I recived this e-mail today from Dr Paul D Cottle, a noted Professor of nuclear physics at FSU and a member of the Florida Citizens for Science. http://www.physics.fsu.edu/Faculty/CottlePaul.htm. He raises many interesting and valid points,so I have posted the letter in its entirety.
 It appears the Discovery Institute folks are opening a second front in their effort to introduce the supernatural into public school science classrooms. I’m sure you’ve seen this already, but it now appears they are taking on cosmology. I’m saying this on the basis of what is perhaps a pretty slim thread, a post on their blog:http://www.discovery.org/
The Executive Summary is the idea that God (well, “designer”) must be invoked to understand the dynamics of the universe at the cosmological level. Here is my paragraph on why cosmology is actually much more vulnerable to the argument for design and non-naturalism than evolutionÂ
Biology’s “standard model,” evolution, explains all the available data, but that is not the case in physics. The standard model of particle physics does not even begin to explain cosmological dynamics, and cosmologists are flailing around nearly helplessly. The only framework cosmologists still have is the requirement of naturalism – that we obviously don’t understand the laws of nature governing cosmology yet. In this way, the physicists are much more vulnerable than the biologists. The standard reference on the challenges facing cosmology is a Scientific American article: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-end-of-cosmologyÂ
Paul Cottle
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Well, at least DI gives me something to laugh at.
Also, in this article at the Discoveroid blog: Considering Buying Into the Multiverse? Caveat Emptor: Multiverse Proponents Hide Their Philosophical Motives to Avoid the Cosmic Design Inference, their ace thinker, Casey Luskin, declares that the “many worlds” hypothesis is a “Darwinist” dodge to evade the inescapable conclusion of design.
Personally, I dislike the “many worlds” approach, but I always thought it was a desperate attempt to deal with the unpredictability of quantum phenomena. I really don’t know, but I’m way ahead of Casey Luskin — so is a goldfish.
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be if you wanted to explain why the moon or sun moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
Nowadays people say you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God, I would tell them don’t bet on it!
I thought that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster already covered Intelligent Falling. Welcome to what biologists and geologists have been dealing with for decades – on the bright side, we can serve as a resource for the cosmologists.
Paul Cottle proved why he is a nuclear physicist, and not a theoretical physicist:
The standard model of particle physics does not even begin to explain cosmological dynamics, and cosmologists are flailing around nearly helplessly.
Yeah, um… the standard model of particle physics says nothing about cosmological dynamics because it isn’t the standard model of cosmology, which is the Lambda, Cold Dark Matter Model, or the Concordance Model of Big Bang Cosmology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model
And WOW, you totally missed the point, which is that “cosmologists [have been] flailing around nearly helplessly” for approximately the last thirty eight years for the exact reasons, (suppression of credible evidence), that the IDists and Ben Stein use to make their bogus case for god.
And it ain’t pretty
http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.2462
The point that the DI made concerns the “reason that cosmologists [have been] flailing around nearly helplessly”, for the last 38 years now and is commonly known by every theorist in existence, and most novices, as well.
Theoretical physicist, David Gross, says that it has only been twenty years, but that’s because he’s a string theorists who is talking about the problem since its appearance in string theory.
Go here to educate yourself from a source that doesn’t include the ideological hype that you will find just about everywhere else, including Wikipedia.
And Paul Cottle is welcome to contact me at rickryals@gmail.com if he wants to learn the correct way to rebut creationists concerning this issue.
FYI: Cosmological ID isn’t new.