Replies

V3: Which leads to (ultimately, from the evolution POV) the question, "Where did the BB come from."

Physicist: Why stop there, and not with "where did God come from", or go further and ask, "why is there something and not just nothing?"

V3: I didn't stop there and my studies came down to two points: Would I allow for supernatural intervention and what is my understanding of the 2nd law of thermo? Obviously, I ultimately allowed for supernatural intervention and my understanding of the 2nd law of thermo allows for God to be outside space/time thereby making moot the question "where did He come from?".

Physicist: At some level, the question is necessarily unanswerable, so our inability to answer "where did the Big Bang come from" is no more of a philosophical disadvantage for physics than is faced by any other school.

V3: I agree, so let's either open up the BB theory to the possibility of God (or ID, if you prefer) or just dismiss the whole dang thing.

V3: Or, possibly more cogently, "How did the energy necessary for the BB to occur organize itself?"

Physicist: I think that's less cogent, because energy is something that exists in the universe.

V3: Does it just exist without explanation? How does it exist? And back to Sandage's question: How is it that energy organizes itself to contemplate itself?

Physicist: Energy conservation is a consequence of the temporal homogeneity of space, which is something that is a consequence of (and subsequent to) the Big Bang. It didn't obviously have to be that way; until recently one of the most promising cosmological models called for an vacuum with significant inhomogeneities (the so-called "cosmic string" models).

V3: I must defer to your knowledge on this cosmic string model and the explanation of the evo belief in and understanding of BB. Isn't this idea of energy conservation dealt with in one of the two laws of thermo?

Would I allow for supernatural intervention and what is my understanding of the 2nd law of thermo? Obviously, I ultimately allowed for supernatural intervention and my understanding of the 2nd law of thermo allows for God to be outside space/time

Now that's a reading of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics I hadn't heard before! But in any case, divine intervention from "outside of spacetime" pretty much trashes the 2nd law of thermodynamics, so you'll have to give one of them up.

I agree, so let's either open up the BB theory to the possibility of God

Sounds good to me. Propose an experimental test of God and we'll be on our way.

Isn't this idea of energy conservation dealt with in one of the [three] laws of thermo?

Yes. What do you conclude from this?