He did say this:
The former First Lady said: “My heart aches with the people of France. The majesty of Notre Dame, the history, artistry, and spirituality took our breath away. Lifting us to a higher understanding of who we are and who we can be.”
To UltraMagaOK, I read the reviews on this book, and most are on the band wagon to discredit the "Big Bang Theory" and use this book as proof.
One reviewer, Dale E. Essary, gave it 1 Star on September 6, 2000. I'd be interested in your response to his review:
"The Big Bang Never Happened" (TBBNH) is an object lesson in how not to engage in the scientific method. Instead of proposing a testable hypothesis and objectively observing whether experimental data support the hypothesis, TBBNH promotes a belief system in the guise of a scientific theory and sets out to prove the doctrine. This presumptive method knows no bounds as to what strategies can be used to discredit the competition, relying on false inferences, misrepresentations, and strawman arguments as it capitalizes on untenable conclusions. The premise of the bangless hypothesis is borrowed from Hans Alfvén's plasma theory, a model that coherently explains such phenomena as the behavior of ionized gases in stars. But the same mechanisms that manipulate matter cannot provide a means for creating matter. Granted, at the time TBBNH was first published in 1991, the Big Bang theory was beset with a few as-yet-unresolved problems, just as any evolving theory would be. But the former "weaknesses" of the Big Bang that TBBNH uses as cannon fodder no longer exist, and the book now reads as though a great shot had been fired that was heard around the world by eager naysayers, except the cannon was only shooting blanks. We observe a paranoid view of the "scientific priesthood" very early on in TBBNH, as though the entire astronomic community is involved in a vast right-wing conspiracy that must be exposed: "This new entanglement of science, authority, and faith, this attempted Scienific Counterrevolution, is dangerous to the whole scientific enterprise. If the wildest theoretical claims are accepted on the word of scientific authority alone, the link with observation is broken. And if appeals to authority extend to Scripture, if one accepts that proof of the Big Bang is proof of one variety of Judeo-Christian doctrine, then attacks on this scientific theory become heresy, as Galileo's attacks on Ptolemy were deemed four hundred years ago. This is a return to a cosmology built on faith, not observation . . . ." (xxi-xxii) We later discern that TBBNH is not so much obsessed with the way that the scientists are looking into the theological implications of the scientific evidence, but that they are appealing to the "wrong" religious worldview. TBBNH wants the evidence to ratify an infinite, eternal universe that pulsates through repetitive cycles of birth, decay, and rebirth (a.k.a. Hindu cosmology), not a universe that began from nothing and is expanding as a finite matter-time-space continuum. How dare the scientific priesthood steer us into a theistic paradigm! And isn't it ironic that the young earth creationists are also screaming bloody murder because the "godless" scientific establishment is steering us away from a theistic paradigm. (Go figure!) The negative criticisms that TBBNH provides to "debunk" the Big Bang are flawed, and models that reflect these flaws were available and were backed up by direct observation even back in 1991. The major "criticisms," all interdependent, include: 1) that the existence of the "Great Wall" of galaxy clusters is said to have taken too long to form from the Big Bang; 2) that observations indicate no dark matter, as required by the Big Bang; and 3) that the cosmic microwave background spectrum is too close to that of a perfect blackbody. These "crises" were resolvable with predictive models that were later confirmed with the COBE findings in 1992 and subsequently. Furthermore, the alternative explanations that TBBNH provides for the redshift of galaxies, the cosmic microwave background, and the abundance of light elements (helium, lithium, and deuterium) are plagued by mathematical errors and observational data to the contrary. Recent findings continue to affirm the Big Bang and tend to cause more headaches for TBBNH (e.g., Yuri I. Izotov, et al, "Helium Abundance in the Most Metal-Deficient Blue Compact Galaxies;" Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 527 [1999], pp. 757-777). As more evidence continues to pour in that bolsters the hot, open Big Bang scenario and refutes all other cosmological models, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain enough legroom for any other viable theory. On a final teleological note (in light of the extent to which the book's latter chapters wax philosophic), TBBNH tries hard to blame the "invention" of the Big Bang on Lemaître's "need to reconcile his physics with the Church's doctrine of creation ex nihilo" (214), to quote Alfvén. Such was the precursor to this whole Big Noise debacle, as TBBNH sees it, allowing bad religion to get in the way of good science. Indeed, TBBNH dogmatically asserts that "the doctrine of creation ex nihilo did not become Christian doctrine until the Middle Ages" (390). But perhaps TBBNH should not comment when it knows not whereof it speaks: "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible." (Hebrews 11:3)
Here is the interview. Weird times we live in...
A valid question for sure. KEK