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Startling admission about the science (i.e., non-science) basis for the multiverse

July 25, 2018

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From Ethan Siegel at Forbes:

So why do so many theoretical physicists write papers about the multiverse? About parallel Universes and their connection to our own through this multiverse? Why do they claim that the multiverse is connected to the string landscape, the cosmological constant, and even to the fact that our Universe is finely-tuned for life?

Because even though it’s obviously a bad idea, they don’t have any better ones.

…

As I’ve explained before, the Multiverse is not a scientific theory on its own. Rather, it’s a theoretical consequence of the laws of physics as they’re best understood today. It’s perhaps even an inevitable consequence of those laws: if you have an inflationary Universe governed by quantum physics, this is something you’re pretty much bound to wind up with. But — much like String Theory — it has some big problems: it doesn’t predict anything we either have observed and can’t explain without it, and it doesn’t predict anything definitive we can go and look for. More.

If so, cosmology is over. As we noted elsewhere, the multiverse is science’s assisted suicide.

One wonders whether such strikingly honest admissions increased in frequency after Sabine Hossenfelder started telling it like it is in Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

The elegant papers and cool essays on the multiverse are polite social noise humming over a stark fact. The evidence shows that our universe is fine-tuned. Assuming it is not leads us away from the science and many cosmologists will boldly go.

See also: Science writer Ethan Siegel says, the multiverse is not the answer

Sabine Hossenfelder: The multiverse is “a fringe idea”

What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

and

The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

Tags: Ethan Siegel

7 Responses to Startling admission about the science (i.e., non-science) basis for the multiverse

1

Silver AsiaticJuly 25, 2018 at 7:14 am

The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

I think we should say the same about Darwin, but for some reason, it’s legitimate to consider the multiverse a laughable idea, but Darwin remains sacred teaching, which cannot be doubted without the pain of exile and exclusion.

To me it’s the power of Hollywood -shaping the culture. It’s all Inherit the Wind and the fear of ridicule that came from that. Darwinists were persecuted – so they remain the hero/martyrs of truth.

Lawrence Krauss ought to try to get arrested.
2

Truth Will Set You FreeJuly 25, 2018 at 7:38 am

SA @ 1: “Darwin remains sacred teaching, which cannot be doubted without the pain of exile and exclusion.”

This is still largely true, especially in academia, but a revolution is taking place as we speak and it is exposing the Darwinian myth for what it truly is… just another unproven (and unprovable) theory.
3

bornagain77July 25, 2018 at 9:17 am

as to this quote from the article:

“Because even though it’s obviously a bad idea, they don’t have any better ones.”

Since when is God not a ‘better’ idea? Indeed, since when is God not the best idea possible?

I’m sure the Christian founders of modern science found the idea of God a good, even necessary, idea for the founding of modern science:

A Heavyweight Look at the Negative Impact of Modern and Postmodern Philosophies – Casey Luskin April 22, 2014
Excerpt: “Not only divine Scripture, but also sound reason teaches us that we must look with amazement on the machine of the universe produced and created by the hand of the infinite Artist. … Neither art, nor genius, can even imitate a single fibre of the endless tissues that make up each body. The smallest filament, in fact, shows the Finger of God and the Artist’s signature.” (p. 120)
Carl Linneaus, inventor of our modern system of biological classification
(Paul Gosselin, Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West)
Gosselin observes that “we have discovered further levels of complexity that Linneaus, or even Darwin, could not have imagined.” (p. 121) He concludes: “Before the twentieth-century, this symbiotic relationship between science and Christianity was the norm, but since then the Enlightenment and modern propaganda have ‘buried’ it, keeping such facts out of view.” (p. 122) According to Gosselin, this is just another way that modernist philosophy has engaged in a form of intellectual fracking, trying to destroy the theological, philosophical, and other intellectual foundations that built the West.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....84581.html

Christians – Not the Enlightenment – Invented Modern Science – Chuck Colson – Oct. 2016
Excerpt: Rodney Stark’s,,, book, “For the Glory of God,,,,
In Stark’s words, “Christian theology was necessary for the rise of science.” Science only happened in areas whose worldview was shaped by Christianity, that is, Europe. Many civilizations had alchemy; only Europe developed chemistry. Likewise, astrology was practiced everywhere, but only in Europe did it become astronomy.
That’s because Christianity depicted God as a “rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being” who created a universe with a “rational, lawful, stable” structure. These beliefs uniquely led to “faith in the possibility of science.”
So why the Columbus myth? Because, as Stark writes, “the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three centuries, been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack of faith.” Opponents of Christianity have used bogus accounts like the ones I’ve mentioned to not only discredit Christianity, but also position themselves as “liberators” of the human mind and spirit.
Well, it’s up to us to set the record straight, and Stark’s book is a great place to start. And I think it’s time to tell our neighbors that what everyone thinks they know about Christianity and science is just plain wrong.
http://www.cnsnews.com/comment.....rn-science

The Threat to the Scientific Method that Explains the Spate of Fraudulent Science Publications – Calvin Beisner | Jul 23, 2014
Excerpt: It is precisely because modern science has abandoned its foundations in the Biblical worldview (which holds, among other things, that a personal, rational God designed a rational universe to be understood and controlled by rational persons made in His image) and the Biblical ethic (which holds, among other things, that we are obligated to tell the truth even when it inconveniences us) that science is collapsing.
As such diverse historians and philosophers of science as Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Duhem, Loren Eiseley, Rodney Stark, and many others have observed,, science—not an occasional flash of insight here and there, but a systematic, programmatic, ongoing way of studying and controlling the world—arose only once in history, and only in one place: medieval Europe, once known as “Christendom,” where that Biblical worldview reigned supreme. That is no accident. Science could not have arisen without that worldview.
http://townhall.com/columnists...../page/full
Several other resources backing up this claim are available, such as Thomas Woods, Stanley Jaki, David Linberg, Edward Grant, J.L. Heilbron, and Christopher Dawson.
4

Silver AsiaticJuly 25, 2018 at 2:03 pm

TWSYF – true. It’s a quiet revolution but it is definitely having an impact.
5

HeKSJuly 26, 2018 at 1:22 am

bornagain77 @3

as to this quote from the article:

“Because even though it’s obviously a bad idea, they don’t have any better ones.”

Since when is God not a ‘better’ idea? Indeed, since when is God not the best idea possible?

Indeed. I’ve argued the point here that the multiverse is a much worse explanation for the fine-tuning than God. Here’s the last time I remember making the point…

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/heks-is-on-a-roll/#comment-616653
6

bornagain77July 26, 2018 at 5:23 am

HeKS link at 5, that is a nice summary of most of the intractable problems associated with the atheistic conjecture of multiverses and/or parallel universes.

As to the intractable ‘inifinite regress’ problem, I might add that atheists also suffer from what we may call the intractable ‘infinite progress’ problem.

As Paul Steinhardt states in the following article. “The deeper problem is that once inflation starts, it doesn’t end the way these simplistic calculations suggest,” he says. “Instead, due to quantum physics it leads to a multiverse where the universe breaks up into an infinite number of patches. The patches explore all conceivable properties as you go from patch to patch. So that means it doesn’t make any sense to say what inflation predicts, except to say it predicts everything. If it’s physically possible, then it happens in the multiverse someplace”

Cosmic inflation is dead, long live cosmic inflation – 25 September 2014
Excerpt: (Inflation) theory, the most widely held of cosmological ideas about the growth of our universe after the big bang, explains a number of mysteries, including why the universe is surprisingly flat and so smoothly distributed, or homogeneous (i.e. why the universe is ’round’).,,,
Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, who helped develop inflationary theory but is now scathing of it, says this is potentially a blow for the theory, but that it pales in significance with inflation’s other problems.
Meet the multiverse
Steinhardt says the idea that inflationary theory produces any observable predictions at all – even those potentially tested by BICEP2 – is based on a simplification of the theory that simply does not hold true.
“The deeper problem is that once inflation starts, it doesn’t end the way these simplistic calculations suggest,” he says. “Instead, due to quantum physics it leads to a multiverse where the universe breaks up into an infinite number of patches. The patches explore all conceivable properties as you go from patch to patch. So that means it doesn’t make any sense to say what inflation predicts, except to say it predicts everything. If it’s physically possible, then it happens in the multiverse someplace”
Steinhardt says the point of inflation was to explain a remarkably simple universe. “So the last thing in the world you should be doing is introducing a multiverse of possibilities to explain such a simple thing,” he says. “I think it’s telling us in the clearest possible terms that we should be able to understand this and when we understand it it’s going to come in a model that is extremely simple and compelling. And we thought inflation was it – but it isn’t.”
http://www.newscientist.com/ar.....CajrGl0y00

Dr. Gordon has a nice summary here of the self refuting nature of inflationary multiverses,,

A Matter of Considerable Gravity: On the Purported Detection of Gravitational Waves and Cosmic Inflation – Bruce Gordon – April 4, 2014
Excerpt: Thirdly, at least two paradoxes result from the inflationary multiverse proposal that suggest our place in such a multiverse must be very special: the “Boltzmann Brain Paradox” and the “Youngness Paradox.” In brief, if the inflationary mechanism is autonomously operative in a way that generates a multiverse, then with probability indistinguishable from one (i.e., virtual necessity) the typical observer in such a multiverse is an evanescent thermal fluctuation with memories of a past that never existed (a Boltzmann brain) rather than an observer of the sort we take ourselves to be. Alternatively, by a second measure, post-inflationary universes should overwhelmingly have just been formed, which means that our existence in an old universe like our own has a probability that is effectively zero (i.e., it’s nigh impossible). So if our universe existed as part of such a multiverse, it would not be at all typical, but rather infinitely improbable (fine-tuned) with respect to its age and compatibility with stable life-forms.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....84001.html

And as you, HeKS, alluded to in your list with the “Boltzmann Brain” problem, and as Dr. Gordon and Dr. Craig point out in the following articles, “multiplying without limit the opportunities for any event to happen”,,, “produces a situation in which no absurdity is beyond the pale.”

BRUCE GORDON: Hawking irrational arguments – Washington Times – 2010
Excerpt: What is worse, multiplying without limit the opportunities for any event to happen in the context of a multiverse – where it is alleged that anything can spontaneously jump into existence without cause – produces a situation in which no absurdity is beyond the pale.
For instance, we find multiverse cosmologists debating the “Boltzmann Brain” problem: In the most “reasonable” models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science.
http://www.washingtontimes.com.....arguments/

Multiverse and the Design Argument – William Lane Craig
Excerpt: Or again, if our universe is but one member of a multiverse, then we ought to be observing highly extraordinary events, like horses’ popping into and out of existence by random collisions, or perpetual motion machines, since these are vastly more probable than all of nature’s constants and quantities’ falling by chance into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range. Observable universes like those strange worlds are simply much more plenteous in the ensemble of universes than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us if the universe were but a random member of a multiverse of worlds. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. On naturalism, at least, it is therefore highly probable that there is no multiverse. — Penrose puts it bluntly “these world ensemble hypothesis are worse than useless in explaining the anthropic fine-tuning of the universe”.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org.....n-argument

And as the following author commented, given an infinite number of universes being created in (presumably) an infinite amount of time,,, pink unicorns must necessarily exist.

Why Most Atheists Believe in Pink Unicorns – May 2014
Excerpt: Given an infinite amount of time, anything that is logically possible(11) will eventually happen. So, given an infinite number of universes being created in (presumably) an infinite amount of time, you are not only guaranteed to get your universe but every other possible universe. This means that every conceivable universe exists, from ones that consist of nothing but a giant black hole, to ones that are just like ours and where someone just like you is reading a blog post just like this, except it’s titled: “Why most atheists believe in blue unicorns.”
By now I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, but I’ll say it anyway. Since we know that horses are possible, and that pink animals are possible, and that horned animals are possible, then there is no logical reason why pink unicorns are not possible entities. Ergo, if infinite universes exist, then pink unicorns must necessarily exist. For an atheist to appeal to multiverse theory to deny the need of a designer infers that he believes in that theory more than a theistically suggestive single universe. And to believe in the multiverse means that one is saddled with everything that goes with it, like pink unicorns. In fact, they not only believe in pink unicorns, but that someone just like them is riding on one at this very moment, and who believes that elephants, giraffes, and zebra are merely childish fairytales.
Postscript
While it may be amusing to imagine atheists riding pink unicorns, it should be noted that the belief in them does not logically invalidate atheism. There theoretically could be multiple universes and there theoretically could be pink unicorns. However, there is a more substantial problem for the atheist if he wants to believe in them and he wants to remain an atheist. Since, as I said, anything can happen in the realm of infinities, one of those possibilities is the production of a being of vast intelligence and power. Such a being would be as a god to those like us, and could perhaps breach the boundaries of the multiverse to, in fact, be a “god” to this universe. This being might even have the means to create its own universe and embody the very description of the God of Christianity (or any other religion that the atheist otherwise rejects). It seems the atheist, in affirming the multiverse in order to avoid the problem of fine-tuning, finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. The further irony is that somewhere, in the great wide world of infinities, the atheist’s doppelganger is going to war against an army of theists riding on the horns of a great pink beast known to his tribesman as “The Saddlehorn Dilemma.”
https://pspruett.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/why-most-atheists-believe-in-pink-unicorns/

Moreover, besides disintegrating into absurdity, and as was somewhat alluded to in the preceding article, atheists’s postulating a multiverse of possible worlds, to the consternation of atheists, also ends up confirming the ontological argument for the existence of God.

That is to say, the materialistic conjecture of an infinity of other universes to ‘explain away’ the fine tuning of this universe also insures, through the ontological argument, the 100% probability of the existence of God, since the multiverse, by its very nature, concedes the necessary premise of the ontological argument. i.e. The necessary premise that it is logically possible for God to exist is some possible world:

God Is Not Dead Yet – William Lane Craig – Page 4
The ontological argument. Anselm’s famous argument has been reformulated and defended by Alvin Plantinga, Robert Maydole, Brian Leftow, and others. God, Anselm observes, is by definition the greatest being conceivable. If you could conceive of anything greater than God, then that would be God. Thus, God is the greatest conceivable being, a maximally great being. So what would such a being be like? He would be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, and he would exist in every logically possible world. But then we can argue:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
7. Therefore, God exists.

Now it might be a surprise to learn that steps 2–7 of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God’s existence is even possible, then he must exist. So the whole question is: Is God’s existence possible? The atheist has to maintain that it’s impossible that God exists. He has to say that the concept of God is incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor or a round square. But the problem is that the concept of God just doesn’t appear to be incoherent in that way. The idea of a being which is all-powerful, all knowing, and all-good in every possible world seems perfectly coherent. And so long as God’s existence is even possible, it follows that God must exist.
http://www.christianitytoday.c.....ml?start=4

A few more notes:
The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics truly exposes materialism in all its full blown absurdity. i.e. The material particle is given so much unmerited power in the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that every time someone observes a particle, instead of the wave function merely collapsing, the particle instead creates a virtual infinity of parallel universes.

Too many worlds – Philip Ball – Feb. 17, 2015
Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way.
That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe.,,,
http://aeon.co/magazine/scienc.....a-fantasy/

Many worlds is basically saying that, instead of God, the material particle has somehow bestowed within itself the power to create as many universes as it wants or needs to in order to ‘explain away’ the much more parsimonious explanation of wave function collapse.

Atheism and the remarkable faith of the atomist – by Dave Armstrong • May 12, 2016
Excerpt: The atheist places extraordinary faith in matter — arguably far more faith than we place in God, because it is much more difficult to explain everything that “god-matter” does using science alone.
Indeed, this is a faith of a non-rational, almost childlike kind. It is quite ironic, then, to hear the constant charge that we Christians have a blind, “fairy tale,” gullible faith, as opposed to the self-described “rational, intellectual and sophisticated” atheist.
In reality, atheistic belief is [see my explanatory “disclaimer” at the end] a kind of polytheistic idolatry of the crudest, most primitive sort. The ancient Babylonians, Philistines, Aztecs, and other groups believed that their silver amulets and wooden idols could make the sun shine, defeat an enemy or cause crops to flourish. The polytheistic materialist, on the other hand, believes trillions of “atom-gods” and their distant relatives, the “cell-gods,” make everything in the universe occur by their own power, possessed eternally either in full or (who knows how?) in inevitably unfolding potentiality.
One might call this (to coin a phrase) Atomism (“belief that the atom is god”). To the atomist, trillions of omnipotent, omniscient atoms can do absolutely everything that the Christian God can do, and for little or no reason that anyone can understand (i.e., why and how the atom-god came to possess such powers in the first place). The atomist openly and unreservedly worships these trillions of gods, with the most perfect, trusting, non-rational faith. He or she is what sociologists call a “true believer.”
http://www.themichigancatholic.....h-atomist/

One final note:

Multiverse Mania vs Reality – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQJV4fH6kMo
7

ScuzzaManJuly 27, 2018 at 2:27 am

Inflation is itself a fudge factor, designed specifically to defend a favoured theory from the inconvenient attacks of the facts.

Rather than accepting that an inflationary universe obliges us to acknowledge our multiversal dopplers riding on pink unicorns, we might be better served by questioning whether we will cling dogmatically to the fudge factor that is inflation?

There’s nothing wrong with admitting that we don’t know. One of the supreme ironies of the modern science commentators is the stubborn persistence of their pretense of knowledge while endlessly pontificating on the subject of learning. Well, you cannot learn while you think you already know.

So some people with strong cosmology credentials believe that various facts lead us to the Big Bang, but the current state of our knowledge cannot explain why various features of our universe cannot be explained by this theory. Even appear to contradict it.

What’s wrong with simply saying “we don’t know“?

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Startling admission about the science (i.e., non-science) basis for the multiverse

7 Responses to Startling admission about the science (i.e., non-science) basis for the multiverse

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