jeffroddit t1_j79oliq wrote on February 5, 2023 at 3:41 AM

I personally don't "believe" in the big bang, or any science. So far as I can tell the point of science isn't to tell a story to believed. It's to tell a story that best fits the observed facts in repeatable ways. I don't "believe" in Newtonian physics as some fundamental truth about reality. I just use the model to understand reality. I use the model to make predictions. And I abandon the model when it doesn't stand up in face of high speed or gravity and use the story (Einstein's relativity) that best fits the observations. If I need to graph a tennis ball, Newtonian phsyics works 100%, whether you believe in it or not, whether we know it's wrong, incomplete or outdated. Doesn't matter, it still graphs the tennis ball just fine.

So saying things like "truly believe in the Big Bang" seems silly to me. We have a process where all the smart people in the world refine the best stories possible to fit all the observations we collectively make. That's not something you believe in, it's a fact, people do it, you can participate. And whether you believe their story or not does not change the fact that it is the best story we've got that can explain the facts we can observe. Belief is irrelevant, unless you are trying to use science the way people use religion, but that always seemed like a silly thing to me.

bigjeff5 t1_j79r83h wrote on February 5, 2023 at 4:05 AM

I like to say that any given Religion is a belief system, but the Scienctific Method is a disbelief system. (Literally just came up with that today, and I like it a lot.)

When scientists do science properly, they try to disprove their beliefs (i.e. hypothesis) systematically and rigorously until they simply can't find a way to disprove it. This then becomes provisionally accepted as true. However, the possibility is always there that someone will find a way to prove it false in the future, and the process continues, with each new discovery building on the foundation of knowledge that came before it.

It's the literal inverse of faith and religion.

Of course, this only applies to people doing actual science. Most people believe science the same way people believe religion - as a belief system. But IMO if you understand that the scientific method is a disbelief system, it makes believing the accepted conclusion of the Science Community much more reasonable and rational than believing the accepted conclusions of any given religion.

squinchyscooter t1_j79ti0x wrote on February 5, 2023 at 4:26 AM

I wanted to give your comment the lightbulb award but I don't have enough karma 😔

Great thought and very well articulated.

Anonymous-USA t1_j79zai2 wrote on February 5, 2023 at 5:25 AM

I’ll just add that there’s more to reality than simply a model that fits observations. String Theory and Holographic Theory (both of which treat our Space-Time as reflections of higher dimensions) may perfectly describe our physics with mathematical preciseness, but that doesn’t make it real. Existence. It’s just a math model. Brian Cox addresses this with several promising theories. They may describe something (and therefore predict it) well, but it isn’t necessarily observably real.

Otherwise I wrote something similar as you — it’s not a question of “believing” or “faith” in facts.