In order to prove
only possible you will have to exclude
everything else. The very fact that you don't know what that
everything else might be, does not necessarily mean that it cannot exist (without your knowledge) and that you can exclude it 'automatically' from the logical inference.
Nowtherefore - what that 'everythingthing else' could be? What are all the other plausible interpretations of the
red shift? Do you want some 'Jokers' here: it might be
shrinking of the particles with the time (blue shift of the particles); it might be
loss of energy when the light beam travels at a large distance (13.8 billion light years is a lot of path) - not to mention that most of the time you don't even have an idea of the medium of that transmission might be; further, it might be
fading away of the light beam with the time (the existence of a light beam for a period of 13.8 billion years is a lot of time) ... and you will never be able to prove that light cannot 'become sparkling' (with some red shift) when it 'matures in space' for a period of 13.8 billion years.
Where have you excluded all that plausible interpretations in order to claim that the
expansion of the Universe is the only possible physical interpretation of the
red shift? Hardly after excluding all that, and not before, you may claim that the photos of the
red shift in the light spectrum are evidence of anything else, except for of the
red shift itself.