Science Ignoramus

The following letter sent to Norfolk & Norwich's Eastern Evening News is a priceless gem of science illiteracy. I don't have the date of the paper: I just happened to stumble across the letter  recently already in clipped form. 

As is the way with this kind of thing I did at first wonder if the letter originated from some mischievous journalist wanting to stir up a big mail bag for the letters page, but that we appear to have a name and address counts against that.

I'm sure 1930s schooling couldn't have been that bad, so it's likely that Fred has forgotten some very basic lessons and is also failing to put 2 and 2 together: "CO2 is most definitely not emitted from vehicle or aircraft exhausts et alia....." *GASP*!

The above letter isn't worth critiquing. In any case I'm sure the Evening News got their big post bag (& email box) of intelligent critics teaching Fred a thing or two about elementary science - at least I hope they did; it would restore my faith in Norwich people's grasp of reality! 

In spite of picking up at least some (if not enough!) lessons from the educational establishment in the 1930s Fred now effectively dismisses that establishment and writes them off as "learned" pundits telling us "squit". Paranoid delusions about a government plot to make money have filled in the spaces of his ignorance. If he's still alive today and a web user then he would be fertile ground for covid 19 conspiracy theorism!

Certainly, the establishment isn't exactly angelic (one need only think of Boris Johnson); that establishment is, after all, populated with sinners like the rest of us. But those who perceive the machinations of Machiavellian motives driving a baroque Agatha Christie style plot behind every government move are a nutritious seed bed for conspiracy stories. When the intuitions and feelings tell one that something is wrong and that one is otherwise unable to discover or articulate what is wrong, the "left brain", or what Steven Pinker has called the "baloney generator", gets to work to rationalise one's fears and invents an explanatory story; perhaps a story of conspiracy. Failure to see that one could be part of the problem need not enter into this story, for one may well be suffering from what Kenneth Clark calls that most fatal of delusions - one sees oneself as virtuous! This is what far-right popularism looks like at grass roots level. If exploited by a would-be-dictator self-righteous popularism is a ready tool for an opportunist to attempt to overthrow the argumentative, messy & factious democratic status quo. It's ironic that establishment overthrow is exactly what the far left also seeks. Marx, however, did correctly perceive that alienation is an aspect of even democratic societies and in fact are part and parcel with a democratic society; that's because democracy must (by definition) give space to dissention. 

Egotistical Godfathers Fall Out

Alex Jones interview: Viewer discretion advised

 

The above video is a short clip of professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones foul-mouthing-off about Donald Trump, of whom he is "so sick". It's not surprising then that the video starts with this warning:

Warning: This video contains explicit langauge

The video goes on to tell us that:

Infowars Alex Jones has made millions of dollars by courting Trump's base.

In January of 2019, Jones told an interviewer that he was "sick" of Donald Trump.

On February 20, 2021, the Washington Post reported that federal investigators were probing the degree to which Jones and other extremists may have influenced those who stormed the Capitol building in Trump's name.

We then hear from Alex himself:

Part of me - the selfish part - wishes I'd never met Donald Trump, wishes I'd never met Roger Stone. Because unlike previous things I'd done that were game-changing, those were just time-space continuum reflections of the third big change I was gonna be involved in. And that was bringing Donald John Trump  into [unintelligible]. Just let me say that again: that's an awesome - into office. Because this is - you guys asking really good questions -  this is gonna be a really good thing. But I'm going to say it again in a minute [unintelligible].  It's the truth - I'm just going to say it - that I wish I never would've fucking met Trump. I wish it never would have happened. And it's not that the attacks that I've been through. I'm so sick of fucking Donald Trump man. God, I'm fucking sick of him.  And I'm not doing this because it's like I'm kissing his fucking ass, you know, it's just like I'm sick of it.  

Do it in a minute.....[That is, do the interview?]

Here's my interpretation of the Trump-Jones relationship.

Both Donald and Alex stood to gain from a cordial meeting: Donald could secure the support of Alex' followers and Alex could derive kudos and plausibility from Donald; it may also  have helped Alex widen his own support base.

Notice that Alex is so convinced of how awesome is his work and egotistical enough to believe that it was him who help put Donald into office (That's what Alex means by "game changing"). Alex may or may not be right about that as far as my information goes: If you took away the Jones' vote I really don't know how it might have affected the 2016 election, an election that was after all a close run thing whatever Donald might claim. But whatever, Alex appears to believe that Donald owes him the presidency. 

However, in the power stakes Alex was by far the weaker partner in the mutual back scratching relationship.  Donald, once in power, had no further need of Alex and so he retuned no further favours and I guess largely ignored Alex. When Alex met Donald he gave something away, namely he sealed the approval of his support base for Trump and he wanted a pay back for what he perceived as helping to deliver the Trump presidency; but he didn't get satisfaction. Alex now regrets his meeting with Donald who he feels failed to return the compliment. 

It's likely that Trump has never believed the insane fantasy world that Jones' peddles (in fact does Jones himself believe it?) but what the hell, he had got from Jones what he wanted. Moreover, Trump also had the QAnon conspiracy theorists on his side. Their boundless flattery, their lionisation of him and the heroic role they gave Trump in their delusional world must have satisfied even the planet sized ego of Donald J Trump. For Trump Jones was a useful idiot, for a while. But Jones felt he had been dumped and he was angry, very angry by the look of it; so angry that he had to calm down before he could start the interview. Unless Trump deigns to toss Jones a few more crumbs Jones won't be "kissing [Trump's] fucking ass" any more! I don't suppose Donald will miss that given the number of his supporters who appear to be queuing up to "kiss his fucking ass"!

Note 1: I haven't yet heard that any conspiracy theorists are claiming the above video to be a deep fake!

Note 2: Relevant link:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/alex-jones-leaked-video-trump_n_603eecd8c5b601179ec13706?ri18n=true

Note 3: Relevant link

‘Bye bye Q, I can’t talk to you any more’: What next for Alex Jones, America’s foremost conspiracy theorist? | The Independent

Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal

This BBC article of 2014 has come to my notice. Here are the opening paragraphs:

People have wrestled with the mystery of why the universe exists for thousands of years. Pretty much every ancient culture came up with its own creation story - most of them leaving the matter in the hands of the gods - and philosophers have written reams on the subject. But science has had little to say about this ultimate question.

However, in recent years a few physicists and cosmologists have started to tackle it. They point out that we now have an understanding of the history of the universe, and of the physical laws that describe how it works. That information, they say, should give us a clue about how and why the cosmos exists.

Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because "nothing" is inherently unstable.

"Nothing is inherently unstable"? How do we know that? Predictably the article goes on to tell us how, given quantum uncertainty, both space and matter cannot be existentially null. The scientifically challenged layman, reading this article, would then think that at last the "something from nothing?" question has been solved. The article trades on the fact that some atheists have simply redefined "nothing" in terms of what is in effect something; namely, the assumed pre-existence of transcendent quantum laws prior to the creation of space, time and matter. Therefore this kind of "nothing"  is clearly something, that something being the existence of physical algorithms controlling space, time and matter. This trick has fooled some people who have mooted it as an answer to the "something from nothing?" question; I have heard it said that quantum theory has given us a better understanding of "nothing", so much so in fact that we can now see how something comes from nothing. But this kind of technical casuistry can be refuted by pointing out that one could equally as well argue that the so-called better understanding of nothing is in fact a better understanding of something i.e. something as transcendent law. But "nothing" means absolutely nothing; no givens, no laws and no stuff of any kind, least of all the givens of quantum uncertainty. 

I have dealt with this subject before in the following post:

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/02/something-comes-from-something-nothing.html

In the foregoing post I quote atheist Sean Carroll who, even as an atheist, is clearly not fooled by the sophistry of this kind of "scientific theology". 

Christian Fundamentalists Embrace Flat Earth.

I'm ashamed to say that recently resurgent
beliefs in  flat earthism, like young earthism, 
has strong christian fundamentalist leanings

An interesting web-article on the Flat Earth movement can be read here. It was written by Lee McIntyre a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. To further his research into the contemporary burgeoning of anti-science sub-cultures he attended a flat earth conference and his web-article tells of his experiences. 

I have touched on flat earth theory before but as with young earthism (unless like McIntyre you are a researcher in the field) I regard it as time wasted spending too much effort refuting the work of people who have a knack of tying themselves up in intellectual knots when there are other things I should be pursuing.  There is no way of stopping this lunacy because, as the saying goes, one can make a refutation idiot proof but these kinds of movement have a way of finding even better idiots from a bottomless pit of idiocy. 

As I have pointed out before flat earth theory necessarily includes huge dollops of conspiracy theorism in order to work as a "theoretical framework"; by necessity conspiracy theorism is part and parcel with the flat earthist mindset. Conspiracy theorism is itself a narrative which attempts to make sense of life, but less in an intellectual way than in the sense of satisfying certain emotional, ego and group needs, catalysed in part by a failure to identify with society's establishment. Generalised conspiracy theorism is itself a theoretical non-starter  (See here, here, here), but no doubt the connectivity of the internet has helped promote the contemporary sub-culture of conspiracy theorism. Moreover, I have a growing conviction that these anti-science sub-cultures are bound up with the rise of anti-establishment popularism and the ascendancy of people like Donald Trump, a man who has (probably) cynically courted the professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (who also makes claims to being a Christian) in his attempts to secure the large American anti-establishment popularist vote; and this includes many Christian fundamentalists.  

What I would like to highlight here is a quote from McIntyre's article providing evidence that Christian fundamentalism is implicated as one of the factors driving the rise of flat earthism. Viz (My emphases): 

For the first day, I kept my mouth shut and just listened. I wore the conference badge and took notes. The second day, I came out hard as a philosopher of science. After numerous conversations, I came away with the conclusion that Flat Earth is a curious mixture of fundamentalist Christianity and conspiracy theory, where outsiders are distrusted and belief in Flat Earth is (for some) tantamount to religious faith. This is not to say that most Christians believe in Flat Earth, but almost all of the Flat Earthers I met (with a few notable exceptions) were Christians. While they claimed not to rely on faith as proof of their beliefs—and were anxious to present their own "scientific evidence"—most did seek empirical findings that would make all of their beliefs (both spiritual and worldly) consistent with one another. And once they started looking, the evidence was all around them.

Further evidence of the rise of flat earthism among fundamentalists can be found from the testimony of the young earthist fundamentalist organisation Answers in Genesis who are aghast at the idea of the flat earth movement identifying itself with a Biblical literalist fundamentalism.  For example in a blog post dated 2nd June this year Ken Ham said: 

In the past, one question I rarely ever received was, “What about the flat earth?” But now I hear it all the time! And that holds true for our other AiG speakers, particularly our astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner.

Clearly then something is afoot among Christian fundamentalists and it is alarming AiG. Here is the original link to Ham's post although the post has recently been taken offline for some unknown reason. If you go to the AiG web site and type in "flat earth" in the search field it returns quite a few articles arguing against flat earth ideas; one of the few times I can get behind AiG! Some of the articles, I think, are less about the flat earth movement per se than worrying the subject of whether or not the Bible writers had a flat earth world view; after all if some of them did then this would raise questions over AiG's literalist paradigm of scripture. 

Also of interest is a flat earth discussion on the Answers in Genesis Facebook page*.  This discussion succeeds in bringing out the flat earth fundamentalists in opposition to the original young earthists who oppose flat earth. The thing to note is how acrimonious the discussion gets when there are fundamentalists on both sides of the debate. This is really no surprise: After all both sides believe their opinions to have the divine authority of a very angry God of eternal damnation so what do you expect? There is, however, poetic justice in the fact that young earthists are being hoist by their own petard as a crass Biblical literalist paradigm is being turned on them by Christian flat earthists. They are very effectively consuming one another's time by arguing among themselves!**.

In many ways flat earthism is a natural outcome of young earthist culture (and in fact fundamentalism in general); the latter believe that there is kind of world-wide conspiracy of scientists, all of whom are spreading ideas of "millions of years and evolution". That a myriad independent scientists across the world manage to largely march in lock step on this question is put down to the fundamentalist notion that because they are all in rebellion to God they are all fixated on the concept of an old earth and shoe horn the data into this preconception. But this requires such a feat of organised behaviour among many independent scientists that the fundamentalist has to invoke the concept of world-wide Satanic influences being at work behind the scenes prompting scientists to work from a false starting point. They are, of course, also many Christians in the academic establishment who accept mainstream science. But according to Ken Ham, AiG's supremo, Christians who contradict his views are wilfully and knowingly compromising their faith; presumably as all part of the world-wide Satanically inspired conspiracy! It is this kind of distrust of outsiders (an observation also made by McIntyre at the flat earth conference - see above) that is an important precursor of conspiracy theorism. 


FOOTNOTES
* In case this  discussion should go offline I think I have managed to capture most of it and copied it here

** It is worth comparing the AiG discussion with the following argument I published between two Christian fundamentalists one of whom is a geocentrist.

https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2010/11/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-1.html
https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-2.html
https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2011/02/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-3.html
https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2011/03/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-4.html

In 2011 when I published that discussion I would never have guessed that Christian fundamentalism was set to get a lot worse and start turning to flat earthism! - it goes to show how quickly it has come to the fore; within less than a decade in fact. By comparison it would be worth researching how long it took for young earthism to gain acceptance among 1960s fundamentalists without the aid of the internet.

ADDENDUM  24/06/2019

There's an interesting post here by PZ Myers where he once again indulges his passion for lampooning fundamentalist lunacy. In this case his target is a very recent (June 22) article on the AiG web site by Ken Ham's tame astronomer Danny Faulkner. The article is a critique of flat earthism and as Myers remarks it is very ironic in that much of the article could be about AiG itself if one simply replaces "flat earth" by "young earth". The article can be found here:

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/earth/reflections-flat-earth-movement/

Before I read the article I thought my many years of observing fundamentalism had pretty much hardened me to its irony and that therefore my own irony meter would survive the reading intact. However, when I read the following my meter did become dangerously overloaded! Viz:

This extreme suspicion of anyone with any amount of advanced education is common in certain brands of Christian fundamentalism. This type of fundamentalism is committed to a very wooden, hyper-literal approach to the Bible. The fear is that if one admits that any part of the Bible is not literal, then one is free to interpret any and all the Bible in a nonliteral sense. But this fear is unwarranted, for some parts of the Bible clearly are not literal.

Additionally, many flat-earth pastors are very domineering and dictatorial. This rubs many people the wrong way, particularly when other, much smaller, differences arise. 

Flat-earthers insist that their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil. This is the major defining characteristic of a cult.

Pastors who are very domineering and dictatorial?  Insistence that  their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil ? Suspicion of outsiders, particularly of academia? That non-literal interpretations are the thin end of the satanic wedge? 

I wonder where have I seen this kind of thing before? Perhaps here,  here,  here, here, here,  here and here?

The Creative Forgery of Young Earthism

The creation of the Hitler diaries would have entailed a creation process and therefore a history, but it wasn't the history the dairies purported to tell: They were forgeries. According to the logic of  young earthism the creation is effectively a forgery

Somebody recently asked me the following question: 

I have a friend who, for some reason, is friendly to the idea that God might have created our universe already aged by a few million years, so to speak - so that the universe looks 14 billion years old, but if at the start of creation God kind of zapped it into existence at several billion years old already then it just looks older but is actually much younger.

 Obviously this is a distortion of the true picture - but I wonder if you have any thoughts on this and/or previous blogs on it, because I seem to recall you writing about matters like that before, where creationists claim similar things re the changing speed of light, a universe that God has made look older than it is.

My reply is given below: It includes some clarifying changes and actually concatenates two emails.

***

This is less of an issue than it was in the late 60s and early 70s when young earthism had its revival. For example in the early 70s my wife was told by a young earthist that God placed the fossils in the rocks "as is". The 1961 book "The Genesis Flood" which I read in the mid 70s tells us that God might have created light from the stars in transit.

But young earthists have been trying move away from this "appearance of age" creation (Sometimes euphemistically called "mature creation"); they will admit:
a) It is subversive of science and can block all attempts to do science.
b) Far worse, it questions God's creative integrity.
This "mature creation" can be likened to the person who wrote the fake Hitler Diaries - it's all a lie.

Hence, for modern young earthists much effort is put into flood geology and star light theories in order to try to give scientific account as to why things are the way they are. These theories have come to grief but at least a protagonist can engage them polemically whereas the guy who just claims that it was all created "as is" is difficult to argue with. But even if God created a fake diary it would still have a history in so far as it would require God to assemble it in his mind - hence you can't get away from history as an assembly path.  See here

But one finds that in the final analysis even those young earthists who try do science have to eventually fall back on creation "as is" and are open to being accused of the "Hitler Diary" syndrome. (See my links below)

Science is a data dot joining exercise: We see a pattern of "data dots" and attempt to complete the pattern with a theoretical narrative which joins the data samples into a coherent whole.  We attempt predictions of further dots and those predictions, if correct, point to the correctness of our dot joining theories. But all this is based on the assumption that the data dots are not misleading us; no problem for a non-fundamentalist Christian who believes in God's creative integrity. But it is a problem to a fundie who is effectively positing huge arbitrary holes in the anticipated background structure joining the data dots*. This is basically what the "appearance of age/mature creation" wallahs are trying to tells us; namely that the world is a forgery! I don't buy it!

Some of my writings on the subject can be seen in the links below.

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/01/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/02/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/04/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/03/mangling-science-part-1-kens-can-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/04/mangling-science-part2-opening-up-kens.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/10/mangling-science-continuing-our-diet-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/02/mangling-science-part-4-worms-all-way.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/12/mangling-science-part-5-two-kinds-of.html

Footnote

* Notice that this back of the envelope sketch of science doesn't recognise the distinction "historical science vs observational science" - the latter is a misleading fundamentalist trope. Science is about timeless patterns and in the exercise of all science both history and observation are always implicit. This is no surprise because every object we observe and study can only be done at the receiving end of  signals transmitted by the object. These signals inevitably have a history of travel.  However, there is such a thing as epistemic distance and this distance varies; some objects are closer to our scrutiny than others, some objects have a greater density of data dots than others and some objects have a greater complexity of behaviour than others: These are all factors that impact epistemic distance, making an object more or less amenable to our epistemology.

The fundamentalist attempt to solve the star light problem by positing a coordinate system which entails the instantaneous arrival of star light at our earthly doorstep (See links above for more on this "solution") immediately creates an issue with the historical science vs observational science dichotomy: This follows because it raises a conundrum as to whether astronomy is to be classified as "historical" or "observational" science!

Sympathy For The Atheist

The inhabitants of the Earth: Lost in space

Barry Arrington, supremo of the de facto intelligent design web-site Uncommon Descent, has recently criticised science populariser Bill Nye for underestimating the ancient's view of the size of the cosmos. Let me quote the first part of Arrington's article (see here):

As long-time readers know, we at UD often disparage Wikipedia for its left-wing bias. Still, you have to give it its due. For a quick lookup of non-controversial facts, it has its uses.

Uses to which, apparently, Bill Nye has not put it. If he had looked up Wiki’s entry on Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in around 150 AD), he would have known that the ancients understood very well that the universe is incomprehensibly vast. Here is the Summary of Ptolemy’s Cosmos from that article:

"The cosmology of the Syntaxis includes five main points, each of which is the subject of a chapter in Book I. What follows is a close paraphrase of Ptolemy’s own words from Toomer’s translation.

The celestial realm is spherical, and moves as a sphere.

The Earth is a sphere.

The Earth is at the center of the cosmos.

The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.

The Earth does not move."

The “the ancients thought the universe was tiny” myth and the “the ancients thought the earth was flat” myth are both refuted by the Almagest.  The persistence of these myths is difficult to explain given that it takes about 30 seconds on Google to find the Wiki article.

But apparently Bill Nye is so busy spouting his anti-Christian propaganda, he does not have 30 seconds to spare.

At the risk of being accused of a left-wing bias......

Ideas that the Earth is a sphere first appear in historical records around 600 BC (See Greek history and possibly also the Book of Job, a book thought to be dated circa 6th century BC). It is of course possible that the concept of the Earth as a sphere goes even further back, but the historical references we possess, as far as I am aware, don't go further back. As Christianity effectively came out of the classical world, belief in a spherical Earth was widespread among Christians from the start although not fully comprehensively so. But Ptolemaic theory swept the academic board after the crusades when the Western Scholastics had rediscovered classical learning from the Arabs. 

The trouble with Arrington's use of the quotation from Ptolemy is that in natural language usage of words like "tiny", "big" and "immense" are relative to perspective and context. When I'm driving around the small country of England, my car in relation to even a small country has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point. Even if one appreciates the relative insignificance of the size of a car in comparison with England or the Earth itself that doesn't mean to say one has a full appreciation of the size of the cosmic context in which the Earth is set. And so it is with Ptolemy: In spite of his comment about the relative size of the Earth we cannot conclude that Ptolemy really had a perspective on the extensiveness of the cosmos in the sense that we understand it today.

The fact that the stars and even the planets show no appreciable parallax probably tipped off many an intelligent ancient observer that those stars were very far away relative to Earthly dimensions. But although they might have an inkling that the "fixed sphere of stars" (See Ptolemy in Arrington's quote) was very distant, naturally enough given the perspective of their times Ptolemy and the Scholastics of the middle ages believed the Earth to be stationary at the centre of things as Arrington's quote confirms. It is this latter fact which really betrays the understandably limited perspective of their time.

There is "big", there is "very big", there is"immense" and there is "incomprehensibly large". I suggest that as time and science have progressed regarding the size of the cosmos we have moved from very big (Ptolemy) through immense (pre-Hubble) to incomprehensibly large (post-Hubble). Since Hubble's discoveries we take it for granted that the size of the cosmos makes even an immense object like our galaxy look small, very small. It is difficult to believe that less than one hundred years (i.e. a long human life time) have gone by since Hubble showed us that the starry universe goes way beyond our galaxy.

In the second half of the sixteenth century Thomas Digges unequivocally advanced the idea of the stars being spread across an infinite cosmos (as opposed to the stars being fixed on a distant sphere of quintessence). Not long after Digges, came the Italian Giordano Bruno who also proposed an infinite cosmos with an infinite number of worlds. On top of these huge increases in scale the centre stage status of the Earth in the Ptolemaic and medieval  cosmologies was in the process of being lost.  At the time these were revolutionary ideas and a complete departure from a finite, symmetrical and enclosed cosmos. The loss of the Earth's center-stage status, if anything, was probably a bigger blow to Western humanity's sense of special-ness than revelations of the ever increasing dimensions of that stage. The take home lesson is that human perceptions on the cosmic context and the status of the Earth have changed considerably over time whatever Arrington is trying to tell us. 

I'm a Christian but I have sympathy with many reasonable and friendly atheists who have difficulty perceiving a Christian God in the modern world view, quite apart from the perennial questions surrounding existence of suffering and evil. Through science God has progressively revealed to humanity a challenging post-enlightenment perspective on a cosmos that has immense depths in space & time and an Earth with no significant central position in terms of its space-time context, Moreover, the folk view of evolution is that it is an informationless process needing no special conditions in order to work (But see here).  All in all the popular impression is that the Earth is an incidental and accidental side show. This apparent loss of Terrestrial centrality and gain in banality has seated itself deeply in the Western psyche. Compounding the apparent loss in the sacredness and sanctity of life is the irony that even in these days of quantum theory the obsolete idea of an underlying insentient  "billiard ball" reality, independent of perception, as the primary reality is still a concept in many people's minds including, surprisingly,  Christians like Justin Brierley who are tempted to solve their consequent philosophical problems with a quasi-gnostic dualist world view.

These understandable but not always correct perceptions and reactions must be factored in when considering the rampant unbelief in the West. Consequently, I find I can hardly blame atheists for their lack of belief, many of whom are perfectly reasonable people whatever many right-wing Christians may think. True, there are some really nasty militant atheists out there who want their ideas to rule the world and would not balk at a Marxist dictatorship in order to impose their will. But then this is all part of flawed human nature and so not surprisingly we also find many really nasty authoritarian Christians out there who are just as domineering and whose toy-town cosmology and theology only further encourages unbelief and polarisation. The return to young earthism, geocentricism,  flat earthism and crackpot conspiracy theories among right-wing Christians and new-agers is evidence that many Westernised people are neither mature enough nor ready for the modern perspective and are unwilling to rise to the challenge it presents.


 I will leave the last words to Sir Kenneth Clarke.

Note: I think that this short sequence of film was taken at Osterley house

Relevant Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view

ADDENDUM 4/2/19

Note on the “Axis of Evil”

Using a combination of the cosmological principle and relativity theory it is possible to trivially proclaim that the Earth is just as much at the centre of the cosmos as any other point. This “many centres” cosmos is, of course, contains nothing like the connotations implicit in the medieval use and interpretation of the Ptolemaic universe, a universe which only tolerated one centre, one axis of symmetry, not many centres and many axes of symmetry....any more than it tolerated Bruno’s “many worlds” concept. To the medieval mind the Earth and its cosmic context was like a stage set, with the Earth at centre stage, the focus of the great cloud of witnesses of Hebrews 12:1. The medieval universe did not have a democracy of centres any more than its concept of government was democratic. The Earth was the centre of creation not a centre. Democracy, whether social or cosmological, was an unnatural idea in a feudal context. 

However, things could change and so I must mention here the so called “Axis of Evil”: Some of the latest high tolerance measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background have discovered asymmetries which give a hint that we may yet be able to conclude that the Earth occupies a special position in the cosmos  - See Wikipedia for a brief account of the “axis of evil”.  The Axis of Evil suggests that the Earth is at an exclusive axis of cosmic symmetry.  It would be nice to find that the Earth’s position and orientation is somehow special after all and that its centrality is not just a case of trivial coordinate system levelling allowing any observer to claim to be at “a centre”. Quoting Wiki:

Data from the Planck Telescope published in 2013 has since found stronger evidence for the anisotropy. "For a long time, part of the community was hoping that this would go away, but it hasn’t," says Dominik Schwarz of the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

But let’s not hold our breath because these results may still prove to be an artefact of measurement:

There is no consensus on the nature of this and other observed anomalies and their statistical significance is unclear. For example, a study that includes the Planck mission results shows how masking techniques could introduce errors that when taken into account can render several anomalies, including the Axis of Evil, not statistically significant. A 2016 study compared isotropic and anisotropic cosmological models against WMAP and Planck data and found no evidence for anisotropy.

Although at this stage it is clearly unwise for theists to laud these observations as restoring the special cosmic status of the Earth in human eyes, what the furore over the “Axis of Evil” reveals is just how far in the minds of (wo)men the status of the Earth’s place in the cosmic scheme of things has fallen since the medieval period and this is at least in part down to the revelations of astrophysics and generalisations of Copernicanism. Evidence of this fall is implicit in the reception among scientist of the so-called "Axis of Evil": For whether the apparent CMB large scale asymmetries are actually there or not, the mere hint of it is clearly a big shock to many scientists and in fact an unpleasant surprise to at least some of them for whom the whole affair sticks in the gullet; it’s not called the Axis of Evil for nothing!  The "Axis of Evil" affair shows us that restoring the Earth to some kind of "preferred" frame of reference would be a huge turn around in the thinking of Western scientific cosmology. Such has the cosmic insignificance of the Earth’s position gripped many a Western mind since Copernicus!

As Kenneth Clarke says; We have long rough voyage ahead of us and we can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement.

The Incoherent Notions of Free Will and Determinism: Part II

Premier Christianity Magazine screws up for once.

In the second part of this series I will be looking in detail at an article which appeared in the November 2018 edition of Premier Christianity magazine entitled "Free To Believe".  It's about the subject of "Free Will and Predestination".  The writer of the article, Justin Brierley, takes it for granted that "Free Will" and "Predestination" are meaningful terms and therefore he goes straight in with the assumption that the question is a clear "Free Will" vs. "Predestination" choice. Having  thrust this dichotomy at us without the slightest sign of hesitation or diffidence, Brierley's subsequent arguments largely consist of hand waving and surfing the cliches which do the rounds on this subject. The fact that Brierley fails to tender intelligible definitions to neither "free will" nor "determinism" means that his content is far too incoherent to facilitate meaningful agreement or disagreement.

In the first part of this series we found that it is possible to throw some light on the meaning of "determinism" from a mathematical point of view and that this meaning revolves around the degree to which behavioural patterns are mathematically predictable. But as we saw in that part the concept of mathematical "predictability" isn't a simple a binary "yes" or "no" choice: For not only does predictability come in degrees it is also relative to human knowledge and computational resources. Even so, it is not clear that the kind of mathematical determinism which facilitates predictability has got anything to do with Brierley's dichotomy. After all, in one sense God's behaviour is very predictable: Viz: We know in advance that God's behaviour will always fall on the side of Love, Justice and Truth. Does this predictability mean that God has no "free will" and that God's responses are "predetermined"?  I think that Brierley and many others who cliche surf this subject are probably confounded by theological word games that seem meaningful to them but turn out to unintelligible when scrutinised closely. This would not be a new development in the annals of theology, a subject which all too easily degenerates into casuistry

Below I follow my usual practice of quoting the writer and interleaving my own comments:

BRIERLEY: If God's grace alone is sufficient for salvation, then we must have played no part at all. God chose us we did not choose him. In Calvin's  mind, God had predestined those who will be saved  and those who will be damned. The lynchpin for this view was contained in Romans: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined  to be conformed  to the image of his Son (8:29)

MY COMMENT: This statement is hamstrung by the fact that it is very difficult for human beings to look at things from the divine perspective.  Presumably, the absolute sovereignty of God entails a power of veto over what comes out of the platonic space of possibility to be reified in the created world. In this sense God selects every thing if only, on occasion, in a permissive sense. (Presumably there are some possibilities he selects positively) Moreover, being omniscient it would seem to follow that God would "know in advance" which possible cases he is going to permit for reification and therefore "predestines it" at least via permission.

But then what meaningful content can we give to the phrase "God knows in advance" when it may well be that "time" as we know it is as much part of creation as is space and matter - in fact it is difficult to give meaning to space, time and matter in isolation from one another; e.g try defining matter without reference to time and space! Created time may be very different to divine time. So it seems quite possible that in Romans 8:29 Paul is using connotational content rather than notational content to express the absolute sovereignty of God in a way which resonates with our limited comprehension of the divine perspective and should therefore not be taken too literally.

And while we are here, a theological point: I was always under the impression that God's freely offered grace may nevertheless be rejected or accepted on the human side and consequently entails human action if only of a very minimal kind, a kind akin to saying "thank you" to someone offering a gift and then gratefully receiving that gift. Therefore I can make no sense of Brierley's claim that:  If God's grace alone is sufficient for salvation, then we must have played no part at all.   Of course, if we have accepted the gift of grace then, like everything else, our choice will be subject to the absolute sovereignty of divine permission. But that apart I would question whether we as human beings are able to talk about the divine perspective with sufficient clarity for us to be able to construct an unequivocally clear dichotomy referred to as  "free will vs predestination".

Brierley goes on to characterise the Calvinistic school of thought as follows:

BRIERLEY: This perspective amounts to a 'deterministic' view of reality. The world is the way it is and could be none other, because God has predetermined every atom and every thought of every heart. In such a universe, human freewill is an illusion. We are all playing our designated parts in a script that was written before the world began. ...[This] looks like the work of puppet master. 

MY COMMENT:  As I have already commented, given the human perspective Calvinistic determinism is probably little more than a fuzzy connotational allusion to the sovereignty of the divine perspective. I myself would personally take the view that the sovereignty of God does entail an ultimate power of veto which means that all that emerges from platonic space into created reality is therefore at least at God's permission.  Whatever we do and think has its "pre-existence" in platonic space. God's role as absolute sovereign may give him a veto over what possibilities emerge from platonic space for reification in the created order, but these possibilities lurked in platonic space before their reification, God or no God. So in one sense we are all playing out our designated parts in a "script" that once existed in platonic space, whether or not God even exists! That "script", along with many others, has always been there hidden as a contingency in configuration space. The history of the created cosmos is a bit like the contents of a giant book: If the cosmos is finite then it entails a finite number of possibilities, albeit very large. God is, as it were, a kind of author reifying one of the many permutations that the contents of the cosmic book can take. It remains a mystery why God has brought about the reification of our particular cosmic story: I don't think this particular mystery will be solved any time soon!

So, with or without those annoying Calvinists, there seems to be a mathematical sense in which "predetermination", so called, is difficult to avoid! But Brierley goes over the top; he's quite sure he can draw the conclusion that any hint of determinism implies we are puppets on strings; in spite of the fact that Brierley is working at the limits of intelligibility he confidently proffers such a conclusion. But what has emerged from platonic space is hardly comparable to a puppet. For a start no one really knows what it feels like to be a puppet, if indeed puppets have any feelings! In contrast the world which has emerged from platonic space is not a world of puppets but a world of conscious beings with very complex patterns of behaviour driven from within. If these beings are following any script at all it is the script of complex adaptive systems whose decisions are a function of an internal complexity as it reacts to its environment. The puppet metaphor is wholly inappropriate to this kind of system. Puppets are neither conscious nor capable of an adaptive response.

BRIERLEY: Atheist determinism springs from a materialist world view. All that exists is the 'material' stuff of the universe. Everything about us and the world we live in can ultimately be explained by the physics of atoms, electrons, quarks and neutrons, interacting according according to the predictable regularity of natural laws.

Think of it like this: The skill of the snooker player is in predicting as accurately as possible how the balls will ricochet off each other in order to find the pockets on the table. But theoretically, if a snooker player lined up their very first shot with perfect precision and perfect force, they could clear the table in one shot. The universe is like that, but on a much bigger scale.

MY COMMENT: I am surprised that Brierley is working to such a passe concept of physics; he fails to take cognizance of the roles of chaos and quantum randomness in today's "mechanical" paradigm. Thus Brierley's characterization of "atheist determinism" using "billiard ball" mechanics looks like a straw-man. Although there may well be many naive atheists out there who share Brierley's characterization it is not at all clear that sophisticated atheists would swallow this view and this has implications for Brieley's freewill vs determinism dichotomy. For a start, as we have seen in the first part of this series "determinism" in the mathematical sense is a graded and relative phenomenon and even when determinism is present in its strongest form such as we see in a computer system, it is still colloquially meaningful to talk about such a system "making choices" within its behavioural envelope. For sophisticated atheists like the philosopher John Searle and physicist Roger Penrose, both of whom undoubtedly understand the way the world works better than Brierley, it would be very unfair to foist this naive account of reality upon them. Moreover, Searle and Penrose are very clear in their identification of the conscious component of human cognition: As Searle may well tell us, "human machines" are a composite of a first person perspective and a third person perspective. This leads to the question as to what is the true nature of reality. In the quote above Brierley has, in all likelihood, defaulted to the dualist paradigm that contrasts the world of hard "billiard ball matter" against the ethereal and ghostly mind. It is a small step from this dualist outlook to the belief that "billiard ball matter" is the primary reality and that the conscious sentience of mind is at best secondary and at worst an illusion to be disposed of. My own view (developed elsewhere) is that conscious qualia are needed to turn the formalities of mathematical configurations into real and meaningful qualities.

It may well be that the world of quantum envelopes has a complete registration with the world of conscious thinking in as much as those envelopes contain a full complement of information about conscious activity. In this descriptive sense the behaviour of quantum envelopes would then provide a complete "explanation" of consciousness - Christians should not necessarily be in the business of denying this possibility. But even if this is actually the case and if the quantum world is humanly predictable (which in fact it appears not to be!), quantum mechanics nevertheless remains a third person theoretical account which ultimately traces back to a first person making observations and constructing a rational theory, a theory which joins the dots of conscious experience into a rational whole. The upshot is that it is impossible to eliminate the sentient mind from the world of theoretical mechanics as it is organically joined to it via perception. All this is a far cry from Brierley's billiard ball mechanics.

BRIERLEY: Every single physical event, from the movement of electrons to the orbits of planets., follows predictable laws of cause and effect. Therefore, the way the universe is now is  a direct  result of the way it was when it first began.  If you rewind the clock by 13 billion years to the exact same physical state of affairs things would roll out in exactly the same way they already have.

But in such a universe, the idea that we have any measure of free will evaporates. Every aspect of our existence was predestined by a cosmos blindly following the laws of cause and effect. 

MY COMMENT: Here we go again with Brierley's naive physics of a highly predictable world! Moreover, he's very emphatic here that the predictable patterning of so called "cause and effect" (sic) is inconsistent with "freewill".  If we are to take Brierley's position to its logical conclusion it would mean that for human beings to qualify as having freewill, their patterns of behavior would have to be absolutely random! This is absurd as clearly humans often (but not always) make rational decisions in reaction to their environment and this necessarily entails a degree of predictability.  Moreover, as I have pointed out in part I human behaviour is in many cases highly predictable and it seems wrong to then draw the conclusion that this implies the absence of "freewill". As we have also seen, God's behavior is also very predictable at a high level (if not at the detailed level) and it doesn't then follow that God therefore has no "freewill"! (what ever that "freewill" is supposed to mean).

Given the physical laws as we currently understand them it is certainly not clear that rewinding the universe back to the year dot and restarting it would mean that exactly the same history would repeat. In fact as many evolutionists would affirm it is not at all clear that, given the contingent nature of evolution, a rewind and restart would ultimately lead to the human species. So much for Brierley's account of "determinism"! The irony is that the very contingent and random nature of physical processes is often used as a counter to theism! (Theism as a concept, it seems, struggles at both the extremes of high order and low order)

Following the above quote Brierley does a brief section on "compatibilism"; that is, the belief that one's actions can be both free and determined at the same time. Trouble is, because Brierley is engaged in some heavy duty hand waving rather than giving us clear understandings of "predestination" and "freewill" it is impossible to come to any firm conclusion about their logical relationship and whether one category necessarily excludes the other. We therefore have no idea what is being claimed to be compatible with what, or vice versa what is incompatible with what.

The rest of Brierley's article suffers from the same woolly thinking. All we have to go on is some indication that Brierley closely identifies determinism with predictable patterns, but as we have seen predictability is both graded and relative, so how predictable has something got to be before it classifies as determinism? Brierley's line of thinking appears to lead to the absurd conclusion that only absolutely random behavior can be considered "free". As the matter stands, then, it is impossible to come to any intelligible conclusions as to whether freewill and determinism are mutually incompatible.

BRIERLEY: Our freewill is not truly free if determinism is still the bottom line

MY COMMENT: This statement is too incoherent to agree or disagree with.

BRIERLEY: Love is only truly love when it is freely given and freely received.

MY COMMENT: If we are to take on board the implicit logic behind Brierley's close identification of predictability with determinism we might conclude that because behavior must be random and unpredictable to be classified as "free" then a person who loves me today, may not love me tomorrow because the patterns of behaviour of  "free agents" are unpredictable. I'm sure Brierley wouldn't agree with this nonsense! At least I hope not!

BRIERLEY: We are all familiar. with the fairy tale of the enchantress who puts the prince under a spell  to make him 'love' her. But we know its not really love - its a delusion. Being manipulated in such a way is the opposite of love. By the same token, if God has pre-contrived  our every desire. so that we have no option but to love our wife, love our children and to love him, then we are acting as little more than robots.

MY COMMENT: The "spell" here reminds me of the scenario I referred to in part I where a computer executing software is infected with a virus; it's no longer the software making the decisions but the virus that has been introduced.  God could no doubt completely and miraculously disrupt our neural make up in order to make us love him, but since our identity is very much bound up with the uniqueness of our character traits, memories and history the identity of "us" would no longer be "us".  Our "I" would effectively have been hi-jacked by a different "I". God, I suspect. is looking for our personal status quo to eventually turn to him and love him. It is revealing that some Christians actually see Christian conversion as a kind personality transplant which almost wipes out the previous personality; This conversion paradigm is, I believe, pathological theology and based on a literal reading of connotational texts.

As I have already said, in one sense God hasn't pre-contrived our desires; they were already contrived in platonic space. However, it is God who chooses and permits what emerges from platonic space into our reified world of contingency. Hence God is not responsible for the forms that "pre-exist" in platonic space, although he is responsible for reifying the possibilities. Obviously there remains the big mystery of why God has reified some configurations but not others, but in this life we can no more comprehensively solve that mystery than we can the many mysteries of why JRR Tolkein wrote the particular book that he did.

***

In the next part I hope to look more closely at Brierleys' subliminal dualism, a dualism probably conceived as billiard ball "cause and effect"  materialism vs. the mysterious ghost in the machine.

....TO BE CONTINUED

Comets: Deconstructing fundamentalist anti-science.

The face of sectarian authoritarianism: Anti-scientist Jonathan Safarti tells us 
what we've got to believe if we don't want to compromise our faith!

In these posts here and here I contrasted Ken Ham's tame astronomer Danny Faulkner's treatment of the second law of thermodynamics with that of young earthist Jonathan Sarfati. Sarfati sensibly warns young earthists not to use it as argument against evolution. Faulkner on the other hand falls for all the old traps that young earthists fall into over the nature of the second law of thermodynamics. 

Sarfarti is a New Zealander who writes articles for Creation Ministries International (CMI). As I have related in my VNP blog Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis (AiG) emerged out of a fundamentalist schism involving CMI and Ken Ham's friend and ex-business partner John Mackay. I wrote about this complex affair in this blog post. CMI still have unresolved issues with John Mackay;  see  here: 

https://creation.com/regarding-john-mackay

(or see my post on the MacKay affair if this web page should disappear).  While I'm on the subject of inter-fundamentalist feuding I may as well also mention the schism between the supporters of Kent Hovind and Hovind's son Eric.The feud seems to have been triggered by Kent's divorce and his son subsequently siding with his mother. One of Kent's supporter's, Pastor Steve Anderson, referred to Eric as one of the most evil men out there.  Eric Hovind, by the way, is in cahoots with AiG (AiG has criticized - and rightly so - the quality of Kent Hovind's creationist ministry). I did a short blog on this fundamentalist family feud here. As a Christian I find this whole sordid business of vicious spiritually fueled in-fighting very embarrassing. I can only sympathize with atheists who see it as further justification for an atheist world view.

With knowledge of the foregoing background  I was interested to see that Jonathan Sarfati has an old article on CMI about comets. As he seems to be a more competent operator than Faulkner I was anxious to compare his article on comets with those of Faulkner who has also posted on comets (See here for samples of the poor quality of Faulkner's thinking).

The article by Sarfati that I would like to scrutinize can be seen here:

https://creation.com/comets-portents-of-doom-or-indicators-of-youth

The article is rather old (June 2003) and comet research at that time had (and still has) plenty of way to go. However, more to the point is that Sarfati's article is a fine specimen of fundamentalist habits of mind and it is that which is of greater interest to me than fundamentalist (anti)science.   

***

At the beginning of Sarfati's article we read this:

SARFATI: It was the Biblical worldview which led to the science that explained comets. The Bible teaches that the universe was made by a God of order (1 Corinthians 14:33), who gave mankind dominion over creation (Genesis 1:26–28). Historians of science, regardless of their own religious faith, from Christians to atheists, acknowledge the vital importance of the Christian worldview in the rise of modern experimental science.

MY COMMENT: From a Christian perspective that is probably a fair summary: The Christian faith leads to a belief in a knowable cosmos, knowable because of a core belief in its created rational integrity. This promotes a sound mind which is not easily seduced by the nihilism of postmodernism. The irony is, as we shall see, that Sarfati's fundamentalist world view does not have much respect for the rational integrity on which science depends; fundamentalism is on a collision course with the order and rationality of God's creation. 

There is further irony here in that this self-same scientific project which the Christian world view encourages and which Sarfati praises also led humankind into a cosmological revolution that overturned the cosy Ptolemaic universe and ultimately uncovered the huge depths in both space and time. Ostensibly the cosmos no longer looked like a stage set centered around Earth where the story of salvation was being played out. This is and was a challenge for Christians.  Moreover, as Western Christian protestant groups became more and more marginalized from mainstream intellectual life, fundamentalists, as we well know, went into denial and attempted to reinstate the cosy dimensions of time if not of space. 

To get round the discoveries of modern science Sarfati and his ilk have to split science into so called "observational" and "historical" or "non-observational" science in order to cast doubt on what they classify as the latter. This is an error in the fundamentalist epistemic, for as I have said before all science is at once both observational & historical, and non-trivial scientific objects seldom, if ever, classify as directly observational (See here, and here for more) 

Safarti's anti-science world view is effectively alluded to early on in his article:

SARFATI: The Word of the Creator of the comets, which inspired the development of the science that demystified them, also tells us when He made them. In Genesis 1:14–19, He told us that He made the sun, moon and stars on Day 4 of Creation Week, which was about 4000 BC, as Kepler and Newton realized. Since the Hebrew word for star, כוכב (kokab) refers to any bright heavenly object, it presumably includes comets as well.

MY COMMENT: The fundamentalist mind is thoroughly dualist in outlook and perceives a sharp dichotomy between the "natural" and the "supernatural".  Cosmic "creation" is seen as an act of God's magical words whereby he speaks the stars into existence*. Clearly this world view is not very science friendly; as Sarfati implies it means that God conjured up the comets, like the stars, as is, just like that!, presumably with their constituents, distribution and trajectories determined by divine fiat. This means that little or nothing is known about the process of comet formation and their properties have to be taken as brute fact.  In the fundamentalist paradigm of creation there is great freedom to patch-in what ever one wants with little regard to any rational integrity or any underlying theoretical conjectures. An extreme case of this fundamentalist "just like that" paradigm can be witnessed in Jason Lisle's "mature creature" cosmogony where he resorts to the old young earthist strategy of positing cosmic signals created in transit in order to explain apparent cosmic interactions (see here for more on this).

SARFATI: The features of comets make perfect sense in a Biblical timescale, but are a huge problem for evolution/billions of years. Because all age indicators work on assumptions, the argument here is not claimed as ‘proof’ of a ‘young’ solar system. Because of the reliable eye-witness account of the Creator in the Bible, the young age is accepted. And this article, among many others,3 shows that even under the evolutionists’ own assumptions, there are huge problems for their timescale

MY COMMENT: Let's start by focusing on what Sartfati means when he says that the features of comets make perfect sense in a Biblical time scale. Does he mean that he understands how the composition, distributions and trajectory of comets is a logical outcome of the time scale he is offering? Of course not! For if he believes that comets came about as a result of God speaking them into existence then that puts very little constraint on their properties; for who can guess what Sarfati's magician God is going to conjure up?  As I've already remarked this is very similar to Jason Lisle's theory that the particles which are the basis of the interactions between the stars or between galaxies were created in transit; an idea mooted in the 1961 fundamentalist book The Genesis Flood. Thus both Lisle and Sarfati have very little constraint on what they can postulate with their "mature creation" world view; just about anything goes and concomitantly very little understanding is therefore being offered. This is what Sarfati refers to when he tells us confidently that what is effectively "magic" makes "perfect sense" of cometary properties!

Because so little is known about the origins of comets much is hidden behind our ignorance and therefore Sarfati is wrong to say that comets are a huge problem for evolution/billions of years. As Sarfati himself admits we know so little about the Oort cloud: The Oort cloud is a conjectured object and its properties rather vague; if we did know more about its size, composition and even, in fact, if it exists it would then constrain our expectations about the life time of cometary invasions and a theoretical inconstancy might then give scientists a huge problem. But in the meantime too many sliding variables make outright contradictions impossible. 

To be fair to Sarfati he has conceded above that none of this is proof of young earthism. Thus Sarfati is in effect admitting that he's simply trying to put a spanner in the works of current cometary theory; after all, this is really all that the young earthist anti-scientist can be expected do, because as we have seen a world view that can always be rescued by appeal to divine fiat has no rules and is therefore not very amenable to scientific epistemology. But this admission by Sarfati is at least a step in the right direction: Some fundamentalist anti-scientists don't make this clear: They point to the weaknesses in current theories without pointing out that this doesn't allow the interpolation that the cosmos is just 6000 years old. Instead they come out with vague statements like "Therefore the universe must be young!" and let their audience fill in what is meant by "young".

Note the common anthropomorphism one sees among fundamentalists of Sarfati's ilk Viz: "the reliable eye-witness account of the Creator."  God, of course, has no eyes and therefore we've no idea how God experiences things. If Genesis 1 is God's experience of creation it certainly doesn't follow that it would be the same experience from a human perspective!  We have little or no  idea what it is like to have the Divine first person perspective and therefore a metaphorical/mythological interpretation rather than literal interpretation for Geneses is in order; if a human "eye-witness" were at the creation there is no telling, a priori, what it would look like to the human eye. After all, the young earthists weren't eye-witnesses there at the time of creation so how do they know what it looked like?

SARFATI: This means that the comet is slowly being destroyed every time it comes close to the sun. In fact, many comets have been observed to become much dimmer in later passes. Even Halley’s comet was brighter in the past. Also, comets are in danger of being captured by planets, like Comet Shoemaker–Levy crashing into Jupiter in 1994, or else being ejected from the solar system. A direct hit on Earth is unlikely, but could be disastrous because of the comet’s huge kinetic (motion) energy. The problem for evolutionists is that given the observed rate of loss and maximum periods, comets could not have been orbiting the sun for the alleged billions of years.

MY COMMENTS: Yes, individual periodic comets can't orbit the sun for billions of years, but because we have very sketchy ideas about the origins of comets we can draw no strong conclusions about how long cometary invasions into the inner solar system have been going on. Sarfati should have been more careful with his wording. His last sentence should have read in the singular; that is:

A comet could not have been orbiting the sun for the alleged billions of years.

And not in the plural: 

Comets could not have been orbiting the sun for the alleged billions of years.


This latter careless expression puts Sarfati in the same category of error making of Faulkner and which I picked up in this blog post. Since established science has sketchy ideas about the supply of comets  (plural) we don't know how long that supply would last!

SAFARTI: The highest period of a stable orbit would be about four million years if the maximum possible aphelion (furthest distance of an orbiting satellite from the sun) were 50,000 AU. This is 20% of the distance to the nearest star, so there’s a fair chance other stars could release the comet from the sun’s grip.

However, even with this long orbit, such a comet would still have made 1,200 trips around the sun if the solar system were 4.6 billion years old. However, it would have been extinguished long before. The problem is even worse with short-period comets.

The only solution for evolutionists is hypothetical sources to replenish the supply of comets:

MY COMMENT: I'm not disagreeing with any of this. Sarfati is right in telling us that given the fragility of comets regular visits to the inner solar system by one comet can only last so long and therefore established science must find a way to keep up the supply of invading comets.  (But see appendix I for yet another wild card - it is conceivable that cometary invasions are a "new" thing)

But notice one thing here: 4 million years, the longest possible period of a comet's orbit, is a lot larger than 6000 years. So we can see that Sarfati isn't going to get a figure of 6000 years out of his "science"! But then he doesn't need to: Comets were created "just like that!"

Here's what Sarfati says about the Oort cloud: 

SARFATI: No observational support Therefore it’s doubtful that the Oort Cloud should be considered a scientific theory. It is really an ad hoc device to explain away the existence of long-period comets, given the dogma of billions of years.

MY COMMENT: He's repeated another error by Faulkner. Sarfati is misrepresenting the process of scientific epistemology. The Oort cloud is a legitimate scientific conjecture that seeks to fit the data dots. In the sense of being part of the process of scientific discovery advancing a hypothetical object, as long as it is acknowledged is such, is a scientific strategy. Ergo, the Oort cloud is a scientific theory in that respect (See my post on Faulkner where I make the same point). Moreover, the Oort cloud is observational in so far as it seeks to explain what we know about comets from celestial observation. Sarfati seems to be displaying the usual fundamentalist misunderstanding of the relationship between theory and observation. All theories are observational in so far as they attempt to explain observations although the epistemic distance of the objects being explained may mean that not enough observational data is available for them to pass from conjecture to settled science. There is no sharp cut-off between "observational" science and historical or non-observational science; rather we have a sliding scale of epistemic distance. Trouble is, fundamentalists have a habit of thinking in black and white terms and seek unambiguous, non-fuzzy categories which gives them a philosophical pretext to discredit historical science.

SARFATI: Collisions would have destroyed most comets: The classical Oort cloud is supposed to comprise comet nuclei left over from the evolutionary (nebular hypothesis) origin of the solar system, with a total mass of about 40 Earths. But a newer study showed that collisions would have destroyed most of these, leaving a combined mass of comets equivalent to only about one Earth, or at most 3.5 Earths with some doubtful assumptions.

The ‘fading problem’: The models predict about 100 times more NICs than are actually observed. So evolutionary astronomers postulate an ‘arbitrary fading function’. A recent proposal is that the comets must disrupt before we get a chance to see them. It seems desperate to propose an unobserved source to keep comets supplied for the alleged billions of years, then make excuses for why this hypothetical source doesn’t feed in comets nearly as fast as it should.

MY COMMENT: Safarti refers to two problems with Oort cloud theoretical models tendered prior to 2002: Namely:

Problem 1: A model of the early solar system predicts that too few comets find their way into the Oort cloud because they are ground to dust via collisional processes before they are ejected into the Oort cloud.  See here:

Rapid collisional evolution of comets during the formation of the Oort cloud S. Alan Stern & Paul R. Weissman

https://www.nature.com/articles/35054508
Coupling dynamical and collisional evolution of small bodies II : Forming the Kuiper Belt, the Scattered Disk and the Oort Cloud  Sébastien Charnoz Alessandro Morbidelli
https://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0609/0609807.pdf

Problem 2: A theoretical model predicts too many NIC and dormant Halley-type  comets.  See here:

Where Have All the Comets Gone?  Mark E Bailey

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/296/5576/2151
The mass disruption of Oort Cloud comets: Levison HF1, Morbidelli A, Dones L, Jedicke R, Wiegert PA, Bottke WF Jr.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12077415

So, on the one hand we have a theoretical model which suggests that the Oort cloud doesn't contain enough viable material to act as a supply of comets and on the other hand theoretical model research which suggests there are not enough NIC comets observed. Conflicting results like this are the signs of a theoretical discipline which is still very much feeling its way. Collisional and interactional dynamics is very sensitive to the typical diameters of the objects in interaction and the output of these models will very much depend on these parameters.  Given the epistemic distance of the early solar system and the conjectured Oort cloud it is no surprise that models are churning out perplexing results.

But Sarfati cannot have his cake and eat it; either a lot is known about the origins and distribution of comets or very little is known; we seem to be nearer the latter rather than the former. If on the other hand knowledge of the Oort cloud was on a much firmer foundation and yet theories still came up with unequivocal inconsistencies Sarfati might have a case. But if as Sarfati has acknowledged it seems our knowledge is sketchy to say the least, inconsistencies and perplexing results are no surprise. Sarfati can't have it both ways: Given the state of knowledge about the conjectured Oort cloud he cannot make claim to unresolvable problems and yet at the same time claim that this is not "observational" (sic) science. (What Sarfati really means by "not observational science" is simply that the objects being studied here have a large epistemic distance)  

SARFATI: The Kuiper Belt is supposed to be a doughnut-shaped reservoir of comets at about 30–50 AU (beyond Neptune’s orbit), postulated as a source of short-period comets. It is named after Dutch astronomer Gerald Kuiper (1905–1973), sometimes considered the father of modern planetary science, who proposed it in 1951.

To remove the evolutionary dilemma, there must be billions of comet nuclei in the Kuiper Belt. But nowhere near this many have been found—only 651 as at January 2003. Furthermore, the Kuiper Belt Objects discovered so far are much larger than comets. While the diameter of the nucleus of a typical comet is around 10 km, the recently discovered KBOs are estimated to have diameters above 100 km. The largest so far discovered is ‘Quaoar’ (2002 LM60), with a diameter of 1,300 km (800 miles), which orbits the sun in an almost circular orbit [Ed. note: Sedna, discovered on 14 November 2003 and reported on 15 March 2004, after this article was written, is probably larger]. Note that a KBO with a diameter only 10 times that of a comet has about 1,000 times the mass. So in fact there has been no discovery of comets per se in the region of the hypothetical Kuiper Belt, so it so far is a non-answer. Therefore many astronomers refer to the bodies as Trans-Neptunian Objects, which objectively describes their position beyond Neptune without any assumptions that they are related to a comet source as Kuiper wanted.

MY COMMENT: Sarfati's article is showing its age: This passage is no longer relevant. Cometary research has moved on, but  not with the help of Sarfati!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt. Viz:

WIKIPEDIA: The Kuiper belt was initially thought to be the main repository for periodic comets, those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. Studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the belt is dynamically stable and that comets' true place of origin is the scattered disc, a dynamically active zone created by the outward motion of Neptune 4.5 billion years ago; scattered disc objects such as Eris have extremely eccentric orbits that take them as far as 100 AU from the Sun.

The Kuiper belt is distinct from the theoretical Oort cloud, which is a thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc and any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Pluto is the largest and most massive member of the Kuiper belt, and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO, surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc. Originally considered a planet, Pluto's status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. It is compositionally similar to many other objects of the Kuiper belt and its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBOs, known as "plutinos", that share the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune.

SARFATI: Summary: Comets are not portents of doom, but are objects God created on Day 4. The successful prediction of comet appearances was an early triumph for modern science, inspired by a Biblical worldview. Comets lose so much mass every time they shine that they could not be billions of years old. Evolutionists propose various sources to replenish the comet supply, but there is no real observational evidence, and numerous unsolved theoretical difficulties. Therefore comets make much more sense under a Biblical timescale.

MY COMMENT: Sarfati once again shows that he really hasn't taken on-board the relationship between observation, theoretical objects and epistemic distance. Clearly there is observational evidence for the Oort cloud in as much as observed comet visitations are thought to be an outcome of the theory. But the observations so far do not yet provide enough evidence to take the Oort cloud concept out of the realm of hypothesis. Moreover, the state of Oort cloud research in 2003 means that there remain too many sliding variables for discrepancies, difficulties and inconsistencies to add up to a blatant contradiction and therefore refute the hypothesis with certainty. Moreover, as we shall see the epistemic distance of the Oort cloud is such that even now there are too many unknowns to either "refute" or "prove" the idea.

As I have already pointed out Sarfati can in no way predict the distribution, composition and trajectory of comets and instead all he can say is that they are celestial objects "God created on Day 4". From such a position only a fundamentalist mind could make a statement like "...comets make much more sense under a Biblical timescale." 

***

Observing the Oort Cloud?
Christian Fundamentalists  a have tendency to think in dichotomies and the idea that "observational" science is something which slowly fades with epistemic distance is not likely to have an easy fit with a mentality which seeks to secure clear cut charges  a) of heresy, b) of evading divine authority, c) of unorthodoxy and d) of compromise. With this in mind just how observational is the Oort cloud? Here's what Wiki says about the Oort cloud hypothesis (emphases mine):

The Oort cloud (named after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort), sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals believed to surround the Sun to as far as somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 AU (0.8 and 3.2 ly)

Astronomers conjecture that the matter composing the Oort cloud formed closer to the Sun and was scattered far into space by the gravitational effects of the giant planets early in the Solar System's evolution. Although no confirmed direct observations of the Oort cloud have been made, it may be the source of all long-period and Halley-type comets entering the inner Solar System, and many of the centaurs and Jupiter-family comets as well.

The Oort cloud is thought to occupy a vast space from somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 AU (0.03 and 0.08 ly) to as far as 50,000 AU (0.79 ly) from the Sun. Some estimates place the outer edge at between 100,000 and 200,000 AU (1.58 and 3.16 ly). The region can be subdivided into a spherical outer Oort cloud of 20,000–50,000 AU (0.32–0.79 ly), and a torus-shaped inner Oort cloud of 2,000–20,000 AU (0.0–0.3 ly). The outer cloud is only weakly bound to the Sun and supplies the long-period (and possibly Halley-type) comets to inside the orbit of Neptune. The inner Oort cloud is also known as the Hills cloud, named after Jack G. Hills, who proposed its existence in 1981. Models predict that the inner cloud should have tens or hundreds of times as many cometary nuclei as the outer halo; it is seen as a possible source of new comets to resupply the tenuous outer cloud as the latter's numbers are gradually depleted. The Hills cloud explains the continued existence of the Oort cloud after billions of years.

The outer Oort cloud may have trillions of objects larger than 1 km (0.62 mi),[3] and billions with absolute magnitudes brighter than 11 (corresponding to approximately 20-kilometre (12 mi) diameter), with neighboring objects tens of millions of kilometres apart.[6][17] Its total mass is not known, but, assuming that Halley's Comet is a suitable prototype for comets within the outer Oort cloud, roughly the combined mass is 3×1025 kilograms (6.6×1025 lb), or five times that of Earth.Earlier it was thought to be more massive (up to 380 Earth masses), but improved knowledge of the size distribution of long-period comets led to lower estimates. The mass of the inner Oort cloud has not been characterized.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud) 

If this is up date then it is clear that as the article admits the Oort cloud is still a very conjectural object where the exact parameters characterizing its properties are unknown. Also just look at the spatial distances involved; the Oort cloud could extend up to 3 light years from the Sun! So getting a spacecraft out there with current technology looks unrealistic. Moreover, at these distances it is unlikely that even today's telescopes would detect dark objects about 10 miles across.  In fact the web page below (dated 2015) discusses the question of the telescopic observability of Oort cloud comets. After presenting some calculations the author then concludes: 

The observation of Halley by the VLT represents the pinnacle of what is possible with today's telescopes. Even the Hubble deep ultra deep field only reached visual magnitudes of about 29. Thus a big Oort cloud object remains more than 20 magnitudes below this detection threshold!

The most feasible way of detecting Oort objects is when they occult background stars. The possibilities for this are discussed by Ofek & Naker 2010 in the context of the photometric precision provided by Kepler. The rate of occultations (which are of course single events and unrepeatable) was calculated to be between zero and 100 in the whole Kepler mission, dependent on the size and distance distribution of the Oort objects. As far as I am aware, nothing has come of this (yet).
(https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/254/why-cant-we-observe-the-oort-cloud-with-a-telescope)

So if this answer is right then with current technology no one is going eyeball an Oort cloud comet any time soon, even with the aid of a telescope. In the fundamentalist mind this will likely disqualify the Oort cloud from the category of  "observational" science.  What then would need to be done for the Oort cloud to fall into the fundamentalist's "eyeball" category of "observational science"? 

The author of the above quote mentions the Kepler mission's attempt to detect Oort cloud comets via star occultation. More about this topic can be found on these web pages::

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kepler-oort-cloud/
https://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0948

But the Kepler mission, even if it came up with observations consistent with the Oort Cloud hypothesis, may not classify as "observational" science from the perspective of the eyeballing fundamentalist. Firstly, theoretical science has to be invoked in order for cometary occultations to be distinguished from planetary occultations; that will, of course, entail assumptions. Secondly, even if Kepler came up with the right number of the right type of occultations, that is, between 0 and 100,  this still doesn't fit with the naive observer's concept of "eyeballing" the Oort cloud - it would just amount to a tiny sampling of the cloud and the extrapolation to this huge tenuous object from such a small data set would entail the use of statistics and assumptions that are not unassailable if we are so minded.  It is unlikely that we will be able to eyeball the Oort cloud in its entirety any time soon and so fundamentalist eyeball-science will remain safe! 

The anti scientist at work
Eyeballing fundamentalist's insistence on so-called "observational science" is ultimately subversive of the whole scientific project..... for all our observations are, in the final analysis, seen through a theoretical lens, a lens which the fundamentalist refuses to use. All science is at once both observational and theoretical - the two go hand in hand. There are however variations in epistemic distance which render some objects more theoretical and less observational than others. But as I have said  fundamenatlists don't usually think in shades - they more naturally to think in dichotomies; us vs them, saints verses heretics, goodies verse baddie, insiders vs outsiders, the faithful vs apostates, the Christian community vs evil conspirators etc and this dichotomised social world view colors their perception of science with its very human epistemic frailties.

And that exactly describes Sarfati; he refuses to lift a finger to advance cometary science; but then how can someone who believes that comets were spoken into existence, just like that, with all their properties as is, be of help to science? The role of the anti-scientist is to bring down established science to the satisfaction of his fundamentalist audience. Sarfati's "science" is so empty that there is nothing in his paradigm to stop him declaring that the Oort cloud itself could have been spoken into existence just like that, thus giving the mere appearance of a solar system that has emerged from a cloud of dust and gas. In the fundamentalist world view anything goes; except of course established science which must at all costs be proved wrong. When he thinks he has done this Sarfati then triumphantly tells his audience of simpletons that ...comets make much more sense under a Biblical timescale. 

Safarti fills the role of an anti-scientist perfectly. He has science qualifications which give him credence among his benighted followers. His scientific training will also equip him to attack the inevitable assumptions that have their roots in the Christian belief in a cosmos of rational integrity and which are the basis of all scientific theories ....not least the assumption that the cosmos has a rational integrity which allows true scientists to rule out, for example, that the particles behind long term cosmic interactions were not spoken into existence in transit. 

Anti-scientists like Sarfati are time wasters. Too much time can be spent in deconstructing their inner world view, a teetering tower of Gish gallop built up over many years and which does the rounds in fundamentalist sub-culture.

Authoritarianism
Lastly here's what Sarfati thinks of evangelical Christian astronomer Hugh Ross, who is an old Earth creationist but who does not accept evolution. This is what Sarfati says of him (my emphases):

SARFATI: The Canadian-born astronomer Hugh Ross is the leading proponent of the view that the days of Genesis 1 were billions of years long. He has influenced many leading evangelicals, and is president of the ostensibly Christian apologetics ministry, Reasons to Believe, in California. As his testimony makes clear, his compromise in Genesis is due to his faith in the ‘big bang’. This leads him into all sorts of unorthodox views, such as millions of years of death and suffering before Adam; plants feeling pain; a local flood; manlike creatures that created art, superglue, and made ocean voyages but didn’t have souls, etc.

[Ross] urges Christians to accept the consensus view of astronomers, and let it over-ride the grammatical-historical interpretation of Scripture.

MY COMMENT: Fundamentalists are evangelicals but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. This passage by Sarfati brings out the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical who isn't a fundamentalist. As I often say fundamentalism is one part doctrine and 2 parts attitude; this means that an evangelical might accept young earth (or even flat earth) and yet not, in my books, classify as a fundamentalist because their attitude to other Christians hasn't become hardened and exclusive. Christians of the latter variety are Paul Nelson and Sal Cordova. The Wiki article on fundamentalism does a good job of characterizing the defining attitude of fundamentalism:

Fundamentalism usually has a religious connotation that indicates unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs However, fundamentalism has come to be applied to a tendency among certain groups—mainly, though not exclusively, in religion—that is characterized by a markedly strict literalism as it is applied to certain specific scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, and a strong sense of the importance of maintaining ingroup and outgroup distinctions, leading to an emphasis on purity and the desire to return to a previous ideal from which advocates believe members have strayed. Rejection of diversity of opinion as applied to these established "fundamentals" and their accepted interpretation within the group is often the result of this tendency.

Fundamentalist insiders regard us outsiders as residing in the Christian equivalent of Islam's Dar_al-Harb, the house of war. We can see this exclusive attitude at work with Sarfati; he even questions the faith of an evangelical like Ross who in many respects would have a lot in common with Sarfati. And yet Sarfati uses the extreme expressions like "the ostensibly Christian apologetics", "his compromise in Genesis" and "all sorts of unorthodox views" to describe Ross. None of this is really new though; Ken Ham makes similar attacks on evangelical Christians and his organisation Answers in Genesis even attacks those Christians who believe the Earth to be only as old as ten thousand years. 

Fundamentalists attempt to justify their authoritarian claims by telling us they are just following the Bible; accordingly, they believe their authoritarianism is excused because they are, in their view, simply acting as a divine mouth piece. But in the above quote Sarfati gives the game away.  He talks of Christians who over-ride the grammatical-historical interpretation of Scripture. The grammatical-historical interpretation of Scripture" is a cluster of concepts which in the fundamentalist mind justifies the use of the literalist lens when reading scripture. The Bible, of course, says nothing of the grammatical-historical interpretation of Scripture". It is an extra Biblical contextual construction that must be invoked by the fundamentalist in order to understand the Bible in a literalist way. This is because the Bible cannot be absolutely self-interpreting; it requires us to bring the requisite contextual resources it needs to be correctly interpreted. In effect Bible meaning can't bootstrap itself - the bootstrap needed is always extra biblical. (See here and here for more on this topic)

Because we are proactive parties in scriptural interpretation we become epistemically responsible for our interpretations and therefore they have no authority. Sarfati has fallen for the illusion that somehow he has direct access to God's mind and this leads to an authoritarian outlook and the standard belief among fundamentalists that those who contradict their views don't have  genuine and well thought out reasons for rejecting the fundamentalist context of interpretative principles. Like all other fundamentalist philosophies Sarfati's grammatical-historical interpretation of Scripture can itself be deconstructed piece by piece.  

Sarfati's fundamentalism might be more plausible if all fundamentalist spoke with a unified voice, but of course they don't -- as we've seen from the interfundamentalist schisomogenesis I referenced at the start of this post. Fundamentalists, by definition, are highly sectarian and authoritarian and in bad cases they are the precursors of cult Christianity. 

APPENDIX I

Below I have reproduced a fairly recent article that appeared on Yahoo. It's  an indication of just how full of wild cards Oort cloud research is. There is no basis for Safarti's assertion that ...comets make much more sense under a Biblical timescale. 

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/alien-star-nudged-solar-system-70000-years-ago-effects-still-visible-now-141534096.html 

Alien star 'nudged' our solar system 70,000 years ago (and its effects are still visible now)

Scholz’s star, seen in this artist’s impression released by NASA, is

 now 20 light years away (AFP Photo/Lynette Cook)

Around 70,000 years ago, a small, reddish star came near our solar system and disturbed comets and asteroids – just when modern humans were beginning to leave Africa.

The star – Scholz’s star – named after the German astronomer who discovered it – approached less than a light-year from the Sun, when Neanderthals were still on our planet.

Astronomers from the University of Cambridge have verified this week that the effects of the star are still visible now in the movements of distant asteroids and comets.

Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, an area of objects at the edge of the solar system, beyond Neptune.

First found in 2015, astronomers analysed the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very open V-shaped, not the typical elliptical) – and found that some of them are still influenced by the passage of Scholz’s star.

Lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos says, ‘Using numerical simulations we have calculated the radiants or positions in the sky from which all these hyperbolic objects seem to come.

‘In principle, one would expect those positions to be evenly distributed in the sky, particularly if these objects come from the Oort cloud; however, what we find is very different: a statistically significant accumulation of radiants. The pronounced over-density appears projected in the direction of the constellation of Gemini, which fits the close encounter with Scholz´s star.’

APPENDIX II

More links to web pages on the Oort cloud:
https://www.webcitation.org/6H9vGLJk6 
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/UHNAI/ws/readings/7031_dones.pdf

One by Safarti: 

https://creation.com/comet-oxygen

Footnote:
*1:  See a blog post by Ken Ham dated 12th April 2018  where he says: 

The universe didn’t start with a big bang. It started when God spoke things into existence. And it’s important to note that the Big Bang idea is based on naturalism and has the stars and sun coming before the earth—whereas the Bible states that God created the earth before the sun and stars.