Religion dressed up as science?

_{Mark

May 20, 2009

Intelligent Design}

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A review of a book titled “The Universe: Order without design” appears in New Scientist. The summary of current ideas has a mythic sound to ordinary readers “a tiny piece of inflating “false vacuum” decays into a fireball, and stars and galaxies congeal out of the cooling debris”. Read it and see what you think.

I have two questions.

First, does description equal causation?

Second, is the invoking of billions of theoretical and eternally undetectable other universes simply to give an atheistic explaination of our one tuned universe, more scientific or rational than believing in an Intelligent Fine Tuner?

Comments

Nakashima, If Stenger cracking out a supposed simulation of star formation is an example of "beginning to address" fine tuning, the bar you've set is hilariously low. If we're playing that game, then science is "beginning to address" (via Dembski, Marks, etc) the idea of unguided evolution, and the initial results are not particularly favorably to the unguided position. On the other hand, I don't think fine-tuning is a knock-down argument against atheism. At most it's a problem, but so what? Atheists are entirely capable of imagining their God-equivalent 'somehow, in some way' accounting for problems. Increase the number of chances (multiverse, eternality of the universe, etc), or just dig in one's heels and say "we got lucky" or "some things are mysterious, but it doesn't have to be design". If the evidence for a YEC depiction of the universe were in abundance - proof of a 6000+ year old earth + cosmos, evidence that all major species popped into existence de novo, the atheist could make the same argument. "Mysterious but non-God / non-mind force is responsible" combined with "we got lucky" or "the chance pool may be huge and it's therefore inevitable".nullasalus_{May 20, 2009
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Mr Jerry, I've tried several times to make clear the reasons for my position. Can you do the same? Merely repeating "irrelevant" is insufficient to maintain a discussion. Are stars relevant to life? Has science begun to address fine tuning, and where does that leave philosophy?Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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jerry, Great questions. What are your answers?Adel DiBagno_{May 20, 2009
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There are a lot of issues that have to be resolved by the anti ID proponents on which they just beg the questions. 1. Why does anything exist? 2. Why does it exist with such exquisite precision? 3. Why is Earth so fine tuned for life? 4. How did life originate? 5. How did macro evolution occur? 6. How did consciousness arise? No answers to any of these but all must be solved for their intellectual position to have any merit. And science has not helped in any of these areas since it has been practiced. In fact it has opened more problems than it has solved. But I am assured that it will eventually get around to them.jerry_{May 20, 2009
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Nakashima, I did read most of the paper. The study is irrelevant. There is no swinging the pendulum back to fine tuning. It is at fine tuning and stuck there. This is getting to be a joke. "However, we are not going back to fly/wall/gun/bullet/Marksman analogizing. That era is now closed." You are starting to get in a habit of saying ridiculous things. It is a really bad habit.jerry_{May 20, 2009
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Mr Cabal, Yes, I agree with Peter Ward in Rare Earth. Life might be common in the universe, but intelligent life like ourselves is probably rare.Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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Mr Jerry, I thought you had read the paper, ne? At the level of detail it attempts, it uses three variables. To go to the next level of detail, it would need many more parameters. I have confirmed this with the author of the paper. He agrees. I don't understand why you think proving whether stars will burn for billions of years is unimportant to a discussion of life. Certainly, the sun is important to life here on this planet. The paper is about establishing some of the pre-requisites for life as we know it. The next step may bring a great narrowing of the field, and bring us back much closer to the traditional view of fine tuning. That is to look at these star-like objects in detail and see if they do two things: - do they create carbon, oxygen and higher elements in stellar nucleosynthesis? - do they explode, releasing these elements and creating still further elements? The first of these is the point identified by Hoyle. I freely admit there is great opportunity here to swing the pendulum of the evidence back towards fine tuning. All it takes is some sharp pencils and a lot of computer time. However, we are not going back to fly/wall/gun/bullet/Marksman analogizing. That era is now closed.Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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Cabal, Some days, you just get lucky.Adel DiBagno_{May 20, 2009
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Not only is the universe fine tuned; had not a collision created the moon, we wouldn't be here either...Cabal_{May 20, 2009
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Off topic---please forgive me---but V J Torley brings up “the traditional doctrine of Divine simplicity” (which seems to me a kind of theological reductionism – but what do I know) which reminds me of something that (in my aged forgetfulness) I seem to recall that Alan Turing supposedly proved: That there is no computation/cognition apart from moving parts (which if so what does this say of God?). If anyone here knows whether Turing or anyone else “proved” this, could you please let me know who and where. I’d really appreciate it.Rude_{May 20, 2009
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Why is the older, theist Anthony Flew more credible than the younger, atheist Anthony Flew?David Kellogg_{May 20, 2009
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David, ----“If the ID people did something so ridiculous they would be laughed at all round the globe.” Um . . ." Um, just ask Antony Flew.Clive Hayden_{May 20, 2009
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"If the ID people did something so ridiculous they would be laughed at all round the globe." Um . . .David Kellogg_{May 20, 2009
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As Vjtorley said, "philosophically naive" sums up the book and review both. First off, grant eternality and the multiverse both if you like - you're still faced with powerful arguments for a personal Creator. Aquinas was more than willing to grant eternality for the sake of argument - and while everyone loves to talk about christianity here (I'm catholic myself), other religions see God differently. Hinduism, mormonism, some of the more theistic-seeming (if typically inscrutable) buddhist outlooks, neoplatonism, etc all have no problem with the thought of an eternal creation being part of the eternal Creator. Second, it gets even worse. If we assume eternality / multiverse, the 'principle of mediocrity' likely ends up either destroyed or unintelligible. You don't merely grant "blind, unguided nature" infinite/eternal chances to 'come up with' our world or intelligent beings under these schemes - *you grant intelligent beings the same opportunity*. Paul Davies, Martin Rees, James Gardner and others have speculated/pointed out that, if you grant so many 'opportunities', you're making it guaranteed that there exist simulated universes, or (closer to Gardner's view) created universes. And since simulations and creations can be nested (simulation within a simulation, within a simulation, within.. etc), then it becomes far more likely humans don't exist in the 'actual' universe, but a created one. Sorry guys. Diving for eternality or multiverse (or both) not only does not 'solve' the God answer, but it practically guarantees that Intelligent Design is real at least in the softer sense ('a designer, but not the classical concept of God') and quite possibly in the harder sense.nullasalus_{May 20, 2009
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Nakashima, The paper is irrelevant. It picks a few of the hundreds of variables and does not deal with life. It is irrelevant. There is a whole literature out there on this subject and you come here and say fine tuning is out because of one simulation of irrelevant conditions. If the ID people did something so ridiculous they would be laughed at all round the globe.jerry_{May 20, 2009
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idnet.com.au asks:
...is the invoking of billions of theoretical and eternally undetectable other universes simply to give an atheistic explaination of our one tuned universe, more scientific or rational than believing in an Intelligent Fine Tuner?
It is a common (and self-serving) assumption among IDers that the multiverse is a concept invented by atheists simply to avoid the theistic implications of the fine-tuning argument. This is ridiculous, as I explained to StephenB in the "Belief in God" thread:
StephenB writes:
If, as you say, the probabilities involved did not constitute overwhelming evidence for a finely tuned universe, then the atheist physicists and cosmologists, all of whom do understand the probabilities involved, would fall back on your argument rather than resort to the desperate tactic of positing “infinite multiple universes” as an alternative explanation.
It is a common theist tactic to paint the multiverse as a desperate last-ditch attempt by atheist physicists to forestall the otherwise inevitable conclusion of design. This is nonsense. For example, string theory predicts the multiverse, but what physicists love about it is that it predicts gravity while also subsuming the Standard Model. The multiverse is thus just a “side effect” of a theory pursued for an entirely different reason. Furthermore, the majority of physicists are leery of using the multiverse to explain any apparent fine-tuning, and they would much prefer an alternate explanation, as Davies writes in the paper that vjtorley linked to: Invoking the multiverse together with the anthropic, or biophilic, principle in an attempt to explain fine-tuning is still regarded with great suspicion, or even hostility, among physicists, although it has some notable apologists. There is consensus that such explanations should not impede searches for more satisfying explanations of the nature of the observed physical laws and parameters. Even the “noted apologists” referred to by Davies, such as Leonard Susskind, embrace string theory not because of the multiverse, but in spite of it. To them, its ability to explain any apparent fine-tuning is a bonus, and they accept it as such, but they don’t consider it a sufficient justification for embracing the theory, and they would prefer a simpler theory if a viable one existed.
beelzebub_{May 20, 2009
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There is a rather simple reason that the multiple-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics is bogus. The only ontology of substance that does not lead to an infinite regress is one that calls for an ex-nihilo universe. How can everything come from nothing you ask? Just as zero is the sum of all positive and negative numbers, nothing is the sum of everything positive and negative. This means that all properties/entities must come in complementary/opposite pairs so as to sum up to nothing. The conservation of nothing is the mother of all conservation principles. We live in a yin-yang universe. So why is there only one physical universe? Simply because there is only one nothing. The universe is ONE, as its name implies. As Wolfgang Pauli would say, the multiverse hypothesis is not even wrong.Mapou_{May 20, 2009
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Mr Jerry, The paper is a first approximation, we agree. That does not make it irrelevant. The Dembski and Marks paper discussed recently is similarly distant from its ultimate goal, and just sketches in the issues of "accounting for active information", but it is still quite relevant to its area of study. The key point is that beginning with this paper, the fine tuning question shifts from a philosophic discussion to a scientific discussion.Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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Mr PaulN, However if you include intelligent causation on top of this realm of scientific inquiry then predictions, explanations, and conclusions, then you potentially have a more sufficient method that touches on things that the former methodology cannot. The trouble is, I could strike out intelligent causation from your sentence and replace it with "astrology", and because of the weasel word 'potentially' still have an equally strong, equally true statement. I was a religious person for most of my adulthood. Please believe me, that I would prefer to hold that there is a Creator of this universe. It has been a long and painful road to the point of admitting that right now there is no evidence for that belief. The bacterial flagella is evidence of cosmological finetuning? That is embarrassing to read.Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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Nakashima, "The initial results are not particularly favorable to fine tuning." This is nonsense and you know it. As I said elsewhere, the paper you presented was irrelevant.jerry_{May 20, 2009
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Mr Borne, My apologies for suggesting any cross dressing on the part of idnet.com.au! I somehow thought this thread was begun closer to the Arctic Circle than across the equator!Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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Hi vjtorley, I just wanted to thank you again for the quality of your comments.Charlie_{May 20, 2009
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Nakashima:
Mrs O’Leary, ...
Uhm... Mrs. O'Leary?? What the... Is idnet.com.au now = to Mrs. O'Leary?Borne_{May 20, 2009
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One day a puddle looked around, examining the hole it inhabited. The puddle concluded the hole fitted so perfectly it must have been constructed just for him....eligoodwin_{May 20, 2009
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I have to say that both NASA physicist Carlos Calle's book, The Universe - Order Without Design (which can be ordered at http://www.prometheusbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1915 ), and Marcus Chown's review strike me as philosophically naive. Judging from the reviews that I have read online, it seems that the book fails to address several cogent arguments that were put forward against the multiverse as an Ultimate Explanation, by Dr. Robin Collins, in his online essay, Design and the Many-Worlds Hypothesis . Dr. Collins wrote that article back in 2000. It is disgraceful that nearly a decade later, his telling criticisms have attracted only a few comments over in the "skeptico-sphere." I'll have more to say on Dr. Robin Collins' criticisms below. After reading Marcus Chown's review of NASA physicist Carlos Calle's The Universe - Order Without Design, I came away with the strong impression that scientists should stick to what they're good at, which is science. Neither Dr. Calle nor his reviewer shows any sign of understanding the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The naive assumption underlying Chown's review is that once we have a model which explains the puzzle of why the universe has just the right amount of "dark energy" and which doesn't require a beginning, we have rendered belief in God intellectually redundant. To which I can only retort: rubbish! Back in the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas formulated no less than five arguments for the existence of God in his Summa Theologica . In all of these arguments, he was happy to grant for argument's sake that the universe could be eternal, as this is precisely what 13th-century atheists held, and he never once mentioned either dark energy or fine tuning. And yet his arguments have impressed many people. Interested readers who wish to understand the thinking behind these arguments (which, I might add, are far more profound than most of their critics assume) might like to have a look at this web page: On the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas . I have already blogged at https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/6695/#comment-316495 on why I think the multiverse cannot serve as an Ultimate Explanation of Reality. What I object to about the multiverse concept is not the sheer number of alternative universes, or for that matter their unobservability. I'm wary of making arguments like that, because some skeptics have argued that a multiverse governed by a few simple laws is actually a far less extravagant assumption than an immaterial, omniscient, all-loving, personal Deity - and of course, God isn't directly observable either. They are wrong, of course, because they mistakenly assume that a Personal Agent has to be something complex. In recent years, the traditional doctrine of Divine simplicity has been attacked by some philosophers as incoherent. However, Dr. Jeffrey Brower mounts what I believe to be a successful defense of this doctrine in his forthcoming article, Making Sense of Divine Simplicity . So why do I think that the multiverse is utterly inadequate as an Ultimate Explanation of Reality? Well, first, it reeks of Platonism. The following quote from Chown's review illustrates the problem:
Physics and cosmology alone may have the answers, says Calle. Combine eternal inflation, in which the primordial false vacuum continuously grows and decays, with string theory and you end up with a multiverse - a vast collection of universes, each of which has a different amount of dark energy. We find ourselves in one where it has just the right value for stars, planets and life because... well, we couldn't find ourselves anywhere else.
In other words, according to the "new" atheists, we don't need information to generate the universe we live in; all we need are a few simple physics equations, combined with the opportunity for all posible values of the relevant parameters to be realized somewhere. But when you come to think of it, this is absurd. Saying that a set of physics equations can magically give rise to life, the universe and everything is no less absurd than saying that the number 42 can. Equations cannot create reality; they can only describe it. Second, the equations themselves beg the question: where did they come from? Why is the multiverse governed by string theory - if indeed it is? Why not some other theory? What's so sacred about strings - or branes for that matter? Why not a beetle-verse? In other words, even the most beautiful set of equations can never be self-explanatory, as they have an irreducible "this-ness" about them. The only thing that can explain them is a Personal Creator, who is not tied to any particular modus operandi. Knowing and loving are two actions that we can fittingly attribute to this Creator, as these acts - unlike walking, seeing or manipulating 0's and 1's - do not require any kind of modus operandi whatsoever. God just knows; there is no "how." Finally, the multiverse fails to explain the underlying beauty of the laws of nature. As Dr. Robin Collins writes in his article, Design and the Many-Worlds Hypothesis , which I cited above (highlights below are mine - V.J.T.):
Next, we will turn to the various features of the laws of nature that both suggest design and cannot be explained by any many-universes hypothesis, whether physical or metaphysical... These features of the laws are: (i) their simplicity; (ii) their beauty, harmony and elegance; (iii) their intelligibility; and (iv) what I will call their “discoverability”... Now, this simplicity and elegance cannot be explained by many-universes hypothesis, since there is no reason to think that intelligent life could only arise in a universe with simple, elegant underlying physical principles. Certainly a somewhat orderly macroscopic world is necessary for intelligent life, but there is no reason to think this requires a simple and elegant underlying set of physical principles... As theoretical physicist Paul Davies notes with regard to these features of the laws of nature:
A common reaction among physicists to remarkable discoveries of the sort discussed above is a mixture of delight at the subtlety and elegance of nature, and of stupefaction: ‘I would never have thought of doing it that way.’ If nature is so ‘clever’ it can exploit mechanisms that amaze us with their ingenuity, is that not persuasive evidence for the existence of intelligent design behind the physical universe? If the world’s finest minds can unravel only with difficulty the deeper workings of nature, how could it be supposed that those workings are merely a mindless accident, a product of blind chance?... (Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, pp. 235-36)

It has been nine years since Dr. Collins wrote these words, and their argumentative force remains compelling. Skeptics will no doubt try to "explain away" the beauty of the laws of the cosmos, but if they read Dr. Robin Collins' article , they will find that he has anticipated the alternative explanations which could be put forward for the apparent beauty of the laws of nature: the beauty of these laws is a merely subjective evaluation on our part; natural selection has programmed into us the category of beauty; we have learned to like the way the cosmos works, during the 400 years that we have been studying its laws; the basic structure of the world is more likely to be simple and beautiful than complex and ugly; and the beauty of the cosmos is just a brute fact. Collins convincingly rebuts each rival explanation. I invite readers to peruse Collins' arguments and judge their merits for themselves. The interesting thing about Collins is that he does not oppose the notion of a multiverse as such. What he does say is that no matter how big and beautiful it is, it still requires a God to explain its beauty in a non-question-begging way. For as Collins puts it, given that God is by nature "a being with a perfect aesthetic sensibility, it is not surprising that such a God would create a world of great subtlety and beauty at the fundamental level." For all we know, some kind of multiverse might exist, beyond this universe. I have listed the conditions under which the idea of the multiverse could possibly contribute to scientific progress at https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/contest-question-1-does-the-multiverse-help-science-make-sense-or-simply-destroy-science/#comment-317249 . However, this would not be the multiverse as we currently understand the term; rather it would be a cosmos which abounds in information attesting to the reality of its Divine Creator. Insofar as scientific organizations, which are predominantly of an atheistic bent, refuse to even bother searching for this information in the cosmos, they are holding up scientific progress.vjtorley_{May 20, 2009
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Ultimately, my point is that you simply won't accept evidence for design(Even if there's a strong evidential inference) because you've made the assumption that there is none, and I believe this is essentially presumed from the assumption that there is no designer. If you feel that purely materialistic processes are the only forces at work in the universe, then you're going to develop predictions, explanations, and conclusions limited to that end. However if you include intelligent causation on top of this realm of scientific inquiry then predictions, explanations, and conclusions, then you potentially have a more sufficient method that touches on things that the former methodology cannot.PaulN_{May 20, 2009
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Nakashima,
And that evidence is?
Well for starters we bear witness to an outboard motor that is 40 nm in length, rotates at up to 117,000 rpm, and maintains an energy conversion efficiency level of nearly 100%. There are a countless amount of other micro-biological marvels that also reveal stunning levels of fine-tuning, specified complexity, and complex interdependent mechanical parts. It just so happens that the universe is fine-tuned in a more broad sense, where as all of the more incredible features are condensed to this planet. As far as the universe is concerned, I'd recommend following the research of Guillermo Gonzalez, as there are plenty of observations he makes for a finely-tuned universe, and more specifically this finely-tuned planet.
My position has been that we are now in a position to simulate (or calculate) the effects of other sets of physical laws and initial conditions to such a degree of specificity that we can bgein (begin!) to make this argument grounded in results, not hand waving.
I think writing off such interpretations of the data as "hand waving" is hand waving in itself. The interpretations of the data according to methodological naturalism completely fail to address any sort of intelligently guided design because it is intentionally ruled out of its scope a priori. How would one go about finding the intelligent origin for say, a laptop using methodological naturalism? C'mon humor me =PPaulN_{May 20, 2009
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so to invoke a supernatural designer falls out of the scope of the philosophy of science. If a multi-verse follows a different set of physical (natural) laws how is that not invoking the supernatural? And at what point does an insistence on a fundamentalist definition of methodological naturalism become a science stopper?tribune7_{May 20, 2009
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eintown: where is this naturalistic explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe?Barb_{May 20, 2009
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Mr PaulN, But why intentionally take steps to assume mediocrity at the cost of ignoring all of the evidence that says otherwise? And that evidence is? We've talked about this recently on other threads here at UD, mostly Mr Jerry, Mr Cordova, and Nakashima. My position has been that we are now in a position to simulate (or calculate) the effects of other sets of physical laws and initial conditions to such a degree of specificity that we can bgein (begin!) to make this argument grounded in results, not hand waving. The initial results are not particularly favorable to fine tuning.Nakashima_{May 20, 2009
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