Real science
In Tesla’s lab at Colorado Springs. From the Tesla Wardenclyffe Project, which is working to preserve Tesla’s lab in Shoreham, Long Island. For a $35 contribution you will get a watermarked print of this or one of the other photographs in the archive.
Personally, I find the success of BBN to be one of the most impressive feats in all of modern science. Here we are, 7,000,000,000,000,000 minutes after the Big Bang, making quantitative statements about what was going on 1 minute after the Big Bang — and it’s a perfect fit. I’ll never cease to be amazed that we know exactly what the universe was doing when it was one minute old.
I don’t think it is politically wise for scientists to exhibit contempt for Intelligent Designers and the like. But I can understand why they might feel contempt. To dismiss evolution or cosmology, the work of thousands over the last two centuries, on the basis of a few half-understood claims about the workings of science, or by reference to disagreement on the remaining open questions, is not only to forego the best instruments reason has yet devised for understanding nature: it is also a kind of desecration. I use that word advisedly. If you think that reason is a gift of God to certain of his creatures, and that in using reason we come to know some aspect of the divine, then to dismiss its findings is to reject that gift.
A tu quoque applies here. Though one would hardly guess it from the current state of discourse on religion, there is such a thing as rational theology, which has, like modern science, its epics. The Summa theologiæ of Thomas, for example, or the works of Francisco Suárez—to mention two that I know something about. That is another, a more philosophical, reason not to reject theism out of hand, despite the ineptness of some of its representatives.
Source: Sean Carroll, “The universe is the poor man’s particle accelerator”, Cosmic variance 19 Dec 2005.
