See the excellent file Cosmology: A Research Briefing for a learned and readable study on what can be learned about the universe, what can be said about it, and why.

Big Bang Cosmology and Atheism is an informative file from the Council for Secular Humanism that explains why the Big Bang isn't the clincher for god some theists consider it.

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos is a popularly written history of astronomy and cosmology in recent times with explanations and observations without the jargon of science. The First Three Minutes and A Brief History of Time are also written for the popularly educated mind.

...is unknown to science, and may be unknowable.

gasp

A possible cause of cosmogenesis (and the beginning of time) is the quantum vacuum fluctuation. While not emotionally satisfying it is reportedly mathematically possible and in line with observation. As nobody has ever seen a thing pop into existence...manufactured yes, popped no...commonsense must defer to the advanced tools of mathematics and physics to explore this uncommon event.

Models of Cosmogenesis don't fit observation
I channel surf on my TV occasionally and have come across a program from a local creationist, Russ Bixler. The deceased Mr. Bixler was owner of Christian broadcasting station WPCB, and satellite channel "AngelOne". I can only stand so much of it, so I'm not sure of the show's title.

At any rate, during the week of March 21, 1999, the show's featured guest discussed the meaning of galactic spirals. The spirals, he pointed out, are curving in. By measuring the curve you can judge the speed of the galaxy's spin. Since the individual galaxy started in a non-spinning "bar" the age of the galaxy is measurable from the galactic arm's curve. Cool, huh? The guest claims the oldest galaxy is 700 million years. This is less than the billions of years cosmologists claim, so cosmology must be wrong.

First, let's take the claims at face value...
Since the first 800, or so, million years after the Big Bang are theorized to be times of such intense radiation pressure that stars cannot form, let alone form galaxies, and since...
The galaxy's whose red shift can be measured, and whose distance from us can be judged thereby, range up to 5,000 million light years away, and since...
The guest did not specify how far these relatively young galaxies were from us...
It looks to me like the guest's "evidence" can be used to confirm a universe of about 7,000 million years. While this is less than the 10 -20,000 million years old that the universe is theorized to be, it's rather older than 10,000 years.

Now, just a little good sense...
Is the current crop of stars the original crop? No, it isn't.
Do galaxies of stars start out as stationary "bars"? I doubt that the nebulae of gas and dust are static before condensing into stars.
His whole presentation was wrong headed from whichever perspective I examine it.

Entropy proves...what?
On this same show, but a different episode, a man from AT and T talked about the AT and T Creation science webpage. At the time, the page was hosted on an AT and T computer and was coded by AT and T scientists and engineers. It was not an official AT and T page, and eventually was moved to the address below.

Creation Science

If you visit, please note the absence of proof for creation built on the entropy argument. This is so because, contrary to popular creationist opinion, entropy has nothing to do with a serious argument for god and design or against a non-mediated natural beginning to the universe and life. Real engineers and scientists, with skills in math, research, critical thinking, and, well, science, know entropy is not a real, effective, and meaningful argument.

TAKE A HINT FROM THE BIG BOYS IN CREATION. DROP THE ENTROPY ARGUMENT ALREADY!

last update: 4/17/02

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