Theory becomes unwieldy

Dear editor:

In his Dec. 16 Sharp Edges column, Jim Taylor writes: “Instead of starting with whatever people already know and assume about the nature of God, she (Nancy Ellen Abrams) starts with science. …Her husband, Joel Primack, was a co-discoverer of that mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy” that make up 95 per cent of the universe. Even though we don’t know what it is, how to measure it, or even how to find it. But it has to be there.”

Cosmologists insist it must be there because they:

1. Believe in Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe

2. Believe that close to 14 billion years has elapsed since the Big Bang, and

3. Believe the galaxies and clusters would fly apart otherwise.

The Ptolemaic model of the solar system was finally rejected in the 17th century because of the huge complexity it had. The real problem with this model was you couldn’t falsify it.

No matter what new data or new observations came along, you could always tweak it. Over the past 40 years, the big bang theory has undergone tremendous change. Cosmologists have changed the expansion rate, hence the age of the universe. They’ve thrown in dark matter, dark energy, inflation, and string theory.

So at what point does the big bang become as unwieldy as the Ptolemaic model, that caused scientists to reject it?

David F. Coppedge writes in his Dec. 11, 2018, article “Cosmologists Cling to Ghosts” (Google it): “The dark-matter believers have been falsified for a century but won’t give up. What drives these people to keep bashing their heads against the wall? The answer: it’s an obsessive-compulsive disorder, inherited through teachers that insists on believing in an old, materialistic universe. Continuous pain in the forehead is not too large a price to pay to avoid the implications of Genesis 1:1.” David Buckna Kelowna