I've posted tons on this topic if you're interested in doing a search. Right now my brain is consumed with politics or else I'd post more.
That's too bad, yer politics flat SUCK, but I rather am enjoying what you are saying in this topic! I look forward to seeing more and learning more with you on this.
What I find most interesting about the anthropic principle and the argument from fine tuning, is that it places humanity back in the center of the universe again. Not literally, of course. This drives atheists completely nuts because it makes the religious author of Genesis 1 appear knowledgable about things scientists would only discover thousands of years later.
Heh... very interesting......... I am going to quit reading your political ideas cause they drive me nuts, but you and I are going to rock on this subject. Can't wait for all the idiots to get elected so we can get you focused on something interesting and useful like this topic! You come back to this ya hear? I think you have really good insights here I want to explore with you deeper.
What I find most interesting about the anthropic principle and the argument from fine tuning, is that it places humanity back in the center of the universe again. Not literally, of course. This drives atheists completely nuts because it makes the religious author of Genesis 1 appear knowledgable about things scientists would only discover thousands of years later.
Heh... very interesting......... I am going to reading reading your political ideas cause they drive me nuts, but you and I are going to rock on this subject. Can't wait for all the idiots to get elected so we can get you focused on something interesting and useful like this topic! You come back to this ya hear? I think you have really good insights here I want to explore with you deeper.
Did you notice I responded to this exact paragraph you are quoting?
Very interesting... you can't stand Kevin when you disagree with his politics, but you want to hear more of him on topics like this where you seem to agree. That's just human nature, I guess. But try and challenge yourself. Did you notice I responded to this exact paragraph? And Thama had some good follow up comments. Why wait for Kevin to pull his head out of one hole just to watch him stick it in another? :)
"And yet another little spot is smoothed out of the echo chamber wall..." Bond
Very interesting... you can't stand Kevin when you disagree with his politics, but you want to hear more of him on topics like this where you seem to agree.
ROFL.
Doesn't that pretty much sum up my existence on debate forums?
Everyone at some point loves me, and then they hate me. Sometimes they love me again until I give them a reason to hate me again.
This annoyed the living hell out of FAIR when I was an apologist on the ropes. They loved me every time I spoke on biblical exegesis, but then hated my guts when I spoke on the Book of Abraham. And then when I came here, everyone loved me because I left Mormonism, until they realized I wouldn't follow them into atheism.
The same with politics, abortion, evolution, etc. People who once liked me quickly found a reason to despise me, and vice versa.
Too funny.
“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
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 the 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 the creation of life. The physicit Robert Dicke was the first to draw attention to this relationship. The scientist John Wheeler, one of the 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 the 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 the 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 the 1970's, with big bang firmly established, physicists began to think about alternative scenarios for the universe's evolution. Say you tinkered with the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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
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 the 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
“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
It's pretty lame if you ask me, what creationists are doing these days when they've given up arguing that God put the pieces of life together himself. Now maybe they accept that evolution could have put the pieces together, and God instead gets credit for setting up the conditions that made evolution possible.
They just keep pushing God to the fringe, to the point of vanishing relevance. What's next?
They would do well to accept (or at least not attack) evolution as such does not contradict scripture. You can still have God involved in the creation, man can still be created in the image of God, you can still have a fall, etc.
Very interesting... you can't stand Kevin when you disagree with his politics, but you want to hear more of him on topics like this where you seem to agree.
ROFL.
Doesn't that pretty much sum up my existence on debate forums?
Everyone at some point loves me, and then they hate me. Sometimes they love me again until I give them a reason to hate me again.
This annoyed the living hell out of FAIR when I was an apologist on the ropes. They loved me every time I spoke on biblical exegesis, but then hated my guts when I spoke on the Book of Abraham. And then when I came here, everyone loved me because I left Mormonism, until they realized I wouldn't follow them into atheism.
The same with politics, abortion, evolution, etc. People who once liked me quickly found a reason to despise me, and vice versa.
Too funny.
Maybe people aren't really responding (love/hate) to your positions, but rather your tone and style relative to those positions.
About the anthropic principle and the long book chapter, it seems to me that the key arguments Patrick Glynn presents can be easily turned against intelligent design. Maybe I missed your point, but here's an example of what I see going wrong:
We should begin by noting that none of these imaginary universes about which cosmologists ceaselessly speculate these days have been shown to exist.
Intelligent-designer/God has not been shown to exist.
They are pure products of scientific imagination.
Intelligent-designer/God is a pure product of imagination.
Moreover, because they are alternative universes, they would been to be inherently undetectable.
Because Intelligent-designer/God existed before all universes, it would 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.
It cannot be shown intelligent-designer/God can even in principle create the characteristics that pervade the one universe we know, or that he/she/it would want to.
In its generic form , the idea that randomness, over time, will eventually produce order has a very old pedigree, long predating modern science....
In its generic form, the idea that intelligent designers created mankind and the earth has a very old pedigree, long predating....
"And yet another little spot is smoothed out of the echo chamber wall..." Bond
About the anthropic principle and the long book chapter, it seems to me that the key arguments Patrick Glynn presents can be easily turned against intelligent design. Maybe I missed your point, but here's an example of what I see going wrong
I think the beauty of his point is that scientists are forced to make religious leaps in order to argue against other religious beliefs. What's sillier, a theist who follows the scientific method, or a scientist who is trying to push his own faith-based thesis?
Intelligent-designer/God has not been shown to exist.
Well, not by scientific methods anyway. How do you know God doesn't make himself/herself/itself known to humanity in ways that escape the perceptions of some, including your own? That seemsmore reasonable than simply declaring billions and billions of people "deluded." Although, I think the fine-tuned universe argument makes a strong case, as do others who converted from atheism because of it, Patrick Glynn included.
You see scientists are tied down by their own philosophy which is the scinetific method. It was something they came up with because they had nothing better atthe time, and they haven't quite figured out how to replace it either. With the idea of multiverses, they have to abandon their own philosophy which means they are essentially doing the same thing they accuse of theists: inventing something out of necessity.
A perfect example of this is Stephen Hawking, who essentially admitted there is nothing unreasonable in postulating a creator's existence, given the universe has a beginning. Since a universe with a beginning is pretty much what virtually all scientists believe, Hawking had to come up with a wild theory that the universe always existed. Why? Well, because otherwise he'd have to accept the plausibility of a creator. It is silliness when scientists have to resort to faith-based hypotheses for the sole purpose of undermining other faiths.
Now I am sure he will follow the rules of the scientific method and fill in all the necessary variables so it is technically qualified as a "scientific" hypothesis and maybe even a "theory," but we know what it is really about. It is born from an imagination that seeks to explain everything within the paradigm of materialism. And most scientists reject it, probably for that reason.
Intelligent-designer/God is a pure product of imagination.
Well, this is just something you say, but cannot prove. It strikes me as an argument out of necessity, and it only holds water some of the time. The multiverse is a product of imagination, hands down. Accusing religion of being a fairy tale, or a result of human fear/imagination, or whatever, is not an argument. But I think it highly unlikely that every civilization in human history has some kind of affinity for the divine, simply because one generation passed it down to the next. That makes no sense, which is one of the reasons why Dawkins had to invent his ridiculous "meme" theory, where memes leap from brain to brain infect humans with a virus of God-belief! This was an amazingly stupid argument, especially for a devout adherent to the religion of materialism. It cannot be tested in any real scientific sense, but he accepts it out of necessity. What necessity? The necessity to explain away the reason why the overwhelming majority of humankind believes they have sensed the presence of our creator's existence. Every religion has its own way of dealing with this perception.
Is there an intelligent source that reveals itself in nature around us? The ancient religions believed the evidence is all around us, as do the modern ones. Do some humans have something that prohibits them from receiving acknowledgment of its existence? If Dawkins' meme nonsense is to be taken seriously, then why not this? From a practical standpoint, it makes more sense to explain why a tiny minority is different, rather than explaining why the vast majority is different. Atheists I have witnessed, even on this forum, have taken the position that religion is an evolutionary defect, implying that atheists are more advanced in that respect. It is really a bunch of hubris if you think about it, which is why I think soem adopt atheism because it is a poer trip for them. They can't just be atheists. They have to celebrate it while mocking the majority theists around them. With this added feeling of being advanced intellectually, and now evolutionary, it has the same ingredients as your typical religion whereby people join to gain acceptance and identity.
The fine-tuning argument goes back to these basics expressed by the earliest theists, because materialism cannot explain what needs to be explained. We've managed to go into outer space, take pictures, poke and prod at various cosmic anomalies, and yet the data we receive tells us that the universe was designed for life.
The speed of light, the nuclear forces, if any of the universal constants had been slightly different from what they have been mathematically programmed to be, life would not have been possible. And I think that the chances of this universe exploding from the big bang and everything existing as it does for our convenience, is just too much of a coincidence to say it was by a random universe.
Say the chance that the gravitational coupling constant being as it is, is one in six. This is probably being very charitable with a low ratio, but for sake of argument, just follow along for a second. Now if there were six universes in existence, it is reasonable to conclude that maybe one of them would include gravity as it exists in our universe. But that is just one constant.
Now let's assume a one in six chance for the nuclear strong force being as it is. And the same with the nuclear weak force. And the same ratio for the electomagnetic force. And the same for the speed of light. There are literally dozens upon dozens that could be listed. So assuming there are 36 necessary constants, and all of then have a one in six chance of being as they are out of six possible universes, then what is the chance that we could throw 36 dice and all of them land on the same number within six tries?
And remember this is assuming there are six universes, for which there is zero evidence. If we stick with the one universe that we know to exist, then what are the chances that we could throw 36 dice and all 36 land on the same number, in one try? And this is using a generous ratio of one in six. But if we consider that the chances of these constants are really much higher than one in six, then the figure is so astronomical that it isn't even serious to consider possible. It would be like landing the same lottery number hundreds of times in a row. I think that the most intriguing piece of evidence in the fine-tuning argument is this:
The age of the universe governs what kinds of stars exist. It takes about three billion years for the first stars to form. It takes another ten or twelve billion years for supernovae to spew out enough heavy elements to make possible stars like our sun, stars capable of spawning rocky planets. Yet another few billion years is necessary for solar-type stars to stabilize sufficiently to support advanced life on any of its planets. Hence, if the universe were just a couple of billion years younger, no environment suitable for life would exist. However, if the universe were about ten (or more) billion years older than it is, there would be no solar-type stars in a stable burning phase in the right part of a galaxy. In other words, the window of time during which life is possible in the universe is relatively narrow.
This one is probably worth another dozen 27-sided dice to be added to the mix.
So how did the universe know we were coming?
This is what has driven career atheists towards theism. Sure, it doesn't tell us much about God's character, but it does make it highly probable that "something" intelligent exists, and that it is responsible for the way the universe is what it is.
Because Intelligent-designer/God existed before all universes, it would be inherently undetectable.
You're postulating a multiverse scenario, for which there is no serious reason to believe.
It cannot be shown intelligent-designer/God can even in principle create the characteristics that pervade the one universe we know, or that he/she/it would want to.
Granted, but who needs to? Only the scientist would, because that is the only paradigm he knows or accepts. God isn't a science project for our laboratory experiments. You're thinking like a scientist, which isn't always a good thing since the scientific method is not perfect. The fact is there is plenty of evidence for fine-tuning that makes our existence too improbable to take seriously as something that happened by chance, without some kind of intelligence behind it all.
It is no surprise that the practitioners of materialism have not been able to produce a single experiment verifying the theory of abiogenesis. They've done their best to recreate the "primordal soup" they believe to have caused the origin of life. They've put it through electric magnetic storms while mixing in all sorts of elements, according to what their experts say represented the earth's environment during the time the first life form spawned from dead matter. But nothing even close to producing a single cell organism. They maintain belief that this is how it happened billions of years ago because that is what the religion of materialism tells them. There is no room for God unless it can be shown in the laboratory. To be sure, theists aren't the ones wearing a straigh-jacket here. Atheists who appeal to science to refute God, are prisoners of their own confining belief system.
In its generic form, the idea that intelligent designers created mankind and the earth has a very old pedigree, long predating....
True. So how is it non-scientists from 4,000 years ago already knew what scientists of the 20th century had to discover via the scientific method?
Geez... did I really just write all that? OK, enough.
“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