From Aristotle to the Big Bang and its metaphysical gospel. The Pantheistic, Materialistic nature of Science and $cientism.

A long history from the Greeks to modern cosmology. Yet the same issues persist. The Big Bang is a theory in Big Trouble.

Preface

“The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues.” Einstein

Atheism asserts that there is a latent conflict between religion and ‘science’.  Ironically this theorem has little historical support and ignores the epistemological data to the contrary.  Epistemology is the study of knowledge and within this domain broadly speaking, there is a paucity of inclusive treatments within the realities of both the scientific and the religious experience and their often intertwined if not inter-dependent dimensions.  In short, they are not mutually exclusive and when a layman analyses and critiques the ‘scientific truths’ of the day, he will often remark that what is offered seems rather religious.

The ‘Big Bang’ theorem is religiously held by its adherents as proof of material dialecticism and endless time.  The most rabid proponents are Atheists, though many religious also believe in and support the doctrine.  The Bangers hang their hats on ‘science’ which they rarely define beyond referencing a ‘scientific method’, an explanatory framework of scientific discovery that has many different interpretations and implementations.  However, the Bang theology in many forms, has a very long history.

Pantheism, Aristotle and the Greeks

Aristotle’s work ‘On the Heavens and Meteorologica’ (4th century BC) is a pantheistic view deifying nature and assigning various Gods which had been invented in most ancient cultures, including the Greek, to explain the marvellous creation and design of life and the Earth and related natural phenomena.  Socrates had previously taught that all matter, whether animate or inanimate contained a ‘soul’ which forced the object to ‘achieve is purpose’.  In Aristotle’s work, the deification of nature used this concept to develop the ‘Prime Mover’ idea, or divine source which directs the physics of motions and planetary states. 

In this model all activity is naturally induced to reach a ‘natural place’, both sublunary and superlunary (below and beyond the moon).  Aristotle’s universe is pantheistic, not geometrical or mathematical and it differs in significant ways from the Christian and medieval view.

Pantheism is naturalism or ‘the universe’. It is the theological belief that nature and the universe reflect Gods (plural not singular) and nature in general. These deities or forces are the controllers of the mysteries found in natural phenomena, physics, states, matter and energy. Humans are just a part of this naturalist-pantheist creation and no anthropomorphic principle or concern is at work. Pantheism offers no theological insights into humans or the creation of sentient creatures. The Big Bang theory is very similar in this regard.

For Aristotle and his pantheistic eternity, the Prime Mover created the Universe, but it was not created ‘out of nothing’ as the Bangers believe.  Motion and physics were assessed but no mathematics was deployed to explain motion. Gods of many gaps were built to sustain the planetary and universal frameworks of motion, energy and life.

From Pantheism to Maths

Opposed to Aristotle’s view were other Greeks who were moving from pantheism into hard maths. Pythagoras’ academy in the 5th century BC, which predates Aristotle’s by 100 years, and in the person of Philolaus, formed ideas of earthly sphericity and motions of the planets around the centre of the Cosmos and its ‘central fire’. Such a model was later opposed by Aristotleians. Eratosthenes (275 – 194 BC) moving away from pantheism, used a geometrical model to calculate the size of the spherical Earth.  Aristarchus (215 – 145 BC), greatly amending the Pythogorean concept, used a similar geometrical framework to deduce the dimensions of the earth-moon-sun system and proposed heliocentricity as a workable model of what was observed in space from earth, detaching planetary motions from pantheistic controls.

Ptolemy and back to Pantheism

Ptolemaic science (2^nd century AD) was built on the above and outlined planetary motions, orbits and time within a structured solar system.  However, in this model the earth was stationary and the planets revolved around it, thus upending Aristarchus’ heliocentric model and deploying Aristotleian pantheism to explain structure and motion. Ptolemy’s model was thus regressive and at odds with the maths of Aristarchus. Within the Ptolemaic universe, Aristotle’s animism is also apparent with the coordination of planets described in terms of humans. 

The anthropomorphic principle is clearly apparent in Ptolemy’s models, with the earth at the centre of creation, a supporting plank for monotheists and the nascent, growing Catholic Church (2nd century AD). The problem with ancient Greek science and with Ptolemy’s model, was the theological-pantheistic barrier to understanding motion. 

A comprehension of motion was only achieved by Christian theism and its scientists as they sought to uncover the ‘Prime Mover’ and how and why objects actually move and why planets keep their orbits. In this search for the ‘5 proofs’ of God’s existence, these men ran into much violent opposition for about 1000 years. Ptolemy’s model was staunchly defended by many in power, especially in the universities and secular-funded observatories.

The reigning paradigm always creates a caste of people who benefit and have power they are loathe to lose. The Catholic Copernicus who rediscovered heliocentricity in the early 16th century, was trained and funded by the Church. Famously it was not the Church or Rome he was worried about when he displaced the earth from the centre of the solar system. His concerns in publishing his theory centred on the violent opposition given by the academics and universities.

Christian Theism and the Universe

St Paul the evangelist, argued for a well-reasoned faith and worship (Romans 12:1).  Athanasius the great Catholic theologian (296-373 AD) defended the logos of Christ (which can be seen in the plasma theory of universal matter) and the rationality and logical reasoning of ordered creation.  Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) picked up this theme to lay down the principle that if conclusions of science about the natural world contradicted scripture, then scripture had to be reinterpreted.  John Philoponus (570 AD) was the first astronomer to argue that since stars shine with a different colour they were composed of ordinary matter (pagans and the ancients gave stars godlike attributes eg Mars, Venus, Jupiter). 

As tooling and knowledge improved so too did mathematics and physics.  Centuries of observations and calculations led to Jean Buridan (1295-1358 AD).  Buridan was propelled by a study of Aristotle’s pantheistic eternity and theorised that God the Prime Mover imparted a certain quantity of motion to celestial bodies to keep them in orbit in a purposefully created frictionless void, or inertial motion (the mover and objects are now separated).  Oresme (1320-1382 AD) who succeeded Buridan at the Sorbonne, viewed the universe as clock-work using inertial motion, an idea which would inform Cartesian linear inertia and Newton’s mechanical laws of motion. 

Copernicus (1473-1543 AD) used the ideas of Buridan and Oresme to improve on the doctrine of ‘impetus’ and the earth’s motion in space.  Johannes Kepler (1571-1630 AD) provided the complicated trigonometry to help prove Copernican theory.  Newton, Leibniz and popularisers of science such as Voltaire, reoriented science to articulated and provable mathematics fully disengaging medieval science from the Greek pantheistic theories.  Heliocentricity, gravity, laws of motion and calculus were produced (see Stanley Jaki, The Road to Science and ways to God, 1978).  

The great breakthroughs were in understanding motion and optics (Roger Bacon and others late 13^th c).  In any event thanks to Christian deism scientific theory had to be provable, replicable, observable and mathematically supported. It was a ‘quantum’ leap in science.

Banging and Pantheism

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a Jewish Deist and with pantheistic tendencies.  Initially he opposed an ever-expanding Big Bang deploying his famous ‘constant’ to keep the universe static and stable.  Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), an atheist formulated the idea of the perfect cosmological principle or the unobserved claim that the universe forever remains unchanged, in opposition to the Banging models. Quantum theory and its supporters including Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg supported (and still support) the unscientific position that anything can happen without a cause (a pantheistic-materialist belief without Aristotle’s Prime Mover).  Within cosmogony and cosmology, there has always been a tension with pantheists and atheist-materialists and observational science.

Big Banging Theism and its God of the Gaps

The issues with the Bang theology are discussed elsewhere in some detail especially regarding the impossibility of an original explosion and its purported timelines, cosmic background radiation, issues with redshifting and quasars which contradict Banging models.  But there are plenty of other issues with the concept that a thermonuclear explosion (first described by the Russian Gamow in the 1930s) created both space and time and that the universe is still creating space and expanding into it at the speed of light at 186.000 miles per second, or the fantastical rate of 669 600 000 miles per hour (some say faster).  Is such a rate of expansion remotely possible?  How did ‘nothing’ create universal space to explode into and fill, and how can galactic mass move at the speed of light (imagine the Milky Way moving at 669 million miles per hour, in apparently perfect synchronicity and even direction with other galaxies)? 

A short list of some other issues:

1-    An explosion of heated energry would not create clouds of gas which then fall into themselves to form planets (the ‘law’ of gravity notwithstanding).  No experiment has ever proved this.

2-    The stupendous ‘acceleration’ post-the cosmic egg explosion and infinite ‘inflation’ (‘Dark Energy’) would require energy to be turned into equal parts of matter and anti-matter (‘Dark Matter’ is invented to cover this), but the universe contains only matter.

3-    An open inflating universe, first proposed by Alan Guth in 1981 and a core tenet in Bang theology, would rapidly disperse all matter and no life would exist.

4-    The Universe as a flat disc has been gaining ascendancy for the past 30 years, and this is not what the Big Bang theory would support.  In this model the flat disc is stable, fine-tuned and created for life (Van Flandern 1993). 

5-    No experiments have proven that an explosion of energy leads to the chemical and biological creation of sentient creatures.

6-    According to Banging Apostles Stephen Hawking and CB Collins, the initial explosion must have produced a miracle; the rate of expansion must have precisely balanced the pull of gravity and fine-tuned the 4 fundamental forces of physics to produce the right conditions for life (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong forces).  Why would an explosion create ‘natural laws’ and ‘forces’?

7-    One of the great problems in cosmology is the value of the ‘cosmological constant’ (Einstein’s constant, now Dark Energy) which prevents the universe from imploding.  The value must be very small given that space in any direction offers structure and ‘normalcy’.  Bang theory however posits a very large constant, which is not what is observed.  In the fact the discrepancy is so massive it is unexplainable by Bang theorists.  This huge problem was completely ignored by Stephen Hawking and others.  In essence this by itself negates the Banging theology (Professor Steven Weinberg, Scientific American, May 1988).

8-    Quantum mechanics (energy into matter, atoms, electrons etc) cannot explain how matter and anti-matter (electron-positron, photon-anti-photon), appear fully formed.  The Bangers posit that a quantum ‘flux’ initiated the original explosion yet no experiment remotely proves this.  And if it was true, why does it not happen again and again (observational science)?  (Hawking and others used quantum fluctuations and Black Holes to theorise about multi-verses)

9-    Magnetic fields and attendant radiation exist in the vacuum of space, around Earth, Jupiter or our Sun for example.  This is not what the Big Bang theory predicted (magnetic shields do not self-repair and they cannot last billions of years as Bangers contend, in fact our shield is losing 1% of its force every century or so).

10- Comets lose material on every passage around the Sun.  There is no possibility they last millions of years.  The Van Oort asteroid belt, beyond Pluto, is the supposed ‘home’ of comets, created after the virgin birth, and is thought to ‘re-fuel’ the comets on their journeys. NASA the gatekeeper and owner of all things ‘cosmic’ describes the Van Oort belt as a spherical shell surrounding the solar system, composed of trillions of comets and icy plantesimals some as large as mountains. The debris was created after the Big Bang of course (they were there, they saw it, they know). No other explanation is countenanced. Comets are an issue for Bangers and their long ages given their composition.

11- Gravitational compression might explain the enormous heat and light from a star, but it would not last billions of years.  Some other factors, outside of Bang theology are needed to explain what is observed about starlight and energy. Energy sources which are non-nuclear, simply don’t last billions and trillions of years.

12-Then we have Black Holes (Eddington, 1935) which are believed to be imploding stars collapsing to a point (Wheeler, 1960s), supported by Einstein’s equations (energy, equivalent mass and equivalent gravity).  No one knows what a ‘singularity’ really is or what it looks like, and Black Holes are not forecast in the Bang model. There are lively disputes about the reality of Black Holes (which made Hawking famous, based on his ‘law of entropy in Black Holes’, which is almost relevant in reality). Some Bangers believe the Big Bang started from a ‘Black Hole’ (it does not save the theory given the same problems would still apply).

13- Time is dilated and even if the curvature of space-time is wrong and the universe is a flat disc, cosmological time is very different than earth-time (also C14, helium and other isotopes disprove a long age universe or earth).  See the ‘Twins paradox’ – a mind bending time dilation which is not officially supported by the Big Bang because of its implications. 

14- Many cosmologists postulate that 99.999% of the universe is composed of plasma (or the original logos) and that electro-magnetism and electric energy, not gravity is the driving force and law in our universe. These two concepts do not need ‘Dark Matter’ or ‘Dark Energy’ nor much of what the Bang theology advocates in its math. There is a lot in this theory that commends itself.

The above is a small list of objections.  What do we see?  Within Banging pantheism, there are many Gods of many gaps.  A universe is created from a violent virgin birth with energy producing matter and especially gas, ex-nihilo.  An Aristotelian ‘Prime Mover’ that remains unidentified but is put down to energy and a quantum ‘flux’.  Energy at high temperatures somehow creates matter in the form of atoms and electrons fully formed and functional, much like a quantum virgin birth.  A pantheistic deification of the various and complicated phenomena which contravenes through observational evidence, the ‘laws’ of gravity, special relativity and Hubble’s ‘redshift’ law.

Hidden pantheistic forces at work include Dark Matter to make Newton’s equations balance and to explain gravitational attraction, along with Dark Energy to justify the acceleration theory and to provide the counterbalance to gravitationally induced destruction.  Quasars or the creation of new galaxies out of White Holes or existing galaxies lie completely outside the framework of the Big Bang and are largely ignored.  Materialism and pantheism are rife within the Bang framework.  Right back to Aristotle we go. 

Bottom Line

The Big Bang theory has provided a framework to create models and advanced mathematics.  Understanding our universe is a positive.  Much of the scientific and observational output from astronomy is fascinating and important.  What is negative is carving into stone, theories and ideas that are rather easily disproven and presenting them as ‘science’. 

The key as always is money and control. The Big Bang has attracted some $1 Trillion in funding since 1950.  NASA is the gatekeeper to the cosmos and controls much of the funding and related narratives. The internet is saturated with endless ‘studies’ and ‘proofs’ of Banging. It is an enormous industry with incredible reach and total control over most governance agencies related to ‘science’, education, universities, research institutes and cosmological journals and papers of record.  You won’t get funding if your intent is to dispute the theory.  However, observational science and common sense do get in the way. 

There are so many issues with the theology of Banging that it must resort to suppression and policing of alternative theories and views.  In many ways we are right back to where Aristotle started and the conflict between pantheism and observational astronomy based on geometry and later, trigonometry.  The significant difference is that today we are prisoners of modern $cientism, or the alliance of money, power, institutions and government and their narratives.

Some sources:

John Brooke, ‘Science and Religion’, 1991

R. Hooykass, ‘Religion and the Rise of Modern Science’, 1972

G. Ferngren, ‘History of Science and Religion’, 2000

S. Jaki, ‘The Road of Science and ways to God’, 1978