Alan Guth, PhD on The Big Bang, the Origin of the Universe and Crackpots

Alan Guth is a Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics in the MIT. He remained at MIT from 1964 to 1971, acquiring S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees, all in physics. His Ph.D. thesis, done under the supervision of Francis Low, was an exploration of an early model of how quarks combine to form the elementary particles that we observe.

According to Guth, people who don't accept the Big Bang theory are seen essentially as "crackpots". Obviously, this fact alone is not a reason to think that "Big Bang denialists" are wrong, but Guth is not saying such a thing. His point is that the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe is so good supported by the evidence that, in the scientific community, almost no one denies it.

This point is interesting, because many of the denialists or doubters of the Big Bang theory are hard-core atheists and materialists, who (correctly) regard the absolute origin of the universe as something which supports theism over atheism (the latter typically saw the universe as eternal). The reason is that theism implies at least an "absolute creation event" or "creationism" regarding the cosmos (i.e. the origin of the universe and life), but atheism doesn't implies such a thing (specially, in its naturalistic contemporary version, "absolute creation" is impossible due to the principle of causal closure of the physical world and the principle of conservation of matter/energy, which are essential to naturalism). In fact, atheism is fully compatible with the non-existence of the universe, consciousness or whatever. But theism doesn't (it entails the existence of consciousness and other person-relative phenomena, plus an universe, or many universe, in which conscious spiritual beings could emerge, live, operate and evolve).

Careful atheistic thinkers realize this, and hence they try to avoid the "absolute beginning" regarding the universe (Big Bang), even if their position clash with the scientific evidence and therefore is unscientific. So, Mario Bunge (who's a materialistic and atheistic philosopher of science and physicist and a strong supporter of organized skepticism), comments in his lastest book Matter and Mind that "although relativistic cosmology is nearly one century old, it still has not decided whether there really was an absolute beginning (Big Bang), and if so what if anything exploded, or even whether the universe is spatially finite or infinite." (p. 38)

Obviously, such opinion can only be held if you ignore or disregard the evidence which has convinced most scientists that the Big Bang model is correct (and that, according to Guth, only is denied or doubted by crackpots), including Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem published in 2003 (another previous theorem by Hawking and Penrose was instrumental in convincing the scientific community that time was finite):

Faced with this scientific theorem, some atheist thinkers are forced to misrepresented it:

Note that the Big Bang model itself doesn't necessarily implies that this universe alone exists, therefore it doesn't implies that the beginning of this universe was the ultimate original one (it is still logically possible that our universe is one of multiple expanding universes which, each of them, began to exist too... this is why atheists appeal to the unproven "multiverses" hypothesis in order to avoid interpreting the Big Bang as the ultimate origin of the universe). But the theorem shows that even in that hypothetical case (hypothetical, because we have only certain evidence for THIS physical universe, not for others). the problem of an ultimate beginning remains. So, given the theorem, appealing for other universes is not a plausible escape for the problem of the "ultimate beginning" of the physical reality.

So, science supports, in a fundamental level, the "absolute beginning" postulated by theistic hypothesis regarding the cosmos. And the hard-core atheists like Bunge are the ones trying to avoid this scientific conclusion.

Ironically, when people (including agnostics like journalist Richard Milton, or hard-core atheists like Jerry Fodor) cast doubts on Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, they're accused of being "unscientific" or "pseudoscientifc" creationists and crackpots. But when it comes to scientific cosmology and the evidence for the Big Bang, then the same hard-core atheistic ideologues become "skeptics of science" and accept unscientific positions and absolutely unsupported theories (e.g. the multiverse hypothesis), acting like crackpots.

And note that contrary to the "Big Bang skeptical atheists", the skeptics of Darwinism appeal to positive, actual scientific evidence to reject this theory (see Milton's paper, or Maximo Sandin's paper, Fodor's book). On the contrary, the atheistic "skeptics" of the Big Bang or the absolute origin appeal to speculations and unsupported theories (the multiverse, for example) in order to justify their skepticism.

Clearly, what is operative here is not "respect for science and reason" nor "following the scientific evidence whatever it leads", but an ideological agenda which uses (abuses) science selectively in order to support atheism, materialism and naturalism.