Design Detection Is a Legitimate Task in Scientific Inquiry, But a Scientist May Be Clumsy At It

Quite a few biology analysts have pondered and studied the sky-high levels of organization and fine-tuning and component interdependence in living systems, and have concluded that such systems show evidence of having been designed. But sometimes people try to "throw a yellow flag" on that type of thinking, by claiming that judging whether something was designed is not a legitimate task in scientific inquiry. 

But such a claim is not true at all. Many types of scientific inquiry do involve judging whether something was designed. I can give some examples:

• Archeologists and anthropologists often in their work spend time judging whether something dug up is a mere accident of nature, or whether the thing dug up is a product of purposeful design. For example, an archeologist or anthropologist may spend quite a bit of time judging whether some sharp rock was a random accidental rock or a rock deliberately fashioned by some intelligent agent hoping to make a tool.
• Radio astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) spend lots of time analyzing radio waves, trying to judge whether they are purely of natural origin or whether they are signals from intelligent agents on other planets. 
• Astronomers may analyze some astronomical object passing through our solar system, and try to judge whether it is a natural object like an asteroid or comet, or perhaps a spaceship from another planet. 
• Virologists and other scientists may spend a great deal of time trying to figure out whether a novel virus such as COVID-19 is a purely natural virus, or whether it is the result of some lab leak involving a lab that was doing gain-of-function research involving deliberate design in an attempt to change a previously existing virus. 

So it is clear that design detection is a legitimate task in scientific inquiry. But if you are a scientist trying to do design detection, you should follow some good principles, rather than clumsily fumbling around.  Avi Loeb is a Harvard astronomer who spends quite a lot of time on tasks of design detection or trying to figure out whether something unusual observed by scientists is designed. But Loeb seems to do a poor job at this task. 

Here are some good principles of design detection:

• Look for the existence of very many well-arranged parts, particularly a case in which nearly all of the parts are needed for some functional result to be achieved. 
• Look for the existence of many different types of parts or components in a very well-arranged system, particularly cases when such parts themselves consist of many well-arranged parts.
• Look for the existence of a hierarchical organization. An example is a book series built from books, each built from chapters, each built from paragraphs, each built from sentences, each built from  words, each built from characters or letters of an alphabet, each built from pixels. Another example is a human body built from organ systems, each built from one or more organs or other components, each built from tissues, each built from cells, each built from organelles, each built from protein complexes, each built from protein molecules, each built from amino acids, each built from atoms, each built from subatomic particles. 
• Look for interdependent components, which can be a particularly strong sign of design. An example is that the blades of an electric fan cannot function without the fan's motor, and the motor serves no purpose without the blades. 
• Look for the existence of very high improbability whenever that serves some functional purpose and can be reasonably called an example of very precise fine-tuning. 

Conversely, "look for something unexpected" is not a particularly good design detection strategy, because it is too easy to find something unexpected when analyzing things, particularly things that are hard to observe. It is just such a design detection strategy that seems to dominate the look-for-design efforts of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, rather than any of the good principles I have listed in the bullet list above. 

Loeb is a scholar of objects that visit our solar system. Loeb has repeatedly tried to claim (without adequate warrant) that such objects are products of deliberate design.  Loeb's first efforts in this regard were focused on a strange object named ‘Oumuamua which was distantly observed by astronomers. It rather seemed to have entered the solar system from outside the solar system.  Being only between 100 and 1000 meters long and passing many millions of miles away, 85 times farther away than the moon, the object was never photographed as anything more than a speck. We can see some astronomical photos of ‘Oumuamua at the link here, where ‘Oumuamua appears as a mere featureless dot, using up only a few pixels in the images.  Press stories about  ‘Oumuamua repeatedly showed some cigar-shaped visual that was not an actual photograph, but was merely a speculative fake visual. 

As described in my post here, Loeb tried to persuade people that ‘Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial spaceship. Loeb capitalized on this opportunity, writing a book trying to promote such a theory. He ignored facts defying his hypothesis. One was that ‘Oumuamua seemed to have a tumbling motion, one we would never expect an extraterrestrial spaceship to have. Another reason for rejecting the claim that ‘Oumuamua was some kind of extraterrestrial spacecraft is that the object showed no sign of moving towards our planet.  Loeb's attempts to suggest that ‘Oumuamua was a designed object seems to have been based on attempts to show that ‘Oumuamua was an oddball outlier having some strange features not seen before. You do not show the likelihood of design merely by showing something has some odd features. 

Loeb's next attempt at design detection involved a  2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor), a meteor that seems to have blown up in the atmosphere.  There was never any reason to think that there was any design involved with this object. But somehow Loeb raised a large amount of money to go on a seafaring expedition trying to dredge up what he thought were remnants of the object.  The expedition dredged up some tiny specks from the bottom of the sea, which Loeb got groundlessly excited about. The result was stories such as a CBS News story story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology."

What went on was a farce of analytic incompetence. There was nothing that looked the least bit designed in the tiny metal  specks that Loeb had dredged up.  But Loeb incorrectly claimed that there was something very unusual about the metal specks. As I show in my post here, such claims were unfounded. The element composition of the specks was very similar to the element composition of similar sea specks and metal specks found all over the world. But Loeb kept claiming that there was something unusual about his beloved specks of metal. 

We may note here the extreme deviance from good principles of design detection.  Showing that something has some unexpected characteristics does not establish any likelihood that it was designed. "Look for something unexpected" is not a particularly good design detection strategy, because it is too easy to find something unexpected when analyzing things. Here the attempt at design detection was particularly clumsy, because there was nothing very special at all about the metal specks that Loeb had dredged up from the sea. 

Now Loeb is back again at the job of trying to look for design in odd things entering our solar system. There is an odd object called 3I/ATLAS which NASA calls a comet. But this year Avi Loeb has been trying to suggest the object is a spaceship from another planet. Loeb's misstatements about his dredged-up sea specks were so far off the mark that I don't think anyone should have any great trust when he analyzes an object of this type while attempting to suggest it is an interstellar spaceship. By now there should be a "boy who cried wolf" effect that diminishes our trust in Loeb when he does analysis of this type. We should "take with a grain of salt" most of the claims that Loeb makes about the characteristics of 3I/ATLAS.

Again, Loeb's attempts at suggesting design are not based on any of the good principles of design inference I listed in my bullet list above.  No one has detected any organization or functional complexity or high functional arrangement of parts in 3I/ATLAS. Again, Loeb's attempts at suggesting design are based on a lame "look for something unexpected" strategy. 

Loeb's main attempt to suggest something unexpected in 3I/ATLAS is his claim that the object has no tail. Comets have tails when they get close enough to the sun. The heat of the sun and its stream of particles (called the solar wind) cause the comet to lose some of its particles, resulting in a comet tail. But at this time 3I/ATLAS is not close enough to the sun for us to expect it to have a long tail. And a recent NASA photo does seem to show the beginning of a tail in the comet. The photo is below:

Credit: NASA (link)

What we see here looks nothing like an interstellar spaceship. It looks like a comet that is beginning to form a tail, by the outgassing of particles. 

Despite the new images, Loeb is still trying to suggest the object is an interstellar spaceship. In his post written just after the photo above was published a few days ago, Loeb states this:

"A way to resolve the discrepancy between the mass reservoir of rocks in interstellar space and the unexpected discovery of a large object, is that 3I/ATLAS was not drawn from a population of rocks on random trajectories but instead — its trajectory was designed to target the inner Solar system. This possibility is consistent with the alignment of this retrograde trajectory with the orbital plane of the planets around the Sun, a coincidence of 1 part in 500 for a random occurrence (as discussed here)."

Loeb's post is unconvincing. Almost all of his reasoning is "it looks find of funny" reasoning based on trying to show that  3I/ATLAS is unusual or unexpected. Showing that something is unusual or unexpected does not show any likelihood that such a thing is designed. Nature is constantly presenting to us unusual things that are not designed. As for something that has a probability of 1 in 500, that is also not any good reason for thinking that design is involved. Things with a probability of merely 1 in 500 happen every day even when no design is involved. You would need to show a much, much lower probability to be providing a good reason for suspecting that design was involved. 

Oddly Loeb has spent lots of time trying to persuade us there is design in cases where there is little suggestion of design, while paying little attention to vastly more convincing cases in which nature shows us things that look very much like design. The things I refer to are:

(1) The enormous levels of accidentally unachievable information-rich hierarchical organization and very fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence within all large living organisms, particularly human beings. 

(2) The enormous amount of fine-tuning in the universe's fundamental constants, laws and physical characteristics, which conspire (against the most enormous odds) to make the universe habitable for creatures such as ourselves. 

Such biological fine-tuning and cosmic fine-tuning offers very much material for "this isn't chance, it is design" arguments enormously more convincing than any of the  "this isn't chance, it is design" arguments that Loeb has made based on strange-looking objects from interstellar space.  When studying such biological fine-tuning and cosmic fine-tuning  you will frequently encounter probabilities that make Loeb's "1 chance in 500" improbability look like "chickenfeed" in comparison, with the probabilities frequently being those like 1 chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Some requirements for our existence

More Pre-1975 Near-Death Experiences

 Near-death experiences first started to become well-known around 1975, with the popularity of Raymond Moody's book on the concept (entitled Life After Life). But we have very good reason to believe that such experiences have been a fact of human experience long before Moody's book.  In my posts below I document near-death experiences dating from long before 1975: 

Near-Death High-Speed Life Reviews From Before 1950

An Early Veridical Near-Death Experience

Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences Long Before 1975

The Evidence for Out-of-Body Experiences

Two More Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century

Four Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century

Old Newspaper Articles Describing Near-Death Experiences

Let us look at some more cases of near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences dating from long before 1975. The newspaper account below (which you can read here) is from 1935.  We read of a near-death experience of John Puckering, who claimed to visit some other realm of existence after his heart stopped for five minutes. Puckering says he saw there two or three friends from his village who had died. 

The same experience of John Puckering is described in the 1935 newspaper account below which you can read here, from the Evening Star, a newspaper I used to deliver when I was a boy.  It is predictable that arch-materialist J. B. S. Haldane turns a blind eye to the report, and tells us the blatant lie that there is nothing abnormal about a person being revived after the heart stopping for five minutes (in 1935 such a thing was very rare). Such a refusal to seriously study or consider important observations conflicting with materialist dogma (and lying in connection with such refusals) is very common for thinkers of Haldane's type. But it is surprising that physicist Oliver Lodge says he is not interested in the report, because the report corroborates exactly the kind of ideas suggested by Lodge's earlier book Raymond, or Life After Death and his earlier book The Survival of Man.  My only explanation of Lodge's lack of interest (other than his very elderly state at the time) is that perhaps he thought that such an account was a one-of-a-kind fluke, and failed to recognize that such accounts are common. The frequent occurrence of such accounts was not well-known until 1975 and after. 

The case was written up in the British Medical Journal, as discussed in the article here which provides some more details. The exact paper in that medical journal can be read here, in a paper entitled "Recovery After Complete Stoppage of the Heart for Five Minutes." 

The account below (which you can read here) is from 1937, and tells of a near-death experience of a boy (Theodore Prinz) whose heart stopped for five minutes. 

A 1920 news article tells us this about Mrs. Levi Shroyer: "Her heart stopped beating for five minutes and afterward, she declared, she experienced the feeling of entering another world and having been in the arms of her late husband." The web page here tells us this about a pre-1975 near-death experience of Thomas Joseph Kedrowski:

"When shot in Vietnam, he bled to death and his heart stopped for five minutes. The medics pumped adrenaline into his heart and revived him. He reported having an out-of-body experience. He often said the feeling during this experience was better than anything he had ever felt prior or since."

On page 5 of a 1944 periodical (the May 10, 1944 Psychic Observer which can be read here) George B. Bronwell MD gives this narrative of a near-death experience and out-of-body experience:

"I had been ill about three weeks, when early one morning, my temperature suddenly dropped from 104 to 95 degrees. The doctor and the nurse were present at the time. They saw me draw what they supposed to be my last breath, and saw every phase of death take place. At my wife's request, various tests for life, were made. The doctor then pronounced me dead.

The last thing I remember was my wife coming into the room when  suddenly I lost grasp of my consciousness. There was a momentary darkness, a void, then I became aware of another presence in the room. Beside me stood a beautiful young girl, whom I recognized as my wife’s sister. I was certain of her identity, although I was seeing her for the first time. She had passed away several years before. 'Come with me. George.'  requested, and started from the room. 

I followed, passing close to the nurse and the doctor, who were  working over my body. I tried to inform my wife of mv safety while absent, and to assure her that I would return. I found communication impossible. I touched her, but she seemed unconscious of mv presence. Suddenly I realized that she thought I still occupied that inert body, which was lying on the bed. All this took but a moment’s time as I was following mv companion from the room. Then an amazing thing happened. I became aware of a sudden, swift movement. I knew, then, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that my soul, free from the physical body, was about to enter another existence, entirely different from its existence on earth....We entered a park, where men and women stood about, singly and in groups. They were beautiful in their glistening soul bodies...A large, stately budding, dome shaped and constructed of the same or similar materials, occupied the center of the community. This was known as the Audience Hall. The grounds surrounding the structure, were extensive and beautifully landscaped. My companion led me up broad crystal steps and into the Assembly room. A lecturer just completed his lecture and the students were dispensing to their various occupations. The instructor came forward to meet me. 'Welcome, George.' he said. 'I have been expecting you. Few have the opportunity of an experience, such as this. Your physical weakness, at this time, made this transition easy of accomplishment.' ...The lessons taught me in the Audience Hall, covered many subjects. But as they are not a necessary part of this, I shall not discuss them here. All instructions were given in a concise, tangible form. Any fear of death, that I had ever entertained, was entirely eliminated. When the lesson was completed, mv companion immediately led me from the building....

Darkness and oblivion claimed me. once more. When I awoke, I was in my bed. with the nurse bending over me. testing my breathing. 'He breathes!' she exclaimed. 'He lives how marvelous!' It was late in the evening when the nurse had her first knowledge that I lived. I had been out of the body twelve hours. How much of that time I spent away from the earth. I shall never know. I immediately related my experience to mv wife and the mystified nurse, going over every detail of my mysterious experience."

On pages 245 to 248 of Volume 7 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (1913), which can be read here, we have some remarkable accounts from Thomas Mulligan MD, written in 1908, describing events in 1900. Given the tendency of doctors to take meticulous notes, we can presume the accounts are based on notes taken at the time the events occurred.  On page 244 he states that while Mrs. M ------ was in a "stupor or comatose condition," he was able to ask questions of her mentally, and that she answered every question. We seem to have here a good anecdotal account providing evidence for the reality of telepathy. 

On page 246 we read that much later in 1908 Mrs. M ----- got much worse, and seemed to approach death:

"I thought it was all over, but told the daughter to take off her mother’s shoes and stockings. The battery had helped us so often I decided to try it again. We put a copper plate on the floor and placed her feet upon it, and attached one pole to the plate. The other I applied to the neck over the jugular vein. Respiration had stopped absolutely, and I could detect no pulse or heart sounds whatever. Both had stopped. Mrs. M------- was dead."

After discussing various medical measures to revive the patient, which apparently went on for hours, the doctor tells us this:

"At 2.45 I noticed a slight gasp, and about five minutes later observed the first sign of life, a twitching of the muscles in the neck. I feared to say a word that might arouse hopes too soon, but gradual animation began and the muscles grew more active, the eyelids began to flicker and she gasped again. I spoke sharply telling her to breathe again. She could not hear, but I kept steadily talking to her,

urging her to try to breathe deeply. Just here I noticed the first slight pulsation. I looked at my watch and found it was 3 o’clock. As her respiration became less labored, the tears began to trickle down her cheeks. Her eyes opened and closed quickly as if to shut out the light, the tears still trickling down her cheeks. The others in the room were deeply affected. I wiped away the tears, spoke soothingly and asked her to open her eyes and look at me. She did so, saying with unusual emphasis,' Don’t you be afraid to die.' Looking directly at me she said,' Oh. I’ve been so far away.” 'Have you?' I asked, 'and did you have a pleasant journey?' 'Very pleasant”, she whispered, ' very pleasant.' ' Did you see anybody you knew?' ' Oh, yes, I met Mother ” and turning to her husband, ' and Tom there.' Mrs. M------- 's mother died Dec. 5, 1888. I

learned from Mr. M------- that Tom was Tom Hobson, his sister's first husband, who died thirty years ago....

After a little wait I again asked her what she saw when

away. 'I saw so much it would be very difficult for me to tell

all: you know when one goes into a place with so many strange things one can't see them separately, and the collective beauty is bewildering. I saw a great many people, and they were so kind and friendly it does me good to think of it. I didn't know any of

them but Mother and Tom.' 'Did you seem to be in the open, and was grass growing there?' 'No, I don't recollect seeing any grass, but it does seem as though I saw trees or shrubbery in foliage, but it was so different from anything you ever saw. or that I ever saw, I can’t compare it with anything here.' 'Do you think you will forget this experience before to-morrow?' 'No. I can never forget it.' I told her I would go home and let her rest and think over where she had been so that she could tell me about it more clearly to-morrow....

On page 248 we read of what happened the next day. 

"When I called in the morning I found we had accomplished

something and could say for the first time that Mrs. M------

would get well. After inquiring how she felt. I asked if her

memory of the day before had changed. 'Oh, no, it can never

change, and I can never forget it.’ ' Was it light so that you

could see distinctly? ' ' Yes, but the light was so different from the light we have here.' ' Did it seem like sunlight, moonlight or planetary radiance? ' ' No, it was an indescribable glow coming from somewhere and invading everything, no shadows or dark places, beautiful beyond my power to describe or compare with anything we are familiar with here.' 'How were the people occupied?' ' I don't recollect that they were engaged at anything. Each seemed to be enjoying the association of the other. They were friendly and happy with a universal happiness.' How did your mother greet you?' ' Just as some friend you might meet in Hartford from an adjoining town that you had not seen for a long time. Every one was very friendly.'

' Was anything said that you can recall?' "No, nothing was

said that left any impression. I was given no instructions and

was told nothing in particular that I can call to mind.' ' Would you like to have remained there? ' ' I certainly would if it were not for Pap and Maggie. I want to stay with them a little longer, and (pathetically) Mother didn’t ask me to stay.' ' How was Tom Hobson?' ' He was very happy. I never saw him

look better. He was a good-looking man anyway, and he was so

glad to see me.' ' Did they ask any questions about their 

friends here?' ' No, I don't recollect having heard a question

asked. They seemed to know without asking me anything.'

' Were there any churches or prisons? ' 'No. no use for either.'

' Were there any thrones or exalted places?' ' No, there was

none of that there. There did not appear to be any enclosures,

distinctions or grading.' ' Did you see any golden harps or

musical instruments of any kind?' ' No, happiness permeated

everything. It didn't need to be toned down to music.' "

-- September 30, 1908   Thomas Mulligan MD

Below is a May 20, 1935 account of a young boy's out-of-body experience, from page 342 of the periodical Light:

You can read the account on page 342 of the document here:

http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/light/light_v55_n2838_may_20_1935.pdf

The account below of a near-death experience is to be found on page 226 of the April 11, 1935 edition of the periodical Light, which can be read here. The author is Dr. G. B. Kirkland.

" 'DIED' AND CAME BACK 

One last word about death. On the ninth of September, 1913, after a long series of disastrous operations when everything inside me seemed hopelessly wrong, grave-faced doctors stood beside the bed and told me it was impossible for me to last the night. At about one the following morning, I officially 'died,' and remained in suspended animation for some little time. I have been told how long but have forgotten, and like to stick to facts only. Now, during that time I had certain experiences.

 To my surprise, I found myself looking at myself lying on the bed. The thought just flashed through me that I didn’t think much of me—in fact, I did not approve of me at all. Then I was hurried off at great speed. Have you ever looked through a very long tunnel and seen the tiny speck of light at the far end ? It seems an incredible distance off. Well, I found myself with others vaguely discernible hurrying along just such a tunnel or passage—smoky or cloudy, colourless, grey, and very cold. I kept wrapping great clouds of grey material round me, but they were powerless against the cold. The others were passing me very rapidly, hurrying with all their might towards the light which was brightening, but my draperies or something clogged my feet, and I could scarcely crawl. After a bit, the going became easier, and I was just beginning to enjoy myself and get into a really good stride, when someone or something suddenly rose up before me blotting out the light. Instantly it became terribly cold again, and I was furious and fought madly, but I was gradually forced back. Then there was a complete black-out. It was as though I was knocked insensible in the struggle, and the next thing I knew was that I was alive again—only just, and very sorry for myself."

The account has features matching those of typical near-death experiences: viewing the body from outside of the body, a trip through a tunnel, and an approach towards a mysterious light. 

Scientist Flubs and Flops #11

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• "However widespread is the acceptance among cognitive neuroscientists of this second part of the ontological postulate -- the mind is an emergent factor from the interactions among the vast number of neurons that make up the brain -- it must be reiterated that there is no proof of it, and it has to be considered as an unprovable assumption rather than a provable fact."-- psychology professor emeritus William R. Uttal, 2011 (link).
• "Neuroscience, as it is practiced today, is a pseudoscience, largely because it relies on post hoc correlation-fishing....As previously detailed, practitioners simply record some neural activity within a particular time frame; describe some events going on in the lab during the same time frame; then fish around for correlations between the events and the 'data' collected. Correlations, of course, will always be found. Even if, instead of neural recordings and 'stimuli' or 'tasks' we simply used two sets of random numbers, we would find correlations, simply due to chance. What’s more, the bigger the dataset, the more chance correlations we’ll turn out (Calude & Longo (2016)). So this type of exercise will always yield 'results;' and since all we’re called on to do is count and correlate, there’s no way we can fail. Maybe some of our correlations are 'true,' i.e. represent reliable associations; but we have no way of knowing; and in the case of complex systems, it’s extremely unlikely. It’s akin to flipping a coin a number of times, recording the results, and making fancy algorithms linking e.g. the third throw with the sixth, and hundredth, or describing some involved pattern between odd and even throws, etc. The possible constructs, or 'models' we could concoct are endless. But if you repeat the flips, your results will certainly be different, and your algorithms invalid...As Konrad Kording has admitted, practitioners get around the non-replication problem simply by avoiding doing replications.” -- A vision scientist (link). 
• "Scientists need citations for their papers....If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content." -- Physicist Ad Lagendijk, "Survival Blog for Scientists."  
• "Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study....Among the 128 assessed articles assessed, 107 (84 %) had at least one example of spin in their abstract. The most prevalent strategy of spin was the use of causal language, identified in 68 (53 %) abstracts."" -- Statement by scientists in a scientific paper. 
• "This system comes with big problems. Chief among them is the issue of publication bias: reviewers and editors are more likely to give a scientific paper a good write-up and publish it in their journal if it reports positive or exciting results. So scientists go to great lengths to hype up their studies, lean on their analyses so they produce 'better' results, and sometimes even commit fraud in order to impress those all-important gatekeepers."  -- Brain scientist Stuart Ritchie (link).
• "Throughout all the journals, 75% of the citations were Fully Substantiated. The remaining 25% of the citations contained errors...In a sampling of 21 similar studies across many fields, total quotation error rates varied from 7.8% to 38.2% (with a mean of 22.4%)." -- Neal Smith and Aaron Cumberledge, "Quotation errors in general science journals."
• "Ioannidis (2005) and Pfeiffer and Hoffmann (2009) argue that reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field, in part because competition leads to corner-cutting and even cheating, and in part because if many people do the same type of experiment, this increases the chances (from a statistical perspective) of getting an experiment with misleading results. Carlisle (2021) identified flaws in 44% of medical trials submitted to the Journal Anaesthesia between February 2017 to March 2020, where individual patient data was made available; this is compared to 2% when it was not."  -- Three scientists (link). 
• "It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life....It’s time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works." -- Biologist Denis Noble (link).
• "If Alexandrian fires were to consume all of thousands of metres of library space devoted to the archives of behaviourist and pavlovian journals from the 1920s to the 1960s, I doubt much of more than historical interest would be lost." -- Neuroscientist Steven Rose (link).
• "We, as a community of scientists, are so obsessed with publishing papers — there is this mantra 'publish or perish,' and it is the number one thing that is taught to you, as a young scientist, that you must publish a lot in very high profile journals. And that is your number one goal in life. And what this is causing is an environment where scientific fraud can flourish unchecked. Because we are not doing our job, as scientists. We don’t have time to cross-check each other, we don’t have time to take our time, we don’t have time to be very slow and patient with our own research, because we are so focused with publishing as many papers as possible. So we have seen, over the past few years, an explosion in the rise of fraud. And different kinds of fraud. There is the outright fabrication — the creating of data out of whole cloth. And then there’s also what I call 'soft fraud' — lazy science, poorly done science. Massaging your results a little bit just so you can achieve a publishable result. That leads to a flooding of just junk, poorly done science." -- Scientist Paul Sutter (link). 

For a 62-page free E-book filled with confessions like the ones above, use the link here 

Periodically Repeating "Big Bang Was Not the Beginning" Story Never Has Substance

The fact that our universe seems to have suddenly originated is one of the most important facts that a human can learn, and also a fact with the utmost philosophical significance.  To understand the importance of this fact, we can consider what positions were taken before it was discovered that the universe suddenly originated. The principle philosophy of ancient materialism was a philosophy called atomism or Epicureanism.  There survives from antiquity one great literary work stating this philosophy, the famous work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. In that book Lucretius denied all claims of purposeful teleology in nature, and states the doctrine that the universe has always existed. Early in the work he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

Such a doctrine was very convenient for a materialist such as Lucretius. For one thing, it allowed him to deny that there was ever any purposeful creation event in which the universe began, something he did not want to believe in.  Secondly, the doctrine allowed him to suggest a possible explanation for how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order.  The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms,  combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time.  Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura:

"So much can letters by mere change of order

Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms

Can effect more combinations, out of which 

All different kinds of things may be created."

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock principle of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences  ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation.

Believers in an eternal universe got a rude surprise in the twentieth century. Scientists discovered that our universe had a sudden beginning, seemingly about 13 billion years ago, in an event they called the Big Bang.  There were two types of observations that established this idea. The first were a great number of observations of galactic redshifts establishing that the entire universe was expanding.  The second type of observations were observations of what is called the cosmic background radiation. The scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation, made around 1965.  Since then fancy space satellites have observed this radiation in great detail. The cosmic background radiation is a type of radiation that was predicted before 1965 as a consequence of a universe that had a hot, dense beginning.  

The discovery of the Big Bang was a very great blow against all those who believe that human existence is accidental or that the universe is accidental. The rather unfortunate term "Big Bang" is somewhat misleading, because it causes some to imagine something like a giant bomb that exploded. The theory actually depicts no such thing, but something far more radical: the idea of all of the matter and energy in the universe arising from an infinitely small mathematical point. It is rather hard to imagine anything that could be more suggestive of a universe being purposefully created out of nothing.   

The Big Bang is a thorn in the side of the modern materialist scientist. Such a scientist wants to believe that the universe has existed forever, because if the universe had existed forever, it takes off the table all talk of the universe being specially created by some divine power.  But, contrary to the wishes of materialist scientists, nature is telling us that the universe has not existed forever. 

It is therefore no surprise that we occasionally get some science news articles giving us what we might call "cosmic beginnings backlash."  There is a type of article that shows up every several months on the science news sites. It is an article that attempts to tell a "the cosmic origins story has been revised" narrative.  The article may claim that now scientists are not so sure that the Big Bang was the beginning. Or, more deceptively, the article may attempt to insinuate that the idea of a sudden cosmic beginning is no longer maintained by most cosmologists. There is never any substance in the articles of this type that periodically appear.  No actual news is being reported. All that is going on is a little "clouding the waters" analgesic activity trying to make atheists feel a little better. 

The latest example of this type of story is an article in the frequently misspeaking and frequently misinforming BBC Science Focus site, an article entitled "Scientists now think we CAN know what came before the Big Bang." The title is bogus, and there is nothing of any substance in the article. We have this deceptive subtitle:

"New theories from leading physicists offer compelling possibilities about what existed before the early Universe. One thing they’re agreed on is that the Big Bang wasn’t the start."

The subtitle is deceptive because no new theories are discussed, and none of the theories mentioned are theories describing a state before the Big Bang with any credibility. No one advancing such wildly speculative theories seems to actually claim that anything can be known about some state before the Big Bang. The theories mentioned are the cosmic inflation theory, something called loop quantum gravity, something called causal set theory, something called horava gravity, something called the epkyrotic universe, cosmic natural selection or cosmological natural selection, a cyclic theory of Paul Steinhardt and a cyclic theory of Roger Penrose.  All of these theories have been around for many years. 

• Cosmic inflation theory has been around since about the year 1980, wasting endless millions in research money without producing any results. Cosmic inflation theory is not a theory of something happening before the Big Bang. It is a theory that something special (exponential expansion) happened during a tiny fraction of the first second of the Big Bang. Cosmologist Ethan Siegel likes to pull a very misleading hairsplitting trick in which he redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it is defined as everything that happened at the beginning of the universe after the first tiny fraction of a second. That is misleading trickery, designed to sneak in some illegitimate claim of "before the Big Bang." The BBC article tries a little of the same empty semantic trickery, saying, "Therefore, if we use the Hot Big Bang definition (which most physicists believe we should), then inflation must be considered a pre-Big Bang scenario." No, the cosmic inflation theory is a theory of what happened during the first second of the Big Bang, and is not a theory of something before the Big Bang. 
• Loop quantum gravity is a theory that has been around since at least 2002, and is some version of quantum gravity, which is well-known to be a groundless never-well-established swampland of speculation. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Loop quantum gravity was chosen by only 5%. 
• Causal set theory is another version of quantum gravity, and since quantum gravity is a very much a "castle floating in the clouds" type of thing, it is premature to grant any weight to causal set theory. The theory dates from 2008, as shown here. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Causal set theory was one of the choices, but 0% chose that choice. 
• Cosmological natural selection is a very silly theory that I have discussed in four posts dating back to 2014.  The theory was some nonsense about black holes spitting out universes, which failed to ever explain how that could happen. The author of the theory (Lee Smolin) stated in a 2004 paper (page 38) that the theory made a firm prediction. He stated, "There is at least one example of a falsifiable theory satisfying these conditions, which is cosmological natural selection. Among the properties W that make the theory falsifiable is that the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses. This and other predictions of CNS [cosmological natural selection] have yet to be falsified, but they could easily be by observations in progress.” By now this prediction has been falsified. A 2019 news story told us that a neutron star has been discovered with a mass of 2.17 solar masses. A Google search for "most massive neutron star" will tell you that one neutron star (the "black widow pulsar") has a mass of 2.35 solar masses. Smolin now seems to have lost interest in his cosmological natural selection theory, which never actually explained how a universe could be born from a black hole. 
• Horava gravity is another version of quantum gravity, and at present no theories of quantum gravity have any credibility. The theory dates from 2009, so it is not a new theory. The wikipedia.org article on the theory states, "Observations of gravitational waves emitted by the neutron-star merger GW170817 contravene predictions made by this model of gravity." The article makes no mention of the theory predicting a state before the Big Bang. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Paul Steinhardt. It's something called the ekpyrotic universe theory, and has existed since 2001.  The theory has not attracted any support outside of Steinhardt and his handful of collaborators. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Roger Penrose. It is something called conformal cyclic cosmology, and has since existed since the year 2012. The theory has not attracted any substantial number of supporters. 

None of the speculations mentioned above have any substance, because none are supported by observations. It is intrinsically impossible that there could ever be any observations supporting some theory of what happened before the Big Bang. The reason is that the Big Bang was a state of such extreme heat and incredibly high density that any traces of a state before the Big Bang would have been wiped out. 

An important fact of nature that will never change is that it forever will be physically impossible for any technology to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe," or to look back prior to such a moment. In its  first 100,000 years the universe was so dense that every type of radiation coming from such a time must have hopelessly scattered, with all of its information as mangled as a top secret document passed through 1000 different paper shredders, and all of the resulting paper scraps being passed through 1000 paper scrap shredders.  It will therefore be forever impossible to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe," or to ever get signals from a time before the Big Bang. Such an impossibility is one reason why all theories of a state before the Big Bang are pseudo-science. Because no such theory can ever be verified or falsified, no such theory should be called scientific.