Dark matter, dark energy, and spiritual realm

trophy33 said:

Dark matter is matter in the universe that does not emit light. Astronomers know of its existence because its gravity curves the paths of visible stars and galaxies flying through space. What makes up dark matter is a mystery, but its effect is visible and measurable.

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If what I have understood applies: We can tell the deviation from our current explanations for matter/energy. We don't know what is causing the deviation, but we can calculate it. We have come up with 'dark matter' to explain the deviation. There is only evidence that we explain by 'dark matter'. This is not the same thing as to say that we have evidence that there is dark matter, (though, granted, we do continue to speak and to research as though there is dark matter.)

tonychanyt said:

Right.

What feels very robotic?

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Well, putting weights on P1 and P2 feels robotic. I am not a computer, but am a living being.

tonychanyt said:

Right. More precisely, it is an algorithmic, scientific, and objective method for determining the strength of your belief in a proposition.


Right.

As a living being, do you want to determine objectively the strength of your belief in a proposition?

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An algorithmic approach to life does not work for everything. It may work well for computer programming, but not for studying the Word of God. Not everything is 0s and 1s. I get it, you studied AI and worked with computers in college and for your career, but this does not translate well to the Bible. We can not quantify a belief, as belief is subjective. God bless, though.

tonychanyt said:

Right.

I find it useful. See A Disciplined Probabilistic Approach to Biblical Hermeneutics


That's exactly what Actuarial Science does every day. That's what the weather forecast is about.


That's why you need an objective and scientific way to measure it.

You can say that it will rain tomorrow, but are you willing to bet on it? If not, then how strong is your belief?

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I like that, because it may serve to keep one's mind in check, but I'm not sure it is as useful as it may seem to be, since our minds tend to go all sorts of places, even when we attempt to keep them in check. From one moment to the next, the weight of one vs the other changes, as does how our mind deals with even one word, nevermind how it plays with a whole concept.

tonychanyt said:

As I receive new evidence or data, I adjust the weights accordingly. I would go back to my original writing and edit and update it. In fact, over the years, I have shifted my position on abortion.

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Ha. I'm curious, but not sure I want to know, lol.

tonychanyt said:

Right.

I find it useful. See A Disciplined Probabilistic Approach to Biblical Hermeneutics


That's exactly what Actuarial Science does every day. That's what the weather forecast is about.


That's why you need an objective and scientific way to measure it.

You can say that it will rain tomorrow, but are you willing to bet on it? If not, then how strong is your belief?

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Yeah, but actuarial science deals with numbers, and weather deals with the motion of the atmosphere, not the interpretation of sacred scripture.

tonychanyt said:

As I receive new evidence or data, I adjust the weights accordingly. I would go back to my original writing and edit and update it. In fact, over the years, I have shifted my position on abortion.

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I wish I could be as constant. My thoughts on any one subject shift in importance ("weight") from one opinion towards another, like a healthy puppy in tall grass.

tonychanyt said:

Right, I seem to be the first person who applied these scientific methods to Biblical hermeneutics.

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Yeah, it does. Sometimes being the first is not the best idea, as this is uncharted territory, and could be risky.

tonychanyt said:

Right, I seem to be the first person who applied these scientific methods to Biblical hermeneutics.

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I value the marriage of Math and Science into theology, because it can be used to dialogue with Atheists.

John Lennox was one of the Apologists that encouraged me to seek out God, when I had ceased to believe.

Interest reading on time, big bang, and dark energy/matter.

… That is, if one of our most firmly held beliefs about the cosmos is true. That assumption, known as the cosmological principle, says that the universe’s matter should be evenly distributed on the largest scales. It is the cornerstone on which much of modern cosmology is built. If the void is real, then that stone might be crumbling.


For this reason, few dared to believe the void could be genuine. But evidence has mounted in recent years, and astronomers have moved from doubt to begrudging acceptance. They have also discovered other similarly vast structures. So now the question is being asked with increasing urgency: if we really are living in a void, do we need to drastically modify our models of the cosmos? That might involve rethinking gravity, the nature of dark matter, or both.


The idea that the universe has the same character through and through can be traced back at least as far as Isaac Newton. He argued that the motions of the stars and planets can be explained by a law of universal gravitation that applies in the same way, everywhere. Today, a similar idea applies to the distribution of stuff. The cosmological principle says that the universe should be both isotropic and homogeneous, meaning its larger-scale composition should look the same in every direction, no matter where you observe from...


...Yet MOND is a deeply controversial hypothesis because it does away with dark matter, an idea that is well-supported by observations. Even Banik stresses that he doesn’t see his work as the solution to this crisis per se. Rather, he says, it illustrates that some tweak to the standard cosmological model could allow for the faster formation of structures. Banik thinks a less-interventionist version of MOND might do the trick, one where the laws of general relativity are tweaked to make gravity ever-so-slightly stronger on scales above a million light years, but not so much that anything else in the standard model is affected, including dark matter. He points out that the strength of gravity hasn’t been tested at those scales yet.


We live in a cosmic void so empty that it breaks the laws of cosmology


Big Bang may not be the beginning.
Why the big bang may not have been the beginning of the universe

Stephen Hawking's final theorem turns time and causality inside out


What “Big Bang?”
As for the beginning of time, there is no way to tell whether the cycling has been going on forever. “We don’t know yet how to make that into a scientifically decidable question,” Steinhardt says. The problem is that information about previous cycles tends to get scrambled. Even if the cycling had a beginning, there may be no way to detect it. Nevertheless Steinhardt remains optimistic. “We addressed a lot of the show-stopper problems that might have stopped people from thinking about cyclic models,” he says. “That’s really opened the door for people to come up with other imaginative ideas that take us back to the big bang and beyond.”

There is another way to think about why our universe began in a highly ordered or “low entropy” state. In 2002, a group of physicists led by Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in California proposed that entities capable of observing the universe could arise via random thermal fluctuations, as opposed to the big bang, galaxy formation and evolution. This idea has been explored by others, including Don Page at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Some researchers argue that under certain conditions, self-aware entities in the form of disembodied spikes in space-time – “Boltzmann brains” – are more likely to emerge than complex life forms. Because they depend on fluctuations of particles, Boltzmann brains would be more common in regions of high entropy than low entropy. If the universe had started out in a state of high entropy, it would be more likely to be populated by Boltzmann brains than life forms like us, which suggests that the entropy of our early universe had to be low. As a low-entropy initial state is unlikely, though, this also implies that there are a huge number of other universes out there that are unsuitable for us.


The cosmos – <I>before</I> the big bang

tonychanyt said:

reference?

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We live in a cosmic void so empty that it breaks the laws of cosmology