Were you there?

I was watching a PBS America programme the other day which examined the fundamentalist Christian movement in the US. The speaker was addressing his faithful followers and advising them how to deal with the heretics who argued that the Universe was very old, and began with the Big Bang.
"Next time you this lie trotted out, ask them: Were you there?"
Hmm. Pretty convincing I guess. It certainly hit the spot for the audience who went away feeling they had been armed with a killer argument. My first thought, however, would be to ask them, when they stated their belief that the Universe began in 4004 BCE: OK, were you there?


We don't need to be there to know what is right and what is wrong. I remember, back in the early 1980s, talking to an Apartheid supporting South African who rubbished my arguments by saying: "You don't live there, how can you know what's going on. Until you have lived there, shut up and keep your views to yourself."
My response was that I haven't got cancer, but I know how to cut it out. Likewise, I wasn't there, 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe came into existence, but I didn't have to be, because the scientific observations and the mathematics tells me that is what happened.


As we know, light travels very fast, but not infinitely fast. Hence it takes 1.25 seconds to get here from the Moon, 8 minutes from the sun and 2 hours from Saturn. Light from the closest star takes 4.3 years, and from the centre of the galaxy about 20,000 years. Now here's a little problem for the fundamentalists: We can see the stars close to centre of the galaxy; we can see, albeit faintly, light coming from our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy, which set out on its journey over 2 million years ago. But hang on, if the Universe began only 6000 years ago, how could we possibly see objects that are more than 6000 light years away? I'm sorry, fundamentalists, but that really is a killer argument.


In the 1960s, before the Big Bang theory had gained widespread acceptance, a different theory, put forward by the eminent cosmologist Fred Hoyle was enjoying a lot of popularity. Simply stated, he argued that the Universe has always been there, that it has always been expanding and always will be. Many years later he revealed that he didn't really believe his own theory but that he had produced the Steady State theory because he was terrified that the Big Bang would be hijacked by theologians to support the idea that God had done it. I don't know if God did it or not, but the argument that it did happen now enjoys overwhelming support. And most tellingly, Stephen Hawking has observed that it didn't need God for it to happen. With or without His efforts, it would have happened anyway.


Finally, I was watching Al Jazeira the other day when they were discussing the settlements in the West Bank. The interviewer asked the Israeli spokesman about the repeated condemnation of them under international law. How could he justify them in view of this? And guess what? He produced the same argument as my Apartheid supporter nearly 30 years ago. "These people, sitting in the Hague, what do they know? Let them come and live in Israel, as I do, only then will they truly understand what's going on there and why the settlements are in fact a good thing."
There you go. Were you there? Have you been there? Answer: I don't have to go there to know what is right and wrong. My conscience, my powers of reasoning and my life experience can tell me what I need to know.