CypressChristian wrote:Ok, but by doing so you are not adhering to your atheistic worldview, because you are believing in a higher "object".
How about this.
"There are natural laws which govern the formation of universes. These natural laws result only in uniform universes. We can't explain why these natural laws exist, but they do, and they govern all interactions of matter in a law-like and uniform way. The universe that we live in is uniform precisely because the natural laws that govern universe formation allow for no other possibility."
Substitute "natural law" for "object" in EA's argument, and the result is the same, and just as rational as your assertion of an All-Magical God. The assertion of "natural law" is, however, more parsimonious, as EA has explained.
And this in no way contradicts typical atheist thought. Indeed, most atheists I have ever listened to believe in something like this "supreme natural law" formulation, whether it is philosophically mandated or not. Uniformity is taken as an axiom. I'm not as well educated in the formal philosophical arguments as EAllusion is, but in my mind, any argument other than ones of a solipsistic nature require at least some axioms. Solipsism itself just isn't very interesting.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen
There is indeed no "epistemic resolution" - i.e., no epistemic justification for accepting the validity of induction - something that I've been preaching for some time on these boards. The justification for accepting it is pragmatic in a sense. However, this is not Jamesian "will to believe" pragmatism, but rational pragmatism. The difference is that Jamesian pragmatism involves believing something (for which there is no epistemic justification) on some such ground as that it will make one feel better, or fulfill some "deep spiritual need". I have nothing but contempt for this kind of "pragmatism". The kind of pragmatism involved here is of a quite different order; it is based on the fact that we have no choice as rational beings. If we refuse to accept the validity of induction (or more generally the construction of an ontology based on empirical evidence, which is inherently a non-rigorous procedure) we give up any chance of understanding the world or of being able to act effectively in it. In other words, we abandon what I call the "rational project". This leads directly to total madness. Moreover, we have no choice in another sense: the structure of our brains is such that we cannot disbelieve in the validity of induction (except, perhaps, in a completely abstract sense). So this option is not really "open" to us.
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Oh, yes, one more thing. You're quite right that positing the existence of a "god" doesn't help in the least unless you simply beg the question by also positing that it designed the world (and us) in such a way as to make induction a reliable method of reaching empirical conclusions. This is merely a more complicated way of positing that induction is reliable. One could just as well argue that one is epistemically justified in assuming that space is Euclidean on the grounds that one has posited the existence of a god who created a world in which space is Euclidean. This sort of thing is just silly. One cannot create an epistemic justification for a belief out of thin air merely by positing the existence of a mysterious being who made it so.
Yes! there is third option that doesn't involve "becoming" ordered at all. "Becoming" implies that natural laws didn't exist, but then they came into existence, maybe by chance or by design. A third possiblity is that the natural laws of the universe have always been -- and there never was a "becoming" step.
If you want to argue for false dichotomy of the above, then you have to throw the "big bang" out the window. I was operating under the assumption that none of our resident atheists were willing to do that. As it is, I can't believe what I'm hearing. You guys are now saying the universe has always existed! Are you kidding me?
Schmo:
That's really what it boils down to, isn't it? Although the universe doesn't seem as though it always existed, the laws that govern it likely have. That's what constants are... constant. I'm not sure why it's assumed that the universe is what dictates the natural laws as much as the laws dictate the nature of the universe.
This is beyond absurd. How can universal laws exist without a universe???
This is like saying the laws of Alabama existed long before Alabama. In what corner of the twilight zone would this be considered true?
Sethbag:
No. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that the universe could have been any other way than it actually is. We don't know how the universe got the way it is, therefore we have no reason to believe it might actually have turned out any different than as it is.
That isn't the issue. The issue is I'm discussing is whether or not the universe was caused; not whether it could have become anything else than what it is.
Uncaused does not equal "chance" or "accident".
I didn't say they were synonyms, but if the universe became what it is by chance or accident, this is consistent with the view that it was uncaused.
If you look up in the night sky and see a UFO, by definition you have no idea how it got there. Since you don't know how it got there, is it reasonable to say that it got there by chance? I'd have to say no, it's not reasonable.
I would agree. But we are not talking about UFOs. We are talking about something that has been taken for granted: the big bang. Atheists argue regularly that we are here by chance (Bertrand Russell said we were a "curious accident in a backwater.") All of the necessary factors just happened to take place on earth by chance. That is why there is life here and not the moon. Just dumb luck.
There's no basis to suppose it got there by chance, or on purpose.
There is a basis, but you don't seem to understand this. There is no other option unless we want to do away with the big bang and just say the universe "always" existed. I'm surprised any atheist (aside from Hawking) would be willing to go that far.
I wish the anti-scientists would stop referring to the creation as "chance", "accident", "cosmic roll of the dice", etc. There's absolutely no justifiable basis for that.
You act like I'm just making this stuff up. This has been standard rhetoric among atheists for quite some time. I speak of it because of this. If you want to call them anti-scientists, then be my guest.
EAllusion:
It is true that we are the most intelligent species on earth. But that doesn't mean earth is more friendly to us. E. Coli and cockroaches "rule the earth" more than we do by any number of measures (biomass, population density, adaptability to environmental changes, etc.).
These are moot points that do nothing to mitigate the thrust of the argument. Since all life is considered God's creation (at least to most theists, and the book of Genesis), I'll rephrase and say the universal laws all share one value: they are needed for life to emerge. Man is considered teh image of God precisely because man is believed to share attributes with it/him/her. Why? Because God "created" the universe by design. What other life form is capable of imagination, let alone create from an imagination?
You don't need to hang your hat on the specialness of humans, which you have defined to be so for tautological reasons. Just because our intelligence is important to us doesn't mean it is objectively special outside of our preference for it.
If you do not think humans are objectively special, then you have serious issues. Even an evolutionist has to admire the mental distinctions between humans and all other known life. Of course all the unique differences can be explained away with a "evolution of the gaps" argument ;), but that would be begging the question.
An argument for theistic justification that is bad because it is an example of an argument from ignorance fallacy is "God of the Gaps" reasoning. I'm using quite correctly here, Kevin. That's what design arguments do, and that's what you'll find theist and atheist philosophers and scientists pointing out to you, to no avail of course. The fine-tuning argument has been around for a long time (one of the co-discoverers of natural selection believed it).
The fine-tuning argument was recently revived once the Copernican revolution was overthrown. It has been gaining more and more support among scientists (particularly among astronomers) since the 70's. It wasn't until Carter's lecture 30 years ago that people started to take notice of its import, and atheists started attacking it immediately - to no avail of course. You are misrepresenting my position at least, when you mischaracterize what I argue by saying anything that is inexplicable can be explained by God because God can do anything. I never said this. That is how Dawkins loves to create the straw man as well. I have never made that argument. Instead, I have simply followed Aristotle's logic.
Sadly, "You can't explain X, therefore X was designed" kills the pursuit of knowledge
See what I mean? You just did it again. You completely misrepresented my argument because I never said such a thing. Why don't you deal with what's said? Instead of offering a silly synopsis of what you think has been said in a way that makes you appear victorious.
There used to be a popular version of the design argument that rested on the inexplicability of the motion of the planets, which seemed so neat and orderly and yet submitted no explanation. That design argument rested on the premise that it was unexplainable by natural means, therefore God did it. Of course, there was no valid basis for thinking that all known and unknown explanations were wrong (you can't know that all unknown explanations are wrong), but the fact that no one could come up with one was enough for people to declare it not explainable. If everyone believed that and was satisfied with the empty answer that the motion of the planets are the way they are because a creator desired and had the power to make them that way, then no one would've actually bothered to explain it. That's how God of the Gaps reasoning impedes progress in knowledge and scientific progress in particular.
Instead, of telling me what my reasoning isn't, why don't you try dealing with the argument that is really on the table? You say my argument is old and you pretend it has been dealt with, but in all my time watching you bash theistic apologetics over the years, I've never once even seen you mention it. And when I first mentioned it here a few months ago, the resident atheists went silent as if they had no clue what I was talking about. Now you think you are going to be able to attack a Dawkinesque rendition of the "God of the gaps" nonsense, and that will somehow count as a refutation of the evidence I presented? You haven't addressed any of it. How do you explain the fact that all the laws are mathematically connected?
Fred Hoyle believed that the universe needed to know exactly how everything was going to unfold in advance. Of course he was an atheist before coming to grips with the scientific evidence he encountered as an astronomer. He said:
"All that we see in the universe of observation and fact, as opposed to the mental state of scenario and supposition, remains unexplained. And even in its supposedly first second the universe is acausal. That is to say, the universe has to know in advance what it is going to be before it knows how to start itself. For in accordance with the Big Bang Theory, for instance, at a time of 10 -43 seconds the universe has to know many types of neutrino there are going to be at a time of 1 second. This is so in order that starts off expanding at the right rate to fit the eventual number of neutrino types."
How about I do this. Sometime in the next day or two I will transcribe a chapter from a book I have that pretty much sums up my position on this matter. Hopefully this will be more effective in getting my point across. The author, Patrick Glenn, is a former Harvard atheist who became a theist for the same reasons I mentioned here.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
Yes! there is third option that doesn't involve "becoming" ordered at all. "Becoming" implies that natural laws didn't exist, but then they came into existence, maybe by chance or by design. A third possiblity is that the natural laws of the universe have always been -- and there never was a "becoming" step.
If you want to argue for false dichotomy of the above, then you have to throw the "big bang" out the window. I was operating under the assumption that none of our resident atheists were willing to do that. As it is, I can't believe what I'm hearing. You guys are now saying the universe has always existed! Are you kidding me?
Read more carefully, Kevin. The option I raised is that the natural laws have always existed, not that the universe has always existed. What about God -- has he always existed? Or was he created? Or did he just appear by random chance? It's the same three options. (This is why regressing to "God did it" is so dumb.)
Last edited by Doctor Steuss on Wed Aug 27, 2008 2:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
"And yet another little spot is smoothed out of the echo chamber wall..." Bond
dartagnan wrote:If you want to argue for false dichotomy of the above, then you have to throw the "big bang" out the window. I was operating under the assumption that none of our resident atheists were willing to do that. As it is, I can't believe what I'm hearing. You guys are now saying the universe has always existed! Are you kidding me?
Not the universe. Natural law, as in the laws that allowed for the big bang to occur. In addition to "chance" and "design" the other option is "regularity."
This is beyond absurd. How can universal laws exist without a universe???
How can a God, having a nature, exist without a universe?!?!?!!?!!?!?!111oneoneone.
dartagnan wrote:These are moot points that do nothing to mitigate the thrust of the argument. Since all life is considered God's creation (at least to most theists, and the book of Genesis), I'll rephrase and say the universal laws all share one value: they are needed for life to emerge.
You can pick other physical phenomena if you want. The universe is also fine-tuned for stars like our sun to exist. Really, you can pick any set of physical constants and its byproducts and call that a unique target. They're all equally unlikely.
If you do not think humans are objectively special, then you have serious issues. Even an evolutionist has to admire the mental distinctions between humans and all other known life.
I admire that we are intelligent. That doesn't make it objectively special outside our admiration for it anymore than a blue whale's giant penis makes it the most awesomeist of species. If you want to know where I'm going on this point, besides simply rejecting false statement about what the universe is all "aiming at," then I can requote what I already quoted to you:
Sure, non-life producing universes might be more probable than life-producing ones, but what does that prove? We only think that life-producing universes are special because we're in one. Each individual universe, life-producing or not, has the same intrinsic probability. The "intelligent design" argument is highly anthrocentric -- it only works if you assume that life-producing universes are special in some way that affects the production of those universes.
For example, suppose that you allow two compartments of randomly-distributed gas molecules to mix together, and then at some instant after a long period of time you take all the molecules in one corner and paint them blue to indicate that this configuration is "special". Then you claim that the initial configuration of the gas molecules must have been set in just such a way that all of the molecules which you later painted -- which surely were distributed almost at random in the beginning -- happen to end up, at that later instant, to all end up in one corner of the compartment. After all, if it had been set up any other way, if the initial distribution of gas molecules in the two compartments had been almost anything else, those particular molecules which you've painted blue would never have ended up in that corner all at once by that time. What are the odds of that happening, that those particular molecules all end up in that corner at that time? About a gazillion to one. That must mean that the initial configuration of molecules was intelligently designed so that those molecules would end up there at that time, right? Wrong. The initial configuration of molecules was random.
This is exactly analogous to what people claim when they suggest that "fine-tuning" must imply intelligent design. You after the fact designate some particular configuration of the system as "special", such as "those molecules in the corner" or "the existence of life on Earth", and say "Wow, things must have been set up in the beginning exactly so that this configuration will occur!". But it's really an artifact of our singling out one configuration as special. It's exacerbated if this configuration happens to give rise to self-aware life -- if all of those molecules in the corner happen to, through their interactions, give rise to some sort of sentient behavior, then they might suppose that the initial distribution of gas in the compartment was "fine-tuned" to make all of them end up in that corner at that particular time.
The fine-tuning argument was recently revived once the Copernican revolution was overthrown. It has been gaining more and more support among scientists (particularly among astronomers) since the 70's. It wasn't until Carter's lecture 30 years ago that people started to take notice of its import, and atheists started attacking it immediately - to no avail of course. You are misrepresenting my position at least, when you mischaracterize what I argue by saying anything that is inexplicable can be explained by God because God can do anything. I never said this.
Your arguments say this by implication. You've used the fact you can pick out, of the many possible Gods, the one that wanted to design this particular universe as an explanation for its features. In other words, your God hypothesis is simply tailored to what the physical constants are. If they were different, you could just as easily modify the hypothesis to accomidate them. You then point the lack of a natural explanation for those physical constants (or in your case seemingly being befuddled that there could be such a thing), and infer that the God explanation, despite simply defining itself to explain the problem, wins. That's an argument from ignorance.
In short, this argument:
P1: If the fine-tuner designer exists then we would observe a life-friendly universe. P2: It is unlikely we would observe a life-friendly universe on the hypothesis of chance P3: We observe a life-friendly universe ------------------ C: It is likely that the fine-tuner designer exists.
Is not different than this one
P1: If a thunder god exists then there would be such a thing as thunder. P2: It is unlikely thunder would exist in our universe on the hypothesis of chance P3: There is such a thing as thunder ---------- C: It is likely that the thunder god exists
As for the history of the fine-tuning argument, again it has been around for a long time. As I mentioned in my previous post, the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Wallace, consistently argued that if physical structure of the earth, solar system, and universe had been built ever so slightly differently, conscious life could not have arise; therefore, intelligence must have designed the universe. Of course, what we knew about that structure was different then than it is now, but the same argument holds. What happened in the 1970's is that "physical constant" version of the fine-tuning argument arose and became increasingly popular among theologians into the '80's where it became one of the main arguments academic theologians were using. It's still largely rejected by academia, so hopefully you aren't insinuating that it's taking over astronomy or something.
You say my argument is old and you pretend it has been dealt with, but in all my time watching you bash theistic apologetics over the years, I've never once even seen you mention it
Then you haven't read me closely. If you give me time, I'm sure I can find posts by myself on it on ZLMB, probably quoting Drange if memory serves.
And when I first mentioned it here a few months ago, the resident atheists went silent as if they had no clue what I was talking about.
Remember when I posted an academic paper attacking it, you promised to respond in the Celestial, and disappeared? Good times.
You say my argument is old and you pretend it has been dealt with, but in all my time watching you bash theistic apologetics over the years, I've never once even seen you mention it
Then you haven't read me closely. If you give me time, I'm sure I can find posts by myself on it on ZLMB, probably quoting Drange if memory serves.
On a board you participated on I've talked about fine-tuning here:
And that's with one simple search-tag related to a specific philosopher I'm sure I've quoted. I'm sure if you typed in "anthropic" and read the threads that come up, you'd find me discussing it there too.
On another board, I'm sure I've talked about fine-tuning arguments more times than I have digits. You can search Rottentomatoes if you like. I like to use poker analogies when talking about FT arguments a lot so you might start there. I searched "fine-tuning" and got a ton of hits. I randomly picked one here.
Drawing some quotes from one post of mine in that thread:
We don't know. We don't know why the universe is the way it is and not some other way. (Because a diety wanted it that way doesn't answer that question anymore than it answers any question) That's the problem. That the universe has a finite begining doesn't mean physical law could arbitrarily be anything. Metaphysical causality and temporal causality aren't the same thing, as I'm sure you'd amply need to agree to argue that a diety "set" the laws of the universe in the first place. It could be the metaphysical "rules" of reality constrict the actual set of physically possible universes in a way the logical set is not. We don't know.
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Richard Swinburne helps himself to a defintion of the properties of God from which he infers such a being would consider life - human life in particular - a good that it would want to achieve. His moral inference aside, that doesn't address my point. The thing is, a diety can have any possible set of intentions. A generic diety could want anything. All Swinburne is doing is saying, "If there were a God who had this particular set of intentions and abilities, then this observed outcome would be likely," via saying, "If the creator-god were like my defintion of God, then it would likely have these set of intentions and abilities." That doesn't, of course, mean the existence of such a diety is likely when observing the outcome. (We can trivially do this with any set of observations by defining out diety as wanting to obtain it.) However, of all the possible diety-creators that could exist (dieties can have malevolent intentions too), it just so happens the one that does wants this particular universe to exist in the precise way it does. What a coincidence!
What has happened is the logical unlikelihood calculation is by fiat being buried in the assumptions about the properties of God. However, the same question exists, only it becomes "Out of all the logically possible creator-gods that could exist, why this one?"
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There are multiple kinds of creator-gods. Different kinds of disembodied personalities with the metaphysical ability to create a universe are logically possible. Unless you plan on endorsing some sort of ontological argument here, I don't see how you can escape that. (Even then, we can use such an argument to argue for a maximally malevolent being, etc.) And if you plan on endorsing something as bold in its attempted demonstration as an ontological argument, what need is there for something as tepid as fine-tuning at all then?
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You allow for some form of extra-universal existence. God is an entity metaphysically responsible for the existence of the temporal universe. If God can have such a property there is no reason reality itself cannot have such a property, as there is no compelling reason to neccessarily attach such a property to a quality like "personhood". It makes no more sense to say the universe "popped out of nothing" than it does to say "God popped out of nothing".
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It's has to do with how the question is answered by proposing a diety. Why is there thunder? Because there exists a diety who has properties such that it can and wants to obtain thunder. Chance is deemed unlikley, because there are all sorts of possible worlds in which thunder doesn't exist. We just happen to live in one where it does. Until we know why thunder is a consequence of rules of reality, then thunder just arbitrarily exists among a host of possiblities. Therefore, the existence of thunder is evidence of this deity. The kind of argument above doesn't work for reasons independent of whether we have a natural explanation for thunder.
etc. etc.
I'm pretty awesome in that thread. You should read it.
"I think you misunderstood what he said there. When he mentioned, "we could have 'lucked out'" he was talking about being right, not about the accounting of the perceived uniformity of the universe."
Right, we got lucky that nature is uniform.
Huh? Are you misreading on purpose?
CypressChristian wrote:
"So what? It doesn't change the fact that what he said is true. How is that using language that suggests randomness?"
The "uncaused" position being just as viable as the "directly caused by some physical process" would lead to chance because the definition of chance is not being able to attribute a cause to a phenomena. But, let's say I grant you that the universe was the direct cause of some other physical process, what was the cause of THAT physical process?
That's interesting. You keep saying the same thing in hopes that some day, it will be true, but I'm sorry; you're wrong. The definition of chance is NOT "not being able to attribute a cause to a phenomena." That, once again, since you seem to have missed it, is the definition of ignorance, not the definition of chance. What makes you think that just because you don't know why something is, it's the product of chance? How do those two things even relate?
CypressChristian wrote:
"No. It's the definition of ignorance. We simply don't know. Claiming it's random is claiming it's chance, but I don't remember him saying that. I remember you ascribing that position to atheists a lot, but I don't remember any atheists actually saying it."
Ok, he was saying that we cannot attribute any cause or non-cause to the universe so we can't say it's chance, but not being able to attribute a cause to a phenomena is the definition of chance! Also, I'm not saying that all atheists must believe that the universe came about by chance, I'm saying that if anyone was to follow out the atheist worldview to it's most logical conclusion, the universe was brought about by chance. Wether an individual atheist will admit it or not is besides the point.
This is like me saying that people who believe in god don't really believe in god. Whether they admit it or not is beside the point.
Sorry, but I don't think the universe came about by chance. That's your false dichotomy, not mine.
CypressChristian wrote:
"You have a bad habit of equating chance to ignorance. How is it that not knowing something is the same as "it must have happened randomly?"
Saying we don't know how it happened but we know it didn't happen randomly is inconsistent. But here is the actual point: If the universe didn't happen by chance, then it was caused. What caused the universe then? Saying it was God is just as logical as saying it was any other natural phenomena. But let's say it's not God, lets it's a natural process powerful enough to create universes. What is powerful enough to cause a cause powerful enough to cause the universe? Where did that uber-powerful cause come from? Another uber-uber powerful cause? Basically, if the universe was caused by a natural process, the atheist must then have faith in an infinite regress of ever increasingly powerful natural phenomena. Pretty soon, the atheist is ascribing abilities to those natural phenomena similar to the abilities the Christian ascribes to God. The only reason the atheist isn't calling the phenomena "God" is because it offends their sensibilities as an atheist.
There may have been something that caused the big bang, but I don't pretend to know what it is. That's religion's job. But what I can say is that magical god creatures that come along and create universes is a cop out explanation.
And I'm not even talking about pre-big bang (how it came to be), or during big bang (how it happened). I'm talking about everything post big bang. I think the universe seems "ordered" because it's been subjected to natural constants.
CypressChristian wrote:Schmo, I was under the impression that Natural Selection selected random mutations and that Natural Selection had no direction in mind. Is that not random?
No, it's not random. Thanks for demonstrating that Christians don't really understand it.
Just because natural selection has no plan "in mind" (or mind at all, for that matter) doesn't mean that what occurs is random. Again, it makes mutation selection based on well defined conditions. What is random about that?
CypressChristian wrote:
"Now, does this mean the funnel and gravity intelligently designed the pile?"
You are attributing the undesigned nature of a pile of sand using an analogy with a designed object, the funnel!
LOL
Dude, funnels occur naturally in geology. Two rocks side by side with a space between them can act like a funnel. That's why I brought up rivers, and the path of least resistance. Funny that you would hear funnel and automatically think of something man-made/created.
CypressChristian wrote:When have you ever heard a Creationist say that rivers themselves were intelligently designed? Talk about a strawman of epic proportions.
Oh really? Aren't rivers a part of the universe? I thought god created the universe. Are you now backing down from that and limiting intelligent design to... what, just living things now?
God belief is for people who don't want to live life on the universe's terms.
In the fall of 1973, the world's most eminent astronomers and physicists gathered in Poland to commemorate the 500th birthday of the father of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus. Assembles for the special two-week series of symposia were some of the most illustrious scientific minds of our time: Stephen W. Hawking, Roger Penrose, Robert Wagoner, Joseph Silk, and John Wheeler, to name only a few. The mood was festive. East-West detente was still in its heyday, and Poland's then-Communist government, bursting with pride at its favorite son Copernicus, rolled out the red carpet for its prestigious foreign guests. Participants were treated to a lavish reception and even a ballet. For the first half of September, scientists shuttled back and forth among Warsaw, Krakow, and Copernicus's birthplace of Torum, taking in the sights, listening to countless lectures, comparing notes on the latest astronomical discoveries, and airing their newest cosmological speculations.
Yet of the dozens of scientific lectures presented during the festivities, only one would be remembered decades later, echoing far beyond the hall in Krakow where it was delivered, indeed far beyond the field of astronomy or even science itself. Its author, Brandon Carter, was a well-established astrophysicist and cosmologist from Cambridge University, a close friend and sometime fellow graduate student of the (later) more famous Hawking. The title of the paper was technical sounding and the tone of the presentation highly tentative. "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology," Carter called it. Yet there was nothing merely technical about the paper's implications. For teh insights he presented, 500 years after Copernicus's birth, spelled nothing less than the philosophical overthrow of the Copernican revolution itself.
Carter called his notion the "anthropic principle," from the Greek word anthropos, "man." The name was a bit off-putting. And Carter's definition of the idea was highly technical. The anthropic principle consisted of the observation that "what we can expect to observe [in the universe] must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers." In plainer English, the anthropic principle says that all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common - these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life. In essence, the anthropic principle came down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man - that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.
This discovery, already percolating among physicists in the early 1970's, came as something of a surprise, to put it mildly. For centuries, scientific exploration seemed to be taking us down precisely the opposite road - toward an ever more mechanistic, impersonal, and random view of the cosmos. Twentieth-century intellectuals had commonly spoken of the "random universe." The predominant view of modern philosophers and intellectuals was that human life had come about essentially by accident, the by-product of brute, material forces randomly churning over the eons. This conclusion seemed to follow naturally from the two great scientific revolutions of the modern era, the Copernican and the Darwinian. With the sun-centered model of the planetary system, Copernicus showed that humanity was not in any sense "central" to the universe. "Before the Copernican revolution, it was natural to suppose that God's purposes were specially concerned with the earth, but now this has become an implausible hypothesis," the atheistic scientist Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1935 classic, Religion and Science. Darwin, moreover, had demonstrated that the origins of life and even of the human species could be explained by blind mechanisms. In the wake of Copernicus and darwin, it no longer seemed plausible to regard the universe as created for humanity as a creature of God. "Man" should rather be understood, as Russell expressed it, as some kind of unfortunate accident or sideshow in the material universe - "a curious accident in a backwater."
The philosophical, cultural, and emotional impact of this conclusion could hardly be overstated. It explained the tone of despair and angst that came to characterize modern culture, the desperate feeling that humankind was alone and without moorings, and above all without God. It was this random universe cosmology that underpinned all the atheistic modern philosophies - from Russell's own positivism, to existentialism, Marxism, even Freudianism.
But then the unexpected occurred. Beginning in the 1960's, scientists began to notice a strange connection among the number of otherwise unexplained coincidences in physica. It turns out that many mysterious values and relationships in physics could be explained by one overriding fact: Such values had been necessary for teh creation of life. The physicit Robert Dicke was the first to draw attention to this relationship. The scientist John Wheeler, one of teh most prestigious practitioners of cosmology, became interested in the idea in the 1960's. Then, at Wheeler's urging, Carter presented the observation in full-blown form at the Copernican festivities.
A Scientific Embarrassment
The anthropic principle offered a kind of explanation for one of the most basic mysteries in physics - the values of the fundamental constants. Physicists had never been able to explain why the values of the so-called fundamental constants - for example, the values for the gravitational force or the electromagnetic force - were as they were. They were just "constant." One had to accept them. Moreover, there were certain mysterious mathematical relations among some of these constants. For example, the forces binding certain particles seemed to be mathematically related to the number for the age of the universe. Why should these forces be related to the age of the universe? In the past, physicists like Arthur Eddington and Paul Dirac had come up with some rather exotic theories to explain these coincidence.
But there was a simpler way of explaining them, as Carter pointed out in his lecture. If one examined closely the evolution of the universe, one would see that these precise values or ratios were necessary if the universe was tro be capable of prducing life. In a certain sense, this finding was no surprise: We would not expect to be observing a universe that had not produced us in the first place. Still, the number of strange "coincidences" that could be explained simply because they were necessary for producing life in the universe was surprisingly large.
That was where Coperniccus came in. People had interpreted Copernicus's theory to mean that humankind had no "privileged central" place in the universe, as Carter put it. But the explanation was not so simple. Too many values had seemingly been arranged around the central task of producing us. So, as Carter stated (in a somewhat hair-splitting fashion), even if our position in the universe was not "central," it was "inevitably privileged to some extent." Few people at the time seemed to be thinking deeply about teh philosophical implications of this discovery. But they were nothing short of astounding. In effect, the "random universe" was out the window. There was nothing random at all about the arrangement of the cosmos - as phsyicists quickly began to see. The vast, fifteen-billion-year evolution of the universe had apparently been directed toward one goal: the creation of human life.
The anthropic principle raised fundamental questions not only about the modern interpretation of Copernicus, but ultimately about Darwinism as well. It certainly showed that Darwin's theory of "natural selection" could no longer be taken as an exhaustive explanation for the phenomenon of life. The notion that the whole process could be reduced to the workings of a single, simple "blind" mechanism was fundamentally flawed. The picture was vastly more complex than that.
The point is this: The "death of God" had been based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of the universe, on a very partial and flawed picture that science had come up with by the late nineteenth century. Now that pictures was being replaced by a new one, vastly more complex - and decisively more compatible with the nation that the universe had been designed by an intelligent creator. Indeed, what twentieth-century cosmology had come up with was something of a scientific embarrassment: a universe with a definite beginning, expressly designed for life. Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced twentieth-century science is closer in spirit to teh vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus. The irony is deepened by the fact that modern cosmology is the result of extending the concept of "evolution" - an idea once viewed as deeply inimical to faith.
The Primeval Atom
What made the discovery of the anthropic principle possible was the advent of big bang cosmology. At the time Russell wrote Religion and Science, nobody knew in a scientific sense how the universe had begun, or whether it had a beginning. In the late 1920's the physicist George Lemaitre proposed that the universe had originated in a primeval atom, but this was a higly controversial idea. Then in 1945 came the explosion of the atomic bomb. Shortly thereafter the physicist George Gamow proposed that the universe had originated in a similar original cataclysm. The existence of the bomb - and the theories that went into understanding nuclear fusion - gave this notion of an initial explosion greater credibility. The Lamitre-Gamow model accounted for one important mystery, the "red shift." In 1927, the astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that other galaxies are rapdily rushing away from our (causing light from these galaxies to shift toward the red end of the color spectrum), that the universe is constantly expanding. The primeval atom theory - which envisioned the universe exploding out from an initial point - explained why that would be. But for roughly twenty years, scientists were divided between Gamow's theory and the so-called steady state universe, or the argument that the universe had always been there. It was Fred Hoyle, a leading proponent of the steady state theory, who coined the derisive term "big bang theory" to describe the position of his opponents. The label stuck.
Then in 1964, a couple of scientists at Bell Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, stumbled on what was later known as the cosmic background radiation. Penzias and Wilson, who were working on communication satellited, were annoyed to find low-level "noise" emanation from every direction in the sky. Physicists quickly realized what this noise was- an echo of the big bang billions of years before. It became apparent that the big bang theory was almost certainly right. Even before the big bang looked like a sure thing, scientists had been making considerable progress reconstructing the evolution of the universe from its hypotehtical beginnings. By teh 1970's, with big bang firmly established, physicists began to think about alternative scenarios for teh universe's evolution. Say you tinkered with teh value of gravity or altered very slightly the strength of the electromagnetic force - how would this affect the path of the universe's evolution? What they quickly found was that even the slightest tinkering with the values of physics derailed the whole process. SOmetimes you ended up with the wrong kind of stars. In other cases you ended up with no stars at all. No matter what alternative scenario you tried to cook up, the most miniscule change in the fundamental constants completely eliminated the possibility of life.
Carter presented some of these points in his 1973 lecture. Any tinkering with teh gravitational constant in relation to electromagnetism, he pointed out, would have resulted in a universe with no middling stars like our sun, but oinly cooler "red" or "hotter" blue ones - incapable of sustaining life's evolution. Any weakening of the nuclear "strong" force would have resulted in a universe consisting of hydrogen and not a single other element. That would mean no oxygen, no water, nothing but hydrogen.
But these initial observations proved to be merely the tip of the iceberg. In the years following his lecture, Carter and other scientists would discover an increasingly daunting and improbable list of mysterious coincidences or "lucky accidents" in the universe - whose only common denominator seemed to be that they were necessary for our emergence. Even the most minor tinkering with the value of the fundamental forces of physics - gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force, of the nuclear weak force - would have resulted in an unrecognizable universe: a universe consisting entirely of helium, a universe without protons or atoms, a universe without stars, or a universe that collapsed back in upon itself before the first moments of its existence were up. Changing the precise ratios of the masses of subatomic particles in relation to one another would have similar effects. Even such basics of life as carbon and water depend upon uncanny "fine-tuning" at the subatomic level, strange coincidences in values for which phsyicists had no other explanation. To take just a few examples:
1. If the ratio between gravity and electromagnetism were changed even slightly, "stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster." 2. Had the nuclear weak force been slightly weaker, all the hydrogen in the universe would have been turned to helium. 3. If the difference in mass between a proton and a neutron were not exactly as it is - roughly twice the mass of an electron- then all neutrons would have become protons or vice versa. Say goodbye to chemistry as we know it - and to life. 4. The very nature of water - so vital to life - is something of a mystery (a point noticed by one of the forerunners of anthropic reasoning in the nineteenth century, Harvard biologist Lawrence Henderson). Unique among the molecules, water is lighter in its solid than liquid form: Ice floats. It id did not, the oceans would freeze from the bottom up and earth would now be covered with solid ice. This property in turn is traceable to unique properties of the hydrogen atom. 5. The synthesis of carbon - the vital core of all organic molecules - on a significant scale involves what scientists view as "astonishing" coincidence in the ratio of the strong force to electromagnetism. This ratio makes it possible for carbon-12 to reach an excited state of exactly 7.65 MeV at the temperature typical of the center of stars, which creates a resonance involving helium-4, beryllium-8, and carbon-12 - allowing the necessary binding to take place during a tiny window of opportunity 10(17) seconds long.
The list goes on. A comprehensive compilation of these coincidences can be found in John Leslie's Universes. The depth of the mystery involved here has been captured best by astronomer Fred Hoyle, the former proponent of the steady state theory:
"All that we see in the universe of observation and fact, as opposed to the mental state of scenario and supposition, remains unexplained. And even in its supposedly first second the universe is acausal. That is to say, the universe has to know in advance what it is going to be before it knows how to start itself. For in accordance with the Big Bang Theory, for instance, at a time of 10 -43 seconds the universe has to know many types of neutrino there are going to be at a time of 1 second. This is so in order that starts off expanding at the right rate to fit the eventual number of neutrino types."
Hoyle's notion of the universe needing to "know in advance" later outcomes captures the depth of teh mystery. The fine-tuning of seemingly heterogenous values and ratios necessary to get from thebig bang to life as we know it involves intricate coordination over vast differences in scale - from the galactic level down to the subatomic one - and across multi-billion-year tracts of time. Hoyle, who coined the term, "big bang," has questioned the very legitimacy of the metaphor of an initial explaosion. "An explosion in a junkyard does not lead to sundry bits of metal being assembled into a useful working machine," he writes. The more phsyicists have learned about the universe, the more it looks like a put-up job.
The Rise and Fall of the Mechanism
This has not been a particularly happy realization for the scientific community. Yes, in a sense you could say that the anthropic principle "explained" all these mysterious coincidences, but it was a very unscientific explanation - the kind of explanation that the old natural philosophers used to offer for things, before modern science came along. The word teleology comes from the Greek word telos meaning "end" or "goal." Aristotle thought it was a sufficient explanation of something to say that its end or goal caused it. He called this the "final cause." For example, an oak tree (or rather its essence or nature) is the final cause of the path of growth that begins with the acorn. The essence of the flower is the final cause of the process that begins with teh seed. The essence or nature of the adult human being is the final cause of the process that begins with the fetus in the womb.
This form of thinking is now quite alien to us, since our view of the world is conditioned by modern science. We don't even use the word cause in this sense anymore. Modern science is not interested in the final cause. It looks rather for the efficient cause, the mechanism that actually brings things about. The anthropic principle harks back to the older style of thinking. In effect, the anthropic principle says that humanity is (apparently) the final cause of the universe/ The most basic explanation of the universe is that it seems to be a process orchestrated to acheive the end or goal of creating human beings. This explanation is not a scientific explanation in the modern sense of that term.
Modern science was born when human beings abandoned talk of final causes and began to look exclusively for "efficient causes," for the underlying mechanisms that explained "how" things "worked." The great transition to modern science occurred in the battle over Copernicus's theory - the Copernican revolution. Galileo was the hero of this great battle. He claimed that the observations of teh heavens he had made with hsi new telescope vindicated Copernicus's theory: Contrary to what people had thought for centuries, the sun was fixed and the earth orbited around it and rotated on an axis. This novel idea was extremely annoying to teh natural philosophers of Galileo's day, who were basically followers of Aristitle. Some of them actually conspired against Galileo to get the Church to silence him and ultimately convict him as a heretic. In so doing, of course, the Church forever discredited its doctrines in the minds of many thinking people. It sacrificed its claim that it had a monopoly on the truth.
Galileo was punished and his books officially banned. But his ideas triumphed, and with them came the end of Aristotelian science and the search for final causes. Modern science was teh triumph of mechanism over teleology and remained so until this century. In time, scientists were able to elaborate more and more mechanisms to explain how the universe and everything we see around us worked. All the mysteries that human beings had once attributed to God or the gods turned out to have simple mechanistic explanations.
The rise of the mechanism went hand in hand with the decline of religious faith among the intellectual elite. One could see this happening even in the writings of the earliest theorists of science. As the mechanistic explanation expanded, it left increasingly little room for God. By the eighteenth century, theism had given way to deism - or the view that God is simply the "first cause" abd underlying principle of rationality in the universe. The most famous eighteenth century deist, Voltaire, openly attacked religion. Deism quickly deteriorated to atheism, or the belief in no God at all. Such was the position of David Hume and of the later generation of French philosophers, such as Baron d'Holbach abd Denis Diderot. The French thinkers were particularly open and aggressive in their attacks on religious belief - partly because of the still powerful role that the Catholic Church played in French politics.
pp 21-33
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
Darwin breathed fresh life into the atheist position - a fact immediately recognized across the globe... Science, it appeared, had found mechanistic explanations for everything. The verdict seemed inescapable. It was uttered finally in 1885 by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "the philosophical "shock jock" of his era: "God is dead." Moderns of the era of nietzsche, and later Russell and Freud, were convinced that this mechanistic vision of the cosmos was the last word. Neither Russell nor Freud nor Marx nor Nietzsche would ever have expected that the mechanistic model itself might be overturned.
The "modern" era in science and philosophy could essentially be defined as the era of the triumph of the mechanism over teleology. The defining feature of modern thinking was that in it mechanism always had the upper hand. For this reason, the advent of the anthropic principle is a much more momentous event in Western intellectual history than many people have realized. Suddenly, for the first time since Galileo, teleology has trumpoed mechanism - and on the biggest and most fundamental question imagineable, the nature of the universe itself. For the first time in over 350 years, science is at a loss to reduce the universe and the order we see around us to mechanistic principles. Indeed, it is growing increasingly doubtful whether the anthropic principle can be explained away in mechanistic terms even in principle, as we shall see. Some scientists (focusing on parallel mysteries that have simultaneously opened up in the field of quantum mechanics) have spoken of the "death of materialism." The change we are witnessing is even more profound than that. The great modern era - spanning the nearly 350 years between the trial of Galileo and the 500th birthday of Copernicus - is at an end. It is truly justifiable to speak of our current period as the "postmodern age." And there is every reason to suppose this age will also be postsecular, since the original philosophical assumptions underpinning the modern secular worldview have been shattered - ironicallu enough, by science itself.
The Pope and the Physicists
Modern science, of course, has hardly given up the ghost. The search continues for an alternative explanation for the universe's mysteries. Indeed, many scientists are inclined to regard the anthropic principle less as an explanation than as an absence of an explanation, a pitiful confession of scientific ignorance. The search for an alternative answer moves on two separate but interrelated tracks. First, there is the effort to find a theory to unify the fundamental forces, a so-called theory of everything. If physics arrived at a theory of everything, the fundamental constants would disappear. There would be no longer a need for unexplained constants, since physics would understand he underlying principle or mechanism that determines why the various forces and subatomic realities of nature take the values that they do. Instead of unexplained, fixed constants, physicists would have equations explaining the interrelations among the fundamental forces. If there were no longer any constants, there could be no coincidences among constants. There would be no coincidences whatsoever. In a theory of everything, everything would be explained.
At present there is a theory that seems to unify three out of the four fundamental forces - electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear force. Gravity, however, remains unaccounted for, the elephant still outside the tent.
The alternative strategy is to come up with a more complete cosmology, a more satisfying mechanism to account for why the universe takes the remarkable form that it does. The most talked about innovation in cosmology today is known as the inflation theory, which raised everybody's hopes a few years ago by seeming to explain two of the important anthropic coincidences: the so-called flatness and smoothness problems. But inflation, a still highly speculative theory, has rapidly encountered new problems of its own.
As recently as a decade ago, there was a good deal of optimism among physicists that a unified theory might be in sight. Today a certain mood of pessimism seems to be setting in. As the phsyicist Steven Weinberg observed, "As we make progress understanding the expanding universe, the problem itself expands, so that the solution always seems to recede from us." Today, moreover, the physicists find themselves constantly looking over their shoulder at the theologians, who watch with intrigue as the scientists are forced to wrestle anew with an issue they thought they had put to rest a long time ago: God. (Thus, we find Weinberg feeling compelled to quote the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and mention St. Augustine in his recent review of scientific cosmology books foe the New York Review, insisting, essentially, that the theologians are still wrong!)
One can discern two somewhat different motives in the strivings of the physicists and cosmologists today. One is a purely professional impulse. A scientist is one who is paid to offer mechanistic explanations for the universe, and the best scientists are more than happy simply to do what they are paid to do. But side by side with the professional impulse, a certain ideological mission has crept in. Many scientists are profoundly uncomfortable with the universe of the new cosmology, precisely because it leaves such ample room for God. The whole picture is damnably disconcerting: a universe with a beginning, designed for man. Many scientists want this picture to go away.
The famous cosmologist Stephen W. Hawking decided to try to solve the first part of the problem by getting rid of the beginning of the universe. He did so in preparation for a major international conference on scientific cosmology in 1981, sponsored by - of all placxes - the Vatican. The willingness of the Church of Rome to play host to an assembly of contemporary physicists doubtless had something to do with the Vatican's sense that the scientific winds were sudenly and delightfully shifting in its favor. Pope John Paul II, no naif when it comes to the ins and outs of modern science and philosophy, seized telling on the weakness of the scientists' case in his address to the conference.... At this very conference, Hawking introduced his famou "no-boundary" proposal, designed to eliminate the universe's beginning. Essentially, the Hawking proposal - later refined in collaboration with Jim Hartle - eliminates the temporal beginning point by placing the universe in a larger superspace comprising real plus (mathematically) "imaginary time." In a sense it was a way of "getting outside" the universe so that t = 0, or the beginnning, was not a point on a linear time line but rather, by analogy, a point on a sphere, like theeh north pole on a globe. In this sense there would be nothing "before" t=0 and, moreover, the point t=0 would be "nothing special."
Lest anyone doubt that Hawking's motivation may have had less to do with the demands of science than with the challenge of theology, Hawking himself has been clear on the point, "So long as the universe had a beginning," he wrote in A Brief History of Time, "we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then for a creator?"
These physicists, one is forced to admit, are clever fellows, and there is no framework provided an ingenious answer to the simple argument raised by the pope...But Hawking's theory has remained controversial. And, more important, it did not solve the larger problem, which lay in the anthropic coincidences. As the Xoford theologian Keith Ward has pointed out, "What the Hartle-Hawking theory leaves unexplained is why the basic quantum fields, the boundary conditions of the cosmos, should be as they are, why the physical laws should be as they are, and how it is that the laws give the appearance of existing objectively and 'governing' the sorts of events that come into being."
From a scientist's viewpoint, the fact that the universe looks as though it had a definite beginning might be upsetting enough. But what appears to drive cosmologists nearly to distraction is the anthropic principle. Again and again, scientific authorities seek to banish it from the halls of science. Again and again, it pops up at scientific meetings in the mouth of some prominent cosmologist. It is a "can't live with it, can't live without it" situation. On the other hand, the principle smacks of a pre-Copernican anthropocentrism - precisely the intellectual ailment of which modern science had supposedly cured us - and, worse, of theism - of which modern science was really supposed to have cured us. On the other hand, it can be used effectively to make scientifically verifiable predictions. Certainly, the effort to explain, or explain away, the anthropic coincidences has been a major factor keeping cosmologists in business these past twenty years. Some of the most imaginative speculation in modern cosmology is motivated by a desire to remove this particular zebra from the front parlor of science.
Monkey Business
How does one do that? It is not clear that even a theory of everything would solve the problem. Even if one could find an underlying mechanism to unify the constants, the larger philosophical issue might remain: How does one explain that the laws of physics fit so perfectly with the fifteen-billion-year project of creating life?
So a theory of everything offers little consolation to scientists; and in any case, it appears to be a long way off. Instead, the battle has been fought largely on the terrain of cosmolgy itself. The main strategy of the physicists for discounting the anthropic principle is to multiply imaginary universes. The reasoning behind this strategy is fairly simple: If there were an infinite number of other universes, then the fact that ours hit on the right combination of physical laws to produce the miracle of life might not be such a miracle after all - or so teh argument goes. Humanity would again become an "accident."
We should begin by noting that none of these imaginary universes about which cosmologists ceaselessly speculate these days have been shown to exist. They are pure products of scientific imagination. Moreover, because they are alternative universes, they would been to be inherently undetectable. That raises difficulties enough. But there is a further problem - the question of whether random variation could even in principle create a vast order that pervades the one universe we know.
In its generic form , the idea that randomness, over time, will eventually produce order has a very old pedigree, long predating modern science....
p.37-44
Ok, I'm tired...
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein