The Myth of the Big Bang

Before you jump into the conclusion that I am about to bash the believers of this myth, I need to bring to your attention that the title of this thread, I have borrowed it from the great Astrophysicist Carl Sagan in his book "Cosmos," page 258.

After going through some quotations about the myths of creation, Carl Sagan refers to them as tributes to human audacity, being the chief difference between them and "our modern scientific myth of the big bang, that science is self-questioning through the performance of experiments and observations to test our ideas." Never mind how a myth can be tested or experimented upon.

The bottom line is that it was rather magnanimous of Carl Sagan to admit the big bang as no more, no less, a myth, just like any other mythological account of creation, which, nevertheless, is "equally worthy our deep respect." Here, Carl Sagan implies, IMHO, that the concept of probability is as good as gold in both cases: Creation and the big bang.

There are two modalities of beliefs: To believe by faith, when we don't know much about what we believe in, and to believe on the basis of probability, when even imaginable things move from zero to some possibility. To believe by faith, which leads to a claim or denial of anything as a fact, Carl Sagan calls it audacity, while king David calls it foolishness. (Psalm 14:1)

No wonder some theists charge atheists with equal need of faith to believe or to deny as both do each other. So, the only solution to this predicament is to believe on the basis of the concept of probability. Thus, audacity and foolishness are replaced by wisdom.

Ben