Dear Editor:
This is my response to your most recent letter to me, which was printed in the February 4 edition.
You challenged me to explain the observation and conclusion of the Big Bang and how it was externally validated. Simple. In the 1920s, astronomers noticed stars in other galaxies were all shifted by the same amount toward the red end of the spectrum. This redshift is called the Doppler Effect, and in 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered this was because galaxies were moving away from our own. This effect is also why a car sounds at a higher pitch as it approaches and lower after it passes by. Whereas scientists, like Albert Einstein, were certain that the universe was static up to this point, this expansion led astronomers to conclude that it was expanding, and that therefore, there was a time when the universe was infinitesimally small and dense. The external validation was made by other astronomers who looked through their telescopes and reported the same results.
You ask, “Who” gave the moon the necessary velocity to stay in orbit and Earth the rotational axis necessary for habitable temperatures, as if to imply this is a perfect situation that could only be engineered by an omnipotent being, ignoring the fact that there are numerous planets where such conditions do not exist, and where temperatures are inhospitable, and moons and other bodies have crashed into planets. Is it so impossible for one planet to form naturally with habitable conditions?
Answering your questions is pointless, because it depends on whether the questioner is speaking in a scientific context or religious one, a distinction you refuse to acknowledge. Your use of “Who” instead of “What” shows you will only accept a theistic answer, and you give that answer yourself when you say, “I say God made the above as is.” Fine. I say this is a theistic answer, not a scientific one. There’s nothing wrong with a theistic interpretation, and I never said there was, nor did I ever say that there wasn’t a God (though I respect atheists’ right to say so).What I said was 1. Many of the scientific principles you stated were false (and they were), and 2. If you’re going to talk theology, fine. If you’re going to talk science, fine. If you’re going to try and force the square peg of one into the round hole of the other, it won’t work, because the two aren’t applicable to one another, something you don’t understand. Science is not simply a “subject” like chemistry, or botany. It’s a methodology of reasoning, of drawing conclusions based on evidence. People, both laymen and professionals use scientific thinking every day, including you, Otto, and I don’t think you’d be so eager to confuse them if you understood what each really was.
Let’s say you walk outside, the street is wet, and puddles are everywhere. You infer that it rained. That’s scientific reasoning. You’re concluding from evidence. Now let’s say you’re arrested for murder, and your defense lawyer says, “What evidence do you have? Why do you think he did it?”, and instead of showing you the physical evidence, the prosecutor says, “Well, my faith in God tells me you did it.” If you dismissed this, and demanded scientific proof, would it be a fair observation that you are anti-God or anti-religion because you say God has no place in a prosecutor’s exhibit? Isn’t the above scenario precisely what’s implicated where there’s no distinction and separation of science and spirituality?
As to the ratio between atoms’ nuclear force to magnetic force, and the assertion that hydrogen fusion would be too rapid or non-existent if it were off, you simply made it up, Otto, as you made up everything else in all your schizophrenic science letters. Magnetic force keeps solid objects from passing through one another, and nuclear force is what’s released when an atom is split, as in a nuclear bomb. There’s no relationship, or “ratio” between the two. Hydrogen fusion has a constant speed. There’s no “rapid” or “slow.”
Luigi Novi