More Unsettled Science

Posted on October 20, 2019 by Loquitur Veritatem

Now hear this:

We’re getting something wrong about the universe.

It might be something small: a measurement issue that makes certain stars looks closer or farther away than they are, something astrophysicists could fix with a few tweaks to how they measure distances across space. It might be something big: an error — or series of errors — in cosmology, or our understanding of the universe’s origin and evolution. If that’s the case, our entire history of space and time may be messed up. But whatever the issue is, it’s making key observations of the universe disagree with each other: Measured one way, the universe appears to be expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise….

The two most famous measurements work very differently from one another. The first relies on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang. Cosmologists have built theoretical models of the entire history of the universe on a CMB foundation — models they’re very confident in, and that would require an all-new physics to break. And taken together, Mack said, they produce a reasonably precise number for the Hubble constant, or H0, which governs how fast the universe is currently expanding.

The second measurement uses supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids. By gauging how far those galaxies are from our own, and how fast they’re moving away from us, astronomers have gotten what they believe is a very precise measurement of the Hubble constant. And that method offers a different H0.

It’s possible that the CMB model is just wrong in some way, and that’s leading to some sort of systematic error in how physicists are understanding the universe….

It’s [also] possible … that the supernovas-Cepheid calculation is just wrong. Maybe physicists are measuring distances in our local universe wrong, and that’s leading to a miscalculation. It’s hard to imagine what that miscalculation would be, though…. Lots of astrophysicists have measured local distances from scratch and have come up with similar results. One possibility … is just that we live in a weird chunk of the universe where there are fewer galaxies and less gravity, so our neighborhood is expanding faster than the universe as a whole….

Coming measurements might clarify the contradiction — either explaining it away or heightening it, suggesting a new field of physics is necessary. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to come online in 2020, should find hundreds of millions of supernovas, which should vastly improve the datasets astrophysicists are using to measure distances between galaxies. Eventually, … gravitational wave studies will get good enough to constrain the expansion of the universe as well, which should add another level of precision to cosmology. Down the road, … physicists might even develop instruments sensitive enough to watch objects expand away from one another in real time.

But for the moment cosmologists are still waiting and wondering why their measurements of the universe don’t make sense together.

Here’s a very rough analogy to the problem described above:

A car traveling at a steady speed on a highway passes two markers that are separated by a measured distance (expressed in miles). Dividing the distance between the markers by the time of travel between the markers (expressed in hours) gives the speed of the car in miles per hour.

The speed of the same car is estimated by a carefully calibrated radar gun, one that has been tested on many cars under conditions like those in which it is used on the car in question.

The two methods yield different results. They are so different that there is no overlap between the normal ranges of uncertainty for the two methods.

The problem is really much more complicated than that. In the everyday world of cars traveling on highways, relativistic effects are unimportant and can be ignored. In the universe where objects are moving away from each other at a vastly greater speed — a speed that seems to increase constantly — relativistic effects are crucial. By relativistic effects I mean the interdependence of distance, time, and speed — none of which is an absolute, and all of which depend on each other (maybe).

If the relativistic effects involved in measuring cosmological phenomena are well understood, they shouldn’t account for the disparate estimates of the Hubble constant (H0). This raises a possibility that isn’t mentioned in the article quoted above, namely, that the relativistic effects aren’t well understood or have been misestimated.

There are other possibilities; for example:

The basic cosmological assumption of a Big Bang and spatially uniform expansion is wrong.

The speed of light (and/or other supposed constants) isn’t invariant.

There is an “unknown unknown” that may never be identified, let alone quantified.

Whatever the case, this is a useful reminder that science is never settled.

Fine-Tuning in a Wacky Wrapper

Posted on February 4, 2017 by Loquitur Veritatem

The Unz Review hosts columnists who hold a wide range of views, including whacko-bizarro-conspiracy-theory-nut-job ones. Case in point: Kevin Barrett, who recently posted a review of David Ray Griffin’s God Exists But Gawd Does Not: From Evil to the New Atheism to Fine Tuning. Some things said by Barrett in the course of his review suggest that Griffin, too, holds whacko-bizarro-conspiracy-theory-nut-job views; for example:

In 2004 he published The New Pearl Harbor — which still stands as the single most important work on 9/11 — and followed it up with more than ten books expanding on his analysis of the false flag obscenity that shaped the 21^st century.

Further investigation — a trip to Wikipedia — tells me that Griffin believes there is

a prima facie case for the contention that there must have been complicity from individuals within the United States and joined the 9/11 Truth Movement in calling for an extensive investigation from the United States media, Congress and the 9/11 Commission. At this time, he set about writing his first book on the subject, which he called The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004).

Part One of the book looks at the events of 9/11, discussing each flight in turn and also the behaviour of President George W. Bush and his Secret Service protection. Part Two examines 9/11 in a wider context, in the form of four “disturbing questions.” David Ray Griffin discussed this book and the claims within it in an interview with Nick Welsh, reported under the headline Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts: Theologian Charges White House Complicity in 9/11 Attack….

Griffin’s second book on the subject was a direct critique of the 9/11 Commission Report, called The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions (2005). Griffin’s article The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-page Lie summarizes this book, presenting 115 instances of either omissions or distortions of evidence he claims are in the report, stating that “the entire Report is constructed in support of one big lie: that the official story about 9/11 is true.”

In his next book, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (2006), he summarizes some of what he believes is evidence for government complicity and reflects on its implications for Christians. The Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, publishers of the book, noted that Griffin is a distinguished theologian and praised the book’s religious content, but said, “The board believes the conspiracy theory is spurious and based on questionable research.”

And on and on and on. The moral of which is this: If you have already “know” the “truth,” it’s easy to weave together factual tidbits that seem to corroborate it. It’s an old game that any number of persons can play; for example: Mrs. Lincoln hired John Wilkes Booth to kill Abe; Woodrow Wilson was behind the sinking of the Lusitania, which “forced” him to ask for a declaration of war against Germany; FDR knew about Japan’s plans to bomb Pearl Harbor but did nothing so that he could then have a roundly applauded excuse to ask for a declaration of war on Japan; LBJ ordered the assassination of JFK; etc. Some of those bizarre plots have been “proved” by recourse to factual tidbits. I’ve no doubt that all of them could be “proved” in that way.

If that is so, you may well ask why I am writing about Barrett’s review of Griffin’s book? Because in the midst of Barrett’s off-kilter observations (e.g., “the Nazi holocaust, while terrible, wasn’t as incomparably horrible as it has been made out to be”) there’s a tantalizing passage:

Griffin’s Chapter 14, “Teleological Order,” provides the strongest stand-alone rational-empirical argument for God’s existence, one that should convince any open-minded person who is willing to invest some time in thinking about it and investigating the cited sources. This argument rests on the observation that at least 26 of the fundamental constants discovered by physicists appear to have been “fine tuned” to produce a universe in which complex, intelligent life forms could exist. A very slight variation in any one of these 26 numbers (including the strong force, electromagnetism, gravity, the mass difference between protons and neutrons, and many others) would produce a vastly less complex, rich, interesting universe, and destroy any possibility of complex life forms or intelligent observers. In short, the universe is indeed a miracle, in the sense of something indescribably wonderful and almost infinitely improbable. The claim that it could arise by chance (as opposed to intelligent design) is ludicrous.

Even the most dogmatic atheists who are familiar with the scientific facts admit this. Their only recourse is to embrace the multiple-universes interpretation of quantum physics, claim that there are almost infinitely many actual universes (virtually all of them uninteresting and unfit for life), and assert that we just happen to have gotten unbelievably lucky by finding ourselves in the one-universe-out-of-infinity-minus-one with all of the constants perfectly fine-tuned for our existence. But, they argue, we should not be grateful for this almost unbelievable luck — which is far more improbable than winning hundreds of multi-million-dollar lottery jackpots in a row. For our existence in an amazingly, improbably-wonderful-for-us universe is just a tautology, since we couldn’t possibly be in any of the vast, vast, vast majority of universes that we couldn’t possibly be in.

Griffin gently and persuasively points out that the multiple-universes defense of atheism is riddled with absurdities and inconsistencies. Occam’s razor definitively indicates that by far the best explanation of the facts is that the universe was created not just by an intelligent designer, but by one that must be considered almost supremely intelligent as well as almost supremely creative: a creative intelligence as far beyond Einstein-times-Leonardo-to-the-Nth-power as those great minds were beyond that of a common slug.

Fine-tuning is not a good argument for God’s existence. Here is a good argument for God’s existence:

In the material universe, cause precedes effect.
Accordingly, the material universe cannot be self-made. It must have a “starting point,” but the “starting point” cannot be in or of the material universe.
The existence of the universe therefore implies a separate, uncaused cause.

Barrett (Griffin?) goes on:

Occam’s razor definitively indicates that by far the best explanation of the facts is that the universe was created not just by an intelligent designer, but by one that must be considered almost supremely intelligent as well as almost supremely creative: a creative intelligence as far beyond Einstein-times-Leonardo-to-the-Nth-power as those great minds were beyond that of a common slug.

Whoa! Occam’s razor indicates nothing of the kind:

Occam’s razor is used as a heuristic technique (discovery tool) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models, rather than as an arbiter between published models. In the scientific method, Occam’s razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives, because one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified; therefore, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.

Barrett’s (Griffin’s?) hypothesis about the nature of the supremely intelligent being is unduly complicated. Not that the existence of God is a testable (falsifiable) hypothesis. It’s just a logical necessity, and should be left at that.

Is a Theory of Everything Necessary?

Posted on October 26, 2016 by Loquitur Veritatem

I begin with Wikipedia:

A theory of everything (ToE), final theory, ultimate theory, or master theory is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. Finding a ToE is one of the major unsolved problems in physics. Over the past few centuries, two theoretical frameworks have been developed that, as a whole, most closely resemble a ToE. These two theories upon which all modern physics rests are general relativity (GR) and quantum field theory (QFT).

Michael Brooks, in “Has This Physicist Found the Key to Reality?” (The New Statesman, October 21, 2016), puts it this way:

In relativity, time is a mischievous sprite: there is no such thing as a universe-wide “now”. . .

He continues

. . . and movement through space makes once-reliable measures such as length and time intervals stretch and squeeze like putty in Einstein’s hands. Space and time are no longer the plain stage on which our lives play out: they are curved, with a geometry that depends on the mass and energy in any particular region. Worse, this curvature determines our movements. Falling because of gravity is in fact falling because of curves in space and time. Gravity is not so much a force as a geometric state of the universe.

Moreover:

The other troublesome theory is quantum mechanics [the core of QFT], which describes the subatomic world. It, too, is a century old, and it has proved just as disorienting as relativity. As [Carlo] Rovelli puts it, quantum mechanics “reveals to us that, the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles, it is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting micro-events.”

But . . .

. . . here is the most disturbing point. Both of these theories are right, in the sense that their predictions have been borne out in countless experiments. And both must be wrong, too. We know that because they contradict one another, and because each fails to take the other into account when trying to explain how the universe works.

All of this is well-known and has been for a long time. I repeat it only to set the stage for my amateur view of the problem.

As is my wont, I turn to baseball for a metaphor. A pitcher who throws a fastball relies in part on gravity to make the pitch hard to hit. Whatever else the ball does because of the release velocity, angle of release, and spin imparted to the ball at the point of release, it also drops a bit from its apparent trajectory because of gravity.

What’s going on inside the ball as it makes it way to home plate? Nothing obvious. The rubber-and-cork core (the “pill”) and the various yarns that aare wound around it remain stationary relative to each other, thanks to the tightness of the cover, the tightness of the winding, and the adhesives that are used on the pill and the top layer of wound yarn. (See this video for a complete explanation of how a baseball is manufactured.)

But that’s only part of the story. The cover and the things inside it are composed of molecules, atoms, and various subatomic particles. The subatomic particles, if not the atoms and molecules, are in constant motion throughout the flight of the ball. Yet that motion is so weak that it has no effect on the motion of the ball as it moves toward the plate. (If there’s a physicist in the house, he will correct me if I’m wrong.)

In sum: The trajectory of the baseball (due in part to gravity) is independent of the quantum mechanical effects simultaneously at work inside the baseball. Perhaps the the universe is like that. Perhaps there’s no need for a theory of everything. In fact, such a theory may be a will-o-the-wisp — the unicorn of physics.

The Limits of Science (II)

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

The material of the universe — be it called matter or energy — has three essential properties: essence, emanation, and effect. Essence — what things really “are” — is the most elusive of the properties, and probably unknowable. Emanations are the perceptible aspects of things, such as their detectible motions and electromagnetic properties. Effects are what things “do” to other things, as in the effect that a stream of photons has on paper when the photons are focused through a magnifying glass. (You’ve lived a bland life if you’ve never started a fire that way.)

Science deals in emanations and effects. It seems that these can be described without knowing what matter-energy “really” consists of. But can they?

Take a baseball. Assume, for the sake of argument, that it can’t be opened and separated into constituent parts, which are many. (See the video at this page for details.) Taking the baseball as a fundamental particle, its attributes (seemingly) can be described without knowing what’s inside it. Those attributes include the distance that it will travel when hit by a bat, when the ball and bat (of a certain weight) meet at certain velocities and at certain angles, given the direction and speed of rotation of the ball when it meets the bat, ambient temperature and relative humidity, and so on.

And yet, the baseball can’t be treated as if it were a fundamental particle. The distance that it will travel, everything else being the same, depends on the material at its core, the size of the core, the tightness of the windings of yarn around the core, the types of yarn used in the windings, the tightness of the cover, the flatness of the stitches that hold the cover in place, and probably several other things.

This suggests to me that the emanations and effects of an object depend on its essence — at least in the everyday world of macroscopic objects. If that’s so, why shouldn’t it be the same for the world of objects called sub-atomic particles?

Which leads to some tough questions: Is it really the case that all of the particles now considered elementary are really indivisible? Are there other elementary particles yet to be discovered or hypothesized, and will some of those be constituents of particles now thought to be elementary? And even if all of the truly elementary particles are discovered, won’t scientists still be in the dark as to what those particles really “are”?

The progress of science should be judged by how much scientists know about the universe and its constituents. By that measure — and despite what may seem to be a rapid pace of discovery — it is fair to say that science has a long way to go — probably forever.

Scientists, who tend to be atheists, like to refer to the God of the gaps, a “theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God’s existence.” The smug assumption implicit in the use of the phrase by atheists is that science will close the gaps, and that there will be no room left for God.

It seems to me that the shoe is really on the other foot. Atheistic scientists assume that the gaps in their knowledge are relatively small ones, and that science will fill them. How wrong they are.

* * *

Nothingness

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Loquitur Veritatem

Edward Feser’s post, “Fifty Shades of Nothing,” prompts this one.

Preamble:

Nothing is the alternative to the existence of the universe,* that is, to the existence of something. Something is either caused by a self-existent, uncaused entity (i.e., God), or something simply exists. In the letter case, something must be uncaused and eternal, ruling out the possibility of nothing.

Therefore, given the necessity of God, nothing is possible, though there has been something for at least 14 billion years, according to the Big Bang theory. And there may have been something into the indefinite past, according to cyclic models of cosmology.

This suggests the following questions:

A. Given that nothing is possible, what can be said about it, other than that is the alternative to something?

Consider:

1. Make a fist and then open it. What do you see? “Nothing” is the usual answer if you’re not holding an object in your hand. But the “nothing” that you see is in fact the absence of an object in your hand. (It would be mere pedantry to say that your hand is “holding” a column of air, which is “something,” anyway.) Therefore, you don’t see “nothing”; you see an open hand, which happens not to hold an object. But the open hand is part of something, that is, the universe. If there were nothing, there would be no open hand to begin with. A vacuum in a bottle or in outer space is of the same ilk; it is an apparent emptiness (lack of matter-energy) that is noticed only because there is something, the universe that includes the bottle and the objects that surround and define outer space

2. If you are a philosophical materialist (i.e., disbeliever in supernatural phenomena or divine interventions),** you believe that a person ceases to exist when his brain ceases to function (if not when the person lapses into permanent unconsciousness). From your perspective, the cessation of brain function (or even of consciousness) puts an end to the things that made the person a particular being with a unique set of characteristics: personality, memory, habits, ways of talking, laughing, etc. You might even say that where there was a particular person there is now “nothing.” But that “nothing” is really an absence or negation of the particular person who existed before brain death (or permanent lapse into unconsciousness). It is not the kind of nothing that is understood as an alternative to the existence of the universe; it is the perceived absence of an erstwhile portion of that universe. In fact, by the laws of physics, that erstwhile portion of the universe continues to exist, though not in a form that you would you would call a person. Here again, we have “nothing” (i.e., absence of a person) only because there is something.

Generally:

No more can be said of nothing than that it is the alternative to something (i.e., the universe). Nothing, by definition, has no characteristics. It is neither imaginable nor describable, despite the temptation to think and speak of it as some kind of empty blackness within which nothing exists. The image of an empty blackness is an image of something, not nothing.

B. Can nothing follow something, as death follows life?

Nothing can follow something only if something (i.e., the universe) is annihilated. Annihilation necessarily means the disappearance of all traces of matter and energy and the space that contains their existence. It doesn’t mean the conversion of matter, energy, and space to a mere blankness (black, white, or otherwise).

Annihilation is beyond the ability of humans, and beyond the forces of nature. It is a job for God.

C. Does the fact that there is something rule out the possibility of nothing?

No. See the preamble and the answer to B.

__________
* I use “universe” generally, to include the possibility of a spatial and/or temporal multiverse.

** I am a kind of philosophical materialist, but unlike most materialists I am not an atheist. Specifically, I believe that the universe was created by God. But I also doubt (regretfully) that God plays an active role in the workings of His creation, except to sustain it (as against the possibility of annihilation). As long as the universe is sustained, it (seemingly) operates according to “laws” that are (in theory) discoverable, though the ultimate nature of existence is not discoverable.

Further Thoughts about Metaphysical Cosmology

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

I have stated my metaphysical cosmology:

1. There is necessarily a creator of the universe, which comprises all that exists in “nature.”

2. The creator is not part of nature; that is, he stands apart from his creation and is neither of its substance nor governed by its laws. (I use “he” as a term of convenience, not to suggest that the creator is some kind of human or animate being, as we know such beings.)

3. The creator designed the universe, if not in detail then in its parameters. The parameters are what we know as matter-energy (substance) and its various forms, motions, and combinations (the laws that govern the behavior of matter-energy).

4. The parameters determine everything that is possible in the universe. But they do not necessarily dictate precisely the unfolding of events in the universe. Randomness and free will are evidently part of the creator’s design.

5. The human mind and its ability to “do science” — to comprehend the laws of nature through observation and calculation — are artifacts of the creator’s design.

6. Two things probably cannot be known through science: the creator’s involvement in the unfolding of natural events; the essential character of the substance on which the laws of nature operate.

It follows that science can neither prove nor disprove the preceding statements. If that is so, why can I not say, with equal certainty, that the universe is made of pea soup and supported by undetectable green giants?

There are two answers to that question. The first answer is that my cosmology is based on logical necessity; there is nothing of logic or necessity in the claims about pea soup and undetectable green giants. The second and related answer is that claims about pea soup and green giants — and their ilk — are obviously outlandish. There is an essential difference between (a) positing a creator and making limited but reasonable claims about his role and (b) engaging in obviously outlandish speculation.

What about various mythologies (e.g., Norse and Greek) and creation legends, which nowadays seem outlandish even to persons who believe in a creator? Professional atheists (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss) point to the crudeness of those mythologies and legends as a reason to reject the idea of a creator who set the universe and its laws in motion. (See, for example, “Russell’s Teapot,” discussed here.) But logic is not on the side of the professional atheists. The crudeness of a myth or legend, when viewed through the lens of contemporary knowledge, cannot be taken as evidence against creation. The crudeness of a myth or legend merely reflects the crudeness of the state of knowledge when the myth or legend arose.

My Metaphysical Cosmology

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

This post is a work in progress. It draws on and extends the posts listed at the bottom.

1. There is necessarily a creator of the universe, which comprises all that exists in “nature.”

2. The creator is not part of nature; that is, he stands apart from his creation and is neither of its substance nor governed by its laws. (I use “he” as a term of convenience, not to suggest that the creator is some kind of human or animate being, as we know such beings.)

3. The creator designed the universe, if not in detail then in its parameters. The parameters are what we know as matter-energy (substance) and its various forms, motions, and combinations (the laws that govern the behavior of matter-energy).

4. The parameters determine everything that is possible in the universe. But they do not necessarily dictate precisely the unfolding of events in the universe. Randomness and free will are evidently part of the creator’s design.

5. The human mind and its ability to “do science” — to comprehend the laws of nature through observation and calculation — are artifacts of the creator’s design.

6. Two things probably cannot be known through science: the creator’s involvement in the unfolding of natural events; the essential character of the substance on which the laws of nature operate.

Mysteries: Sacred and Profane

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

A philosopher named Jamie Whyte, about whom I have written before (“Invoking Hitler“), is the author of Bad Thoughts – A Guide to Clear Thinking. According to the publisher, it is a

book for people who like argument. Witty, contentious, and passionate, it exposes the methods with which we avoid reasoned debate…. His writing is both laugh-out-loud funny and a serious comment on the ways in which people with power and influence avoid truth in steering public opinion.

Bad Thoughts is witty — though “laugh-out-loud funny” is a stretch — and, for the most part, correct in its criticisms of the kinds of sloppy logic that are found routinely in politics, journalism, blogdom, and everyday conversation.

But Whyte is not infallible, as I point out in “Invoking Hitler.” This post focuses on another of Whyte’s miscues, which is found under “Mystery” (pp. 23-26). Here are some relevant samples:

…Consider … the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Unity of the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct entities — as suggested by ‘Trinity’. Yet each is God, a sinle entity — as suggested by ‘Unity’. The doctrine is not that each is part of God, in the way that the FM tuner is part of your three-in-one home stereo. Each is wholly God.

And there’s the problem. It takes only the most basic arithmetic to see that three things cannot be one thing. The doctrine of the Unity of the Trinity is inconsistent with the fact that three does not equal one.

Whyte goes on and on, but the quoted material is the essence of his “case” that the Blessed Trinity (Catholic usage) is impossible because it defies mathematical logic. What is worse, to Whyte, is the fact that this bit of illogic is “explained away” (as he would put it) by calling it a “mystery.”

I am surprised that a philosopher cannot accept the idea of “mystery.” Anyone who thinks for more than a few minutes about the nature of the universe, as Whyte must have done, concludes that its essence is beyond human comprehension. And, yet, the universe exists. The universe — a real thing — is, at bottom, a mystery. Somehow, the mysteriousness of the universe does not negate its existence.

And there are scientific mysteries piled on that mysteriousness. Two of those mysteries have a common feature: They posit the simultaneous existence of one thing in more than one form — not unlike the Blessed Trinity:

Wave–particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, this duality addresses the inability of classical concepts like “particle” and “wave” to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects.

* * *

The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. Many-worlds implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an actual “world” (or “universe”).

As Shakespeare puts it (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V), “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Or in your physics.

If Whyte wants to disprove the Blessed Trinity, he must first try to disprove the existence of God — a fool’s errand that I have addressed in other posts; for example:

“A Digression about Probability and Existence”
“More about Probability and Existence”
“Existence and Creation”
“Probability, Existence, and Creation”
“The Atheism of the Gaps”
“Not-So-Random Thoughts (II)” (see the first section, “Atheism,” which inter alia addresses Lawrence M. Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing, which is summarized in this article by Krauss)

More about Probability and Existence

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

In “A Digression about Probability and Existence” I address

the view that there is life as we know it — an outcome with a low, prior probability given the (theoretical) multitude of possible configurations of the universe — only because there are vastly many actual or possible universes with vastly many configurations.

I observe that

[i]n this view, life as we know it is an improbable phenomenon that we are able to witness only because we happen to exist in one of the multitude of possible or actual universes.

I should have pointed out that it is impossible to know whether life as we know it is a low-probability event. Such a conclusion rests on an unsupportable assumption: the existence of a universe which is “fine tuned” to enable life is a low-probability event. And yet, that assumption is the basis for assertions that the existence of our universe — with its life-supporting combination of matter, energy, and physical laws — “proves” that there must be other universes because ours is so unlikely. Such “logic” is an edifice of rank circularity constructed on a foundation of pure supposition.

Such “logic,” moreover, misapplies the concept “probability.” No object or event has a probability (knowable chance of happening) unless it meets the following conditions:

1. The object or event is a member of a collective of observable phenomena, where every member of the collective has common features.

2. The collective is a mass phenomenon or an unlimited sequence of observations, where (a) the relative frequencies of particular attributes within the collective tend to fixed limits and (b) these fixed limits remain the same for reasonably large subsets of the collective. (Adapted from “Summary of the Definition,” on pp. 28-9 in Chapter 1, “The Definition of Probability,” of Richard von Mises’s Probability, Statistics and Truth, 1957 Dover edition.)

Mises, obviously, was a “frequentist,” and his view of probability is known as “frequentism.” Despite the criticisms of frequentism (follow the preceding link), it offers the only rigorous view of probability. Nor does it insist (as suggested at the link) that a probability is a precisely knowable or fixed value. But it is a quantifiable value, based on observations of actual objects or events.

Other approaches to probability are vague and subjective. There are, for example, degrees of belief (probabilistic logic), statements of propensity (probabilistic propensity), and “priors” (Bayesian probability). Unlike frequentism, these appeal to speculation, impressions, and preconceptions. Reliance on such notions of probability as evidence of the actual likelihood of an event is the quintessence of circularity.

In summary, there is no sound basis in logic or empirical science for the assertion that the universe we know is a highly improbable one and, therefore must be one of vastly many universes — if it was not the conscious creation of an exogenous force or being (i.e., God). The universe we know simply “is” — and that is all we know or probably can know, as a matter of science.

The Improbability of Us

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Loquitur Veritatem

An argument often used against the belief in a Creator who designed the universe runs like this:

The existence of humans is indeed improbable. The laws of nature that govern our existence are but one set out of infinitely many possible sets of laws of nature. Ad had they differed only slightly the universe would be a mere swirl of subatomic particles, free from medium-sized objects like rocks, trees and humans. And even given the actual laws of nature, evolutionary history would have taken different twists and turns and failed to deliver human beings. (Jamie Whyte, Bad Thoughts – A Guide to Clear Thinking, p. 125)

Embedded in that seemingly reasonable statement is an unwarranted — but critical — assumption: that there are infinitely many (or even a large number) of possible sets of laws of nature. But there is no way of knowing such a thing. There is only one observable universe, and one set of observable and (mostly*) consistent laws of nature within it. It is impossible for the human mind to conjure an alternative set of consistent natural laws that could, in fact, coexist in a possible universe. Any such conjuring would be mere speculation, not a falsifiable hypothesis.

Given that, it is impossible to deny that a grand design lies behind the universe. But it is also impossible to prove, by the methods of science, the existence of a grand design. The fact of the universe’s existence is, as I have called it, the greatest mystery.

Related posts:
Atheism, Religion, and Science
The Limits of Science
Three Perspectives on Life: A Parable
Beware of Irrational Atheism
The Creation Model
The Thing about Science
Evolution and Religion
Words of Caution for Scientific Dogmatists
Science, Evolution, Religion, and Liberty
The Legality of Teaching Intelligent Design
Science, Logic, and God
Capitalism, Liberty, and Christianity
Is “Nothing” Possible?
A Dissonant Vision
Debunking “Scientific Objectivity”
Science’s Anti-Scientific Bent
Science, Axioms, and Economics
The Big Bang and Atheism
The Universe . . . Four Possibilities
Einstein, Science, and God
Atheism, Religion, and Science Redux
Pascal’s Wager, Morality, and the State
Evolution as God?
The Greatest Mystery
What Is Truth?
__________
* The exception is quantum mechanics, the science of the sub-atomic world. Sub-atomic particles do not seem to behave according to the same physical laws that describe the actions of the visible universe; their behavior is discontinuous (“jumpy”) and described probabilistically, not by the kinds of continuous (“smooth”) mathematical formulae that apply to the macroscopic world.

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Tag Archives: universe

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Is a Theory of Everything Necessary?

The Limits of Science (II)

Nothingness

Further Thoughts about Metaphysical Cosmology

My Metaphysical Cosmology

Mysteries: Sacred and Profane

More about Probability and Existence

The Improbability of Us

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