I learned a really interesting insight while posting on this newsgroup
that answers a question that I've always wondered about. I once went
to a museum in New York City that had artifacts from ancient Egypt,
many of them idols. I wondered to myself why would an intelligent
people such as these who built incredible pyramids still standing
today believe in such nonsense? These weren't just the common folk
who believed this stuff but the whole society revolved around this.

Now I understand how it happened through talking to others in the
thread that I started "A question about the big bang". My hypothesis
is that one guy decided to try to worship a stone that he carved to
see what happens. Then afterwards, he had something really good
happened to him, he found a few gold coins, he met a lady (or man, as
homosexuality has historically been linked with idol worship) to spend
the night with, or he was able to kill one of his enemies. He told
everyone about his good fortune and they tried it. Some of them had
good fortune afterwards and they were convinced in its power.

Others weren't so fortunate, but the man explained to them that this
is because they had angered the stone god and they had to say offer
sacrifices to it. So they did and some of them had good fortunes and
they concluded that it was a result of worshiping the stone god. The
others who did not have luck with the stone god, were mad at it, so
they built another stone god and some of them had good fortune
afterward, so they concluded that their stone god was better than the
other one. This continued on until the whole country was infected
with idolatry. Anyone who questioned it would of course be persona
non grata in such a society, because such a person would anger the
gods, so people like this would have to be killed. And they would
respond to anyone who says all of these things (before they kill him)
that if these gods are not real and G-d really exists, then why would
he have led us to believe in these gods, giving us good fortune when
we worship them? And so that is why the ancient world was the way it
was.

Now, I guess since we are modern people, we are immune to such
nonsense, right? Wrong. You will see that our society has an illness
very similar to idolatry - namely belief in the big bang (also a more
chronic illness is belief in evolution but this is a physics post, so
I'll stick to the big bang). The theory says that there was once a
big explosion in the universe and that's caused everything that we see
today to be as it is. The evidence for the theory is that we look
into the sky through our telescopes and we see the stars behaving in a
certain way which fit mathematical equations that predict a
"singularity" in the space-time continuum about 13.7 billion years
ago. And the scientists proclaim that they now know pretty much how
the universe was created (through a big explosion). But do they? If
someone were to come to these same scientists one hundred years ago
and proclaim that the universe has a beginning they would have laughed
at him and called him a religious zealot with an agenda, since
classical physics does not account for this in its equations. But
now, since we are more enlightened, we see that in fact it took 13.7
billion years for the universe to evolve and not everyone believes it
necessarily, but if they don't, then they are in the "out group" and
not a "true scientist".

Now there are two problems with such a theory.

1) The theory states that there was a giant explosion in the beginning
of time which resulted in a relatively ordered universe. But
explosions never result in order whatsoever. Explosions take place in
wars and terrorist attacks, but what do they bring? Destruction and
disorder. Not order. Therefore, if a giant explosion did occur in
the beginning then it could not have produce the relatively ordered
world that we live in today.

2) The observations made through the telescopes yielded data which is
very accurate. However, the data has been interpreted with the
assumption that the laws of the universe way out there in space are
the same as they are here, without actually going out in space and
taking measurements there. They figure that by looking at it through
a telescope, it is sufficient to make their conclusions, because they
are "seeing" what is going on. The problem is that seeing things from
only one perspective plus an unproven assumption that the laws out in
space are the same as on earth (for instance the values of the
universal constants such as G, c, h, epsilon, mu, etc.) does not yield
the whole picture. It is certainly conceivable that our
interpretations of the telescope observations are wrong and the laws
of the universe distant from us are different than what we experience
here. In fact, this is not only conceivable but probable. We have
observed many weird things in the universe and it is not a simple
thing to understand. So for instance, it is probable that these
universal constants are not really so universal.

But tell it to a scientist today, at least the "scientists" that
posted on the thread I started. They will attack ruthlessly, calling
the person who makes such claims "ignorant" or a religious zealot.
They are afraid of discussion because it might upset their gods (not
literally, but they are afraid of being refuted, because this means
that in fact G-d caused them to come into existence, not some big
explosion and they don't want there to be a Higher Power since they
would have to be held accountable morally for their behaviors.) So
they might give excuses such that if you wait a few billion years, the
explosion will naturally become ordered because the atoms naturally
are attracted to each other and bond with each other or because a
thousand monkeys on a typewriter will produce Shakespeare one day. Or
they will say, if G-d exists then why would he fool us like this,
similar to the idolaters described above? Of course, this is all
nonsense because experimentally, order does not result from disorder.
And G-d is not fooling them, they are only fooling themselves.

So we see that idolatry and the zealous belief in the big bang theory
have much in common.

Craig