Do you believe in god, if not do you believe in something else?

[draik]

Just trowing some Q&A out there for the people who doubt the big bang. I'm just trying to stirr up a discussion, not trying to offend you or your faith. Please refute.

Q: The universe was supposedly formed in the big bang, but explosions do not produce order or information.

A:

1. The total entropy of the universe at the start of the big bang was minimal, perhaps almost zero. Because it was so compact, it had considerably more order than the universe we are in now. The complexity we observe around us today can be produced from the ultimate order of the hot but cooling gas of the big bang.
   
   
2. The big bang was not an explosion. It was an expansion. Besides the fact that it got bigger over time, the big bang has almost nothing in common with an explosion.
   
   
3. Explosions do produce some order amidst their other effects:
   
   
   • Large surface explosions, such as nuclear bombs, produce the familiar mushroom clouds. There are not very highly ordered, but they are not purely random, either.
   • Supernovae produce heavy elements, and the shock waves from them compress interstellar gases, which begins the formation of new stars.
   • Powerful explosions can compress carbon into diamond crystals, the most ordered arrangement.
   • Explosions of atomized gasoline produce compressed gas, which is harnessed in internal combustion engines to power automobiles and other equipment.

Q: The theory of a big bang has been shaken with unresolvable inconsistencies, such as an unexpectedly uneven distribution of matter in the universe and a need for dark matter. Several astronomers think it is no longer a valid theory.

A:

1. The big bang is supported by a great deal of evidence:
   
   
   • Einstein's general theory of relativity implies that the universe cannot be static; it must be either expanding or contracting.
     
     
   • The more distant a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us (the Hubble law). This indicates that the universe is expanding. An expanding universe implies that the universe was small and compact in the distant past.
     
     
   • The big bang model predicts that cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation should appear in all directions, with a blackbody spectrum and temperature about 3 degrees K. We observe an exact blackbody spectrum with a temperature of 2.73 degrees K.
     
     
   • The CMB is even to about one part in 100,000. There should be a slight unevenness to account for the uneven distribution of matter in the universe today. Such unevenness is observed, and at a predicted amount.
     
     
   • The big bang predicts the observed abundances of primordial hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and lithium. No other models have been able to do so.
     
     
   • The big bang predicts that the universe changes through time. Because the speed of light is finite, looking at large distances allows us to look into the past. We see, among other changes, that quasars were more common and stars were bluer when the universe was younger.
   
   Note that most of these points are not simply observations that fit with the theory; the big bang theory predicted them.
   
   
2. Inconsistencies are not necessarily unresolvable. The clumpiness of the universe, for example, was resolved by finding unevenness in the CMB. Dark matter has been observed in the effects it has on star and galaxy motions; we simply do not know what it is yet.
   
   There are still unresolved observations. For example, we do not understand why the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up. However, the big bang has enough supporting evidence behind it that it is likely that new discoveries will add to it, not overthrow it. For example, inflationary universe theory proposes that the size of the universe increased exponentially when the universe was a fraction of a second old (Guth 1997). It was proposed to explain why the big bang did not create large numbers of magnetic monopoles. It also accounts for the observed flatness of space, and it predicted quantitatively the pattern of unevenness of the CMB. Inflationary theory is a significant addition to big bang theory, but it is an extension of big bang theory, not a replacement.