Twiglet wrote:James Redford wrote:
Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort." [My emphasis--J. R.]
... But as [Weinberg] himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn't take the equations of physics seriously, but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics. ...
I don't see how Weinbergs quote, which you've emphasized and repeated twice in this thread so far - backs up your point of view. When a scientist admits that gaps exist in their knowledge and understanding, that isn't an automatic invitation for God to come in and fill the gaps, like some kind of cosmic polyfilla.
Scientific theory evolves in the light of evidence - supporting or contradictory.
You can say just about any observed behaviour is "consistent with quantum theory". A table spontaneously jumping 20 feet into the air, doing a backflip, then coming to rest gently on your head - is consistent with quantum theory, it's just very bloody unlikely to happen, and quantum theory doesn't need God to explain why such an event might happen either.
The laws of physics don't really have "religious implications" in the sense of validating any particular religion. There are occasional correlations (the universe evolved from a Bang - God said "let there be light" - or whatever)
Prof. Steven Weinberg's comment concerned his previous rejection of the Big Bang model: in explaining his previous rejection of it, he said "Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort." The reason the Big Bang theory was not considered "respectable" by the physics community was because it was considered by them to be confirmation of the traditional theological position of creatio ex nihilo (since in literal terms, the Big Bang really is creation out of nothing), and so the physics community tried hard to avoid the Big Bang theory, even when that meant rejecting standard physics.
Prof. Stephen Hawking reinforces what Weinberg and Tipler wrote about concerning the antagonism of the scientific community for religion, resulting in them abandoning good physics. In his book The Illustrated A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), p. 62, Hawking wrote:
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Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible). There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang.
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On p. 179 of the same book, Hawking wrote "In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to spacetime and at which the laws of science break down."
Agnostic and physicist Dr. Robert Jastrow, founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in his book God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 113:
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This religious faith of the scientist [that there is no First Cause] is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.
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