Is the Big Bang in the Bible?

[Buster's Uncle]

Is the Big Bang in the Bible?
The Daily Beast
By Karl W. Giberson  20 hours ago






The “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe got a big boost this week when scientists reported the discovery of 14-billion-year-old echoes of the universe’s first moments—the first proof of an expanding universe, and the last piece of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Creationists and other conservative religious believers have a curiously ambivalent relationship with the Big Bang—unlike evolution, which is universally condemned. Young-earth creationists mock the Big Bang as a wild guess, an anti-biblical fantasy that only atheists determined to ignore evidence of God’s creation could have invented. In contrast, creationists who accept that the earth is old—by making the “days” of creation in Genesis into long epochs—actually claim that the Big Bang is in the Bible. Some of them are rejoicing in the recent discovery.

The leading evangelical anti-science organization is Answers in Genesis (AIG), headed by Ken Ham, the guy who recentlydebated Bill Nye. AIG’s dismissive response to the discovery is breathtaking in its hubris and lack of insight into how science works. They call for Christians to reject the discovery because the “announcement may be improperly understood and reported.” This all-purpose response would also allow one to deny that there is a missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.

Secondly, Answers in Genesis complains that the predictions being confirmed in the discovery are “model-dependent.” They fail to note that every scientific prediction ever confirmed, from the discovery of Neptune, to DNA, to the Ambulecetus transitional fossil is “model-dependent.” The whole point of deriving predictions in science is to test models, hypotheses, theories. Finally, AIG suggests that “other mechanisms could mimic the signal,” implying that, although the startling prediction was derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the inflationary model of the Big Bang, it could have come from “some other physical mechanism.” No alternative mechanism is suggested.

The AIG response declares instead that “Biblical creationists know from Scripture that the universe did not begin in a big bang … we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did.”

Not all biblical literalists take such a hard-line stance. Like Ham, the popular Christian apologist Hugh Ross is a biblical literalist who rejects all forms of evolution: Ross believes that the “days” of creation in Genesis are vast epochs and thus the universe can be billions of years old. Ross heads the organization Reasons to Believe, which is often ++attacked by AIG++ and other young earth creationist groups for having a “liberal” view of the Bible. (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross)

Ross, an astronomer by training, was delighted by the discovery of the gravitational waves and told the Christian Post that “The Bible was the first to predict big bang cosmology.” Ross, in fact, is convinced that many ideas in modern science—including the inflationary model for the Big Bang confirmed by the recent discovery—were actually predicted by the Bible. He argues—to the dismay of Hebrew scholars—that the word “bara,” translated “create” in Genesis 1:1, means “to bring into existence that which did not exist before.” Ross has ingeniously located much of modern physics in the Bible, including the laws of thermodynamics and the Big Bang.

The initial response from the Discovery Institute, the headquarters of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, maligned the motivations of the cosmologists searching for the gravity wave, claiming they found more theologically friendly models of the Big Bang “disturbing,” and wanted to refute them. The recent discovery of the gravity waves—after years of searching—is being trumpeted by the scientific community because it “saves the jobs of a thousand people at two national labs who are having to justify their expensive failure.

Despite his organization’s snarky cynicism, the Discovery Institute’s director, bestselling ID author Stephen Meyer, was in the this-new-discovery-proves-the-Bible camp. Meyer went on the John Ankerberg show to extol the theological virtues of the Big Bang. Using the same arguments as Hugh Ross, Meyer finds both the Big Bang and even the inflation model in the Bible: “We find repeated in the Old Testament, both in the prophets and the Psalms,” he told the Christian Post, “that God is stretching or has stretched out the heavens.” Meyer says this “stretching” means that “Space expanded very rapidly,” and the recent discovery provided “additional evidence supporting that inflation.”

Meyer and Ross are right that English translations of the Bible do speak of the heavens being “stretched out.” But to suggest that this is what has been confirmed by the recent discovery is simply not possible. A typical biblical passage supporting this claim is found in Isaiah 40:22 where we read that God “stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” Does this really sound like an event at the beginning of time when the universe experienced a momentary burst of expansion? And what do we make of the apocalyptic vision described in Revelation 6:14 that, at the end of time, “the sky rolled back like a scroll”?

The biblical authors—and most ancients—understood the sky over their heads to be a solid dome—an inverted bowl resting on a flat earth for the authors of Genesis, a crystalline sphere surrounding a round earth for Aristotle and most Christians until the scientific revolution. The Hebrew word used in Genesis for the sky is “raqia” which means “bowl” or “dome.” It does not mean “space-time continuum” and it is not something that could be “inflated.” It could, however, be “stretched out like a tent” or “rolled back like a scroll.” These divergent responses are full of hubris in both directions, making extravagant claims for or against scientific discovery, embracing or rejecting science on the basis of existing religious commitments. But these extremes aren’t the only ways for religious believers to respond to major scientific breakthroughs. Not every scientific idea has to have a theological interpretation, although the tendency to fit new science into ancient religious frameworks is often irresistible. And the Big Bang is certainly no exception.

The Big Bang theory, in fact, was developed in the 1920s by a Catholic priest who was also an acclaimed physicist, the Monsignor Georges Lemaître. It was ridiculed and rejected by Lemaître’s atheist colleague, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle applied the derisive term “Big Bang” to Lemaître’s theory in a 1949 BBC interview—a nasty label that stuck.

Hoyle, who labored heroically to produce an alternative theory, didn’t like the theological implications of the universe beginning suddenly in a moment of “creation.” It sounded too much like the first verse in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And, as Hoyle and others noted, Lemaître was a priest who might reasonably be suspected of trying to smuggle Catholic theology into science.

Hoyle’s concern was amply illustrated in 1951 when Pope Pius XII declared that, in discovering the Big Bang, science had indeed established the Christian doctrine of the “contingency of the universe” and identified the “epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.” “Creation took place,” the pope said. “Therefore, there is a creator. Therefore, God exists!”

Both Lemaître and the Vatican’s science advisor were horrified by the Pope’s confident assertion that physics had proven God. They warned him privately that he was shaky ground: the Big Bang was not a theory about the ultimate origin of the universe and should not be enlisted in support of the Christian belief in a Creator. The pope never mentioned it again.

Ironically, in this dispute, the atheist Hoyle was on the side of the pope in seeing a linkage between the Big Bang and God. It was Lemaître and the pope’s science advisors who saw clearly that scientific theories, no matter how well-established, should not be enlisted in support of theological notions. And, as the Catholic Church learned in the Galileo affair, scientific theories should not be opposed on theological or biblical grounds.

These lessons have been learned by Catholics, for the most part, as evidenced by the relative scarcity of prominent Catholic science-deniers. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same things for many evangelical Protestants, many of whom belong to truncated religious traditions that began after Galileo, or even after John F. Kennedy. They lack the accumulated wisdom that restrains the pope from inspecting every new scientific discovery and either rejecting it because it counters a particular interpretation of Genesis or enthusiastically endorsing it because it confirms this or that doctrine. And when the pope strays, his advisors quickly get him back on track. Catholic thinking on science is informed by the pontifical academy of science, an advisory group with no counterpart in Protestantism.

Ken Ham and his colleagues at Answers in Genesis, Hugh Ross and his colleagues at Reasons to Believe, and Stephen Meyer and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute are too quick to embrace, reject, or gloss with theological meaning the latest scientific discoveries. Rather than rushing to the Bible to see whether its ancient pages can accommodate the latest science, they would do well to heed this caution from Lemaître, as he spoke of the theory that he discovered:

“We may speak of this event as of a beginning. I do not say a creation … Any preexistence of the universe has a metaphysical character. Physically, everything happens as if the theoretical zero was really a beginning. The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations.”

http://news.yahoo.com/big-bang-bible-040000314--politics.html

...

Comments, gentlemen?

[gwillybj]

"The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations.”

Being a theophile, a creationist, and a science-minded person, this much I can agree with.
The dogmatic statements by the folks at AiG, RtB, and DI are far from anything I've been taught.
I was not taught these things "from infancy," either. I was a 14-year-old cynical realist heading into High School to learn the Sciences in order to silence the questions in my own mind. I learned that science right alongside my scriptural studies, and find no reason the two cannot coexist in my brain.

[Impaler]

Scientists like Hoyle certainly had an initial bias against the BB as steady-state had been the default position of Astronomy for ages, the sky has always been more or less changeless so this was considered the rational 'default' position.

The real acceptance of the BB among scientists was NOT driven by the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) as is often proclaimed, it fits the BB theory well but it is just black-body radiation, a whole variety of theories might spit out something similar so it on it's own proves nothing.  The real kicker was Type Ia super-Nova light-curve time dilation, aka distant events appear to be stretched over time in a way that can only conceivable be the result of the expansion of space, and the BB theory is really just the straightforward backwards extrapolation of that expansion of space back to a point when everything is on-top of itself. 

The slight similarity to biblical stories was not in my opinion relevant to the scientific consensus around the BB theory, though it dose explain some of the difference in vitriol directed at the theory vs Evolution, should scientific consensus ever move back to a steady-state model you would see an increase in vitriol directed as astronomy, but still probably not equal to what evolution gets as that theory is by nature so much more visceral in it's implications for the average lay person or religious zealot.  On a related note the theories of Sigmund Freud are in a way even MORE visceral as they deal without our mind/soul, it is said that while Darwin showed that we are descended from animals, Freud showed that we behave like animals.  In a way Freud attacks the very idea of the soul which is very close to home for lots of people.  A lot of the vitriol against evolution is actually a rejection of Freud because Darwin and Freud being so close in time become mingled in the Victorian mind and this commingling has been handed down to us.  When people attack evolution they are mostly defending the belief in the soul and the nobility of the human mind.


But their is a problem with the BB theory itself, other objects at great distance are NOT showing time-dilation, the pulsation rate of Quasars have never shown it and this has been a lingered problem for decades, which was bad enough.  But then a few years back extremely brief but extremely distant gamma-ray bursts were discovered and these were also without any time-dilation.

If space is really expanding the time-dilation fingerprint MUST be on everything but 2 out of 3 tests are coming back negative, and the Quasars and Gamma-ray bursts are FAR more distant then observable Super Novas, they should be hugely dilated.  Our observed SN's are fairly close and are only dilated about 40% more then normal which is really not that much when dealing with a star as stars normally vary by many orders of magnitude in size and energy output.  We would need to be absolutely certain that these events are perfectly similar in brightness and duration to conclude that time-dilation is occurring. 

The Chandera limit theory provided such a basis for this belief as it describes the mass at which a white-dwarf star will implode and then explode under it's own weight, but it is a brutal simplification in which rotation and magnetic fields are ignored.  Account for thouse variables and a star can be considerably above the limit and possibly slightly below it, also the merger of two stars is likely able to create a huge range of explosion sizes.  Now IF the duration of these explosions correlates with their size, which models do predict, then it would be very easy for us in the search for very distant Super Novas to preferentially or only find the brightest ones, and these being longer in duration would APPEAR to be dilated in a fairly linear relationship with distance.

And low and behold he have in fact observed SN that are nearby (such that no dilation should be happening) which are in fact dilated, SN 2001ay was a good example of this.  So the standard-candle nature of these SN's is quite in doubt and should further observation invalidate the time-dilation of SN's the BB theory will immediately collapse.  I think this is actually rather likely in the next few decades as further study of SN's continues and better telescopes see further and give a larger sample size.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've never seen any explanation/rational for the assumption if the Standard Candle for supernovas, and I fancy I've a good grasp of that sort of astronomical thingy.

The phenomena you describe makes me wonder about the interpretation of relatively local observations - since dark matter is bull -it is- there must be something we don't understand about how gravity works on a galactic scale...

[Buster's Uncle]

Confirming the Big Bang's Inflation: Q&A with Study Leader John Kovac
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer  10 hours ago



The tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (shown here as color) trace primordial density fluctuations in the early universe that seeded the later growth of galaxies



On Monday (March 17), a team of astronomers sent a jolt through the physics and cosmology communities and made front-page news around the world.

The researchers, led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announced that they had detected a type of polarization called "B-modes" in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the ancient light that began saturating the universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

The B-modes could only have been produced by gravitational waves a few tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, during a period called "inflation" which saw the universe expand from mere quantum fluctuations to something of macroscopic size, scientists say.

If it holds up — and most astronomers seem to think it will — the discovery opens a new window onto a realm of extreme physics and gives astronomers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.

Space.com caught up with Kovac recently to talk about the big find, its implications and what the discovery means to him and his team on a personal level.


Space.com: What does this mean for astronomy and cosmology? What's the biggest implication of this find?

John Kovac: Well, the B-mode signature in the CMB at the angular scales — angular scales from 1 to 5 degrees, that is — is widely regarded as the "smoking gun" signature of inflation. It's the unique prediction of inflation that we wouldn't expect to be there in the universe, according to any alternative theory. It's fundamentally built into the paradigm of inflation itself, this prediction.

So, having seen a signal with our telescopes, and very clearly, and with high signal to noise, that appears to match that prediction exactly — this is by far the most direct evidence that the universe has apparently offered us that inflation is in fact correct.


Space.com: How sure are you about the B-mode detection? Is there any other explanation, or is this pretty much a slam dunk?

Kovac: The paper describes the statistical confidence of the measurement, and it is between five and seven sigma. That is extremely significant; the signal to noise is very high.

We have for years pored over this dataset and done all kinds of internal consistency checks, and that high signal to noise allows us to slice up our data in many ways and confirm that the signal that we see is seen consistently in all parts of the data. That allows us to rule out many possible instrumental effects that one might worry about.

So we've done that very carefully, and we're very confident that the signal that we're seeing is real and it's on the sky. This is probably a direct image of gravitational waves across the sky, showing us the early universe.



John Kovac, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in front of the Keck Array (right) and BICEP2 telescope (left), with the South Pole Telescope in the background (far left).


The possibility that a B-mode pattern in the polarization is produced by something other than inflation or gravitational waves is of course something that we can't rule out absolutely, but we explore the possibilities in our paper.

The possibility that the B-mode signal that we're seeing is produced by a pattern of polarized dust in our own galaxy, for example, is a possibility that many people consider and are rightly concerned about. And we'll say that the data that we've got right now disfavor that explanation through multiple lines of reasoning.

So we believe that by far the most likely explanation is that it is the B-mode signature from inflation, a direct image of the gravitational waves that are predicted by inflation.

It's going to be controversial. We can expect that people will try to shoot at it from every direction, and we invite that — that's the scientific process, and it'll be fun and interesting.


Space.com: So this detection is a smoking gun for inflation. But does it also tell us about how the inflation process occurred?

Kovac: Yes, it does. There are many details, many models of inflation. But the basics of the inflationary paradigm are well-established and are universal. One of them is that the amplitude of these gravitational waves directly corresponds to how fast the universe was inflating at the time those cosmological scales were projected out of the horizon during this early process. And how fast the universe was inflating directly tells you at what energy inflation was happening.

The scale that we are probing with our experiment, the scale at which we have detected this signal, corresponds to what has long been understood to be the predicted energy scale at which grand unified theories operate, and unify the strong, the weak and the electromagnetic force all together. So those are energies of 10^16 GeV or so, gigaelectron volts. That has long been a popular choice for imagining what is the likely energy scale of inflation, broadly speaking.

So an implication of seeing gravitational waves at the strength that we've seen them is that, yes, in fact, that is the energy scale of inflation. And another thing that is an important aspect of this that is quite fundamental is that the production of these gravitational waves during the inflationary process relies on the interaction of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It actually relies on there being gravitons, the gravitational field being quantized. And that is something of which we'd had no prior direct evidence.


Space.com: So the existence of gravitons is now on solid ground as well?

Kovac: Well, if gravity were not quantized somehow — and I think everybody assumes that it must be, or we don't really understand physics at all — but if it were not quantized, then you would not expect this background of gravitational waves from inflation.

So it's usually a starting assumption that is built into all of these theories of inflation, but it's not something to take for granted, either. This is a point that has been highlighted by some physicists recently — that many cosmologists take this point for granted, but it is quite fundamental.


Space.com: This discovery will doubtless inspire many other projects. What do you hope future experiments will do, or what do you expect them to do?

Kovac: There are many experiments out there that are already very actively looking for this B-mode signal from inflation, so I'm sure it will not be long before there is follow-up, from us and from others — including from the [European Space Agency's] Planck satellite, we hope. And that follow-up will broaden the coverage and the information we have about this signal to multiple frequencies and a larger fraction of the sky, and in the process we'll be learning more about the inflationary process.

As we cover a broader range of angular scales, we'll actually be tracking the evolution of inflation, the evolution of the energy scale as inflation unfolds. And that's a very exciting prospect.


Space.com: On a personal note, how does it feel to be the leader of the team that makes such a potentially monumental discovery?

Kovac: It's extremely exciting — many people on our team have worked for many years on this result. But we are all at this point focused on doing the most careful and correct job that we can of explaining our measurements to the scientific community, because we understand how important this is. We know that what we have is potentially very, very exciting in its implications.


Space.com: Finally, what have the last few days been like for you? And were you surprised that the results made such a big splash around the world, or were you prepared to become a sort of science rock star?

Kovac: Well, I must say that we appreciated how the importance of our results and their potential bearing on fundamental physics — we expected there would be news, but not this level; the response has been quite overwhelming. I'm exhausted, but it makes me appreciate (again) just how universal is our interest in the really big questions.

Andrew Lange, my mentor at Caltech and a great leader of these experiments who, sadly, passed away four years ago, used to inspire people about the potential of science by posing the question, "How far can we see?" I expect he would say now that it's apparent the answer is much farther back than we once dared imagine was possible. That has captured a lot of people's imagination.

http://news.yahoo.com/confirming-big-bangs-inflation-q-study-leader-john-121047123.html

...

On the other end of the size spectrum, I should mention that all those weird effects they can't explain in quantum mechanics?  The six missing spatial dimensions from string theory.  I always heard they were very small dimensions...

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA says it may have new evidence of the seeds of black holes
The Sideshow
By Eric Pfeiffer  4 hours ago



The red dot in the center of this image taken from the NGC 4395 galaxy may be a supermassive black hole. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)



NASA says it may have found evidence of the seeds of black holes, pointing to the origins of the universe itself.

New information from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has revealed that supermassive black holes are located even in so-called dwarf galaxies. The finding is significant, because the standard belief is that black holes were formed when galaxies collided, forming larger celestial bodies.

"Our findings suggest the original seeds of supermassive black holes are quite massive themselves," said George Mason University’s Shobita Satyapal, lead author of the new study. The paper was published in the latest issue of Astrophysical Journal.

The use of infrared technology allows WISE to pick up details that other telescopes couldn’t otherwise detect through traditional visible light sources that are unable to penetrate through the thick layers of dust that occupy parts of deep space.

"Though it will take more research to confirm whether the dwarf galaxies are indeed dominated by actively feeding black holes, this is exactly what WISE was designed to do: find interesting objects that stand out from the pack," NASA astronomer Daniel Stern, who did not participate in the study, said.

Black holes remain an ongoing source of mystery and speculation in the scientific community. Most smaller galaxies observed by NASA are described as “bulgeless," meaning they do not appear to possess a cluster of stars near the galaxy's center. But the infrared data gathered by WISE indicates that there may actually be giant black holes existing at the center of these smaller galaxies.

For years, scientists have worked to confirm the existence of smaller, intermediate black holes. While those smaller black holes remain elusive, it has been assumed by some that they must have existed at some point before becoming the supermassive black holes we are more familiar with today.

But Satyapal says the WISE findings could mean that supermassive black holes have been around since the earliest days of the universe itself, approximately 15 billion years ago. As the universe itself has expanded over time, the black holes have also theoretically grown.

"We still don't know how the monstrous black holes that reside in galaxy centers formed," Satyapal said. "But finding big black holes in tiny galaxies shows us that big black holes must somehow have been created in the early universe, before galaxies collided with other galaxies."

Other scientists have theorized that  exploding stars may be creating infant, intermediate black holes on a regular basis. As those newborn black holes consume gas from within their host galaxy, they would continue to grow over time. And the very existence of black holes, at least as we currently understand them, was  recently brought into question by Stephen Hawking.

The WISE telescope was recently put back into service by NASA as part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s ongoing efforts to detect near-Earth objects, that is,  asteroids that potentially pose a threat to Earth.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/nasa-says-it-may-have-discovered-the-seeds-of-black-holes-235047309.html

...

Of course early universe masscons were the seeds of early galaxies, and of course they collapsed into black holes...

[Rusty Edge]

The phenomena you describe makes me wonder about the interpretation of relatively local observations - since dark matter is bull -it is- there must be something we don't understand about how gravity works on a galactic scale...

Maybe you should write an article about that for The Onion.

[Buster's Uncle]

How much they pay me to pretend I don't believe what I'm saying?

[Rusty Edge]

I have no clue.

Of course a link on their site to yours might be worth something to you.

"Dark Matter Discovered in the Constellation Taurus"

[Buster's Uncle]

Cosmologists Admit: Dark Matter So Much "Dark Matter"

[Geo]

"Dark Matter Discovered in the Constellation Taurus"

Cosmologists Admit: Dark Matter So Much "Dark Matter"

What are you guys talking about? It isn't April yet...

[Rusty Edge]

"Dark Matter Discovered in the Constellation Taurus"

Cosmologists Admit: Dark Matter So Much "Dark Matter"

What are you guys talking about? It isn't April yet...

You joke and tease so much that it's hard to know when you are being serious.

Supposing that you are-

The Onion  http://www.theonion.com/  is a website that is dedicated to news parody. Sometimes it is too subtle and taken seriously, which is even funnier.

IF I UNDERSTAND HIM CORRECTLY, Buncle suggests that dark matter is scientific crap designed to disguise scientific ignorance as authority with regard to gravity.  Something along the lines of "the ether" and "the humors" which scientists and doctors believed in during the 1700s.

I suggest that he should write a funny pseudo-article about it.

[Buster's Uncle]

You left out "Phlogiston" and "The Spheres".   I don't doubt the sincerity of anyone's belief about "Dark Matter" - but it does smell to me of serious error - Great Embarrassing Boners of Science History serious.  Occam's Razor and all that.

I probably speak cosmology/astrophysics more than well enough for a science reporter, so I DO like the idea.  It would be sweet to break into getting paid to write bullcrap for The Onion, and make money out of my journalism studies for the first time in 22 years...

[Valka]

Is the Big Bang in the Bible?
The Daily Beast
By Karl W. Giberson  20 hours ago






The “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe got a big boost this week when scientists reported the discovery of 14-billion-year-old echoes of the universe’s first moments—the first proof of an expanding universe, and the last piece of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Creationists and other conservative religious believers have a curiously ambivalent relationship with the Big Bang—unlike evolution, which is universally condemned. Young-earth creationists mock the Big Bang as a wild guess, an anti-biblical fantasy that only atheists determined to ignore evidence of God’s creation could have invented. In contrast, creationists who accept that the earth is old—by making the “days” of creation in Genesis into long epochs—actually claim that the Big Bang is in the Bible. Some of them are rejoicing in the recent discovery.

The leading evangelical anti-science organization is Answers in Genesis (AIG), headed by Ken Ham, the guy who recentlydebated Bill Nye. AIG’s dismissive response to the discovery is breathtaking in its hubris and lack of insight into how science works. They call for Christians to reject the discovery because the “announcement may be improperly understood and reported.” This all-purpose response would also allow one to deny that there is a missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.

Secondly, Answers in Genesis complains that the predictions being confirmed in the discovery are “model-dependent.” They fail to note that every scientific prediction ever confirmed, from the discovery of Neptune, to DNA, to the Ambulecetus transitional fossil is “model-dependent.” The whole point of deriving predictions in science is to test models, hypotheses, theories. Finally, AIG suggests that “other mechanisms could mimic the signal,” implying that, although the startling prediction was derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the inflationary model of the Big Bang, it could have come from “some other physical mechanism.” No alternative mechanism is suggested.

The AIG response declares instead that “Biblical creationists know from Scripture that the universe did not begin in a big bang … we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did.”

Not all biblical literalists take such a hard-line stance. Like Ham, the popular Christian apologist Hugh Ross is a biblical literalist who rejects all forms of evolution: Ross believes that the “days” of creation in Genesis are vast epochs and thus the universe can be billions of years old. Ross heads the organization Reasons to Believe, which is often ++attacked by AIG++ and other young earth creationist groups for having a “liberal” view of the Bible. (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross)

Ross, an astronomer by training, was delighted by the discovery of the gravitational waves and told the Christian Post that “The Bible was the first to predict big bang cosmology.” Ross, in fact, is convinced that many ideas in modern science—including the inflationary model for the Big Bang confirmed by the recent discovery—were actually predicted by the Bible. He argues—to the dismay of Hebrew scholars—that the word “bara,” translated “create” in Genesis 1:1, means “to bring into existence that which did not exist before.” Ross has ingeniously located much of modern physics in the Bible, including the laws of thermodynamics and the Big Bang.

The initial response from the Discovery Institute, the headquarters of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, maligned the motivations of the cosmologists searching for the gravity wave, claiming they found more theologically friendly models of the Big Bang “disturbing,” and wanted to refute them. The recent discovery of the gravity waves—after years of searching—is being trumpeted by the scientific community because it “saves the jobs of a thousand people at two national labs who are having to justify their expensive failure.

Despite his organization’s snarky cynicism, the Discovery Institute’s director, bestselling ID author Stephen Meyer, was in the this-new-discovery-proves-the-Bible camp. Meyer went on the John Ankerberg show to extol the theological virtues of the Big Bang. Using the same arguments as Hugh Ross, Meyer finds both the Big Bang and even the inflation model in the Bible: “We find repeated in the Old Testament, both in the prophets and the Psalms,” he told the Christian Post, “that God is stretching or has stretched out the heavens.” Meyer says this “stretching” means that “Space expanded very rapidly,” and the recent discovery provided “additional evidence supporting that inflation.”

Meyer and Ross are right that English translations of the Bible do speak of the heavens being “stretched out.” But to suggest that this is what has been confirmed by the recent discovery is simply not possible. A typical biblical passage supporting this claim is found in Isaiah 40:22 where we read that God “stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” Does this really sound like an event at the beginning of time when the universe experienced a momentary burst of expansion? And what do we make of the apocalyptic vision described in Revelation 6:14 that, at the end of time, “the sky rolled back like a scroll”?

The biblical authors—and most ancients—understood the sky over their heads to be a solid dome—an inverted bowl resting on a flat earth for the authors of Genesis, a crystalline sphere surrounding a round earth for Aristotle and most Christians until the scientific revolution. The Hebrew word used in Genesis for the sky is “raqia” which means “bowl” or “dome.” It does not mean “space-time continuum” and it is not something that could be “inflated.” It could, however, be “stretched out like a tent” or “rolled back like a scroll.” These divergent responses are full of hubris in both directions, making extravagant claims for or against scientific discovery, embracing or rejecting science on the basis of existing religious commitments. But these extremes aren’t the only ways for religious believers to respond to major scientific breakthroughs. Not every scientific idea has to have a theological interpretation, although the tendency to fit new science into ancient religious frameworks is often irresistible. And the Big Bang is certainly no exception.

The Big Bang theory, in fact, was developed in the 1920s by a Catholic priest who was also an acclaimed physicist, the Monsignor Georges Lemaître. It was ridiculed and rejected by Lemaître’s atheist colleague, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle applied the derisive term “Big Bang” to Lemaître’s theory in a 1949 BBC interview—a nasty label that stuck.

Hoyle, who labored heroically to produce an alternative theory, didn’t like the theological implications of the universe beginning suddenly in a moment of “creation.” It sounded too much like the first verse in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And, as Hoyle and others noted, Lemaître was a priest who might reasonably be suspected of trying to smuggle Catholic theology into science.

Hoyle’s concern was amply illustrated in 1951 when Pope Pius XII declared that, in discovering the Big Bang, science had indeed established the Christian doctrine of the “contingency of the universe” and identified the “epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.” “Creation took place,” the pope said. “Therefore, there is a creator. Therefore, God exists!”

Both Lemaître and the Vatican’s science advisor were horrified by the Pope’s confident assertion that physics had proven God. They warned him privately that he was shaky ground: the Big Bang was not a theory about the ultimate origin of the universe and should not be enlisted in support of the Christian belief in a Creator. The pope never mentioned it again.

Ironically, in this dispute, the atheist Hoyle was on the side of the pope in seeing a linkage between the Big Bang and God. It was Lemaître and the pope’s science advisors who saw clearly that scientific theories, no matter how well-established, should not be enlisted in support of theological notions. And, as the Catholic Church learned in the Galileo affair, scientific theories should not be opposed on theological or biblical grounds.

These lessons have been learned by Catholics, for the most part, as evidenced by the relative scarcity of prominent Catholic science-deniers. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same things for many evangelical Protestants, many of whom belong to truncated religious traditions that began after Galileo, or even after John F. Kennedy. They lack the accumulated wisdom that restrains the pope from inspecting every new scientific discovery and either rejecting it because it counters a particular interpretation of Genesis or enthusiastically endorsing it because it confirms this or that doctrine. And when the pope strays, his advisors quickly get him back on track. Catholic thinking on science is informed by the pontifical academy of science, an advisory group with no counterpart in Protestantism.

Ken Ham and his colleagues at Answers in Genesis, Hugh Ross and his colleagues at Reasons to Believe, and Stephen Meyer and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute are too quick to embrace, reject, or gloss with theological meaning the latest scientific discoveries. Rather than rushing to the Bible to see whether its ancient pages can accommodate the latest science, they would do well to heed this caution from Lemaître, as he spoke of the theory that he discovered:

“We may speak of this event as of a beginning. I do not say a creation … Any preexistence of the universe has a metaphysical character. Physically, everything happens as if the theoretical zero was really a beginning. The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations.”

http://news.yahoo.com/big-bang-bible-040000314--politics.html

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Comments, gentlemen?

*ahem* And ladies, too...

we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did.”

And the problem with that is...?

[Buster's Uncle]

...And Ladies, too. 

Been on gaming forums too long.