This topic has been beaten to death, here.
The pro-Evolutionary Science posters vastly outnumber those who may believe other explanations of cosmology, biological diversity, origins of life, etc. So, at some point, the people who do not accept Evolutionary Science tend to keep their heads down to avoid pile-ons.
Do a search on evolution or abiogenesis. We’ve got lots of threads on the topic.
Anything that it a possible alternative to a single explanation “scares off” a argument of necessity. Of course, with questions like this, it seems like at SOME point we’re going to have to say “that’s that: no more explanations” so it seems that, as we search back and back for ultimate origins, the idea that “this has to exist, or else there’s no explanation for that” becomes weaker and weaker.
But yeah, without evidence, the many world hypothesis is ad hoc, though no more or less than an intelligent designer. Speculation is what we’ve got to go with, and speculation should be diverse and fun.
Who is to say that ‘life’ has to take a ‘form (even) remotely resembling what we know?’
Its very unlikely that any other creatures we meet as we explore THIS universe will look like the bipedal humanoid aliens of ‘Star Trek’… so why should we think we can even IMAGINE what life might look like in an entirely different universe?
I’m not talking bipedal humanoids but single celled organisms. For instance, molecules adequately complex for sustaining basic life functions require carbon, silicon or boron as a basis. One could conclude carbon-based biochemistry is required for physical life (silicon cannot form long enough strings of amino acids, boron is toxic to life-critical reactions). Since certain values of universal constants would preclude elements heavier than, say, helium, you have a problem. Now if you are advocating a hydrogen gas cloud form of life…
I thought you might have completely missed my point until I got to the last sentence. Just because ‘life’ and ‘living’ mean carbon-based and self-replicating in our universe, doesn’t mean that’s what it has to mean everywhere else. We’ve just decided to include these criteria as essential because it seems to be what differentiates us from the rock beneath our feet. In other universes, other characteristics may be important. Although I think that self-replicating would most definitely be one of these characteristics.
Also, perhaps you can clarify something for me: why is it all-or-nothing? Why is it that if the constants weren’t what they are now, then the only alternative is that everything is hydrogen (let me know if I’m putting words in your mouth). I find this hard to believe and would need a good amount of scientific proof to swallow it.
The other shortcoming of the intelligent designer problem is explaining who designed the designer. It just pushes the argument back one level.
There are always unobservables in science, and people have always tried to wedge God into those unobservables. The problem is that as our powers of questioning grow (from Galileo’s refractive telescope to multiple array radio telescopes; from van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope to full genome high throughput shotgun sequencing), the unobservables shrink. People’s concept of God gets forced into narrower gaps. People become uncomfortable when this happens.
I am not religious, but if I felt anything resembling faith, I would take a lead from the Catholic clergy who are scientists. Instead of embracing a God of the Gaps, they picture the overarching God unquestionable by scientific methods. They don’t say that God directed evolution, they don’t say that God set physical constants – those are all things that may one day be answered scientifically. Instead, they believe in another spiritual plane, one existing outside of our questionable universe. They believe in that plane having few manifestations in ours – things like the soul and love. It is a beautiful concept, it is reasonably explained, it is totally outside of scientific questioning, and it only serves to expand the concept of God, not force God into a smaller and smaller shoebox.
Not quite. The latest Scientific American article is about repetition inside the universe, not parallel universes.
I’d heard that quote attributed to Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide.)
And I agree. The claim says the earth’s temperature ranges, oxygen content and nutrient sources are so perfect for us, that it must have been designed FOR us.
But personally, I say that’s backwards- all those factors came about long before we did, and we evolved to take advantage of the conditions, not vice-versa.
Yes, mostly true, though the article DOES in fact discuss parallel universes. More importantly to the original ID poster I directed to the article, it also discusses the infinite variations in conditions that occur throughout the “multiverse.” Being credulous that conditions just couldn’t have accidently arisen to allow for complex life but rather required some kind of Intelligent Design is functionally equivalent to being credulous that the winning Powerball numbers ever get picked. Sure, that any one ticket has the right combination of numbers is millions to one again, but there are millions of tickets. Every few weeks, someone picks the right numbers. And every so often, the conditions in a universe, or the conditions in an isolated pocket of the universe, come together to allow the likes of us to bicker about it.
I’ll try to address a few points. Please remember I am not a biologist or physicist, nor do I pretend to be some expert.
bo989 has agreed that life should be self-replicating. This would require the ability to pass on certain amounts of information about oneself, leading back to my described adequately complex, carbon requiring molecules. If the information isn’t being passed on in some physical form, you begin talking about something that looks more like a soul.
Also, I don’t say its the universe we have or a hydrogen field. There could be a myriad of things. We could have a universe of just microvave radiation, or a universe of solely one black hole. It seems that our particular universe is one of the more complex possibilities. The energy of the Big Bang didn’t just collapse back onto itself, or spread out nice and evenly as radiation. Instead we have stars and planets and lots of elements and clumps with a lot of energy and clumps with almost no energy.
edwino it seems to me that physicists are using the gaps just as well. We can’t see before Planck time, so anything could have happened before them. Maybe there are infinite universes. There is no way to observe these universes, but their existence is useful in nudging a creator out. I fill the gap with a creator; they fill it with whatever they like excluding a creator. Neither of us has any real evidence.
Doc Nickel, I don’t think its that simple. I would submit that the universe, and our planet in particular, is prepared to accomidate self-replicating life that passes on information about itself. This requires a certain amount of complexity, which need not exist in the universe at all.
Bukk, I think the Scientific American is very telling. I don’t think you can find a biologist or physicist nowadays that won’t tell you that the chances of the universe being set up for our possible existence is astronomically low. Instead of facing the idea that we really lucked out, they create an infinite universe (unobservable by definition) in which anything is possible. I completely agree that in and infinite multiverse, the laws of nature could be random in each one and sooner or later we would get our very special universe that allows intelligent life to exist. I just don’t see how belief in such a multiverse is any different from belief in a creator.
Tertius, it’s not a matter of “belief” in a multiverse, it’s a matter of physics. Read the article carefully and you’ll see. I’m the first to admit, as do the authors of the article, that all the results aren’t in, but the theories that support the existence of a “multiverse” aren’t metaphysical, they’re built upon the foundation of modern physics, and in fact, are beginning to be supported through reproducible experiment.
Life that has/will evolve should be self-replicating. ID or ID created life would have no such necessary need.
What does a soul look like? It seems to be the ultimate in the “I have no idea what it is, what it does, where it is, how it works, or how it stores information, but I’ll give it a cool name” school of thought. We can’t go on about how we can’t think of physical mechanisms for this or that, and then to appeal to a concept that doesn’t even have a well-defined cognitive meaning. That’s playing tennis with the net down only for certain concepts and ideas.
The problem is: chances? To assume that we’re talking about chance AFTER THE FACT is as ad hoc as anything else. You can’t really talk about chance unless you know the values on the dice, and how the dice rolls. So abscence of evidence of mechanism is not evidence of pure chance.
So I noted before, there are a lot of serious conceptual problems with thinking of universal constants as “values” that can be “set” to any of various random values. Fact is, we don’t know anything about the range of possible values, or the mechanisms that led to any particular value, or even if they could have been anything other than they are.
Douglas Adams.
Bukk, I guess I’ll wait for more results to come in on the multiverse. I can understand how the possibility of a multiverse can be theorized, but I don’t understand how it could ever be observed. It seems that it would be out of our realm of observation by definition. The inability to be directly observed was why I compared belief in a multiverse to belief in a creator.
Apos, I am not sure how your first statement is relevant. I was saying that some hydrogen gas cloud “life” would be incapable of passing on information about itself physically and thus would require a metaphysical “soul” to do so. I was using this as an example of the implausibility of hydrogen gas cloud “life”. I guess my paragraph taken alone is a little hard to understand.
I am pretty sure the SA references some sort of probability distributions of the universal constants, claiming other universes could have different values based on said distribution (I have no idea how they arrived at the distribution). I do think we know that the various equations we use to describe the universe could use other values for the constants, resulting in a different looking universe. I agree that maybe its not best to look at them being set, but they are there. If those are the only values available, why are they the only values available?
In the end, there is no model of the universe that precludes a transcendent creator by tautology. I guess thats a little unfair as it gives me infinite room to bob and weave. I suppose to an athiest, invoking an intelligent creator will never seem reasonable.
Oh and I am saying that we are lucky to have any terrain to form puddles at all.
Who created the creator?
First: how would we know it would be incapable? Insinuations of its improbability are pretty baseless at this point, considering our limited range of knowledge about the forces and regularities involved.
Second: How can you express thoughts like “thus would require a metaphysical soul to do so” as if they actually conveyed information. Telling me that “a metaphysical soul” passes on information about itself no different than telling me nothing at all about how information is “passed on.”
Yes, but this is just speculation itself. The reality is: we don’t know how inevitable any particular course of events was. With different constants, the universe would be different. But we don’t know IF there could be different constants at all, and indeed we not only don’t know by what mechanism they would be set, or even if “set” is the right way to think about them.
I agree: nothing can rule out things which can simply be outside the rules and reality of whatever we’re talking about, especially if they can be litterally anything. There’s nothing wrong with that: it’s not unfair. Indeed, it’s more unfair to you, more than anyone else, because it actually makes a substantive case FOR much harder.
Is that supposed to be an insulted invocation of the “well, those people will never…” fallacy?
People should be able to appreciate the force of arguments the same, and whether they’re atheist or theist is beside the point. The fact that you might think there is a creator is no reason at all to think that any argument for that position is a good argument. The fact that I don’t believe is certainly not a reason for me to take seriously ridiculous attempts to disprove the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.
But remember, the job is not to make something reasonable, but if we’re talking about ultimate origins of which we cannot give any further account, then ANYTHING could be reasonable. The job is to explain the existence of what we see as best we can. And frankly, a purported explanation that doesn’t, in fact, explain anything (because it could explain anything) shouldn’t be particularly satisfying to anyone, theist or atheist.
I knew I should have never used the word soul. I simply meant if an organism is passing on information about itself, but it is not doing so via physical means, you have to come up with some non-physical construct to explain the passage of information. Honestly I don’t see why this is a sticking point. My contention is that life must necessarily have some base level of complexity to be recognizable as life. Perhaps you believe that simpler systems are capable of reproducing and passing information about themselves. I certainly can’t say you are wrong, merely that we have never observed such life, or anything suggesting it exists. If you want to change the definition of life, talk to a biologist, not me.
You seem to be using a completely different line of argument than the SA infinite worlds approach. All I can say it the constants are what they are. The equations that we use to describe the universe imply they could be something else which describes a different looking universe. It does not appear that a universe that sprang from nowhere HAD to use the constants it did. Maybe someone better versed on the SA article could expand on this.
I have great difficulty thinking about this, as I have only one sample point (our universe) to observe. I think about the options more or less like this:
I. Universal constants HAD to be what they are in our universe.
–Why? How were their values fixed?
II. Universal constants followed some probabilistic distribution but could be anything within a range.
–I THINK this is what most physicists believe.
A. There are infinite universes.
--One of them had to have our particular constants, allowing life.
B. There is only one universe (ours).
--We lucked out that our universe allows life.
I think (I) requires you to question why the constants had to be what they were. As I’ve said, I don’t think any of the equations we use to describe the universe require them to be a particular value in general. If (IIA) is demonstratably true, I will seriously rethink my worldview. If (IIB) is true, you could employ the “puddle principle.” I say, “Maybe something wanted us here.” I don’t think that is unreasonable.
Some sort of multiverse would make me stop and rethink what I believe. I didn’t understand all of the SA article, but I am left unconvinced. I am sure the question has been asked before in GD, but what physics find would make you consider an intelligent creator? I don’t think a single universe with finite age would suffice for people who don’t believe in a creator, but I can’t think of better evidence (beyond some supernatural revelation).
I think I am in over my head.
Tertius, have you had a chance to read the article in SA? In many ways it’s just a start, but it covers some of the ground you’re wondering about. To grossly oversimplify, while it is true that you can’t directly see beyond the event horizon of our own universe, or into other universes that may exist alongside our own, astronomical observations and certain reproducible experiments confirm their existence. The exact nature of these other universes remains to be fully explored, but the basic theoretical models are getting pretty tight, and there’s lots of empirical evidence to back them up. Certainly this is all plenty esoteric, but it’s not just pointy-headed space cadets making stuff up as they go along, or New Age fruitcakes expounding on their 'shroom visions – this is hard-nosed, peer-reviewed science.
I have reread the article more thoroughly and here are my initial thoughts:
The existence of Level I multiverses is more or less irrelevant. It certainly helps those who need an infinite universe to lend likelihood to spontaneous biogenesis.
As the article says, Level III multiverses are effectively equivalent to Level I multiverses.
Level IV multiverses are again irrelevant.
The existence of Level II multiverses, universes with the same laws of physics but different values for physical constants, has been the basis of my arguments from the beginning. I would like to point out that the author does not deny the remarkable “fine-tuning” of our own particular universe. Now here is an excerpt from the article.
This basically takes us back to my (coincidentally named) thought II. When faced with the “unexplained coincidences in our universe”, the author says we can infer there are infinite parallel universes, so ours was bound to turn up. I look at the remarkable level of unexplained coincidences and say something did the fine tuning.
I have a question. The article still referenced the Big Bang. If this serves as a beginning to all these multiverses, how is it explained? I’m not sure I understand its role in this context. It seems like anytime you put a “beginning” on the universe you run into trouble with why it began.