Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by patrick451 968 days ago
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.
1 comments
Jensson 968 days ago
> 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.

link
patrick451 968 days ago
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.
link
Jensson 968 days ago
> 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?

link