The other night I saw a program on TV called the “Trouble With Atheism” by Rod Liddle. This must rate as being the biggest pile of ignorant bullshit that I have seen on TV for quite some while.

The program drew parallels between the supposed “increasing intolerance of atheists” with attacks on religion for being intolerant. His polemic was largely against what you might call militant secularists but instead of having a polemic with secularists, militant or otherwise, he insisted on attributing the views he was attacking to all atheists. Then we are told that the Soviet Union under Stalin was responsible for millions of deaths – thus we must see that atheism is potentially evil, it has a poor track record. The program consisted largely of the conflation of concepts , atheism and secularism, and the false attribution of ideas or traits from one example of “atheism” to apply to all examples of atheism.

That there are diatribes against rational thought in the mainstream media now and again is nothing new but this program was dressed up with a semblance of being intellectual and addressing a modern ideological perspective i.e. atheism – which was becoming more and more of a problem. The treatment by Liddle of Darwinism and modern physics was so abysmal it was unbelievable – absolute rubbish, I had expected it to be bad but I was quite taken aback by how awful it was.

A few weeks back I saw a program by Richard Dawkins (a scientist best known for books such as The Selfish-Gene) which put an excellent case for atheism. I am not sure whether Liddle’s program was partially a response to this earlier program but Liddle did include a brief interview with Dawkins. Liddle was arguing that the existence of God could neither be proved or disproved so vehement argument that god does not exist is therefore unscientific as such a premise cannot be proved – if there is doubt then only dogmatism and not science could justify the vigorous denial of the existence of God. Dawkins replied by saying that some people believe in the existence of fairies – it is impossible to prove that fairies don’t exist, you can believe in them if you like but don’t expect science to give credence to such nonsense.

Last night I started reading A Brief History of Time by Steve Hawking. The first chapter gives a historical development of views of cosmology from conceptions of the earth being flat, the earth being the centre of the universe through to big bang theory. Reading this stuff reminded me of a polemic I was having on this list a year ago about dialectical materialism and cosmology. Grant / Woods wrote a book arguing that those who adhere to dialectical materialism must reject Big Bang theory. In essence they argue that to accept Big Bang theory is to accept that there was “an initial impulse – the hand of God.”. I argued this was unscientific anti-materialist nonsense rooted in a complete failure to understand the science involved, particularly the nature of space and time in general relativity. In the name of rationalism and marxism these comrades advocate that marxists reject what are possibly the most important developments in theoretical physics. They are wrong, although their arguments are dressed up in loads of scientific detail, they end up being a dogmatic attack on science in the name of dialectical materialism.

For myself I have no problem with dialectical materialism and I see Big Bang theory as being entirely in accord with marxist philosophical methods – I think they have their understanding of these subjects rooted in the writings of Engels from over 100 years ago. Engels was wrong but given the understanding of the subject matter at his time he was correct in his conclusions derived from the false understandings that were then current in science.

Anyway I want to quote a very interesting section from A Brief History of Time (p.10). A bit lengthy but bear with me.

Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!

The problem with Grant-Woods is that they reject a materialist conception of time. Instead they adhere to a Newtonian (actually philosophically this goes back to the Ancient Greeks) conception of time being a universal clock, that proceeds at a constant and uniform rate and can be measured backwards and forwards to infinity. Time in this conception can be seen geometrically as a straight line which is infinite in both directions or in a finite universe as a line segment which has a beginning and an end. How long is a piece of string? Well that depends on whether your string is finite or infinite. In essence the “dialectical materialist” argument reduces to whether there is an end to this piece of string – this argument has its origins in Engels’ writings. All fine and good but this conception of time is man-made it is a mathematical model, a linear one, which is being imposed on reality. Materialists don’t impose ideas from their head on reality. Instead they understand that our ideas must derive from reality. Engels didn’t understand this problem because he wrote in times prior to the understanding that came from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Time is not a universal clock but varies depending on the reference frame of the observer. Likewise the old Cartesian conception of space turns out to be invalid. Space and time are intertwined, intervals in time and space are not absolutes but wholly dependent upon the frame of reference of the observer. Real time is not that piece of uniform string. Real time varies from place to place in gravitational fields – closer to the surface of the earth a clock records time more slowly than a clock distant from the effects of the earth’s gravity. These kind of relativistic time dilation effects have been confirmed by measuring the decay time of short-lived particles found in cosmic radiation. Our erstwhile materialists may recoil at how nature so cheekily defies dialectical materialism – but the evidence for this is irrefutable.

Space and time are not a set of fixed co-ordinates: X, Y and Z axes that are mutually perpendicular and advance to infinity with an additional and separate time axis like an infinite piece of string. In general relativity space and time combine into a four dimensional geometry which is non-linear, non-Euclidean (“not flat”) – space-time curves in relation to the presence of energy and matter. It is the curvature of space time that gives the path of objects acting under the “force” of gravity. This conception of space and time seems counter intuitive and is difficult to understand but materialists, as with scientists, have to base their understanding on what the material world is really like and not on how we want to shoe horn reality to fit in with our preconceived ideas (ideas based on a human created abstract idea of what space and time should be). The observations that the universe is expanding and the understanding of cosmology that comes from General Relativity leads to the conclusion that our universe is both finite and unbounded. Engels argued dialectically against the possibility of the universe having a boundary and concluded that the universe must therefore be infinite in space.

Engels lacked a crystal ball. If he had written after the publication of General Relativity he would have probably understood that he had been wrong – the universe can be both finite and unbounded. By analogy no-one today would argue that the surface of the earth is unbounded and therefore infinite – it is approximately a sphere and as such has no “edges” on its surface and is finite. Engels also argued that time could not be finite, again his conceptions are rooted in a Newtonian conception of time. If time is seen purely in isolation like a piece of string then his arguments have philosophical merit. But this conception of time was killed scientifically with Relativity. The whole of cosmological space-time is governed by the solution to the Einstein Equations of General Relativity. There is no time without space. To speak of time before the existence of space or the existence of a universe is absolutely meaningless. Our “materialists” take their own notion of time which they find within their heads and confuse it with the real material space and time of the universe we live in. An inability to grasp the significance of the altered understanding of space and time lies behind the Grants-Woods objection to Big Bang theory. In essence their objections to Big Bang theory is a rejection of General Relativity and from that a rejection of modern classical physics. To accept their viewpoint is to denounce modern science.

To return to my earlier quote, Hawking says, “An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!”. Hawking is saying here that a creator could only have been around and have had an input during the very earliest stages of the universe, I think he refers to what is known as the Planck Era which is seen as lasting for about the first 10 to the power of -43 seconds of the universe. That is a fairly fleeting appearance. So In Hawking’s mind God could only theoretically have an input during this tiny fraction of a second but then I suspect he would see speculating about such a scenario as being as about as useful as speculation about fairies.

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