In my review of his book, I will argue that Atkins walks a thin line between established scientific fact and wild speculation, but that he does so in an engrossing and ultimately plausible way. He certainly doesn't establish that the universe can arise from nothing, but he convincingly argues that there's no reason why it couldn't.
Order is a slippery concept, it can mean several different things depending on what you're talking about. Because its meaning can be subtle, the term is often misused. I hope in this article to shed a bit of light on how we can understand what order is in physics, and whether it can be applied coherently to the universe as a whole.
Even if we don't interpret Genesis as a literal account of creation, we still face the difficulty that parts of the account directly contradict science suggesting that, if science is correct, God lied to us about how he made the world.
A painting requires a painter. A building requires a builder. Creation requires a creator. Order requires an orderer. "On an atheist's worldview" - the theist claims - "how can there be order in the universe? How can a random, unintelligent explosion produce an ordered universe?"
In the next few posts I will be discussing the argument in favour of design presented by Douglas Axe in this book. Will he be able to put some thought-provoking evidence on the table? Or will the book fail to make any convincing case at all?
It's a term that creationists and other science-doubters like to abuse. When we try to explain to them how the Big Bang and evolution can explain the origins and development of life in the universe, their rebuttal is that they are "just theories".
Here is one of my recent articles in a nice, condensed visual form. While baryon asymmetry is an intriguing unsolved problem in modern cosmology, it does not endanger the Big Bang theory in any significant way.
One of the most common headlines I see in popular science articles is "Was Einstein Wrong?". While it is certainly true that relativity is going to be replaced by some more advanced theory of physics at some stage, the basis of Einstein's theory is unlikely to change.
So how do we explain the fact that there is more matter than antimatter in the universe? The fact is that currently, we don't know. This is called the "baryon asymmetry problem" of cosmology.
