Man Created God With The Computer

That monkeys can not figure out where trees came from does not in and of itself suggest a magic tree genie. Whether the monkeys are even capable of understanding the mechanics of how and why a tree grows is inconsequential to the truth of the existence of the tree.

I agree. This old monkey is waiting for the rest of the story.

Doktor S,

Can you provide a counterexample to the dichotomy I have proposed?

stuh505

I should have specified the constants I was referring to beyond giving just one example I suppose. I have read a lot of David Brin and Gregg Benford (both scientists) and other Hard Science Fiction authors and the speculation that some constants might have initial variability is referred to. Anti gravity proportional to the square of the distance at long ranges?

Stephen Hawking, The Big Bang, and God

Here are some of the questions cosmology seeks to answer (As elsewhere in this lecture, I borrow heavily from astrophysicist Hugh Ross' excellent books The Fingerprint of God and The Creator and the Cosmos.):

Is the universe finite or infinite in extent and content?
Is it eternal or does it have a beginning?
Was it created? If not, how did it get here? If so, how was this creation accomplished and what can we learn about the agent and events of creation?
Who or what governs the laws and constants of physics? Are such laws the product of chance or have they been designed? How do they relate to the support and development of life?
Is there any knowable existence beyond the known dimensions of the universe?
Is the universe running down irreversibly or will it bounce back?

Let me begin with five traditional arguments for the existence of God. It may seem an unlikely starting point for this topic, but I think you'll see as time goes on that these arguments keep coming up. I'm not going to comment right away on whether these arguments are valid or not, but I will state them because throughout astrophysical literature these arguments are often referred to:

The cosmological argument: the effect of the universe's existence must have a suitable cause.
The teleological argument: the design of the universe implies a purpose or direction behind it.
The rational argument: the operation of the universe, according to order and natural law, implies a mind behind it.
The ontological argument: man's ideas of God (his God-consciousness) implies a God who imprinted such a consciousness.
The moral argument: man's built-in sense of right and wrong can be accounted for only by an innate awareness of a code of law--an awareness implanted by a higher being.

The Big Bang
The idea that the universe had a specific time of origin has been philosophically resisted by some very distinguished scientists. We could begin with Arthur Eddington, who experimentally………..
http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9404/bigbang.html

Ever heard of 'many worlds'?

Doktor,

I had not heard of that before. Now I have. This example is indeed a counterexample to my precise statement, since I referred to "everything" in the universe.

However, the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is only an explanation of probabilistic events.

Although it is is believed that probabilistic events underly our own universe, this probability can be abstracted away in more high-level models.

For instance, quantum physics is necessary for our explanation of an atom -- but it would still be possible to formulate an atom using deterministic laws.

Additionally, we would be ignoring relativity.

So, the statement could be revised to "a universe macroscopically similar to our own could be constructed by a computer program using nothing but fundamental particles and forces/rules"

There is another interpretation which I have just thought of (inspired by MWI), that the result of all quantum events is not random but is actually determined by God.

Such an idea would yield an omnipresent, omnipotent God that is necessary for the progression of every single event in the universe, while not contradicting any of the scientific laws.

Edgar, the conversation has taken a turn away from the objective. Why not start with the work of george LeMaitre. I have a series of papers by him that give the basis for what originated the thinking re: Big Bang. Usually it comes back to Father George, especially since Einstein loade up on him until Einstein himself became a convert.

Aside from Ockham's Razor, anyway....

Thanx Farmerman. I have labored long and hard today. I may not be up to that kind of reading until the weekend. Right now my brain's a greasy old sponge.

LeMaitre - Wikipedia

Biography
At seventeen years old, after studying humanities at a Jesuit school, he entered the civil engineering school of the Catholic University of Leuven. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, he paused his studies to engage as a volunteer in the Belgian army. At the end of hostilities, he received the Military Cross with palms.

After the war, he undertook studies in physics and mathematics and began to prepare for priesthood. He obtained his doctorate in 1920 with a thesis entitled l'Approximation des fonctions de plusieurs variables réelles (Approximation of functions of several real variables), written under the direction of Charles de la Vallée-Poussin.

The tragedy of the war in which he took part deeply marked him: he entered the Mechelen seminary and was ordained as a priest in 1923. However, neither the war nor his studies nor his vocation dried up his curiosity: since 1920, he had learnt the theory of relativity and perfectly mastered it.

In 1923, he visited the University of Cambridge where the astronomer Arthur Eddington initiated him into modern stellar astronomy and numerical analysis. He spent the following year at Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Harlow Shapley, who had just gained a name for his work on nebulae, and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he registered for the doctorate in sciences.

In 1925, on his return to Belgium, he became a part-time lecturer at the University of Leuven. He then began the report which would bring him international notoriety and which was published in 1927 in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles (Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels), under the title Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques (A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae). In this report, he presented the new idea of an expanding Universe.

At this time, Einstein, whilst approving of the mathematics of Lemaître's theory, refused to accept the idea of an expanding Universe. He believed it immutable, but would later recognize that it was the greatest error of his life.

Not very concerned with honors, Lemaître did not think it desirable to become famous, nor to publicize his article. In fact, he was already concentrating on a new challenge: to solve the problem of the origin of the Universe. The same year, he returned to MIT to present his doctoral thesis on The gravitational field in a fluid sphere of uniform invariant density according to the theory of relativity. He obtained a PhD and was then named ordinary Professor at the University of Leuven.

In 1931, Eddington published an English translation of the 1927 article with a long commentary. Lemaître was then invited to London in order to take part in a meeting of the British Association on the relation between the physical Universe and spirituality. It is there that he proposed an expanding Universe which started with an initial singularity, and the idea of the Primeval Atom which he developed in a report published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Lemaître himself liked to describe his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation", which was later to be coined by his critics as the Big Bang theory.

This proposal caused a sharp reaction from the scientific community of the time. Eddington found Lemaître's notion unpleasant. As for Einstein, he found it suspect, because, according to him, it was too strongly reminiscent of the Christian dogma of creation and was unjustifiable from a physical point of view. The debate between cosmology and religion took the form of a polemic that would last several decades. In this debate, Lemaître would be a fundamental actor who unceasingly tried to separate science from faith.

However, in January 1933, Lemaître and Einstein, who had met on several occasions - in 1927 in Brussels, at the time of a Solvay congress, in 1932 in Belgium, at the time of a cycle of conferences in Brussels and lastly in 1935 at Princeton - traveled together to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened".

In 1933, when he resumed his theory of the expanding Universe and published a more detailed version in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, Lemaître would achieve his greatest glory. The American newspapers called him a famous Belgian scientist and described him as the leader of the new cosmological physics.

On March 17, 1934, Lemaître received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Léopold III. His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international jury were Eddington, Langevin and Théophile de Donder. Another distinction that the Belgian government reserves for exceptional scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial prize for applied sciences for the period 1933-1942.

In 1936, he was elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He took an active role there, became the president in March 1960 and remaining so until his death. He was also named prelate in 1960.

In 1941, he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.

In 1946, he published his book on L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif (The Primeval Atom Hypothesis), a book which would be translated into Spanish in the same year and into English in 1950.

In 1953 he was given the very first Eddington Medal award of the Royal Astronomical Society.

During the 1950s, he gradually gave up part of his teaching workload, ending it completely with his éméritat in 1964.

At the end of his life, he was devoted more and more to numerical calculation. He was in fact a remarkable algebraicist and arithmetical calculator. Since 1930, he used the most powerful calculating machines of the time like the Mercedes. In 1958, he introduced at the University a Burroughs E 101, the University's first electronic computer. Lemaître kept a strong interest in the development of computers and, even more, in the problems of language and programming. With age, this interest grew until it absorbed him almost completely.

He died on June 20, 1966 shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, proof of his intuitions about the birth of the Universe.

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Personality
Sociable, devoted to his students and collaborators, he remained, however, an isolated researcher, and one finds only few correspondences and scientific exchanges with his peers.

If this undeniable precursor of modern cosmology remains in the shade of the great names of the 20th century (Einstein, Eddington, Hubble and Gamow in particular), it is probably because he was a priest (Fred Hoyle, who coined the name Big Bang, never forgave him!) and because of the ambiguity of his character, at the same time modest and full of himself. Modest, because he neither pursued honors nor sought at all costs to be recognized. Full of himself, in his manner of affirming, at least in private, his capacities as a mathematician and the originality of his ideas. But that did not prevent him from being open, frank, merry, optimistic, jovial, and always remarkably flexible of mind.

Quite da man!

Reminds if in some very small way of a another SF story I read as a wee lad. A Case Of Conscience:

Told in two parts, the first and much superior of the two was published as early as 1953 as a novella. It focuses on Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit priest who also happens to be a biologist on a four-man team investigating the planet Lithia. Lithia has given rise to a species of intelligent lizard-beings, who have developed a purely rational culture in which everyone pretty much goes about his business, and there is no war, crime, or dissent. There is also no religion; the Lithians seem to be patently incapable of religious faith. For Ruiz-Sanchez, this is a paradox. Convinced, as are many Christians, of the fallacy that ethics and morality without religion are impossible, Ruiz-Sanchez is at a loss to explain this planet, which he likens to the Garden of Eden before original sin came along. Is it possible that original sin simply never happened on Lithia, or could there be another explanation?

That the big bang occurred seems a given. What caused the bang, and what, if anything, may have preceded it is apparently still in question. I am still searching some of this stuff.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/huascar.htm
The rest of this essay can be read at this link.

the Big-Bang a Religious Hoax?
Huascar Terra do Valle

Science is the opposite of religion. Right? No! Wrong! Religion is always trying to infiltrate into religion. Sometimes it succeeds. For instance, in the Big Bang theory.

Today it is almost unanimous among the orthodox astronomers and astrophysics that the world was created some 12 billions ago from a magnificent explosion of a primodial atom. In a few seconds, as the theory goes, all the universe was created from this primordial explosion. From the energy of this fantastic explosion all matter has been created, according to Einstein's theory that matter is energy and vice-versa. Even space and time have been created by this explosion.

There are some astronomers, as Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Herman Bondi, that don't accept the Big Bang theory. They rather believe in a steady-state universe. Regretfully they are the losers in the academic establishment.

To some nonbelievers, like me, the Big Bang theory seems just a disguised version of the Bible creation, when Jehovah said "Fiat Lux", and the universe was created. So far as I am concerned, in spite of the beautiful mathematical formulas of the scholars, I can't accept that this indescribably immense universe has been originated from a single atom (or from a fireball the size of a baseball), all of a sudden, out of nothing. I would rather believe in Santa Claus.

How did such strange idea infiltrate into science? Science began some centuries before Christ, in Classical Greece, when some brilliant minds began to analyse the world free from the shackles of religion. Pitagoras discovered that mathematics rule the world. Leucippus and Democritus figured out that all matter is made of atoms. Hippocrates and Galen robbed Medicine from the priests. Aristaco de Samos found out that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not otherwise. Another Greek scholar measured the distance from the Earth to the Moon and missed by only 200 kilometers. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle abandoned the fables of Greek Mythology in favor of secular Philosophy.

Unfortunately this wonderful beginning was checked by the wide acceptance of the Christian cosmology based in the Bible. Europe remained in the intellectual darkness of Christendom for more than a millennium. The world was only to be awakened by the study of the pagan Greek classics (Renaissance and Humanism).

During more than a millennium the Roman Church has been accustomed to being owner of the truth. The Bible and the pope were declared infallible and those who dared to disagree were considered heretics and condemned to terrible tortures before being sent to the stake. This happened, among thousands, to Giordano Bruno, in the year 1600.

The Church didn't like when, after the Renaissance and after the religious liberty provided by the Protestant revolution, science exploded, explaining all the phenomena of nature without the help of the Bible, not to say of a god. Much to the contrary! Among dozens of discoveries that defied the authority of the Bible, Copernicus and Galileo dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe and Darwin showed that there are not fixed species and that man, instead of being a replica of God, is just a sophisticated ape.

It has not been comfortable for the Catholic Church to lose her authority as a source of truth. The Church never accepted being relegated to a second position. The Roman Church, under the guidance of Pope Pius XI, decided that she could no longer remain away from the debate of the origin of the universe. After all, she had the age-old cosmology of the Genesis to defend.

In the 20's a conference on Cosmology was held in the Vatican, in the Pontificia Academia de Scienza di Roma. The intention was that the Vatican should have a word in the academic establishment on scientific matters. The pope Pius XI decided that the Church had also to make science within the Vatican. Georges Lemaître, a monk with a great knowledge on theology and mathematics, was designated to study Einstein's and other scientist's ideas, with the explicit intention of selling the Roman Church's cosmology.

In 1927 Lemaître, inspired by the Bible's cosmology, developed a theory that the universe began from an explosion of a "primordial atom" (whatever it is). George Gamow follow suit developing the idea that all the constituents of the universe have been created in the first few minutes after the big bang, and Alan Guth, from Cornell University, authored the inflation theory of the Universe, according to which "the entire universe is supposed to have grown from an almost infinitesimal bubble of space, only one trillionth the size of a proton" (apud Herbert Friedman, "The Astronomer's Universe", 1998). Certainly both scientists swallowed Lemaître's bait and gave scientific credibility to the Bible version by elaborating on the beginning of the universe through a primordial explosion.

Hawking also helped to advance the Bible's

I only posted the above because it is the one such criticism of the Big Bang I have found. The author does not offer really compelling information to refute it.

Does not compute.

I think he meant infiltrate into science.

Computes

BEGINNINGS
by Martin Rees

Cosmology is the study of the large scale structure and evolution of the Universe. Where do space, matter, energy, and the forces of nature come from? How did the Universe begin?

70 years ago George Lemaître, a Belgian priest who was also an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate, pioneered the idea that everything began in a dense state. He called this 'the primeval atom', but that phrase never caught on. Nor did the word 'ylem', introduced by the boisterous Russian/American, George Gamow.

These phrases were usurped by the term 'big bang' a flippant term introduced in the 1950s by Fred Hoyle as a detrimental description for a theory he didn't like. Hoyle favoured the view that our Universe was in a 'steady state', with new atoms being 'created' all the time, forming new galaxies and filling in the gaps between the old galaxies, so that everything looked the same. This idea was popular in England in the 1950s, but the voices of the articulate trio who invented it, Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle, never carried across the Atlantic. Nor were their views ideologically acceptable in the Soviet Union.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the most vocal advocates of the Big Bang were George Gamow with collaborators Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann. Gamow studied the physics of the hot dense beginning attracting little interest at the time, mainly because theories about dense beginning of the Universe (if there was one) seemed inaccessible to observations, and therefore pure speculation. The final demise of the steady state model came in 1965, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected the afterglow of hot dense material from the beginning of the Universe. This background hiss perplexed the duo who even considered whether bird droppings in their horn antenna were responsible.


They had, in fact, accidentally discovered the fingerprint of the early Universe. They announced their discovery in a famous paper, Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were radio astronomers, with expertise in electronics rather than cosmology. Their success stemmed from persistence and their technical skills. It wasn't surprising that it took others to convince them of what their discovery meant. In fact Wilson only realised the consequence of his achievement when he read a report of it in the New York Times.


Intergalactic space isn't completely cold, it is warmed slightly by microwaves with no apparent source, suffusing the entire Universe. Its intensity at different wavelengths, when plotted on a graph, traces out what physicists call a 'black body' or 'thermal curve'. This particular curve is explained when the radiation has come into balance with its environment (as happens deep inside a star, or in a steadily burning furnace). But in 1990 the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) provided the evidence for this special spectrum. COBE confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that everything, all the matter that galaxies are now made of, was once a compressed gas, hotter than the Sun's core.

The expansion has cooled and diluted the radiation, and stretched its wavelength. But this primordial heat, the afterglow of creation is still around. It fills the Universe with nowhere else to go! We see it every day, it even causes interference on our TV screens. For its first few minutes, our Universe was far hotter than the centre of the Sun, hotter even than big stars at the end of their lives, and certainly hot enough for nuclear fusion. Fortunately for us, it cooled before there had been enough time to 'process' everything into iron -- the most tightly bound nucleus. If it had stayed hot for longer (or if the reactions had happened faster), there would be no nuclear fuel left to power the stars.

The expanding Universe took hundreds of thousands of years to cool to the temperature of the Sun's surface. At that stage, the electrons and ions combined into neutral atoms that no longer scattered the radiation. The Universe became transparent, lifting the 'fog'. The primeval light then shifted into the infrared part of the spectrum, and the Universe literally became dark, until the first stars formed, lighting it again.

The only cosmological input is the expansion rate. How strongly should we believe the hot Big Bang theory? Certainly more strongly now than in earlier decades. It has lived dangerously ever since the 1960s, and survived. Several things could have been discovered during the 1980s or 1990s that would have discredited this hypothesis. The Big Bang theory deserves to be taken at least as seriously as anything geologists or paeleontologists tell us about the early history of our Earth. Our knowledge is just as indirect (and less quantitative). Its survival gives me (and I suspect most cosmologists today) 99% confidence in extrapolating right back to the first few seconds of cosmic history.

So what can we predict about the future fate of the Universe? Friedmann and Lemaître stated that the expansion of the Universe balanced gravitational attraction to avoid a complete collapse. They concluded that this expansion could either continue forever or eventually reverse into a phase of contraction. With the picture of the expanding Universe coming from the Big Bang, one must wonder if this seemingly endless expansion will reverse itself and lead to a process of Universal contraction.

Sir Martin Rees became Astronomer Royal in 1995 and is Professor in the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge.