I was reading .this article on Yahoo news.
I was interested by this paragraph:
"with findings of modern physics, it “seems extremely unlikely” that the existence of life and humanity are “just accidental,” which inevitably raises religious questions about whether the universe was planned.
Can someone point me to these new findings in physics he’s referring to?
Reading the article, I think by “recent” and “modern”, he means over the course of his career, not the last 3 months. He’s comparing the state of knowledge today with, say, Newton’s time, or maaybe even Aristotle’s time.
Now he’s hard-core religious, he was speaking to a religious group, and so he suggests that a God-built universe is the only to explain the fact that much of what we know requires lots of things to be just so. For example, change the gravitational constant a bit and the universe would be very different.
He finds that compelling. Lots of other scientists, and ordinary schmos like me, find it bunk.
If the Universe exists, it must exist in some configuration. Who/whatever is observing it will discover a lot of interlocking facts that must be just so for it to behave as it does. But nothing within that problem says it couldn’t be arranged differently. If it WAS arranged differently, they’d be making different discoveries and marvelling at how this universe has many “just so” properties, all different from the first universe.
He started by assuming God & then discovering science. So, unsurprisingly, he ended up with God in the middle and science at the edges.
Basically, they are referring to the anthropic principle which addresses the fact that we only exist because the universe is exactly how it is.
The link above gives some details, but basically there are several coincidences in the fundamental basics of the universe that mean life can arise. If the values of some constants were ever so slightly different, life could not exist.
There’s a lot of debate about what this means - is it just a coincidence, or has someone or something designed the universe this way? Is it simply that there are loads of universes, and ours works because it happens to be the one with the right values? And we’re in the one that happens to be right, because, obviously, we couldn’t be in the ones that couldn’t?
All of this ends up in GD not GQ but I’d suggest you read more on the anthropic principle - googling it brings up loads of sites.
This is no great contribution to the thread, and I read it somewhere else, and I can only paraphrase, and it doesn’t matter if you’re athiest or not to appreciate it:
“We’re just the universe trying to understand itself.”
I think the life around the sea-floor vents in some of the deepest parts of the ocean is a reasonable illustration of the above. Such life does not get energy from direct photosynthesis or by ingesting life that does so. Instead such life gets energy from the earth’s interior heat. This demonstrates to me that life of some kind is possible under drastically different conditions from those on or near the surface of the earth.
To me the anthropic principle is a long-winded way of marveling at God’s foresight in arranging the ears and nose so as to support eyeglasses.
In particular, M-Theory (or by whatever name you want to smell it) gives an infinite range of variations in parameters which come up with widely varying physical properties. Only a very restricted set of parameters would allow us, and indeed the basic physical properies that permit matter to come together and form chemical bonds, to exist; and the values seem completely arbitrary. On this basis, some have argued that there must be a higher intelligence to have selected these values, which in my mind is not only putting the cart before the horse but actually disconnecting the harness and praying real hard to make it move. The fact that we do exist is evidence only of our existance, and the attempt to extrapolate that into a justification for a supernatural being is a fallacy, IMHO.
If the constants were different, life could form in a different way, with different properties…or not at all, in which case there’d be no one to question it. The anthropic principle is no more logical than heliocentricity of pre-Enlightenment times.
Stranger
It’s a good indication of how we must remember to “think outside the box” - if things changed so that chlorophyll couldn’t exist, it doesn’t mean life couldn’t. However, the implications of some of the “coincidences” are that if fundamental constants were slightly different, it would be impossible for galaxies to form, in which case we’d have no where to live.
Of course, that’s not to say some other life form couldn’t turn up - maybe a Space Odyssey-esque starchild thing, made of pure energy.
I think Stranger summed it up well - if things were different, life would be different, and marvelling at how their universe is how it is. If things were so different that there was no life, no one would be worrying about it.
The strong anthropic principle, yes. The weak one is practically a tautology which you all-but-stated.
We see a fine-structure constant close to 1/137, and we can tell that if it weren’t very finely tuned atoms could never form and either everything would decay instantly into radiation or would never have gotten out of the free lepton gas stage. Either way, it’s safe to say that no intelligent life could exist.
The strong AP says that Someone (usually God) set the parameter like that so life could arise. The weak AP says that of course we see a finely tuned parameter because if we didn’t we wouldn’t be here to not see it.
The anthropic principle makes me think of people’s reaction to coincidence: those who are inclined to find something numinous (or sinister) in coincidence will do so; those who aren’t, won’t.
Neither reaction tells us anything about cosmology or the price of tea in Marianas Trench.
Has the price of tea from Marianas Trench increased since 1960?
Stranger
Only for about 20 minutes [rimshot].
For a really excellent explanation on how life is not only NOT extremely unlikely to have arisen, but actually quite likely, go read “At Home in the Universe” by Stuart Kauffman.
The fact that I am 6’2", have dark hair, and can eat anything without getting fat (and am smart and humble 
) proves that there must have been an intelligent designer selecting the one sperm that made me out of millions. That I have allergies and bad eyesight proves that the designer works in mysterious ways.
It really shows that being an expert on one area doesn’t mean that what you say about another is particularly significant.
Lots of it deals with coincidence, sorta like the gambler’s phallacy :rolleyes: - we see that the tossed coin lands heads up twelve times in a roll and presume the odds of it landing next time on heads is astronomical, when in fact it’s still 50/50.
Truly random events will cluster together; in fact, when we don’t see clustering, we attribute this to some controlling phenomena. :smack:
Enlighten me. The constant is that number with all of the other rules of quantum mechanics as they are now. Can completely different set of rules with a different constant, or no constant at, all be imagined?
The thing that gets me is that creationists look at the world around us and marvel over how well designed it is, to be able to support us so well… OBVIOUSLY it was all created just for our benefit!
But, dammit… compared to the rest of the universe, the Earth is tiny. Incredibly so. Almost infinitely so. Space is, well, big. And we can’t even survive, unaided, on most of the Earth’s surface!
If the universe was designed with us in mind, it was designed to kill us in the worst ways possible.
Ah yes, the “misanthropic principle.” (Strong form: There is a God, and He hates me.)
Funneee.
“Why me God, why me?”
“Because, somehow, you just piss me off.”
Satan is God!
He enslaved us all in this little world to make us suffer. The laws of physics are just diversions that He created to make us think we’re smarter than we really are. Then one day, in a beautiful coup de grace, He’ll reveal His gloriously sinister truth and crush the human spirit once and for all.
Well, that’s the most simply stated case. Currently, the Standard Model of fundamental particles has about 19 tuneable parameters. If they were significantly different than they are observed to be (“significantly” being “disagreeing before the 10th decimal place”, which is better than most people really appreciate), then there couldn’t be anything around to observe them in the first place.
Strong AP: “If the parameters of the Standard Model weren’t set within this unimaginable small region of their possible values, Man wouldn’t exist, so God must have made it that way.”
Weak AP: “Of course we see the parameters of the Standard Model set within this unimaginable small region of their possible values, in any universe with intelligent life to look for such things they must be true.”