Yes, the r word.
I have a rule … not a big, important rule but a little, important one: If someone is obviously right about something, but everyone else acts like they never even heard it, watch carefully: Something big, and possibly fraudulent, is happening.
It’s the kind of thing you see when the bookkeeper quits and leaves town just before having to sign off on the books, and no one thinks that’s an interesting accident of timing and location.
I am thinking of mathematician Peter Woit’s conflict with Max “multiverses” Tegmark. Woit has said the unsayable, noting that the multiverse is a religious enterprise:
I take Tegmark’s vision as empty, so a good thing to ignore, but Rubenstein sees this as an opening for theologians to get back into the mainstream cosmology business, and the rest of the book focuses on this. With the boundaries between science and religion now gone, all sorts of possibilities open up for theologians. The final part of the book begins by invoking (just like Henrich Päs, who comes at it from the mind-altering drug rather than theological angle) Nietzsche.
Most people I hear quoting Nietzsche have some religious or political project in mind. Note: This is not a rule, big or small. Treat it as a rough guide, noting counter examples.
It seems that, unlike most authors, Rubenstein actually has got the story of multiverse mania right: it’s left conventional notions of science behind and entered into the realm of theology. We do, however, disagree about whether or not this is a good thing…
Sure, you disagree, but why is the fact that it is a thing at all not more generally recognized? Why is the pop science media, including Scientific American, sinking comfortably into this religion?
Why did the bookkeeper suddenly quit and move to the Seychelles?
My Science Fictions series of posts on cosmology sets out briefly (to spare you all having to read a book) that the multiverse was not developed because it was some sort of “only answer” to conundrums of our known universe. Quite the opposite, modest tweaks have been performing well. The big issues, like unifying gravity with the other three forces, likely await new discoveries in this universe, not more dramatic claims about putative other ones.
The multiverse was developed because cosmology in our own universe provides no evidence against theism or rationality. On the contrary, the Big Bang and fine tuning fit quite comfortably with both. But, inconveniently, large number of cosmologists are atheists.
So is Woit. But he sounds like the sort of fellow who is disinclined to simply build a universe that suits him, probably because he does believe in rationality. And to believe in the multiverse, one must get around rationality, which the new cosmologists are more than happy to try to do. As Woit knows.
Science as we have known it just isn’t giving these guys what they want. They want a universe where scientism is reasonable, and as David Berlinski helpfully explains here, this isn’t that universe. But just wait till our universe’s lone vote is drowned out by the multiverse …
No wonder Woit is now labelled a creationist and a hater. He struggles to defend himself against claims that he can’t defend himself against because they make no sense. Welcome to the multiverse, Woit, where things don’t need to make sense, and rationality is only a limitation. And religion absolutely rules. But it’s not the rational religion you grew up with, and there is no use treating it that way.
So, of course the multiverse is a religious enterprise! The critical mass is actually all the chair warmers in the middle, pretending that the multiverse has anything to do with science as we have known it.
– O’Leary for News
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
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Thank you Mrs O’Leary
I tried thinking of something to add, but you said it all.
Thanks for this interesting piece Denise. I’m finding this kind of willful blindness in a lot of places on a lot of charged topics (gay marriage for example).
as to Professor Woit’s comment here:
Well, contrary to whatever Professor Woit may believe, ‘conventional notions’ of science, in so far as they have been artificially divorced from theological presuppositions, particularly Christian Theistic presuppositions, are a fantasy just as detestable as the multiverse he despises as ‘unscientific’. Modern science was born out of Judeo-Christian theistic presuppositions and continues to be dependent on them:,,
Please note the application of mathematical to the systematic study of nature. Why should man presuppose that just by taking thought he can construct an accurate mathematical model of the universe?
Clearly this presupposition is born out of the belief that the rational Mind of God created this universe and that man, being made in God’s image, has a mind that is capable of grasping the way in which God constructed this universe.
In fact, on discovering the laws of planetary motion, Johann Kepler declared these very ‘unscientific’ thoughts:
But something very important seems to have been lost since the Judeo-Christian foundation of modern science. This something very important that seems to have been lost in ‘modern science’ is that man seems to have have literally lost his mind in his quest to be ‘scientific’ and stay within ‘conventional notions of science’:
i.e. How can science be rationally practiced without the ‘consequent reasoning’ that is based outside the material/physical order, i.e. based in our ‘mind’?
Imagining that mind simply ’emerges’ from some materialistic basis also leads to the epistemological failure of science itself:
There is something else that is very important that seems to have been completely lost in Woit’s ‘conventional notions of science’ that eschew the theological considerations. The considerations upon which modern science was built in the first place. It seems that many scientists/mathematicians are confusing mathematical description with causation. I believe Tegmark did it in his Level IV multiverse, and Hawking did if a few years back in his book ‘The Grand Design”. There is simply no beating Dr. Bruce Gordon’s critique of Hawking’s book:
Contrary to what Hawking (or Tegmark) may believe about laws (or mathematical equations) creating universes,,,,
,,the fact of the matter is that laws (or mathematical equations) do not have any causal power within themselves, they are merely mathematical descriptions of a regular event:
Krauss also seems to have made a very similar category error when when he tried to say ‘nothing’ created the universe:
In fact, since Dr. Woit thinks (and I agree with him) that testability is paramount to staying within the bounds of true science, I hold that every time a test is performed in quantum mechanics for non-locality and realism (Bell’s and Leggett’s Inequalities respectfully) that a test is being performed on the Theistic claim that the universe is contingent on the infinite mind of almighty God.
Moreover even math (at least math specific enough to have counting numbers in it), which is Dr. Woit’s bread and butter, through Godel’s incompleteness theorem is shown to be ‘contingent’ on an outside source for any truthfulness inherent within the math:
Even Hawking himself, at one time, acknowledged that there can be no purely mathematical ‘Theory Of Everything”
Thus any successful theory of everything is going to have to include God so as to provide causal adequacy:
Verse and Music:
“Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil Turok: “What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws.” Turok was surprised by the question; he recognized its force. Something seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature, and what makes this observation odd is just that neither compulsion nor obedience are physical ideas. (p.132) In a Landscape in which anything is possible, nothing is necessary. In a universe in which nothing is necessary, anything is possible. It is nothing that makes the electron follow any laws.
Which, then, is it to be: God, logic, or nothing?
This is the question to which all discussions of the Land-scape and the Anthropic Principle are tending, and because the same question can be raised with respect to moral thought, it is a question with an immense and disturbing intellectual power.
For scientific atheists, the question answers itself: Better logic than nothing, and better nothing than God. (…) The laws of nature, as Isaac Newton foresaw, are not laws of logic, nor are they like the laws of logic. Physicists since Einstein have tried to see in the laws of nature a formal structure that would allow them to say to themselves, “Ah, that is why they are true,” and they have failed.” (p.133)
Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion pg. 132-133
Stephen Hawking, for all of his alleged high IQ, says some very stupid things. As if saying our existence is due to luck is science and as if science supports that point of view. But at least Stephen admits in the absence of design all you have are lucky coincidences.
Lucky Coincidences Built the Universe
No need to invoke a designer when one has sheer dumb luck at one’s disposal. But just how is that scientific? It can’t be tested- how is it falsified?