Design Intervention, Information, and the Nature of Time

I take issue with the notion of an absolutely timeless transcendence in the first place. Firstly, it doesn't really mean anything positive. Secondly, who's to say that whatever came before (or caused) our spacetime box/bubble exists outside of any kind of time? If we existed in a collosal virtual reality (like the Matrix, which idea is nothing recent) with conscience beings attached to virtual begins within the VM, engineers on the "outside" of the VM would clearly be living in a different timeframe, and could rewind, tweak, and otherwise gyrate the system on demand, in ways that would look "miraculous" and "outside of time" to those "inside." The engineers themselves could even "incarnate" from time to time and directly interact with the virtual beings. (The gods have come down.) To me, it is impossible imagine time - the dynamic relation of objects - springing from an absolutely non-temporal state. It makes no sense. I think the question is wrong-headed. This is what the voices in my head have told me. mike1962

Of course there is as far as we are concerned, and we cannot even speculate about any other perspective outside of our universe. We can know absolutely nothing about "time" or anything else for that matter before the big bang. There certainly is however a noticeable difference for us as far as whether supernatural intervention occurred at the beginning of the universe or throughout the history of the universe. ftrp11

The fine tuning of the universe doesn’t mean the fine-tuner has to be outside the universe any more than the fine tuning in your office requires that you be outside your office. It seems to me that the most we can say is that the design present in the cosmos requires agency be present in the cosmos. I think Mung hits close to an interesting point. Those theologians who postulate that Agency resides outside the cosmos are on about as speculative grounds as those many worlders who postulate that Chance resides outside the cosmos. Rude

skiddlybop sez: "The kalam argument is an argument for God’s existence. Why do you guys spend so much time on God’s existence, when God doesn’t necessitate ID and (supposedly) ID doesn’t necessitate God?" I would say, in this thread and in general, that it's God's nature and relationship to the universe more so than his existence where so much time is spent, and the reason there's so much time spent there is because that's where so much time is spent by critics of ID. It's typically the critics (believers in God and not) who "go there" first. landru

Raevmo said: "The universe can only be regarded as fine-tuned if we know that there even was wiggle room in “tuning” the constants. We don’t know that, so any talk about fine-tuning is pure speculation and wishful thinking, hardly well-established. " Well said. Is there "wiggle room" in the constants or not? If not, then the Universe must be as it is. It could not exist in any other way. My hunch, or suspicion, is that this is the case. How could any Universe exist at all if, say, the charge of the electron were at all different than it is? Did God have a choice in the way He designed the Universe? I've sort of belabored this point before, but I believe that existence, the Universe, as a totality is irreducibly complex. The discovery of irreducibly complex features within the Universe (e.g. flagella) might be called the Weak Irreducible Complexity Principle and the belief that the Universe itself is irreducibly complex as the Strong Irreducible Complexity Principle. Stu Harris www.theidbookstore.com StuartHarris

“We know that anything outside of these highly improbable settings would prevent life”

How do you know these settings are improbable? To be able to make such a statement you would need to know the sampling space of the settings. Nobody knows that. How likely is 1 to show up if you throw an n-sided dice but n is unknown?

No theory of physics predicts that the physical constants in question must have any specific values. The values are assigned empirically not theoretically. You're clutching at straws. -ds Raevmo

Re #5: The word "tuning" implies purpose or intent. If the laws that permit life were the product of a lucky roll of the dice, the cosmos wouldn't be "tuned," it would just be the way it is for no reason at all. The multiverse thesis is thus an effort to do away with the notion that the universe is tuned for life, which is whole idea. Multiverse speculation has the same pedigree as efforts to explain away design in biology with random mutation and natural selection. These efforts have a long tradition. Don't forget that Einstein wrote that the circumstance of an expanding universe "irritated" him. "To admit such possibilities seems senseless," he lamented. Even after Hubble's discovery, other eminent scientists also remained obstinate. Arthur Eddington, the most distinguished British astronomer of the day, wrote, "The notion of a beginning [of the universe] is repugnant to me." One last thought: A miracle is an event with no naturalistic explanation or cause. The origin of the universe is therefore a miracle, by definition, and on the grandest scale imaginable. There was no nature (i.e., the physical universe and its natural laws) to provide a naturalistic explanation or cause for this event. GilDodgen

Scott sez:

We know that anything outside of these highly improbable settings would prevent life.

It would prevent life as we know it. But as someone else pointed out recently, any universe in which life occurred would of necessity be fine-tuned for it. How do we know that a universe with a different set of parameters would not be fine-tuned for a different sort of life?

Ordinarily I try to avoid indulging in such idle speculation, but I am trying to figure out why the argument about the fine-tuning of our universe is not a tautology. If the universe were any different we would not be here to speculate about it.

The point is that no one can *imagine* a universe where any kind of life could exist with different physical constants. When atoms fly apart and make chemistry impossible you don't have any wiggle room for how life could possibly exist. Some things seem to be basic requirements that can't be avoided. Atoms capable of forming complex groupings appears to be one of those things. Of course if it were any different we wouldn't be here to talk about it but we ARE here talking about it so we know something either impossibly fortuitous or purposely made to happen let us be here. -ds sagebrush gardener

But Raevmo, we are fully aware of the tolerances in the constants which allow for organic life to thrive. We know that anything outside of these highly improbable settings would prevent life. This might help you.

Scott

The universe can only be regarded as fine-tuned if we know that there even was wiggleroom in "tuning" the constants. We don't know that, so any talk about fine-tuning is pure speculation and wishful thinking, hardly well-established. Raevmo

Cosmological fine-tuning for the existence of life is so well established that it is essentially beyond question at this point...

I think you should have ended this with a period.

...unless one is willing to put blind faith in wildly-fantastic speculation about an infinitude of in-principle undetectable alternative universes.

And this should begin a new statement. It seems to me that even if one does speculate about alternative universes (and aren't we sort of doing that anyways by asserting that this universe is fine-tuned for life?), it does not change the fact that this universe is fine-tuned. As far as I can tell the two statements should not be connected and the second does not relieve the burden of the first. This universe is fine-tuned, regardless of what one chooses to believe about other universes.

This means that the cause of the universe must exist outside of matter, energy, space, the physical laws of the universe, and even time.

Supposing that the universe had a cause. And I'd like to ask people to think about what it means to say that a physical law came into existence. I think we are really slopping in our thinking about laws.

In other words, from a perspective that transcends time itself, is there any difference between the moment of the creation of the universe and any other moment in the history of the universe?

I do think that is a very good question. Perhaps not as regards time, but what about as regarding states of affairs? The universe is not in the same state at all moments in time.

This means that the cause of the universe ...

If any aspect of the universe is the effect, and the effect is natural, isn't the cause of that effect by definition also natural? Mung

What, they conduct polls by seance now? :P Patrick

The kalam argument is an argument for God's existence. Why do you guys spend so much time on God's existence, when God doesn't necessitate ID and (supposedly) ID doesn't necessitate God? skiddlybop

Yes. But purely in an aesthetic sense. Haphazardly distributing interventions within the "apparent" timeline, even from an exterior eternal perch, is generally regarded as poor form. At least it is according to a recent poll of influential transdimensional beings. great_ape

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