----- Original Message ---- From: John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Fri, January 29, 2010 6:33:01 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Darwinian evolution only part of story?
Shane Mage wrote:
>
> On Jan 28, 2010, at 7:00 PM, John Thornton wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hawking has more than once publicly claimed he wished he had never proposed the idea of a singularity as the beginning of the universe.
>>
>> I thought perhaps Shane misunderstood Hawking's reversal on the idea of a singularity as a reversal on the idea of a big bang...
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> It was and is none of my concern what Hawking chooses to call his pre-big-bang state-of-things. The point simply is that, call it "singularity" or not, that pre-big-bang state-of-things was not part of the universe whose observed and mathematically formulated regularities ("laws") suggested to Hawking that before it existed there was a state-of-things that somehow big-banged and became the present universe. But the theory (apart from its inconsistency with the observed world) is flawed--it has no way to bridge the gap between there and here. That is its "myth of origins" nature.
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> Shane Mage
That's what I thought, crackpottery. Hopefully you won't be surprised if I side with Penrose, Hawking, Walsworth, Stenger, etc and not Mage. To do otherwise would just seem silly.
John Thornton ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk