Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Anti-Theist Creation Myth; The Big Bang.

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.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Belief in relativity, IS just another religion.

If you listen to many anti-theists, you will no doubt have come across their tendency to try and use the scientific method as a justification of their ideas.  It generally is presented that verifiable evidence is preferable to unverifiable evidence.  Leaving a side the obvious question of the validity of only considering verifiable evidence, this approach is misguided mostly by the fact that there are an awful lot of cases in science where the established explanation is based on unverified assumptions that have no evidence to support them.

If you are going to require that when an explanation is formulated, only verifiable evidence is allowed to be considered, that leaves you will a big logical problem when the final explanation contains ideas that have never been verified with any experiment.

The best known and most misunderstood example of this is the theory of relativity.  If you ask most people if they think that relativity is a correct, they will say yes.  But if you ask them to explain the theory, very few, even college professors, are able to explain the theory in an adequate way.

The reality is that with some high school level mathematics training, relativity is an extremely simple idea.  It is also quite easy to understand where the theory is useful and where people use it incorrectly.  But a real good question is just how verified is the theory?

Proponents of the theory will claim that it's been verified when actuality, even more than 100 years after it was published, its core concepts have never been tested.  Several tangential aspects of the theory have been verified, but they only show that theory has not been proven wrong.  They are a far cry from showing that the theory is correct.

One thing, most people fail to understand is that there are entire families of theories that predict exactly the same thing relativity does.  Every single observation ever made is equally well explained by those theories as it is by relativity. But if you ask people about WHY relativity is better than those alternative theories, there are even less people that can give that answer than there are people that can explain the basics of relativity itself.

So you may be asking, what is unverified.  Simply put the two postulates that form the basis of the whole theory.  The easiest one to deal with is the invariance of the speed of light. The issue has to do with exactly how you measure that speed.  Basically this can be done one of two ways.

The first way is to setup a light and a clock at one end of some distance, and put a mirror at the other end.  You turn on the light and measure the time it takes for the light to travel to the mirror and return.  This is known as the two way speed of light.

The other way, known as the one way speed of light, is where there are two points at some distance apart that each have clocks that have been synchronized so the time difference for light to travel the distance can be measured.

You would have to be an idiot to not realize that a more complicated test with two clocks that have to be synchronized is less precise than the single clock test.  A major assumption that the two clocks run at the same speed has to be added for the two clock model to hold any validity.  We already know that where you are can absolutely affect the speed a clock runs.

Simply take two identical atomic clocks and place one on the ground floor of a tall building and place the other one on the top floor.  They actually run at different speeds.  This fact is why the GPS system must account for the difference in clock rates in orbit and on the ground.

The relativity proponents will claim that the issue is because of the gravitational field and special relativity does not account for it.  But where exactly have they performed any experiments that are free of any gravitational field?

So we know that clocks DON'T always run at the same speed and we don't have a lab to perform the tests outside of a gravitational field.  So how is the two clock method anything more than being told we should ignore the man behind the curtain?  No experiment is ever actually performed that meets the requirements, and any experiment that is performed must take into account they fact the assumption of the clocks working at the same rate is wrong.

So if we turn our attention to the two way, one clock test, we get around the synchronization and clock rate problems.  But all of a sudden relativity is NOT so assured any more.  Some simple calculations show that whether the speed of light is constant or the speed of light is variable, all possible observations are exactly the same.

The only serious argument that has been made is one that Ritz and deSitter had years ago.  deSitter argued that if light was not constant in speed the observed orbits of binary star systems would be distorted.  But that argument adds another big assumption.  The assumption is that the speed of light is constant over the whole distance regardless of the length of that distance.

Given that today, the farthest any EM signal has been transmitted and received is about 0.002 light years.  That's quite a bit away from being anything near the distance between star systems.  To assert that the speed of light is constant of such a large distance is nothing more than a guess.  Once again no experiment has ever verified the assumption.

So we are left with a situation where the only reliable test is over a very short distance using a method that doesn't rule out the possibility of the assumption being wrong.  So given no experiment has been performed using either of the methods that is not open to serious questions, how can anybody claim relativity is right or wrong?  Simply put there is no verifiable evidence for either position.

So how exactly is belief in relativity any different than a belief in a religion?

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

If they use the word objective, they are religious kooks, unless they are talking about linguistics.

We have all heard both the theists and anti-theists talk about objective versus subjective this or that.  The theists have their objective morality and the anti-theists have their objective reality.  They are both doing the same thing.  They are using the linguistic concepts of the subjective and objective parts of speech to try and add some level of credibility to their statements

For anybody that has studied linguistics, the subjective part represents the entity performing the action, the verb part represents the action, and the objective part represent what is being acted on.  So the use of the term objective outside of linguistics is just an attempt to make something sound independent of the subjective part of the statement. This is an obvious attempt to make it sound immune to personal biases.

The theists use this to assert that morality is completely independent of how somebody thinks about it.  The anti-theists use it to assert that reality is independent of how anybody thinks about it.  But when you start to look at it from this perspective and how they justify this increased level of independence, you quickly find that there is no real basis for the assertion.  You begin to see that all the adjective is being used for is to make the argument SOUND more convincing than it really is.

The question boils down to what is the difference between subjective and objective outside of linguistics.  The simplest way I can come up with to describe it is that subjective refers to cases where a mind is involved and objective is when a mind is not involved.  The theists suggest that their morality would exist regardless of the existence of people and the anti-theists suggest the universe would exist without the existence of people.

But doesn't that beg the question: How could you possibly know anything for certain about a place or time that cannot by definition have anybody experiencing it? Without anybody there to verify the assertion, any claim to having evidence to support the position must be a bold faced lie. The theists try to use the excuse of divine inspiration and the anti-theists try to use the claim that processes worked the same in the past as they do today.

But look closely at those excuses.  How could anybody ever show that either of those is more valid than an assertion of exactly the opposite?  Basically the theists are claiming divine inspiration must have happened because we have their objective morality.  And the anti-theists are claiming that processes must be the same in the past because of what they see now. So how is it with absolutely no evidence, either position is anything but a personal guess?

Both are a bit of trickery known as a logical implication.  If you have studied logic, you will know that an implication is a two input Boolean function where one input is the premise and the other is what is being tested.  The truth table for this function is that when the premise is true, the output follows the value of what is being tested.  However, when the premises is false the output is ALWAYS true.

For example, it the premise is that "Guns kill people" it makes sense to ban guns.  But if the reality is that actually "People kill people" then the original argument is just a ruse to get you to agree with the logic.  If the premise is true the output is meaningful, but if the premise is false the output is meaninglessly always the same. 

So if the premise is wrong, the use of a logical argument has absolutely no power to shed any light on the question.  What the person making the argument was doing was simply being intellectually dishonest.  Either that, or they where just plain stupid, in which case there is even less reason to agree with their argument.

In either case, this amounts to a need for a major red flag to be raised whenever someone uses the word objective in any argument they make.  At a bare minimum it is an indication that you need to be looking VERY closely at any assumptions or premises that might be proposed.  For if you don't accept the premises they are presenting, their argument is even less valuable than to have not made the argument to begin with.

In addition, if you are planning on using the word objective in your argument, you need to be very careful and get your opponent to stipulate to your assumptions before you make the argument.  Otherwise your opponent will simply dismiss your argument on the grounds that you are dishonest or that you are stupid