Somewhat thin evidence, I think, to determine what happend 15 billion years ago. For all we know, the universe is more of a churning soup, and it just so happens that all the galaxies we can see are moving away from eachother for now, or there may be other explanations for the red-shift that makes it look like the galaxies are spreading apart.
Thin as that evidence might be, it's infinitely thicker than the evidence supporting faith-based creation theories.
The Big Bang theory is the simplest extrapolation from the most straight-forward interpretations of our current observations. That's what makes it a good scientific theory. It doesn't make it true, though. The evidence is far from overwhelming and the tests nonexistant.
Evidence overwhelmingly supports the Big Bang theory more than faith-based creation theories.
You could argue that of all the popular "creation" stories, the Big Bang has the most emperical evidence going for it, but that isn't saying much.
Good. I argue this, and I say it says quite a bit more about the actual nature of the universe than faith-based creation stories do.
Personally, I have yet to hear a creation story that didn't sound weird, silly, and unbelievable, and I've certainly never heard one that had enough substantial and well-tested evidence supporting it that I would believe it despite my reservations.
Surely, there's room in this world for a better mouse-trap; and understanding this does not make the current mouse-trap invalid or worthless--and it most certainly does not put the current mouse trap in the same category of effective usefulness as "believing" the mice away.
It irritates me that you would treat science as some sort of religion.
I listed reasons it was a good scientific theory.
It isn't rational to believe something just because it's a good scientific theory, though.
Yet, it is rational to reject any bad theory,
just because it's bad.
Good scientific theories approach certainty asymptotically in proportion to how well-tested they are. This one is a long way off from that.
Yet, it is MUCH farther along than faith-based theories.
Hm. Perhaps I'm just a romantic, but I can't help but suspect that there's more to the nature of the universe than patterns of physical behavoir, but *shrug* I can't really say.
Interesting hypothesis--how would you test it?
Yes, limitations of observability and testability can be overcome through technology.
No doubt as time goes on we will develop a more piercing analysis of the history of the universe. I don't think either of us can say whether the Big Bang theory will survive such increased capabilities.
Yet if it fails, I won't walk the path of the proponents of faith-based theories and deny the evidence, and use the strength of that denial to argue the strength of my faith, and the validity of the theory.
The "masses" need no help or prompting to remain gullible or to buy into authoritarian power structures. Science won't change that.
Yet faith promotes it, and I choose not to.
