What is Religion? - (Part Two)
Religion fights a battle of Creation versus Evolution, even though, for anyone with two or more brain cells to rub together, they are clearly not contradictory. (In case you’re wondering, Evolution cannot occur vefore there is a goal-seeking mechanism (ie. Life) to make it work – Creation is about where that goal-seeking mechanism began)
In Science, they are equally ‘authority’ based. The story of creation involves a number of magical events for which we not only have no verbal explanation, we don’t have the math for them. The math says the Universe cannot be as large as it is by now – nor can it be as (simultaneously) homogenous (large scale) or discrete (smaller scale) as it is.
So we invent stuff. Like global cooling with fear of an Ice Age because the Earth was in a cooling cycle from 1940 to 1975, or global warming because it got warmer after that, we seek an explanation that we can tell ourselves is Truth.
The reason for the homogeneity is because a magical force called ‘Inflation’ came along a certain time after the ‘Big Bang’ and somehow grabbed SpaceTime and stretched it instantaneously to the point where the math allows for our universe to be as it is. Then it went away.
We don’t know what it was so we label it as Scalar Field’ and think we have an answer.
Even with this magical field, there are mysteries as to how galaxies formed and why they currently behave as they do. So, the reason for the discrete nature of matter clumps, and to make the math match observations, we decided there must be Dark Matter – strange stuff that only reacts with the normal universe enough to adjust things so what we see matches our theories.

August 24th, 2008 at 12:55 am
[...] along from What is Religion? (Part Two) the Universe followed the ‘expanding as gravity slowed it’ process until about five billion [...]