Templeton: Write about harmonies between science and religion, $10,000

As to:

Over the next few years, as you see things like this make it into the media, realize that this is not evidence of an intellectual trend, but a reflection of Templeton money and their agenda.

It is interesting that Woit continually bashes both the multiverse and God. Yet, due to fine-tuning, "If You Don’t Want God, You Better Have a Multiverse"!

God vs the multiverse: The 2500-year war - 15 December 2015 Excerpt: On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? “If there is only one universe,” cosmologist Bernard Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830520-800-god-vs-the-multiverse-the-2500-year-war/

Woit refuses to pick either of those options and thus leaves the 'big question' of the universe's origin and fine-tuning completely unanswered. I suspect that Woit imagines a better alternative than those two will turn up someday. If that is the case, IMHO, then Woit will die waiting for some other better option to magically appear out of thin air. As well, Woit defines something as being scientific if it is testable. In fact, that is his main gripe against 'multiverse mania', as he puts it, and I would suppose that is also his main gripe against God, (although I don't know for sure exactly what his beef with God is). Yet, the presupposition that the universe should be testable in the first place is a belief that was born out of Christian presuppositions. And 'testability' continues to be a belief that can only be firmly, and reasonably, grounded within the Theistic, even Christian, worldview. Here is a fairly detailed analysis of exactly why science, i.e. of why 'testability' itself, can only be reasonably grounded within Theism:

Induction is dependent on Theistic premises about unchanging universal constants - Why Atheism Cannot Account for Science | James N. Anderson, PhD – video (conclusion at 17:40 minute mark) https://youtu.be/8FvwDdRH9pM?t=1060

My main gripe with Woit's criticisms against the multiverse and against God is that it is easy to sit back on the sideline and take potshots at whatever you don't like about science, but until Dr. Woit gets in the game, and gets his hands dirty as it were, and tries to honestly answer these 'big questions' for himself, then he will forever be an armchair quarterback with no real answers for the big questions that are currently staring us in the face in science. Not that Woit cares one iota what I may think, but since he is a mathematician, I would suggest that he start with the 'big question' of exactly where did his bread and butter, i.e. where did mathematics itself, come from? Now that would be something worth pondering for him!

Cantor, Gödel, & Turing: Incompleteness of Mathematics - video (excerpted from BBC's 'Dangerous Knowledge' documentary) https://youtu.be/n1jTjXIbud8 Dangerous Knowledge http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dangerous-knowledge/ "Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine." - Kurt Gödel As quoted in Topoi : The Categorial Analysis of Logic (1979) by Robert Goldblatt, p. 13 "In an elegant mathematical proof, introduced to the world by the great mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann in September 1930, Gödel demonstrated that mathematics was intrinsically incomplete. Gödel was reportedly concerned that he might have inadvertently proved the existence of God, a faux pas in his Viennese and Princeton circle. It was one of the famously paranoid Gödel's more reasonable fears." George Gilder, in Knowledge and Power : The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World (2013), Ch. 10: Romer's Recipes and Their Limits BRUCE GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – October 2010 Excerpt: ,,,The physical universe is causally incomplete and therefore neither self-originating nor self-sustaining. The world of space, time, matter and energy is dependent on a reality that transcends space, time, matter and energy. This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world,,, Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency – a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them. This is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Anything else invokes random miracles as an explanatory principle and spells the end of scientific rationality.,,, 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. Universes do not “spontaneously create” on the basis of abstract mathematical descriptions, nor does the fantasy of a limitless multiverse trump the explanatory power of transcendent intelligent design. What Mr. Hawking’s contrary assertions show is that mathematical savants can sometimes be metaphysical simpletons. Caveat emptor. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/

Verse and Music:

1 Thessalonians 5:21 but test everything; hold fast what is good. Sarah McLachlan - ANSWER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6pQcpFnXOI

bornagain77

If you tried to show that the universe shows evidence of design, chances are, you’d get nowhere. These people a interested in the warm, the fuzzy, the deniable.)

Original sentence: These people a interested in the warm, the fuzzy, the deniable.) convert 'a' to 'are' where's the opening '(' for the trailing ')'? maybe remove ')'? Edited sentence: These people are interested in the warm, the fuzzy, the deniable. Dionisio