I personally think that one of the most important phrases I have ever uttered is: "I don't know."

We all want to know the answers to what I call, "The Big Kahuna Questions." So, we begin with observations (such as, "the universe seems to be expanding"), and inevitably wind up with Big Kahuna. Other people vehemently disagree, and guess what: they also wind up with their version of Big Kahuna. I guess it's just human nature. When we observe something, we are driven to explain it.

In every "scientific" statement, there are two distinct parts: observation, and interpretation. "Aye, there's the rub." Interpretation is where we begin to get into trouble.

Some people "observe" things and see "science," while others observe the same things and see "God" or "gods." But, I think that we lack any objective basis from which to "conclude" which one of these viewpoints is actually correct. Some people look at a pin and wonder how many angels can dance on its head. Others do not. So, maybe we all should agree to disagree. We will never actually know what "the elephant" looks like. An observation can be useful to us, even if we have no way to know – and we very often don't – if it is correct.

I have seen science, and I have had unexplainable, "mystical" experiences. I was once startled-awake by a voice. I listened to what that voice was saying and it led me out of a difficult situation. My grandfather once gave a warm coat to a man at his front door who suddenly wasn't there. I don't try to "explain" these things. I don't think anyone can. But you can never tell me that these things didn't or couldn't happen, because they did. As the Good Book said of Mary, "I treasure them in my heart." I embrace every mechanism that we have to understand our world and our very-brief place within it. I don't need to "know it all."

Interestingly enough and as noted by many, "The more you know, the more you realize you don't know." That implies one must know something just to ask a pertinent question. It's quite unlikely an ant is going to ask how an automobile works. 2000 years ago no man was likely to ask "Why does the Earth orbit around the Sun". They were far more likely to ask "What sort of pedastal supports the Earth?"

So it is indeed important to realize what we don't know, but all the while recognizing that actually comes from the struggle to know something with progressive accuracy in order to ask better questions. I can accept that sundialsvcs' grandfather perceived events as he related them, and not presume to have the definitive answer as to what actually occurred, all the while discarding the idea that an actual man can just pooof! disappear.

My grandfather lived on the end of a rural street and he immediately wasted no time looking at every possible place where this man "might have gone in three to five minutes." The man was "gone." I accept my late grandfather's testimony at face value. There is no "rational explanation."

But you also bring an important point: thousands of years ago, no one knew that they were living on a "planet" that "orbited." Yes, they really did believe that the Earth was flat, because they'd never yet encountered anything which was contrary to that idea. Centuries later, it was established religious dogma that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that the Sun revolved around it. You could get your head cut off if you didn't "preach the party line." Galileo took an extraordinary risk.

So: politics. But also: the existential limits of human knowledge at any one time. We must not judge our human ancestors too harshly. "They were just doing, then, the very same things that we are doing, now." And for the very same reasons. Just like us, they were simultaneously dealing with "science and religion and politics" . . . within the limits of the knowledge of their time.

They could not know what they did not know. I can only hope that "our children's children's children" will be equally kind and forgiving of us.

The last 2 posts must have been made where the Bermuda Triangle intersects with the Twilight Zone, because curiously, the Bible agrees after a fashion with you both

Returning to topic briefly, because somebody will make sure it's only a brief return,
https://science.slashdot.org/story/2...ng-of-universe

That wasn't a bad post, business_kid, but it didn't speak to the fundamental Science involved. This is EXACTLY what scientists and engineers designed JWST to do, to gather more and better data to reveal flaws in our current understanding of the Nature of the Universe and how we model it's evolution. Nowhere else but in Science is discovering flaws not only welcome but exciting since that's where growth resides.

Here is a deep dive look at the subject by a not-yet PhD astronomer who hosts a very decent channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubCzcyQfqX4&t=574s


If you prefer a more UK-centric view or a nice lady's voice try Dr. Becky's Astronomy Channel.

Thanks, but no. I'm not signing up to any channel. That wasn't the way my mind was working at all.

Prior to the 20th century, most scientists & naturalists usually financed themselves (for example the Earl of Rosse built the Leviathan_of_Parsonstown using his own (his wife's, actually) money. There was no agenda, and he did what he wanted. The other path was Gentlemen's clubs or Societies like the Royal Asiatic Society or the Smithsonian Institute. Only after 1840 did science start becoming commercial.

Today, science needs external finance in massive amounts. A scientist can't afford to be wrong, or the money dries up. He/She can't annoy people, because the environment is very unforgiving. So sacred cows can't be led to the slaughter. Richard Feynman once said:That's the idealistic theory, not the practicality. The practicalities are:

1. What's commercially profitable but wrong, harmful or dangerous can be stifled for decades. Examples are: Smoking; Global Warming & climate change; Many dangerous but profitable drugs, e.g. Thalidomide, Oxycontin, etc. The thing they had in common was the profit motive. Powerful companies profited at people's expense, and held up the truth for decades.

2. I believe there are "Sacred Cows" in science, like the flat earth in times of old. You refute them at your peril. You need billions to do it. It amuses me to see what happens when these come under threat by fact. I won't mention any examples because that simply gives subject matter to your ad-hominem attacks on me. So we end up with "scientific" ideas which are "Too big to fail." They all have issues but all are universally accepted. It amuses me to see see people wrestle with conflicting information on these topics as it comes out.

Before your fire back your usual tirade of off-topic ad-hominem attacks, do something constructive with your time. Honestly and candidly examine the arguments against your scientific positions. Take your time. The information will be much harder to find. And, because of post #1, we will limit this to the Big Bang. Is peer review acting as a form of censorship? If it's not, where were the issues raised by the 'Big Crunch' papers from 2013-2015 satisfactorily explained in peer reviewed papers? If you don't rigorously do the exercise, you're no better than the Flat (or Young) Earthers, or the Capitol rioters who firmly believe (without evidence) that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Hopefully, you'll see the issue I'm pointing out. I feel Scientific Truths are being censored. In particular, Inconvenient Truths are being censored. So the possibility exists that Truth is being censored. And, as you are probably a better physics student than I ever want to be, you may know more of these inconvenient truths than I do.

One last word: Don't accept "It's being worked on" as an answer. I've been hearing that since I was young. Any Biology student who wants to do his PhD on the Origin of Life has been steered away since Francis Crick's discovery - his Paper was 1956, IIRC. It's not being worked on. Miller & Urey (1953?) is quaint but obsolete. But nobody can write that truth in a Paper, because it will never pass peer review. It is an inconvenient truth. So it's censored. You've got to be more rigorous than that. Never Mind OOL, check out the Big Bang.

Business_kid, just FTR you don't have to sign up for anything to view that video. If you don't like that one or have any problems whatsoever try this one that tecck graciously posted in my Anti-Science thread

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6414664

"Big Crunch" is barely hypothesis, especially since we have yet to understand accelerating expansion, termed "Dark Energy" until we know something more about it than that one observed effect. Students are not steered away from Darwin anymore than they are steered away from Newton. They are each extremely important figures who, to the best of their abilities and resources of their times,planted breakthrough milestones in The Body of Human Knowledge. It is expected in Science that over time and with continued observations, better instruments, and more peer review, knowledge is refined. Sometimes such refinement is outright and devastating disproof as in cases like the well-meant Phlogiston Theory, or the bald-faced agenda driven hoax of Piltdown Man.

Scientific hypothesis is not censored but one of the main tenets of scientific inquiry is "falsifiability". Phlogiston is not censored but it is not taught as fact because it objectively failed once Oxygen's role was discovered. The experiments that disproved phlogiston are repeatable by any student with the exact same results today and will still be 10,000 years from now. Piltdown, too, will always be just a cruel joke, but also serve as a lesson that "Truth will out" eventually.

This is not to say that peer review has never been something of an elitist Men's Club, because the exclusion and derision of female scientists as just one example is a documented fact. Having a scientific bent by no means insures anyone can ever become inhumanly just and not a product of one's times but over time, sometimes a few months, sometimes over decades, it does work out. We certainly can't fault our ancestors for building homes out of timber and mud, insisting they should have just resorted to 3D Printing, but progress does appear and evolve.

Just because some hypothesis you (or I !) favor is disregarded as unproven fringe if not outright Woo Woo (like your Young Earth views), does not translate into censorship, and my noting this fact is not my "tirade of off-topic ad-hominem attacks". My conclusions merely hurt your fundamentalist bible-thumping sensibilities. It is actually fine with me that you think that about me and my views since our words describing our respective views are publicly here for anyone to judge for themselves.

I don't hold young earth views, and I don't know where you got that notion from. I can imagine, mind you, given that you're surrounded by "Christians" holding to a young earth. Our thinking is that scientific tests on the oldest rocks found to date put them around 4.5 Billion years old. We have no problem with that age. We don't teach it or deny it. We don't hold that the Earth was created in a week of creative days either, FTR.

As for scientific premises being falsifiable, that's ridiculous. The origin of life on Earth by natural means (i.e. Without God) is a ridiculous and chemically impossible, but unfalsifiable notion. Scientists can't even put together a hypothesis = "Maybe it happened this way..." Much less can they put forward a proof. Every advance in Genetics makes a accidental origin of life more impossible. Yet the whole Inverse House of Cards that Science has built ultimately relies on that LIE. Without life, there's nothing to evolve, etc. There seems to have been a wrong turn early on. Oh, you have your line that allows you to dodge that Inconvenient Truth, and you'll probably trot it out again, but you know I'm right, whether you admit it or not.

You certainly have my sincere apology if I have confused you with someone else, business_kid. I just have this vague memory of you having deep doubts about dating methods but maybe it was about the age of the Universe rather than the Earth. I am quite certain you are in general Anti-Science ev en though you'd apparently like to employ it to prove your religious convictions. BTW, who is "we"? Are you part of a collective?

Absolutely untrue. Every year we get closer to a complete OOL. Just as JWST did NOT throw out modern cosmology as your thread starter proposed, NOTHING so far has disproved that Life can start by merely chemical means naturally, more and more it looks like it is entirely possible that Life is just something the Universe does as organic molecules are everywhere we look. It could take 10 years, 50 years, 100 years but I given the historical progression I have little doubt it will occur. Man dreamed of flying to the Moon for hundreds if not thousands of years before all the parts were in place in 1969 despite the common belief that "If Man were meant to fly, God would have given us wings".

That is neither Truth nor Inconvenient. It's just what you need to believe to keep your beliefs intact and this thread and your starter post is absolute proof of that and your ambivalent disdain for Science. Truth is not about You nor I and subjective speculation. It's about data. Apparently you still don't get it that JWST is doing exactly what it was designed to do, gather actual observation to improve our understanding. It's proactive not an attempt to add credence to existing models. You simply prefer closed edicts from on high all wrapped up in a bow instead of accepting that we must dig and claw out an evolving body of knowledge, complete with mistakes and setbacks, but ultimately the best methodology humans have.

You ought to know the answer to that question by now! business_kid is a Jehovah's Witness and when he says "we", he is speaking for his faith. He probably believes that he is also speaking for the whole Christian Church, since he doesn't think that the rest of us are real Christians.
You need a lot more than organic molecules to make life! One of my personal interests is evolutionary theory and the origin of life in particular. Because you can't have evolution until you have life forms that are capable of evolving. Now there are logically only three possible explanations of the origin of life:
1) It just happened. There was non-life and somehow it became life. That seems to me to be a non-starter and waving your arms and saying "billions and billions" won't make it work. Because there are two kinds of improbability: there are things that are just very unlikely and are not going to happen in a year or in a lifetime but will happen eventually given enough time, and there are things so outrageously improbable that they will never happen in any amount of time. Direct conversion of non-life into life is of this second order of improbability.
2) God worked a miracle and made it happen. But that means that God designed a planet with the intention that it should come alive and it failed to do so! He had to correct His error with a miracle, like an incompetent computer programmer editing the output of a malfunctioning program. That's not the sort of God I believe in.
3) There is an intermediate continuum between non-life and life (let us call it proto-life) such that, at its lower end it shades into non-life and at its upper end it shades into life. If each step through this continuum is improbable but not impossible, then life could indeed evolve spontaneously given enough time.

Maybe we need to return to Paley's Watch. Paley created his watch metaphor to explain the exquisite adaptation of lifeforms to their environment. He saw this as unequivocal proof of a Designer God just as a watch is unequivocal proof of the existence of a watchmaker. Then Darwin came along and showed that a combination of chance variation and deterministic natural selection could explain adaptations just as well. But maybe there's life in Paley's metaphor yet!

Open a watch and what do you find? A lot of interlocking gear wheels. These wheels transfer the energy of the relaxing spring and the regular movement of the escapement into the movement of the hands. Each wheel in the gear train is fitted by its size and position to interlock exactly with the others. Now look inside a living cell and what do you find? A lot of interlocking chemical cycles. Each of these cycles takes in certain small molecules and spits out others, eventually returning to its starting point. The cycles interlock because the output of one cycle becomes the input of another.

Each of these cycles is intrinsically unlikely but not impossible. Given enough time, a natural chain of chemical reactions might indeed catch its own tail and regenerate its starting material. And once it did, it would run permanently. Now suppose that its output served as the input of another potential cycle. Eventually, given enough time, you would have two interlocking cycles. And then three.

That is not life of course. But each added cycle would make it more like life. And each added cycle would be at least as likely as the previous ones and perhaps more so because you're creating an environment in which the necessary inputs for a new cycle might be permanently present. And eventually you would get a set of interlocking chemical "gear wheels" complex enough that one would have to say, "Well, it may not be life exactly but it's closer to life than to non-life".

Just a speculation! But I believe it might have happened like that.

Thank you hazel for being your usual thoughtful, fair and thorough self. It's impossible to outright disagree with your 3 points. Those are all at least possible. I simply take some issue with plausible since I'm not fond of Deus ex Machina even in literature in most cases.

I see it rather like other examples of lifeforms. One example would be Meganeuropsis, the 2 meter dragonfly that lived between the late Carboniferous period and the Permian. They existed because conditions, one being extreme atmospheric oxygen content, supported them. Had humans existed at that time they likely would have gone extinct post haste but it's far more unlikely apes could have even had a start then. Consider the main reason our ancestors survived the Chicxulub asteroid event was because they were small and lived mostly underground.

In all fairness it is possible that some Creator had a Master Plan that involved a 38.000.000.000 year preface to the climax of that asteroid to make it possible for humans to exist but that can't make sense to my Earthbound puny human brain. Everything I see in event progressions, one thing follows another, and only when "all the ducks are in a row". That seems like Chance to me, dependent on tipping points, just like avalanches, landslides and tsunamis.

Not long ago 3 LDS initiates knocked on my door and I politely told them they probably should skip my house because I am an atheist. I added that I'd worked for a family of LDS who gave me the Book of Mormon and I read it, even though it smacked of real Woo Woo magic. They were such nice people and very good to me that I figured I owed them that, and to not go too deeply into what I thought about the book. Anyway the 3 Initiates asked me what I thought was going to happen upon my death. I told them I figured the odds are "That's all she wrote. Done and done"

They said that seems a sad way to look at it and I responded, "What"? Isn't this (arcing my arm indicating the world around us) enough for you? We GET to be ALIVE! Why are you so focused on death? Don't you imagine that affects your focus and commitment to being alive?" I can't know for certain what caused me to be born but I don't need to speculate beyond the obvious odds. I just need to try to make the most of my time, whatever, if anything, comes after.

In that process, things like JWST expanding our understanding of what our Universe is and how it works makes my life more wondrous.

Yes, this is just the obvious secular-mainstream position, right? Vitalism is a fringe idea now. "Direct conversion of non-life into life" (without God) is just a strawman that nobody serious believes in.

By the way, there's less than 1 billion years gap between the formation of Earth and the first fossilized life.

https://www.livescience.com/57942-wh...-on-earth.html

Maybe we need some bootloaders for the DNAs ?

Yeah. I like that. Far too many human things – including, if I may say, virtually the entirety of "religion" – is focused singularly upon death.

"Death," like it or not, is the one appointment that we cannot ign

"Gods," and "their sons," are defined by their ability either to ignore Death, or to defy it by somehow being "born again." They somehow "pass through the shadow of death" while "fearing no evil." Death is always the operative word. If you can't overcome Death, then you do not qualify to be a [G|g]od.

- - -

And, as you very rightly say, this "entirely short-changes" the reality of life! ("We are here now ... en-ter-tain us ...")

Even if we have utterly no idea "how we got here," and even if it sux(!) that we don't get to remain here as long as we'd like to, "by gawd (or whatever), we are here now!"

We are uncomfortably confronted with the reality that the day will come when our physical bodies stop working, and that this date will be engraved upon our tombstone if we have one. But, that day has not come yet!

"Carpe Deim!"

Isn't that sufficient cause for celebration?