DrNoGods wrote: ↑Thu Nov 10, 2022 1:29 am There’s no need for any external signals to have these reactions take place … they will naturally occur due to the local behavior of the atoms and molecules involved according to the laws of chemistry. If the properties of dark energy (whatever that actually is if it exists at all … it is just a hypothesis at this point) were such that it caused spacetime to expand, it should have that same effect anywhere dark energy exists within spacetime.
However, your example is a local case, whereas dark energy is everywhere. Even on a local scale, uniformity would be difficult (have we ever seen a car that rusts uniformly?), yet at the most extreme scale, dark energy is able to have absolute uniformity at every point in the universe.
And not only that, the rate of expansion is changing.
“Observations show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, such that the velocity at which a distant galaxy recedes from the observer is continuously increasing with time.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerat … e_universe
And so the rate of acceleration would also have to be uniform.
The very use of the word “dark” suggests that these are preliminary ideas, not offered as confirned explanations.
Yes. And as I’ve argued, cosmologists have now had to resort to extranatural explanations (such as dark energy) to account for our observations. As a matter of fact, the characteristics of dark energy are similar to theological explanations.
Dark energy is:
* Undetectable (there is no empirical evidence to show it exists)
* Unknown how it operates
* Powerful (it is strong enough to move objects that make it seem it is traveling faster than the speed of light)
* Omnipresent (it occupies every point in the universe)
* Inerrant (there is such a high level of precision of expansion that each point in the universe is expanding at exactly the same rate with zero deviation)
https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1099053#p1099053