Which scientific theories appeal to you most?

@wildbill83 Right. Here's the thing.

You did both those things. Repeatedly.

"Slime washing up on a beach and growing legs" is very much not how evolution works and is not the argument anyone is making. Strawman. Deliberately making a separate and more ridiculous argument to attack rather than the argument before you.

Calling scientists motivated only by tenure, money, and hostility to religion and calling them lunatics solely to cast doubt on their views without addressing the views themselves is ad hominem.

As to your points about the big bang,

NASA's John Mather states that the name Big Bang is misleading. It's not like a firecracker. It's not an explosion at a particular location with a center. The cosmological expansion has no center, because space itself expands. And expansion of space does not mean expansion through some external empty space.

Now,


At last, you ask very good questions. Scientists and philosophers genuinely discuss these. Contemporary cosmology doesn't claim to have complete answers. NASA even explicitly states that the mechanism behind inflation remains unknown and that scientists aren't sure what preceded or powered inflation.

But to say a theory doesn't explain what ultimately caused its initial conditions does not disprove it. Newtonian mechanics can't explain why the matter which makes up a bowling ball exists. It can certainly describe it being thrown.

"Spinning singularity"

No, who said it was spinning? You introduce that spinning yourself and then demand an explanation centered around a thing which nobody meaningfully claims. Galaxies rotating in different directions does nothing to trouble the big bang theory. The early universe was not homogeneous. Fluctuations in density happened, and gravity amplified those differences over time, eventually resulting in the formation of true structures - the first stars, then more stars, then newer and more interesting stars. Then galaxies.

"Anything external to..."

Gravity is not being proposed as something outside the universe pulling on it. That's not how relativity describes gravity at all.

As for your claims about radiocarbon dating, that's just straightforwardly false. It's routinely checked against independently dated materials. Radiocarbon dating routinely has examples that line up very well with known historical chronologies. It has known limitations too - it's only really useful back to about 50,000 years, and other methods are used to determine the age of a specimen. But it is spectacularly reliable within its window.

"It's easy to accuse... When they provide no argument of their own..."

I did provide arguments. Many times. And that has nothing to do with whether you did those things. Independently of whether I gave an argument or not, you did those things.

Your trump analogy is just plain stupid and not relevant. It's a political device in an apolitical conversation.

Science answering a question with "we don't know" is not an embarrassment, it's honesty.

@NonePizzaLeftBeef Explain then, in your own terms how life was created from dirt, then evolved into humans...


then what was it? because a sudden release of energy and expansion is literally the definition of an explosion...

"space itself expands" is a logical fallacy and would have to assume there is an impassible barrier on the edge of universe or that an explosion can occur without space to expand in to (which obviously it can't, easily testable)

"Spinning singularity"

everything in the universe spins, from subatomic particles to super dense/super gravimetric objects like black holes and neutron stars. It the default state of matter. So what? this super dud singularity is an exception?


nor did I claim it was. I was merely pointing out that the big bang theory is inconsistent with observable understanding of gravity


I've witnessed such results first hand, have you? or are you just repeating what you read somewhere on google? I've seen multiple tests on same object provide widely varying results. The problem is that it is contingent on a consistent amount of carbon14 being present in atmosphere, which is easily disprovable via ice core sampling, dendrochronology, etc.
Anyone who really understands how radiocarbon dating works (or rather, is supposed to work), also understands why it doesn't work...


No, it's an embarrassment. Compounded by the reality that it's treated as fact in schoolbooks...
Were they really honest about not knowing, they'd state as much... not fabricate evidence & silly pictures to support it...

@wildbill83 First of all, strawman round two. How life itself came to be exactly is a different question from how humans evolved. And you're intentionally making a ridiculous claim about what abiogenesis and evolution are in the first place.


That is absolutely false. The universe need not have an edge or an external space into which it expands. And easily testable how exactly? Every explosion that was ever observed occurred within the confines of spacetime. Every single one. All of them.

Cosmological expansion isn't classified as an explosion merely because distances increase. In cosmology, the metric describing spatial separation changes with time. Calling that an “explosion” and then importing everything characteristic of conventional explosions—center, surrounding space, pressure front, ejecta—is precisely the misconception Mather was correcting.


That's just not how angular momentum works at all. Quantum spin is not an elementary particle literally rotating like a tennis ball. It's intrinsic angular momentum. A quantum property, not a thing which says a thing is definitely spinning all the time. It's a quantifiable property, not immutable. Treating electron spin as evidence that matter's default state is physically spinning conflates two different things. Angular momentum can be zero. It can be altered by gravitational interactions, or impacts. It is conserved only insofar as a closed system with nothing imparting a torquing force upon it - such as a gravitational interaction with another planet, or an asteroid impact.

The big bang theory is consistent with general relativity and thus gravity, but I'm not going to belabor this point right now. I might come back later and edit this comment to include one.

Re: radiocarbon dating.

What you're describing is in fact a thing scientists know and compensate for. They know carbon-14 levels were different at different times in history and calibrate accordingly. You seeing a bad example of carbon dating and the resulting inconsistencies has nothing to do with its accuracy when done correctly.