Underdetermination and Cosmology

People tend to use cosmology when they are really discussing cosmogony, but that is not surprising because the fields tend to overlap. Scientists riding for the cosmic evolution brand tend to get a mite pretentious and make proclamations about how the universe formed and operates, then get surprised when their beliefs turn out wrong.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins Univ)
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Secularists reject recent creation, and do not even consider the evidence for it. There are several materialistic models for the origin and development of the universe, but they are continually changing. The Big Bang is the best of the bad ideas, so secularists cling to it and continually patch it up.  Atheists and anti-creationists show their lack of knowledge regarding science and fields related to astronomy by insisting that the evidence requires certain conclusions. Not hardly! This is where underdetermination comes in.

Can we definitively know the global structure of spacetime? This is a good question. It is one that is actively discussed within the area of the philosophy of modern physics. . . .

However it is a question that highlights the fundamental weakness of cosmology and hence of cosmogony. (Cosmology is the study of the structure of the cosmos whereas cosmogony is the study of the origin of the universe.) That weakness is the inherent inability to accurately construct any global cosmological model, i.e. a model that accurately represents the structure of the universe at all times and locations. The reason for this is underdetermination.

. . . 

In the philosophy of science, underdetermination means that the available evidence is insufficient to be able to determine which belief one should hold about that evidence. That means that no matter what cosmological model one might conceive of, in an attempt to describe the structure of the universe, every model will be underdetermined. 

To read the entire article, be determined and click on "Cosmology’s fatal weakness—underdetermination". 



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