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To: Mudtiger
> Good post but I have some questions. No flame.

Thanks, and I appreciate that. ;-)

> Is the Big bang scientific since “it only offers an explanation without disprovable hypotheses or testable predictions of as-yet unobserved things.”

The Big Bang theory does actually provide quite a few testable predictions of as-yet unobserved things. The description of the events and conditions in the first few instants following the Big Bang are surprisingly well defined by the mathematical models developed over the past decades. They offer lots of opportunities to find flaws, to disprove assumptions, to trim and improve the model and the predictions one can make from the model.

There are, of course, numerous competing variations on the model, and the math, and the challenges fly fast and furious when the better scientists get together.

The high-energy particle colliders (like the LHC) are for exactly that purpose -- to test the predictions that can only be checked under conditions similar to the first instant of the Big Bang.

> If the big bang is "spiritual cosmology" should we expunge it from the science books? Thanks.

If it were, I would say "yes", but it's not -- it's actually very decent scientific theory at this point. All the best scientists have basically lined up behind it, but continue to challenge it and test it and try to poke holes in it, because that is the scientific method.

Did you know that the scientist who first advanced the theory (Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître) was a Roman Catholic priest? ... in addition to being a professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Leuven. Quite a guy.

It is wonderful and pleasing to me that the theory of the Big Bang, the best science can offer for the start of the universe, maps surprisingly well into my personal idea of how God created the universe. But my spiritual cosmology doesn't weaken the scientific basis for the BB -- it merely coincides well with it.

39 posted on 11/12/2009 7:02:36 PM PST by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!)
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To: dayglored

Thanks for the reponse.

What evidence would disprove the big bang? What experiment could we run that would that, if successful, disprove the big bang?


46 posted on 11/13/2009 7:22:41 AM PST by Mudtiger
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