[gwd]

It's interesting that you changed the question, because if you had education answer the same question, it would be a lot less compelling:

> In education: "The earth accumulated matter together after a previous supernova."

> How do you know that? "It's written in this book."

In the vast majority of cases, that is literally how the teacher knows it: they don't actually know the evidence or the chain of reasoning that science took to get to where the current theory is, nor how one could actually go about gathering the evidence oneself to prove it true or false.

[Jensson]

That is a good question since it is well explained in middle school, maybe you forgot it but here goes what they told me in middle school:

We were taught basic nuclear physics in middle school and were shown the valley of stability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_stability

Atoms larger than iron came from atoms crashing together like in an atom bomb ie super novas and similar, while atoms smaller than iron can come from regular decaying processes. Doesn't take much to explain that.

Does it explain exactly how the nuclear energy was calculated? No, but we can see how people figured out that parts of earth came from a super nova. This is very different from just "it was written in a book".

[patrick451]

Science just obfuscates the issue with a lot more layers of sophistry. Ask "and where did that come from" enough times, and you get to the big bang. The origin of that infinitesimally small speck containing all the energy in the universe is just as mysterious as the origin of god.

As an agnostic, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but science has no better explanation for our origin that the religious people do. It just sounds fancier.

[Jensson]

> science has no better explanation for our origin

Science doesn't try to explain our origin. Science is a tool to help us understand how the world works, it isn't there to replace religion.

The big bang is just as far as our explanations can take us. We know a lot about how many things works, by using that knowledge and looking at possible processes that would result in our current state we arrived at the big bang if we look far enough back. There is no belief there, its just us observing the world.

[patrick451]

Oh I know, I've heard all that before. But it's a cop out. Just more sophistry. If science doesn't try to explain our origin, they have no business thinking about the big bang or evolution or anything else that happened billions of years ago. They should only be concerned with the here and now and future prediction. And this is part of the problem. They can't actually test these theories. It's all conjecture. Nobody is running a big bang experiment under various hypothesized conditions to see if actually works. The most charitable characterization of Cosmology is that it is a history, not a science. I think a better description is pseudo science.

[Jensson]

> They should only be concerned with the here and now and future prediction

Anything that can help us figure out ways the past played out can help us understand the future. For example, if we see that many stars have likely gone supernova in the past, we can look at our own star, the sun, and figure out when or if it will go supernova as well. We can't test stars and supernovas because we don't have control over them, but studying those things means we will have a more accurate understanding of the topic than if we didn't.

Gathering data and making theories about that data is science. The scientific method with experiments is the most important signal and it trumps everything else, but when we lack the ability to do experiments then extrapolating what we know from those experiments is the next best thing and it is still science.

Anyway, I'm not sure why you are so anti-science here. Can you explain why you feel you need to put the big bang on the same level as "God did it"? Do you really think that those two things are on the same level here? The big bang comes from extrapolating what we know from experiments and applying it to the universe and then looking at what happens if we play that backwards. It is a very mundane thing.

Edit: An example that is similar to big bang:

You stand on an open field. You feel something hitting your head. You look down and see a ball. You turn around and see a person standing there, nobody else in sight. Do you think these two are the same level:

"God created the ball and dropped it on your head"

"The person you see had the ball and threw it at your head"

You would say "We can't know for sure which is true, they are equally valid beliefs!", right? If not, why do you think this is different?

[c0pium]

It’s the same thing. You have to ask why a few more times, but you get to the same place.

[Jensson]

No it isn't the same thing. It clearly explains why these scientists believe parts of earth came from a supernova, and the steps you yourself would have to take to see the same things as them.

If you say that is the same thing as religion, then I ask you what steps do I have to take to meet God? I know how to replicate the physics steps, but nobody tells me how to replicate anything that religious people believe in. That makes them inherently different and not at all similar.

[c0pium]

Where did the supernova come from. Where did the Big Bang come from.

It’s written in a book.

[gwd]

> maybe you forgot it but here goes what they told me in middle school:

The first time I remember hearing that theory was as an adult in a public lecture by an astrophysicist at a local university. (It sounds like I may be a decade or more older than you.) The speaker recited the theory, followed by "at least, that's our current best model", as though they were a Sunday-school teacher reciting some pat explanation for "Why did God made the snake?" that they weren't entirely convinced by.

Which is pretty much exactly my point: real scientists think in terms of evidence and possible models, which are challenged and revised all the time. The lecture wasn't about the development of matter in the universe, so the speaker didn't go into the details, but presumably they knew all the problems with that model.

What's taught to children isn't typically evidence and various models. It's not even typically the most recent best model; at best it will be the best model at the time the textbook came out. At worst it might be the best model at the time the textbook's author left university.

But you know what? That's OK. Middle schoolers don't yet need to have a 100% accurate picture of how the elements formed. They more need to know that the universe is predictable and comprehensible; they need to be given a "big picture" to either decide to learn more about, if they become scientists or engineers, or to talk with scientists and engineers if they instead become managers or politicians (or even stay-at-home parents deciding whether to give their children vaccines).

In the same vein, the people at the time Genesis was written didn't need to be taught astrophysics. They needed to be given an alternate to the Babylonian creation myth.

Go look up the Babylonian creation myth on Wikipedia. The earth and humans were formed from the carcass and blood of various gods after epic battles, more or less by accident; until the gods noticed the humans and thought they'd look like good slaves. Now think about how that story answers these questions: "What is the universe like, and what is my place in it as a normal human being?"

Now read the Genesis account, where God intentionally, step by step creates things in a logical progression, bringing order from chaos. At each step he "saw that it was good", and at the end he "saw that it was very good". How does the Genesis story answer those questions differently than the Babylonian story?

That is what the original readers of Genesis needed to know, and so that's what God told them. How the elements and the planets formed is something we've been allowed to work out on our own.

[epups]

Sorry but there is an incomparable difference between knowledge obtained by revelation and scientific method. The book is the vehicle, not the source of knowledge for the latter.

[graemep]

The book is a vehicle for the former too. The source of knowledge is whoever had the revelation or who ever sent/was the revelation.

Not all religious people have the same views as American Christian or Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalists. For most the books are not literal, and personal experience (of self or others) matters more.