I was hoping someone would bring it up sooner or later. There is the whole idea of spirituality, and I don’t mean the dead white guy on a cross. I’m talking about a sense that there is something else, something transpersonal about our world. The buddhist idea of bodhicitta or the wish to achieve complete enlightenment. So much could be written.
More like trying to replace an unproven but plausible hypothesis with a wild guess.
The existence of many universes doesn’t violate known physical laws in any way - God, as described by the vast majority of believers does. We know for a fact universes are possible; we have no reason to think God is. Multiple universes are an explanation created by highly educated people who have a lot of knowledge of how the world works; God is the assertion of a bunch of primitives who were almost utterly ignorant about the world. Science has a record of success in understanding the world; religion a record of failure.
And yours is an exceptionally hasty conclusion. We simply do not have enough data points to be able to draw the conclusion you suggest.
By the way, I think you’re mischaracterising my point anyway. I’m not saying the universe had to be any particular way. It is what it is, and that happens to make it possible for us to exist.
I read this analogy several times and I have no idea what it means in relation to the topic. What is the relevance of the multiple wins?
I think a better one would be to marvel at the astonishing coincidence that the person turning up to collect the lottery winnings just happens to be the very same guy who guessed all the numbers correctly - when one is in fact a consequence of the other.
You keep repeating this as if it were obviously true, yet you have no evidence to back it up. In fact, you base your entire argument on this premise. However, actual astrophysicists like Fred Adams and Victor J. Stenger disagree, having performed the requisite calculations instead of simply taking your word for it. Adams’ results are due to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. You can review Stenger’s work here, entitled appropriately enough MonkeyGod. The data from these scientists show that the known universe could have taken many different values for the universal constants and still support life.
Nevertheless, let’s ignore all that, as you assuredly have done. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the universal constants are tightly constrained. What then? How do you address the fact that some 99.999% of the known universe is directly hostile to our existence? Take a stroll on the surface of the moon or the sun for a few minutes, or even take a few steps outside the International Space Station if you think the universe is so benign and comfortable. Even most of our own planet presents difficult living conditions, and we certainly wouldn’t survive in the ocean for long, which comprises a great deal more of planet than the fraction we inhabit. Volcanoes? Tornados? Hurricanes? Earthquakes? Tsunamis? Personally, I could use a little more “fine-tuning” if my existence is a concern.
But let’s forget all that too. What of this so-called “intelligent” design? What type of intelligence would design the Guinea worm, Plasmodium parasites, Filarial worms, Ascaris worms, and Candiru? Of course, I could go on endlessly with examples such as these, but I hope you get the point. Would you call this type of design “intelligent”, or “fine-tuned for our existence”? Seems more like malevolent design, or at the very least, indifferent to my survival. I won’t even get into any examples of suboptimal design, because at this point if you still believe in intelligent design, then I have to conclude it is an article of faith, not science.
Let’s think about this for a minute.
Most of the universe is a freezing void.
Where it’s not a freezing void, it’s a giant ball of fire so hot it can break down atoms.
Where it’s not a freezing void or a giant ball of fire, it’s a chunk of rock bathed in toxic gases.
Where it’s not a freezing void, or a giant ball of fire, or a chunk of rock bathed in toxic gases, it’s a chunk of rock entirely devoid of any gas at all.
Where it’s not a freezing void, or a giant ball of fire, or a chunk of rock with either way too much or not nearly enough gas, you’ve got a place that’s capable of supporting life. So far as we can tell, there’s precisely one such place in the entire universe, and we happen to be standing on it.
Seems to me that the universe needs a lot more tuning.
You have no idea what the probability of a created universe supporting life is… Perhaps dehacker’s cite (Thanks!) will show the odds are more like getting a free ticket in all 50 states. You also don’t know how many chances there have been to come up with a universe that supports life. The metaverse is timeless, so there might have been an uncountable number of universes formed before we got to ours. It’s like the odds when that guy has been buying 50 tickets a day for a trillion years. The point of the anthropic hypothesis is that no one would ever notice the “failed” universes, since no one is around in them. Life sees a universe suited for itself by definition.
I think this argument, boiled down, consists of:
-If intelligent design were true, things would be the way they are now
-Things are they way they are.
-Therefore intelligent design.
If multiple universes don’t refute intelligent design (and I agree they don’t, necessarily), what would? What, if anything, could we ever hypothetically discover that would refute ID?
A hidden message encoded directly into the mathematical structure of the universe that, when discovered and translated, simply says: “Duh.”
Well! There we are, then.
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
You have it completely backwards. We are tuned to the universe. The universe is not tuned to us. This is how Douglas Adams once addressed the fallcy you’re espousing:
This is a bogus analogy. The universe didn’t win any lotteries. It is not a staggering coincidence that the universe suits our existence. We followed the universe. It didn’t follow us. The universe is the hole and we are the puddle.
I question the assumption that physical constants were set due to luck or probability. The constants are well constant, immutable. There’s only 1 possible value for each. Planck’s constant is what it is because of all the physical, chemical and electrical forces that affect photons, not from a roll of the dice that happened to go our way, and could have just as easily been different.
I could come up with a million impossible ways the world could have been destroyed yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that we hit a one in a million shot to live through yesterday.
I think this is the point, isn’t it? ID cannot be refuted, because it isn’t a scientific theory and therefore doesn’t make predictions that can be falsified. Instead, it is an ad hoc hypothesis, where any data is made to fit the hypothesis with statements such as “God’s will”.
Oops, I meant “The Intelligent Designer’s will”, of course.
Actually, I think the ID hypothesis has migrated from statements that could be falsified (and have been) to claims that are identical to those made when ID isn’t assumed. It’s gone from an actually hypothesis to wishful thinking. The pathetic part is that it got falsified nearly two centuries ago.
There’s no reason to believe that, and it does beg the question of why the “sole possible” universe just happens to be a universe with life and not, say, a six dimensional field of plasma that lasts thirty seconds and collapses into a black hole.
Many universes, with varying physical laws solves that. And multiple universes seems to me more plausible than one; why would a natural process that could make one universe stop with just the one ?
Besides chance and intelligent design by the way, a form of evolution has also been proposed to explain some of any “fine tuning”. According to some theories, new universes bud off from old ones. If one assumes that the new universe’s laws are not completely random, but at least somewhat related to the parent universe, evolution of a sort can occur. Bigger universes would spawn more than small universes, and so on.
Technically we don’t “know” that they are possible. We think they may be possible, however, we aren’t sure if they are just interest artifacts of some complex physics equation. Kind of like inputing negative mass into E=mc^2.
We know universes are possible because we live in one.
This is just not true and has been shown to you to be not true before, with examples.
Again : This is not a reasonable conclusion. You are arguing by assertion here.
Again : Prove it.
No, it is saying that the question is a stupid one to ask, it is tautological. A circle.
No, it doesn’t. It is highly improbable, but no impossible. But anyway, it is not an analagous situation. There are lots of lotteries (so a sum of probabilities). There is only one Universe accessible to us. So only 1 roll of the cosmic dice.
Only if you assume the conclusion (us) is the point. And that constants are all independent variables, rather than tied togeher on some fundamental level.