This blog spends a certain amount of time knocking organised religion and the control freaks who have inhabited priestly vestments over the centuries. Let us separate the sometimes well-meaning, sometimes ignorant, blather from what we know and what, maybe, we will never know.
We know that the universe is 13 billion years old. We know it is expanding and might well contract sometime. We know the universe is flat, we know a little bit about dark matter, and we have a sneaking suspicion that our universe may be just one of many, and that we on Earth could be one huge accident, a one in a billion offchance. In other words we are alone, an exception in a dark, cold space. Every year we know more, but what we may never know is what preceded the big bang and why, out of what did we come and into what are we expanding. The idea of space without end or purpose is hard to fathom.
So when a religious person “quotes’ God saying, “I said I made the universe, but I never said how I did it, or why”, then we have to concede that, since we know so little, it is arrogant to say that there can be no Prime Mover. What the odds are against is the personal god of the Christian church who hears and answers prayers about petty matters. Prayers may be psychologically efficacious, but the chances of anyone out there answering and doing anything about them are all down to coincidence and chance. What we can agree on is that the universe is mind-blowingly wonderful. But, as matters stand, we simply don’t know what preceded the big bang. Mind you, given the speed of scientific progress even this might be solved in due course. Who could have foreseen, in 1900, the state of knowledge in 2014?
Meanwhile, Epicureans can say “I don’t know” or even espouse the idea of the prime mover, and no one should mock them. To say “I don’t know” is o.k. Meanwhile, the whole subject is amazing and exciting.
Yes, I agree that “I don’t know” is a truthful, therefore helpful response. The trick for our relatively brief life is to navigate with little certainty and without evidence. That is, there is a short-fall between a believing agnosticism on one hand and the imperative to live intelligently and lovingly, on the other,
It also means committing to values which the scientific method is not designed to address at all. Ironically, “agnosticism” requires a far deeper faith than adhering to miracles and magic.
From that point of view, both organized religion and science must operate with, above all, intellectual humility. These days religion claims too much and science can drift into a despairing kind of materialism. Neither mind-set is particularly helpful.
BP, yes, there are alternate explanations of “the red shift and tenets of Big bang cosmology” but to accuse the scientific community of ostracizing and shunning critics on non-scientific grounds requires significant supporting evidence, doesn’t it?