Blowing Smoke

Jay Grant is again blowing smoke. Here is what Jay Grant is really saying in his withered little column “Veiling the Truth” (12/8/2000): The universe is perfect and precise in its creation and the universe is in perfect balance. God created the universe as is and the universe is perfectly tuned. Therefore, evolution in all its forms is impossible.
Perfection like heaven itself is changeless, static. Perfect balance again is another way to say, nothing changes. According to Grant, the universe must look like god and heaven. The truth is the universe is not balanced or perfect.

Jay Grant undermines his own argument from the get-go. He rightly tells us, our universe is continually expanding. An expanding universe is by definition continually undergoing change, creating and recreating itself moment to moment. What causes the universe to accelerate away in all directions? More than three centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton taught the world that only an unbalanced force can cause an acceleration. Therefore, the entire universe had or is presently experiencing an unbalanced force. That initial unbalanced force is known as the Big Bang.

Jay Grant writes the universal gravitational constant (=6.67 x 10-11Nm2/kg2, a really tiny number) is an example of god’s perfect balance. Again, Jay Grant undermines his own argument. In an accelerating universe, the universal gravitational constant is getting smaller as everything in the universe moves away from everything else. Because of the acceleration given to the universe by the Big Bang explosion, the universal gravitational constant is not constant at all but is itself undergoing change.

The universe is also filled with variable stars. Variable stars change their brightness over time. Cepheid variable stars and RR Lyrae stars first grow bright then after a few days or months, these stars grow dim again. What causes this variation in brightness? The inward pull of gravity and the outward push of nuclear induced radiation are out of balance with one force winning for a time only to be reined in by the other force. When the outward push of radiation can no longer hold back the inward pull of gravity, a huge cataclysmic explosion occurs. Nova and Super Nova stars blow themselves up spewing forth the chemical ingredients that will eventually evolve into life itself. From the nuclear fusion furnaces of stars to the DNA ovens coding for the diversity life: talk about undergoing a spectacular change!

Jay Grant is correct when he says there are hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy and there are billions of galaxies in the universe. In the universe, no two galaxies look alike. There are great groupings of galaxies which are known as spiral, elliptical, and irregular shaped galaxies. These islands of stars distributed throughout the sea of space-time are all different in size, particular shape, and the number of stars they contain. With all these differences, which one is the perfect galaxy in this perfect universe? Jay Grant does not tell us.

As astronomers look deeper into the distant reaches of our universe, they are also looking back in time. Telescopes are actually time machines that look into the past. In the distant past, the universe was filled with quasars. There are no more quasars in the present universe. What happened to all the quasars? They evolved into galaxies.

Does God Exist?

Mr. Enderle, I will see your astrophysicist who believes in god and raise you a Methodist preacher, a Baptist minister and two Catholic priests who no longer believe in god. The point is simple, so what! No matter how many authority figures you find to back up your point of view, I can find just as many, if not more authority figures, who will back up my point of view.

The central difference between you and me is your heavy and irrational reliance on the authority figure as provider of evidence (truth in your language). If god, prophet, saint, preacher, minister, priest, rabbi, or someone with a pair of testicles says it’s true, you and your crowd will elbow each other out of the way grasping for the given enlightenment.
Science considers useless all evidence provided by authority figures who provide no data for their opinions. Isaac Newton believed in god. Albert Einstein believed in god. Both men also recognized they had no evidence for god. Data is derived from highly structured observations and controlled experiments. Inferences can be drawn from these data if the inferences are logical extensions of these data and confined to known principles of physics. Did your Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist and PhD show you incontrovertible evidence for the existence of god? Is the evidence provided by Ross subject to interpretation? Is it possible to “doctor” his evidence? Is the evidence subject to independent verification? If Dr. Ross, astrophysicist, says it’s true, then does that mean it’s absolutely and without reservation true? Are Dr. Ross’ inferences confined to the known laws of physics. If so, please tell me what are the physics of god and the supernatural?

Authority figures always try to speak for reality. Reality, nature, speaks for itself. We humans have the intellectual capability, if we choose to use it, to understand nature’s arcane language. If we choose to ignore nature, we do so at our peril. Why? Because nature does not require the existence of humans, but we humans require the existence of nature. The natural world predates human existence and nature will continue long after we naked apes have exited nature’s stage. If we continue to pursue supernatural folly's perpetuated by foolish authority figures who continue to to confuse and delude us with their smoke and mirror magic, we will exit nature’s stage early. Conversely, we humans may survive if we wake up and decide to create and blend a philosophy (and by extension a psychology) which mirrors the actual behavior of the natural world. We can join and become part of the evolutionary spiral of nature.

Mr. Enderle, the universe is not stationary, frozen in time, unchanging.The universe does not mirror your static ideas of god and heaven. The universe is dynamic, in motion, evolving. One way or the other, nature will forever put to rest your reactionary attempts to control and halt nature’s onward motion!

PS. Merry Winter Solstice and Happy New Year!