FIRST CONSTRUCTIVE ARGUMENT FOR THE EVOLUTIONISTS
This Debate is in a hybrid policy format, and divided in parts for easier viewing and separation of major discussions.
COSMIC EVOLUTION
Almost all astronomers agree on the theory of the Big Bang, that the Universe is expanding and that its origin is approximately 13 to 14 billion years ago. And as stated in the opening, the public has welcomed and accepted scientific discovery over superstitious hyperbole. And there are a multitude of proofs and evidence that affirms both scientific cosmic evolution, as well as the Big Bang Theory.
In 1912, Vesto Slipher calculated both speed and direction of a ‘spiral nebulae’ using changes in wavelengths of light coming from the formation. Such current and modern discoveries amended and corrected previous theories that certain clusters of stars are not in our galaxy but separate galaxies, as also verified by Edwin Hubble and his 1924 progression of the telescope.
In 1917, the first cosmological model of Albert Einstein described a static universe, i.e. one whose spatial geometry is constant over time. Such a model was not consistent with the original field equations; thus Einstein modified the equations by the addition of a cosmological constant Λ. Although Einstein later regretted the introduction of the cosmological constant, in recent years there have emerged independent reasons for introducing it into the equations.
At any rate, Einstein’s static universe was empirically inadequate: it cannot account for the redshift data gathered by Edwin Hubble and others in the 1920s. The redshift data indicates that distant stars are moving away from us, and moving faster in direct proportion to their distance. Thus, the data indicate an expanding universe.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of cosmological models of general relativity were proposed that predict the expansion of the universe. The most accurate account of the data is given by the family of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) models.
Astronomers now examine the Universe by measuring the ratios of hydrogen, helium and other trace elements. Moreover, in the 1960s Penzias and Wilson used a radio telescope to discover background radio emission that was in the sky. Microwave background radiation confirms that part of the Big Bang theory or Cosmic Evolution that says there was a release of radiation.
In fact, the standard view in the 1950s and early 1960s was that the singularities of the FRW models were consequences of false idealizing assumptions, namely assumptions of perfect isotropy and homogeneity. But this escape route from singularities was definitely closed when Robert Geroch, Stephen Hawking, and Roger Penrose proved the “singularity theorems,” according to which almost all spacetimes are singular, and in particular, almost all cosmological models describe a finitely old universe.
In the early 1960s, a group of educators and scientists funded by the National Science Foundation produced a new biology textbook that emphasized evolution. School districts around the country quickly adopted the new book, even in the three southern states where were antievolution laws. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the school board moved to adopt the new biology book in 1965. The book it replaced had made no mention of evolution. Arkansas, at the time, had an antievolution law dating to 1928 that made it a crime to “to teach the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals.” Susan Epperson, a young tenth-grade school biology teacher at Little Rock’s Central High, became the plaintiff in suit instituted by the state teacher’s organization to test the antievolution law in state court.
In 1968, the Supreme Court heard the Epperson case and ruled the Arkansas statute and those like it in other states violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces the First Amendment’s prohibition of state laws respecting an establishment of religion. The court did not deny the state right to prescribe a public school curriculum; only one that prohibited teaching a scientific theory for reasons that run counter to the principles of the First Amendment.
The next year, 1969, Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon. The importance of NASA and the treat of Soviet Nuclear weapons brought Cosmology and Space into the light and textbooks. In 1945, Sci-fi writer Arthur Clarke published in Wireless World magazine the concept of a world-wide communications system by three satellites in orbit. In 1963, we had a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
In 1970, the first X-ray astronomy satellite was put in space. By the 1971 six nations had launched men into space. In 1972, Canada launched the first domestic communications satellite. Direct Broadcast Satellite was launched in 1974 (ATS-6). In 1976, the Soviets launched Direct-to-Home TV Ekran 1. At the time, HBO, Turner Broadcast and the Christian Broadcasting Network all that satellites. However, the costs of TV Dishes were very expensive then.
In 1978, the first X-ray photographs of astronomical objects were captured and returned to Earth. In 1979, the European Space Agency was established. By 1980, TV communication satellites were common and in geostationary orbit at about an altitude of 35,000 kilometers or a little less than 22,000 miles. They follow a curved path of orbit related to gravity, such as by Newton’s Theory of Gravity. In 1985, Mexico’s first satellite was in orbit. And in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. Thus, by the turn of the century scientists were receiving good quality solid space data.
And of course it should be noted before his death in 1996, Carl Sagan significantly brought Cosmology into the light of the public with his 1980 TV series; and his bestselling books from The Cosmic Connection to Billions and Billions. Now Neil Tyson has picked up Sagan’s mantle and hosted Cosmos in 2014.
The Concept of Cosmic Evolution
Now concerning the origin of the Universe or its genesis was introduced by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles. Late 18th century, Erasmus – a Christian – used poetry to put forth the idea of evolution. In one poem he stated, ‘The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.” This was possibly the first concept of the Big Bang theory. Before Darwin, Kepler and Newton described the universe. But it was Lemaitre’s ‘explosion’ theory that led Sir Fred Hoyle to coin the term ‘Big Bang’ in a 1949 BBC radio broadcast. Although, Hoyle preferred his own Nucleosynthesis e Process theory to that of Lemaitre.
Now, the consensus of the genesis of a planetary system is that it is the outgrowth of the birth of a star. Chance, contingency and catastrophes were all involved. As stated by Dr. Chaisson at the CFA, “Chance and necessity are twin features that weave in and out of the cosmic-evolutionary tapestry… the role of chance would have manifest itself not only as planetesimals (smallest fraction of a planet) collided randomly to build protoplanets (small planets equal to the size of moons) in the formative stages, but also as the established planets and moons were later bombarded with incoming debris… it’s those chancy, catastrophic effects of collision that likely explain many of the planetary anomalies… while impossible to test these assertions directly – for these events are long gone and done – we can reasonably suppose that some of the decidedly odd aspects of our Solar System, especially those deviating from its well-ordered architecture, can be explained by means of untraceable, chancy events during and after its formative stages…”
More evidence for Cosmic Evolution is in the SPIN of the most massive black holes. Most scientists that study Cosmology believe in Black Holes. According to NASA’s science.nasa.gov article on ‘Black Holes,’ they are ‘anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area – think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City. The result is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Although the term was not coined until 1967 by Princeton physicist John Wheeler, the idea of an object in space so massive and dense that light could not escape it has been around for centuries. Black holes were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which showed that when a massive star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core. If the core’s mass is more than about three times the mass of the Sun, the equations showed, the force of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces a black hole.
In 1990, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite found that light from the CMB had the telltale spectrum of a system in equilibrium, known as a blackbody — exactly what was expected if the universe began as a dense, scalding soup of particles and photons that all interacted with one other. And just this year, 2016, a team of scientists with the LIGO group announced that they heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away. A faint tone which is evidence of gravitational waves in the fabric of space-time as Einstein predicted.
Other Facts
Now, addressing another factor of cosmic evolution, scientists are looking at Newton’s and Einstein’s theories and beginning to say they are not at odds, but happen at differ times. A hybrid approach to space-time in that is Newton said time and space are not equivalent and that time is absolute; however, as Einstein stated that time was of a separate dimension, then the evolution law of an isolated system satisfies space-time. Or as some theorize space-time is a continuous object without gaps, but with occasional ‘granular’ pieces.
David Layzer of Harvard (Cosmic Evolution and Thermodynamic Irreversibility) stated, “Cosmology also has its zeroth law… no two cosmologists can be in the same state of mind at the same time… (More so he said) Einstein’s equations admit no static solutions satisfying the cosmological principle.”
Some physicists suggest that our universe is part of a ‘multiverse’ with different universes coexisting with each other. These models have come out of theories of the universe’s inflating or inflation and theories of different space-time rates. Nevertheless, what physicists and cosmologist agree on is the explosion of small particles where such a Big Bang occurred as small but incredibly dense primitive matter-energy exploded. Then, with seconds the fireball ejected matter/energy at velocities approaching the speed of light; then somewhere between seconds later and years the energy and matter began to split apart and all of the different elements in the universe today developed and evolved from what came out of the original explosion.
More technically, according to Dr. Eric Chaisson at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics, “A variety of models SUGGEST that about a millisecond after the BANG, the conditions suitable for hadron annihilation had nearly subsided, thus allowing the initially less abundant, lighter elementary particles such as electrons, neutrinos, and muons to predominate… These physical conditions are still excessive by terrestrial standards, but they had diminished considerably compared to the chaotically dense and hot conditions extant a fraction of a second earlier… COSMIC EVOLUTION stipulates that COMPLEXITY arises from SIMPLICITY. It seems straightforward enough: light, quarks, atoms, stars, planets, life, Intelligence – an entire hierarchy of material coagulations from RADIATION, to MATTER, to LIFE. Yet this increase in complexity over time bothers some researchers because it seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics which dictates that entropy (or disorder) should be increasing everywhere…”
However, what is revealed to us now is that with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) we can look far out into space and receive light waves from depth into the Universe. Some of the waves originate approximately 80 or 90 million miles away; the common number is about 76 sextillion miles away from earth as stated by scientist such as Richard Kurin the Acting Provost of the Smithsonian (2016).
CONCLUSION
Now, it was take an enormous amount of time beyond what is available to explain the process and progression of Cosmic Evolution, Dark Energy and Dark Matter, Seed Magnetic Fields, or Cosmic Microwave Background; however, the Eight Evolution Epochs from ‘Big Bang to Humankind’ are Particulate, Galactic, Stellar, Planetary, Chemical, Biological, Cultural and Future. These and in-depth details can be discovered at cfa.harvard.edu and search ‘Cosmic Evolution.’
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/splash.html
In 1969, Joseph Weber, a physicist at the University of Maryland, claimed to have detected gravitational waves using a six-foot-long aluminum cylinder as an antenna. Waves of the right frequency would make the cylinder ring like a tuning fork.
In the late 1990s, Van Waerbeke pioneered weak gravitational lensing to measure the invisible web of dark matter that makes up 80 per cent of the mass of the universe. This technique is similar to taking an X-ray of the body to reveal the underlying skeleton.
Along with weak gravitational lensing, the study uses data from the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), one of the most ambitious undertakings by the Hubble Space Telescope. COSMOS is a joint project of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA involving more than 100 scientists from a dozen countries.
To generate the COSMOS survey, a camera aboard the Hubble photographed 575 slightly overlapping views of the same part of the universe. This required nearly 1,000 hours of observations, during which Hubble circled the Earth almost 600 times.
Dr. Eric Chaisson of the CFA has stated, “Cosmic evolution is a broad working hypothesis that attempts to integrate all that is known into an overall framework of understanding… without a specific understanding of each of the major evolutionary events, we can never hope to comprehend this all-encompassing view of our Universe… adopting a highly interdisciplinary approach and studying phenomena almost completely out of context… The origin of the galaxies may constitute the biggest missing link in the entire scenario of cosmic evolution. Conditions at the present epoch of the Universe seem entirely inappropriate for the formation of galaxies.”
Michio Kaku, bestselling author, Discovery Channel and Science Channel host, and a theoretical physicist at City University of New York offers a String theory, saying, “Our universe could have either popped into existence or collided with another universe…” then added, “Big Bangs happen all the time.”
Kaku, host of the radio program Exploration said, “No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.” Those these things may be; we known by the next generation, we will discover more.
In 2016, Hawking told Guardian before the Google Zeitgeist conference in London, “”I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” He talked about the M-theory or ‘theory of everything,’ that we have 11 dimensions, including one of time and that ‘String theory’ is included in this THEORY, and there are undiscovered particles we can’t see with names like selectrons and squarks. There are many unknowns in the Universe, but the way to find them is through science, not superstition.
Considering the weight of scientific evidence and the intelligence of scientist versus child-like blind faith as some say, I am sure you can see why professors, teachers, scholars and students become believers in these theories. Thank you for your time.
| UNDERSTAND: The above theories are not the belief of TheTruthSource; only many of the bests arguments of that position. It is our belief that many cosmologist and scientists, along with atheists and agnostics, in their disdain and or hatred for God and His creation – which they cannot understand – grasp at, seek, and invent theories which can’t be understood, proven or are simply fail scientific laws and reason. |
See CREATION vs. EVOLUTION Debate Part IV for the:
FIRST CONSTRUCTIVE ARGUMENT FOR THE CREATIONISTS
The TRUTH SOURCE 