Mathematician: Our universe is really chaotic; we just don’t see it that way

Of course he doesn't make any sense. Are scientists that "act like a sieve" not part of the same "chaotic universe"? If so, what would make them "focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable"?Nonlin.org

December 3, 2018

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Let me get this straight, the fine tuning of the constants of the universe including inflation cosmology, that supposidly make it "flat" in a Euclidean sense, and a myriad of other constants that have to be "just right" or no universe or a failed universe, but it's chaotic? In fact they fall on the sword of the multiverse just to get away with how perfect an balanced the contents are, but this knucklehead wants to say it is chaotic? Well if it really acted as if it came from one big hairy random explosion (instead it behaves like a sculpted creation that was precisely coordinated), then he would have a point - also if the microwave background radiation was not so incredibly ordered and already in such a low entropy state from the very beginning (they don't like to talk about that, but the distribution of the background radiation, which should be terribly irregular, is actually terribly regular and precise (they don't like to talk about this much, and they used some bizzare statistical techniques to get rid of that nasty "axis of evil" - even though each probe launched after the first was built to get rid of any anomalies like the "axis of evil", but only showed it more clearly (a preferred axis for the universe), so they had to air brush it out - this universe is highly ordered - this author is the same kind that claims life and birth are horribly ugly (just because in their mind it should be some clean sterile process), and that dang crying baby makes it unordered - really??? One sees what one wants to see, even if the data says otherwise I suppose.Tom Robbins

December 3, 2018

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vmahuna, as to your observation that,

"there ain’t much point in collecting lots of cute little datums until you have SOME hope of knowing how to sort wheat from chaff."

And that failure is precisely the primary, and fatal, flaw within the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought. As Pastor Joe Boot states in the following video,,,

“If you have no God, then you have no design plan for the universe. You have no preexisting structure to the universe.,, As the ancient Greeks held, like Democritus and others, the universe is flux. It’s just matter in motion. Now on that basis all you are confronted with is innumerable brute facts that are unrelated pieces of data. They have no meaningful connection to each other because there is no overall structure. There’s no design plan. It’s like my kids do ‘join the dots’ puzzles. It’s just dots, but when you join the dots there is a structure, and a picture emerges. Well, the atheists is without that (final picture). There is no pre-established pattern (to connect the facts given atheism).” Pastor Joe Boot – 13:20 minute mark of the following video - Defending the Christian Faith – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqE5_ZOAnKo

And Pastor Joe Boot is not just whistling Dixie. Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which can be stated as such, “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”,,,

Gödel's incompleteness theorem (1931), proves that there are limits to what can be ascertained by mathematics. Kurt Gödel (ref. on cite), halted the achievement of a unifying all-encompassing theory of everything in his theorem that: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”. Cf., Stephen Hawking & Leonard Miodinow, The Grand Design (2010)

Gödel's incompleteness theorem,,,, has now been extended to physics. In the following article entitled 'Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics', which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description."

Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics - December 9, 2015 Excerpt: A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable,,, It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, "We knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and Gödel in the 1930s," added Co-author Professor Michael Wolf from Technical University of Munich. "So far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description." http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html

To put it mildly, this is not a minor failing of the Darwinist's reductive materialistic worldview. Besides, as mentioned previously in the thread, the inability of reductive materialist to be able to give an account for why the universe, or any object within the universe, may have the precise structure, shape, and/or form that it does,,,

How do we know the universe is flat? Discovering the topology of the universe – by Fraser Cain – June 7, 2017 Excerpt: With the most sensitive space-based telescopes they have available, astronomers are able to detect tiny variations in the temperature of this background radiation. And here’s the part that blows my mind every time I think about it. These tiny temperature variations correspond to the largest scale structures of the observable universe. A region that was a fraction of a degree warmer become a vast galaxy cluster, hundreds of millions of light-years across. The cosmic microwave background radiation just gives and gives, and when it comes to figuring out the topology of the universe, it has the answer we need. If the universe was curved in any way, these temperature variations would appear distorted compared to the actual size that we see these structures today. But they’re not. To best of its ability, ESA’s Planck space telescope, can’t detect any distortion at all. The universe is flat.,,, Since the universe is flat now, it must have been flat in the past, when the universe was an incredibly dense singularity. And for it to maintain this level of flatness over 13.8 billion years of expansion, in kind of amazing. In fact, astronomers estimate that the universe must have been flat to 1 part within 1×10^57 parts. Which seems like an insane coincidence. https://phys.org/news/2017-06-universe-flat-topology.html Why We Need Cosmic Inflation By Paul Sutter, Astrophysicist | October 22, 2018 Excerpt: As best as we can measure, the geometry of our universe appears to be perfectly, totally, ever-so-boringly flat. On large, cosmic scales, parallel lines stay parallel forever, interior angles of triangles add up to 180 degrees, and so on. All the rules of Euclidean geometry that you learned in high school apply. But there’s no reason for our universe to be flat. At large scales it could’ve had any old curvature it wanted. Our cosmos could’ve been shaped like a giant, multidimensional beach ball, or a horse-riding saddle. But, no, it picked flat. https://www.space.com/42202-why-we-need-cosmic-inflation.html

,,, Besides, as mentioned previously in the thread, the inability of reductive materialist to be able to give an account for why the universe, or any object within the universe, may have the precise structure, shape, and/or form that it does, the ‘bottom up’ reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution is found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form.

Darwinism vs Biological Form - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w

And to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality. Of related interest to the inability of reductive materialists to be able to give an account for why the universe, or any object within the universe, may have the particular structure, shape, and/or form that it does, Gödel stated this, "In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind."

“In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind." Kurt Gödel – Hao Wang’s supplemental biography of Gödel, A Logical Journey, MIT Press, 1996.

And whereas Darwinists, with their reductive materialism, have no clue what the unifying principle could possibly be that is keeping the trillions upon trillions of molecules in our bodies focused on the singular task of keeping our temporal bodies alive "precisely for a lifetime and not a moment longer (S. Talbott)" on the other hand, Theism, especially with recent breakthroughs in quantum biology,,,

Darwinian Materialism vs Quantum Biology - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHdD2Am1g5Y

,,,is found to be very well supported in its claim that we each have a immaterial soul that is capable of living past the death of out temporal material bodies. Quantum Biology, as the preceding video made clear, even goes so far as to strongly support the Christian's claim that God has formed each of us in our mother’s womb. Verses:

Psalm 139:13-14 For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

Of related interest to this is, of course, the problem of 'the hard problem' of consciousness and/or mind. .. As to the problem of ‘scientifically defining’ exactly what consciousness is, (i.e. 'the hard problem', qualia), Stephen Talbott has a very interesting article that highlights the fact that the more precisely we ‘scientifically define’ something, (its weight length, height speed etc.. etc..), the more we subtract qualitative meaning from what that something actually is. Here is an excerpt from his article to get this point across:

The Language of Nature – Stephen L. Talbott Qualities Try sitting outdoors in a natural landscape for half an hour. After quieting yourself and becoming as receptive as possible to the surrounding world, consider this: Is there any content here beside the purely qualitative? From the sky and the distant hill to the grass, pine needles, or soil beneath your feet, do you not have to say, “The world I am experiencing simply is its qualities”? How many of us, during years or decades of creative work, will put such a problem to ourselves in this direct, observational, scientifically sanctioned way, as opposed to thinking about the problem in our studies or laboratories, with our thought mediated by a vast network of mental abstractions? Now try subtracting from the content of your observation everything qualitative. In the case of the tree over there, remove the green of the foliage, the gray of the bark, the smell of sap, the rustling of leaves in the breeze, the felt hardness of the trunk…and what do you have left? Nothing at all. You do not even have geometric form, since without light and color there is no visible form, and without the different qualities of touch there is no felt form. Form is not something independent that we proceed to flesh out with qualities; it subsists in nothing but the qualities themselves. You may want to say that the quantities we abstract from our qualitative experience of the world point us toward a more substantial reality hidden behind the world of our perceptions. But unless you can say something about this hidden reality — unless you can characterize it, giving your quantitative constructions some sort of content — where is your science? And how will you characterize this content without appealing to qualities?,,, “Quality” is in fact an approximate synonym for “meaning.” But we usually speak of qualities when we are referring to the world, and we speak of meaning when we are referring to language and thought. The two usages are closely intertwined. The way we reduce the world to atomic things without qualities is by reducing our descriptive language to the atomic terms of logic without meaning. That is, we can obscure the qualitative character of the world only by obscuring the meaningful character of our words. But we never fully succeed in this. The world remains word-like because it is full of the meanings of language, just as our words remain world-like because they are full of the qualities of the world. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-language-of-nature

And therein lies the unavoidable pitfall of scientifically trying to define exactly what consciousness is. i.e. The “hard problem of consciousness” with reductive materialism. Any attempt to try to scientifically define “qualia” necessarily entails a process of subtraction from qualia itself. With the subtraction from the actual qualitative experience of consciousness becoming more and more acute the more scientifically precise, and mathematical, you try to be in your ‘scientific’ description of consciousness. (which, in the case of reductive materialism, entails abstracting away from the actual qualitative experience itself until you are at the level of unseen atoms and particles which have little, if any, bearing to the actual qualitative experience of consciousness itself. Of related interest to this, it seems that George Berkeley, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop, and a renowned Christian Philosopher, (after whom Berkeley University got its name (via the town of Berkeley, Ca.),,,it seems that George Berkeley may have followed much the same path as Stephen Talbott did in his article, i.e. of starting out with the qualitative experience itself, in order to arrive at his conclusion that God must be the “immediate cause of all our experiences.”

George Berkeley,,,, A convinced adherent of Christianity, Berkeley believed God to be present as an immediate cause of all our experiences.,,, Berkeley believed that God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery,,, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley#Theology Quote: All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth – in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world – have not any subsistence without a mind. – George Berkeley

It is kind of amazing that hundreds of years ago, long before quantum mechanics came along, that someone, a Christian philosopher at that, was able to deduce, apparently from reasoning about the qualitative experience of consciousness itself, what we are just now finding out from quantum mechanics.

Divine Action and the World of Science: What Cosmology and Quantum Physics Teach Us about the Role of Providence in Nature – Bruce L. Gordon – 2017 [A] system of spatiotemporal relationships constituted by sizes, shapes, positions, and changes thereof, is too incomplete, too hollow, as it were, to constitute an ultimately real thing or substance. It is a framework that, by its very nature, needs to be filled in by something less purely formal. It can only be a structure of something of some not merely structural sort. Formally, rich as such a structure may be, it lacks too much of the reality of material thinghood. By itself, it participates in the incompleteness of abstractions. . . . [T]he reality of a substance must include something intrinsic and qualitativeover and above any formal or structural features it may possess.117 When we consider the fact that the structure of reality in fundamental physical theory is merely phenomenological and that this structure itself is hollow and non-qualitative, whereas our experience is not, the metaphysical objectivity and epistemic intersubjectivity of the enstructured qualitative reality of our experience can be seen to be best explained by an occasionalist idealism of the sort advocated by George Berkeley (1685-1753) or Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). In the metaphysical context of this kind of theistic immaterialism, the vera causa that brings coherent closure to the phenomenological reality we inhabit is always and only agent causation. The necessity of causal sufficiency is met by divine action, for as Plantinga emphasizes: [T]he connection between God’s willing that there be light and there being light is necessary in the broadly logical sense: it is necessary in that sense that if God wills that p, p occurs. Insofar as we have a grasp of necessity (and we do have a grasp of necessity), we also have a grasp of causality when it is divine causality that is at issue. I take it this is a point in favor of occasionalism, and in fact it constitutes a very powerful advantage of occasionalism. 118 http://jbtsonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JBTS-2.2-Article-7.compressed.pdf

Here are a few more relevant quotes:

“No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck (1858–1947), the main founder of quantum theory, The Observer, London, January 25, 1931 “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Schroedinger, Erwin. 1984. “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. p. 334. “The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws,” could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists.” – Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, pp 167-177. “In any philosophy of reality that is not ultimately self-defeating or internally contradictory, mind – unlabeled as anything else, matter or spiritual – must be primary. What is “matter” and what is “conceptual” and what is “spiritual” can only be organized from mind. Mind controls what is perceived, how it is perceived, and how those percepts are labeled and organized. Mind must be postulated as the unobserved observer, the uncaused cause simply to avoid a self-negating, self-conflicting worldview. It is the necessary postulate of all necessary postulates, because nothing else can come first. To say anything else comes first requires mind to consider and argue that case and then believe it to be true, demonstrating that without mind, you could not believe that mind is not primary in the first place.” – William J. Murray “You see we always start from the fact that we are conscious. Consciousness is the only carrier of reality and existence that we can know. Everything else is abstraction; [they] are inferences we make from consciousness.” Dr. Bernardo Kastrup:

bornagain77

December 2, 2018

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As far as I know, Science is willing to study almost any phenomenon, but collecting enough data to perform any useful analysis can get expensive. Organized, methodical collection and analysis of Weather is perhaps 500 years old, or perhaps very much younger. The first man who predicted weather in the North Sea using a barometer was nearly burned as a witch when he got too many predictions RIGHT. And he still didn't know WHY air pressure CHANGED. And Biologists are STILL trying to make sense of what we can now see inside cells. So there ain't much point in collecting lots of cute little datums until you have SOME hope of knowing how to sort wheat from chaff.vmahuna

December 1, 2018

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Seversky you, as an atheist who does not believe in mind and/or agent causality, have a far more profound problem than the ever present 'measurement paradox' in quantum mechanics. That much more profound problem is the fact that the 'free will loophole' has been, for all practical purposes, closed.bornagain77

December 1, 2018

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According to the reduction postulate, each measurement causes the wavefunction to collapse to an eigenstate of the measurement basis.In the context of this effect, an observation can simply be the absorption of a particle, without the need of an observer in any conventional sense. However, there is controversy over the interpretation of the effect, sometimes referred to as the "measurement problem" in traversing the interface between microscopic and macroscopic objects

From the ever-reliable Wikipedia Seversky

December 1, 2018

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The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno effect as to establishing consciousness and free will’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, as was mentioned previously, by a wide margin the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang. For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power for actions within the space-time of the universe:

Shining Light on Dark Energy – October 21, 2012 Excerpt: It (Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,, Even gravity, Vedral argued, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,, The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe —,,, http://crev.info/2012/10/shining-light-on-dark-energy/

In fact, entropy is the primary reason why our physical, temporal, bodies grow old and die,,,

Entropy Explains Aging, Genetic Determinism Explains Longevity, and Undefined Terminology Explains Misunderstanding Both - 2007 Excerpt: There is a huge body of knowledge supporting the belief that age changes are characterized by increasing entropy, which results in the random loss of molecular fidelity, and accumulates to slowly overwhelm maintenance systems [1–4].,,, http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030220

And yet, to repeat,,,

Quantum Zeno effect Excerpt: The quantum Zeno effect is,,, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. per wikipedia

This is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should my choice whether to observe a unstable particle or not put a freeze on the entropic decay of that particle unless consciousness and free will was and is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy is? Moreover besides the "Quantum Zeno Effect", recent advances in information theory, as it has been applied to thermodynamics, have now demonstrated that "entropy is a (NOT) property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

Even the author's own field of expertise, i.e. mathematics, (in so far as mathematics is applicable to our world and to the universe at large) is crucially dependent of a 'top down' structure of the universe that simply can find no explanation within his assumption of methodological naturalism. Specifically, as the following articles state: "the universe is flat, and this means that parallel lines will always remain parallel. 90-degree turns behave as true 90-degree turns, and everything makes sense.",,, and,,, "As best as we can measure, the geometry of our universe appears to be perfectly, totally, ever-so-boringly flat. On large, cosmic scales, parallel lines stay parallel forever, interior angles of triangles add up to 180 degrees, and so on. All the rules of Euclidean geometry that you learned in high school apply. But there’s no reason for our universe to be flat."

How do we know the universe is flat? Discovering the topology of the universe – by Fraser Cain – June 7, 2017 Excerpt: We say that the universe is flat, and this means that parallel lines will always remain parallel. 90-degree turns behave as true 90-degree turns, and everything makes sense.,,, Since the universe is flat now, it must have been flat in the past, when the universe was an incredibly dense singularity. And for it to maintain this level of flatness over 13.8 billion years of expansion, in kind of amazing. In fact, astronomers estimate that the universe must have been flat to 1 part within 1×10^57 parts. Which seems like an insane coincidence. https://phys.org/news/2017-06-universe-flat-topology.html Why We Need Cosmic Inflation By Paul Sutter, Astrophysicist | October 22, 2018 Excerpt: As best as we can measure, the geometry of our universe appears to be perfectly, totally, ever-so-boringly flat. On large, cosmic scales, parallel lines stay parallel forever, interior angles of triangles add up to 180 degrees, and so on. All the rules of Euclidean geometry that you learned in high school apply. But there’s no reason for our universe to be flat. At large scales it could’ve had any old curvature it wanted. Our cosmos could’ve been shaped like a giant, multidimensional beach ball, or a horse-riding saddle. But, no, it picked flat. https://www.space.com/42202-why-we-need-cosmic-inflation.html

Simply put, if the universe were not exceptionally flat, but the universe was instead governed by chaos as the author presupposes, modern science and technology would have never gotten off the ground here on earth. Nor would we have been able to eventually deduce the 'higher dimensional' mathematics that lay behind Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Scientists Question Nature’s Fundamental Laws – Michael Schirber – 2006 Excerpt: “There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant,” says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. “These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are.”,,, The observed differences are small-roughly a few parts in a million-but the implications are huge (if they hold up): The laws of physics would have to be rewritten, not to mention we might need to make room for six more spatial dimensions than the three that we are used to.”,,, The speed of light, for instance, might be measured one day with a ruler and a clock. If the next day the same measurement gave a different answer, no one could tell if the speed of light changed, the ruler length changed, or the clock ticking changed. http://www.space.com/2613-scientists-question-nature-fundamental-laws.html

Indeed, since the extremely fine tuned flatness of the universe allows us to see that the tiny temperature variations (in the Cosmic Background Radiation) remarkably and unexpectedly correspond to the largest scale structures of the observable universe,,,

How do we know the universe is flat? Discovering the topology of the universe - by Fraser Cain - June 7, 2017 Excerpt: With the most sensitive space-based telescopes they have available, astronomers are able to detect tiny variations in the temperature of this background radiation. And here's the part that blows my mind every time I think about it. These tiny temperature variations correspond to the largest scale structures of the observable universe. A region that was a fraction of a degree warmer become a vast galaxy cluster, hundreds of millions of light-years across. The cosmic microwave background radiation just gives and gives, and when it comes to figuring out the topology of the universe, it has the answer we need. If the universe was curved in any way, these temperature variations would appear distorted compared to the actual size that we see these structures today. But they're not. To best of its ability, ESA's Planck space telescope, can't detect any distortion at all. The universe is flat.,,, Since the universe is flat now, it must have been flat in the past, when the universe was an incredibly dense singularity. And for it to maintain this level of flatness over 13.8 billion years of expansion, in kind of amazing. In fact, astronomers estimate that the universe must have been flat to 1 part within 1×10^57 parts. Which seems like an insane coincidence. https://phys.org/news/2017-06-universe-flat-topology.html

,,, Indeed, since a the extremely fine tuned flatness of the universe allows us to see that the tiny temperature variations (in the Cosmic Background Radiation) remarkably and unexpectedly correspond to the largest scale structures of the observable universe, then we have every right to assume that the universe, and all the structures within it, are the result of purposeful intent, not the result of chaos as atheists presuppose.

Job 38:4-5 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?

There is more that can be said in critique of the assumptions that he made in his article, such as how Godel's incompleteness theorem would invalidate some of his assumptions, but I'll let it suffice for now to echo Pauli's refrain in regards to his article, 'It is not even wrong'.bornagain77

December 1, 2018

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As to this claim:

Science does not study all physical phenomena. Rather, science studies predictable physical phenomena. It is almost a tautology: science predicts predictable phenomena.

And yet one of the most profound discoveries in quantum mechanics, our most fruitful theory in science, is the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Which basically says that the universe, at its most fundamental level, is unpredictable, i.e. non-deterministic.

The Beauty of Uncertainty: In 1927, the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (December 5, 1901–February 1, 1976) formulated the tenet for which his name is best known today — Heinsenberg’s uncertainty principle, which points out the limits of our knowledge by stating that the more precisely we know the position of a given particle, the less precise our measurement of its momentum, and vice versa. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/08/lori-henriques-heisenbergs-aha/

Thus his claim that "science studies predictable physical phenomena" is, as Pauli would state, 'not even wrong'. Science indeed brought us Heisenberg's Uncertainly principle itself. Some people, in prior years, have even used Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle to argue against a completely deterministic universe and for the reality of free will.

Why Quantum Physics (Uncertainty) Ends the Free Will Debate - Michio Kaku - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFLR5vNKiSw

Moreover, now quantum mechanics has gone much further than just the Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle in trying to establish the reality of free will, and via Contexuality and/or the Kochen-Speckter Theorem, as well as the closing of the free will loop-hole, has now confirmed the reality of free will within quantum mechanics.

Specifically, advances in quantum mechanics, with Contexuality and/or the Kochen-Speckter Theorem, now confirm the reality of free will within quantum mechanics. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/human-consciousness-may-not-be-computable/#comment-668994

That is to say, 'science', (as defined by methodological naturalism, which is the author's base assumption about how science should operate), cannot explain free-will.

Do You Like SETI? Fine, Then Let's Dump Methodological Naturalism - Paul Nelson - September 24, 2014 Excerpt: "Epistemology -- how we know -- and ontology -- what exists -- are both affected by methodological naturalism (MN). If we say, "We cannot know that a mind caused x," laying down an epistemological boundary defined by MN, then our ontology comprising real causes for x won't include minds. MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn't write your email to me. Physics did, and informed (the illusion of) you of that event after the fact. "That's crazy," you reply, "I certainly did write my email." Okay, then -- to what does the pronoun "I" in that sentence refer? Your personal agency; your mind. Are you supernatural?,,, You are certainly an intelligent cause, however, and your intelligence does not collapse into physics. (If it does collapse -- i.e., can be reduced without explanatory loss -- we haven't the faintest idea how, which amounts to the same thing.) To explain the effects you bring about in the world -- such as your email, a real pattern -- we must refer to you as a unique agent.,,, some feature of "intelligence" must be irreducible to physics, because otherwise we're back to physics versus physics, and there's nothing for SETI to look for.",,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/09/do_you_like_set090071.html

In fact, according to the strictures of methodological naturalism, every time a person simply exercises his free will by raising his arm, that should, by all rights, be considered a miracle. In the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, Dr. Craig Hazen relates how he performed, for an audience full of academics at a college, a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,

The Intersection of Science and Religion – Craig Hazen, PhD – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xVByFjV0qlE#t=746s

The author of the article in the OP also falsely claimed:

We postulated that, for the most part, the universe is chaotic and there is not so much structure in it.

Contrary to that false postulation, the universe has a very ordered 'top down' structure to it. He is confusing things that are governed by thermodynamics (shapes of clouds) etc.., and by the free will choices of people (presidential elections) etc.., with his a priori naturalistic belief that the universe must be, at its foundational basis, chaotic. He simply has no evidence for his naturalistic assumption. For prime example of 'top down' order/structure, instead of chaos, being imposed on the universe, I refer to the extremely fine-tuned origin of thermodynamics itself:

"The 'accuracy of the Creator's aim' would have had to be in 10^10^123" Hawking, S. and Penrose, R., The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton, Princeton University Press (1996), 34, 35. “An explosion you think of as kind of a messy event. And this is the point about entropy. The explosion in which our universe began was not a messy event. And if you talk about how messy it could have been, this is what the Penrose calculation is all about essentially. It looks at the observed statistical entropy in our universe. The entropy per baryon. And he calculates that out and he arrives at a certain figure. And then he calculates using the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for Black-Hole entropy what the,,, (what sort of entropy could have been associated with,,, the singularity that would have constituted the beginning of the universe). So you've got the numerator, the observed entropy, and the denominator, how big it (the entropy) could have been. And that fraction turns out to be,, 1 over 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. Let me just emphasize how big that denominator is so you can gain a real appreciation for how small that probability is. So there are 10^80th baryons in the universe. Protons and Neutrons. Now suppose we put a zero on every one of those. OK, how many zeros is that? That is 10^80th zeros. This number has 10^123rd zeros. OK, so you would need a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, universes our size, with zero on every proton and neutron in all of those universes just to write out this number. That is how fine tuned the initial entropy of our universe is. And if there were a pre-Big Bang state and you had some bounces, then that fine tuning (for entropy) gets even finer as you go backwards if you can even imagine such a thing.” Dr Bruce Gordon - Contemporary Physics and God Part 2 - video – 1:50 minute mark - video https://youtu.be/ff_sNyGNSko?t=110

Methodological naturalism simply has no explanation for the extremely fine-tuned origin of Thermodynamics , whereas Christian Theism predicted it:

Romans 8:18-21 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. "We have the sober scientific certainty that the heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment’.... Dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unilluminated by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and a new earth.’" Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) – pioneer in many different fields, particularly electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Of related interest to this, in quantum mechanics we have something called the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’. Which is, to put it simply, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.

Quantum Zeno Effect The quantum Zeno effect is,, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect 'Zeno effect' verified—atoms won't move while you watch - October 23, 2015 Excerpt: Graduate students,, created and cooled a gas of about a billion Rubidium atoms inside a vacuum chamber and suspended the mass between laser beams.,,, In that state the atoms arrange in an orderly lattice just as they would in a crystalline solid.,But at such low temperatures, the atoms can "tunnel" from place to place in the lattice.,,, The researchers demonstrated that they were able to suppress quantum tunneling merely by observing the atoms.,,, The researchers observed the atoms under a microscope by illuminating them with a separate imaging laser. A light microscope can't see individual atoms, but the imaging laser causes them to fluoresce, and the microscope captured the flashes of light. When the imaging laser was off, or turned on only dimly, the atoms tunneled freely. But as the imaging beam was made brighter and measurements made more frequently, the tunneling reduced dramatically.,,, The experiments were made possible by the group's invention of a novel imaging technique that made it possible to observe ultracold atoms while leaving them in the same quantum state.,,, The popular press has drawn a parallel of this work with the "weeping angels" depicted in the Dr. Who television series – alien creatures who look like statues and can't move as long as you're looking at them. There may be some sense to that. In the quantum world, the folk wisdom really is true: "A watched pot never boils." http://phys.org/news/2015-10-zeno-effect-verifiedatoms-wont.html Interaction-free measurements by quantum Zeno stabilization of ultracold atoms – 14 April 2015 Excerpt: In our experiments, we employ an ultracold gas in an unstable spin configuration, which can undergo a rapid decay. The object—realized by a laser beam—prevents this decay because of the indirect quantum Zeno effect and thus, its presence can be detected without interacting with a single atom. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150414/ncomms7811/full/ncomms7811.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20150415

bornagain77

December 1, 2018

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Here we have a universe with zillions of particles belonging to just a handful of types. Every electron has exactly the same properties as any other regardless of their distance from one another. Same with neutrons and protons. And yet, this guy has difficulty seeing order? Aren't the laws of physics examples of universal order? Furthermore, Alan Turing was speaking of a hypothetical sequential computer, not a universe of parallel entities.FourFaces

November 30, 2018

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or maybe a method to the madness, as even a random operating system can be a design choice. refererence RCCF framework for understanding sciencePearlman

November 30, 2018

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