While the Christians have their Genesis creation myth, the anti-theist crowd has their own creation myth in the form of the Big Bang theory. If you listen to the anti-theists they would have you believe the theory is established scientific fact just the same as the Christians would claim the Genesis story is established fact.
In reality the Big Bang theory has absolutely no evidence to support it just as the Genesis story has no evidence. Now of course the anti-theists will start claiming that things like relativity, Hubble’s law, and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are evidence of the correctness of the Big Bang theory. But are they?
Most of this claim there is evidence comes from the observation of the Doppler affect and the observation that light coming from distant sources appears shifted in frequency. The assumption is that this entire shift in frequency is caused by the Doppler affect. However, what evidence is there that this is actually so. Simply put none.
First they assume that light travels unchanged, at a constant speed, for the entirety of its journey from its source to here on earth where we see it. But what evidence is there for that? The furthest that humans have ever transmitted an EM signal is only about 0.002 light years. These signals are the transmissions from the Voyager space craft. So would someone please explain to me how a transmission of such a short length provides any evidence of things working the same way over distances that are billions of times longer?
The Quantum Theory fans would have you believe that the laws of physics are quite different on extremely small scales, so why should we believe they are the same on extremely large scales? At least the quantum fans have some evidence to support their claim.
It is interesting that part of Planck’s kicking off the quantum theory was the relationship between frequency and energy. The higher the frequency of the light, we find the higher the energy level of the light. In general, the light coming from distant objects is red shifted to a lower energy level. The objects further away have a greater red shift.
If light simply lost a little energy during its long travel, we would see what would look like a Doppler shift when we received the light. All it would take is slight drag or loss of energy for this effect to be real. In addition, there would be no way for us to find this experimentally because we cannot transmit and receive light over any significant distance.
Given that some nearby galaxies have a blue shift; it’s not hard to imagine that both a Doppler shift and a slight drag could both be real phenomenon. All observations that we would have made are still valid, only the interpretation of those observations would change.
Most importantly, it would mean that the universe is not expanding. And therefore since it’s not, there is no reason to believe that all the matter used to be closer together, so there is no evidence that a big bang happened.
Recently, a real kink in the big bang theory has come to light (pun intended). Measurements of the red shift from various objects have shown that the rate at which the universe is supposes to be expanding is accelerating. But this is a problem in itself.
According the conservation of energy laws, no new energy is supposes to be created. However to accelerate, you must add energy to the objects that are accelerating. So where is new energy coming from? If the universe is accelerating its expansion must be being caused by additional energy that was not present in the past, or it is being released from someplace where it has been locked up for the entire past of the universe.
Interestingly enough, if the universe was simply cooling down and becoming denser, you might expect that the drag it produces on light would increase. A simple explanation might be that over time the existing energy is getting more and more evenly distributed across the universe. As energy gets more evenly distributed the amount of energy that light has to interact with on its long journey increases. So, this would cause the amount of drag and therefore red shift to increase. This would look like the rate of expansion is increasing when viewed from here on Earth.
About this time the anti-theists will start so say, “You don’t have any evidence for this”. The appropriate response, “Well you don’t have any evidence for your position either”. At which point they generally bring up cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). They generally ask well how do you explain CMBR? Well actually quite easily.
If light is loosing energy as it travels, CMBR is simply light from much further away that has been red shifted down into the microwave range. At this point the smarter ones go after "but we have no evidence the universe is that large". This of course leads to the question of the sensitivity of the instruments being used to see distant objects.
Ever noticed that as equipment has been getting more and more sensitive, the estimated size of the universe has been getting bigger? The simple reality is that to focus light that has longer and longer wavelength (and therefore smaller and smaller frequency) you need a bigger and bigger detector.
Once you have instruments the size of the diameter of the Earth or even the diameter of the Earth’s orbit you MIGHT be able to claim you are actually seeing to the edge of the universe, but any estimate that you are making now, is just you trying to make up a theory that fits the observations you do have.
Give me 1000 years of increases in the sensitivity of detecting equipment without seeing anything further away and you may have some evidence. But claiming there is nothing out there because you haven’t seen it, is just intellectual dishonesty.
The main point of this post was to highlight the fact that given any set of observations it quite easy to come up with alternative explanations that fit those observations perfectly. To choose one particular interpretation and demand that others agree with it is exactly why so many anti-theists are simply pushing their flavor of religion on others.
Anybody can write something in a book and get some group of people to believe it. After a while you get a clergy of people that have studied the book and are somehow qualified to tell others what it means. It doesn’t matter if it religion or science, the same thing is being done.
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