Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
No, you need the speculation, too, and some initial assumptions to wean theories off solipsism. Observation without hypothesis is purposeless. The problem when you take away observation is that scientists are not used to having to rein in their speculation themselves, because reality does it for them.That's because science is practically synonymous with observation.
I suppose I deserve that for putting an opinion in the form of an equationKool Aid - water = Kool Aid
Frankencell that atheist believe existed sounds supernatural to me. If the idea that a mindless universe creating a mind isn't supernatural then I don't know what is.
You may know how this universe behaves (at least in some regard) but you have no evidence of how other universes would.
How does that make the argument for you? So you agree with fine tuning, however, you feel that it is just the way it is because the universe is one of a trillion other universes and we were that lucky to be the one that has these fine tuned constants?
Tweeking didn't happen. It was completely necessary for life to form on earth and for the ability for the universe to expand and not collapse onto itself at the very first moments of its creation. There was a simple beginning that at the very first moments needed the almost exact measurements of over 100 elements to be as we see it today. Tweeking had nothing to do with the creation of the universe. The tweeking was the experimental method to conclude that those measurements were so precise and necessary for our universe to exist with intelligent life to arise.
We also have equally number of natural phenomenon without a natural explanation.
Is it more reasonable to just shrug our shoulders and conclude it is just the way it is,
Loudmouth, what makes you so sure?
However, it is what it is. Evolution is supported by the evidence we discover, but evolution still has unanswered questions.
There are holes in your theory and you allow that to exist with comfort. Why?
Why would it act any different?
What do you mean, constants can change? I've never proposed that they can change.We couldn't be in any of the other universes, so the question is moot. If constants can change as you propose, then EVERY universe is going to have unique features. That doesn't mean that the Universe was fine tuned by a deity to get those features.
So not only do we have a universe that allowed our evolution but a planet that was just right for it as well. Seems more like more than chance to me.Use planets as an analogy. Is it just chance that we do not find ourselves on Mars? No. We can't live on Mars, so there is no reason that we would evolve there. However, the Face on Mars requires an absolutely precisely fine tuned in order for geologic forces to produce that exact geologic feature. The Universe is just as finely tuned for the Face on Mars as it is humans.
What evidence do you base that conclusion on? IF you can't determine that there is fine tuning in our universe how would we assume that any other universe would require what ours does? Which is really immaterial as we do not have evidence for other universes. All that is empirically proven to exist is our own universe, there is no reason to believe that there are others in existence.No matter what universe we look at, the features in that universe will require the same precision for their constants.
How do you know? What would a supernatural explanation look like?And yet not one has a verifiable supernatural explanation.
Not at all. We want to know how God did it. That works for scientific motivation as well as any other.Is it more reasonable to just shurg our shoulders and say, "God did it"
I think that works fine in most cases. However, I don't see any problem looking outside the box and starting with another theory that would include testing the Bible and its claims against the evidence.Or do we do scientific research to find a natural cause?
You do know that men of faith began the current Scientific endeavors correct?Which has been more successful?
That is not what I think. I am backing up my beliefs with tested verifiable evidence.Because of evasive replies like this one. You think that restating your beliefs is somehow evidence. It isn't.
I haven't said that. This is exactly what was said:You are saying that you have answered the question. You are saying that God guided evolution or designed evolution, and yet you can not supply any evidence for this claim outside of just repeating your belief over and over.
Does it cause you discomfort?Who said I allow them to exist with comfort?
There are several organizations that are doing research based on the premise that God created the universe. We will see in time if you will.I am ever curious and very excited to read about research that tries to answer these questions. What I have NEVER seen is anyone doing this research based on their beliefs in deities. Not one.
There are several organizations that are doing research based on the premise that God created the universe. We will see in time if you will.
How are they going about this?
They probably all wore pants as well. Your point?
Either.
While I know you don't care, it is incorrect to categorize ID as a scientific movement at all because it is fundamentally negative. It provides no scientific hypothesis to replace evolution.
Okay, cool, apologies for misunderstanding.
Simple: even if you accept that the constants could be different (which I don't, necessarily), and that there might be a system of physical laws with "nice" constants, why couldn't the inhabitants simply imagine all the other potential universes--including universes like ours, where tiny changes in constants could possibly wipe out their type of life? And why on earth should the universe care what constants we have assigned to it?
But that isn't really meaningful in this kind of discussion. What constitutes "remarkable precision" in a discussion about possible worlds?
And anyway, you are assuming that it is in fact the constant that is the "pure truth" of the universe, but it's just a number in our model. If we split up the number in our model, does the constant change?
Constants are necessarily constant, so we have no evidence that these parameters could be any different.
If we are going to speculate that they could, why must we constrain our speculation to changing constants?
That may or may not be true. My impression was that nobody working on the Higgs boson thought it would solve fine tuning--I think the fact that the Higgs boson falsified a lot of string theoretic assumptions actually has more to do with the fact that much of string theory is precisely an attempt to "undo" what we see as fine-tuning and is therefore very sensitive to changes to the actual model. But of course if the real universe in fact has a perfect mathematical model, there is no reason why that model has to be "robust" to change like a good scientific theory would, since it is universally true and can never be falsified.
I'm not disputing any of this and I've heard all these arguments before. What I think is going on above, and what I think is the only way that anyone can be convinced by a fine-tuning argument, is that scientists are falling in love with their models to the point that they forget that they are not "true" (necessarily, anyway).
And in forgetting that, we have seen the rise of unified theories of everything that interact with "our" universe as little as possible and mostly deal with some unseen and as-yet-unverified realm (one that it is entirely possible we will never be able to verify).
We're talking about universes entirely outside the realm of our experience, unbound (apparently) by the universal laws we have observed elsewhere. As such, it seems to me we can imagine whatever we want. So because this is a metaphysical question, the only studies I could conceivably have to look at are model-theoretic studies. And I'd accept an argument that even those don't tell me anything useful because we don't know if math works "outside our universe." We don't know if that even means anything and most likely we never will.
That is a large part of what string theory, loop quantum gravity, and other such theories are about--making the math pretty. So not only has it been done, it's been done over and over again. There's a large group of people devoted to laying out a theory that says the exact same thing as the "ugly" theory in all cases for which we have evidence, and there's really no reason to believe one is more true than the other (except when an actual observation like the Higgs boson comes around, and--shockingly--validates the standard, evidence based model while invalidating a lot of theories that there was never any reason to prefer in the first place). I have made no secret of the fact that I do not think these people are really engaging in science so I am not surprised to find nonscientific attitudes from them, but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that fine-tuning arguments make no sense.
Like I said, I would certainly accept a model theoretic proof that "almost all" eventually consistent universes don't have life--though I can't imagine how one would even begin proving such a thing, in the absence of some easy to constrain things like cosmological constants--but only as a starting point. We'd still have to contend with various "impossible worlds" where Turing computability was optional, since we have no reason to believe the Church-Turing thesis holds outside our universe and we can certainly conduct thought experiments in which it is violated.
And even then--even after we've covered variation in the universes--we still haven't a shred of evidence that more than one actually exists. That means that we get to play around with theories about how such universes could form (or could fail to form) and a wide variety of possible interactive effects, probability distribution functions, and so on. Our only constraint would be that our universe has to be possible.
Does this sound like fun to you? Or does it seem like a massive waste of time? Thought-provoking and revelatory, or frustratingly stupid and beside the point? Welcome to metaphysics--when you abandon reality, you can say all kinds of wacky things and no one can prove you wrong! This is why I don't understand why religion and science are so often depicted as being at odds--they're both ways of helping us make sense of reality by reducing the possibility space. All things considered, I think religion bears the much heavier load--science just has to deal with our universe, but religion has to deal with nonsense like this!
Only in our universe. Which, for people like you and me, does not immediately imply that there are other universes. But for those who do, it seems to me that it is rather important that they explain (1) why universal laws would be different, anywhere, and (2) why they would only differ in ways that worked to help explain "fine tuning" that is entirely a construct of the model.
In any case--once you start talking about locations that can necessarily not be observed, you can make any predictions you want.
Saying it's "unlikely" is meaningless because it's completely outside the realm of our experience. Again, things like this are warning signs that you have left the confines of scientific inquiry. But notice that I didn't even propose that mathematical laws had to be abandoned, just that they could be immeasurably more complex than our own.
In fact, as we learn more about the universe, our own fundamental laws seem to have grown in complexity, rather than becoming simpler. Since any "true model" of the universe would necessarily already explain all present phenomena, either (1) there is a simpler (easier to calculate) model, but for some reason we haven't found it yet, (2) it's already out there (maybe as a form of string theory), (3) the universe isn't governed by any one mathematical model, or (4) There is a "true" model, and it is at least as complex as quantum mechanics + special relativity. Given that physicists have had no problem assuming unseen entities to make their theories simpler for at probably a good century, I think (1) is probably the least likely, but I can't rule any of them out.
How about the field of drug discovery? In physics we probably wouldn't figure out the most optimal design for a trebuchet by lining up millions of models, testing them one by one, and then retesting again with different groups, but that type of thing is extremely common in biology because even though we know the underlying processes, they can't help us usefully predict organic behavior. This concept is known as the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. To be clear, I'm not anti-math--quite the opposite--but even if you believe, as I do, that it all ultimately does come down to math, that's (1) not provable, and (2) doesn't actually help us in a wide variety of practical problems.
[/QUOTE](continued in next post due to length)
(continued from previous post due to length)
Smolin's model is only persuasive if you accept, as a premise, that his rules for universe formation are valid, which we have no real reason to believe in the absence of evidence.
So Smolin's hypothesis is testable and scientific. In theory. But--and this is where I think a lot of modern theoretical physics gets an undeserved free pass--it isn't meaningfully falsifiable. It has no direct avenue for falsification that I can see. The claimed mechanism, loop quantum gravity, has made no successful predictions that standard theories have not. So why should we believe his calculation? It's probably not necessary to point this out, but a theory being falsifiable and consistent with current data doesn't make it "true," especially when it's far from the only competing theory in this domain.
I see some assertions from him that his theory is falsifiable:
Of course, some scientists disagree:
I suspect that following this debate could be entertaining and I would probably learn quite a bit--like I said, the it's definitely a fun theory--but at the end of the day it doesn't address the question of why universes should vary in only a few fundamental physical constants, which we have never seen varying. It doesn't even address that a little bit. In fact, it assumes it.
So am I disagreeing with his math? No, though I haven't seen it and it might well be off. His technique? Not necessarily--again, I don't know enough about it, and it seems like this is a discussion I'd be arriving at many years late. Either way, it wouldn't fundamentally change the point I was making--fecund universes "solve" a problem that only exists because that is how we have written down the equations. There's no reason to think that the simplest model is the "true" model; that's just a pragmatic tool scientists use to make calculations easier. Making the leap from Occham's razor as a universal tool to The Truth is what gets us in trouble like this in the first place. Occham's razor can both be wrong trivially (causing us to arrive at a model that correctly predicts the data, but is not the "real" model in some metaphysical sense) and result in selection for the incorrect model in situations where we don't have all the evidence. I don't know offhand what the hero-worship of the Razor I sometimes see is called, but the negative outcome there is basically this--very smart people wasting years of their lives wrangling with problems that are meaningless.
Well the only one I am really that familiar with is Behe's research.
Like I said, it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.
And how familiar are you with his research?
It probably should if you're going to support it so.
It might not, but you have no idea.
What do you mean, constants can change? I've never proposed that they can change.
So not only do we have a universe that allowed our evolution but a planet that was just right for it as well. Seems more like more than chance to me.
The premise that the face on Mars requires any fine tuning is not in evidence.
What evidence do you base that conclusion on?
IF you can't determine that there is fine tuning in our universe how would we assume that any other universe would require what ours does?
Which is really immaterial as we do not have evidence for other universes.
Regardless, the calculations that Smolin used were in determining the probability of star formation in our universe.
We don't know that anything of similarity would form in another universe at all.
How do you know? What would a supernatural explanation look like?
Not at all. We want to know how God did it. That works for scientific motivation as well as any other.
You do know that men of faith began the current Scientific endeavors correct?
That is not what I think. I am backing up my beliefs with tested verifiable evidence.
I said:
The reality stays the same, it is within our positions that the reality takes on differences. The reality shows evolution but it does not show an absolute certainty of unaided unguided processes.You ask: Where is the evidence for guided processes?
I answered:I said that you are claiming that the natural processes were all that were needed for life to exist and evolve.
As you can see, I never claimed anything about having evidence of God's aiding or guiding the process. I believe that, however, I have not claimed that I have proof of that.
Does it cause you discomfort?
There are several organizations that are doing research based on the premise that God created the universe.
I don't really think it is all that necessary that ID researchers do research or not.
I do have an idea. We observe that constants are consistent within a universe.
Then no fine tuning is required.
We have billions of planets that are not just right for life. How do you explain that? Going by the vast bulk of the observations, the universe is much more likely to produce planets not meant for life.
The face on Mars requires the same fine tuning as life does.
Basic logic. As you have said, if we have different constants we will have a different universe. Therefore, what makes that universe different is what makes it unique. That uniqueness is dependent on those precise constants.
By your definition of fine tuning, every universe is fine tuned no matter what the constants are because what we find in that universe is dependent on those precise constants.
You need evidence that this is the only universe in order for your probabilities to work.
Which is nothing more than the Sharpshooter fallacy. You are putting the bull's eye around the bullet hole.
Why would that matter? What ever forms in another universe will be unique to that universe.
You are the one who uses supernatural explanations. You show me.
Examples?
And yet they didn't include God in the process, at all. Their beliefs are irrelevant and superfluous to their scientific explanations. Can you name one theory produced by these men of faith that includes the verified actions of a deity? Or are these theories use natural mechanisms?
No, you are restating your beliefs.
Like I said, you have beliefs, not evidence.
As in physical pain? No. Does is pique my curiosity and feed a need to find an answer? Yes. I see ignorance as a chance to learn something new.
What research are they doing? Who are they?
I still don't see the correlation, other than many, if not most, of the people of that time were religious. And they did science. Religion is still religion.My point was that the earliest modern scientific endeavors were from men who did believe that God made a universe that was uniform and mathematical in nature. Science rests on this assumption as well.
Perhaps I got that impression from your skipping of posts and repeated questions.
I'll go out on a limb here and presume that as geneticist working with and discovering disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project he might have access to information that you do not have. You'll have to ask him directly.
Your god-of-the-gaps argument. You said (post#168) "It is a gap in your naturalistic explained universe." and have followed that up with arguments from ignorance, which is consistent with a god-of-the-gaps approach. You came in using that word.
I am not asking for examples.
I am asking for testable criteria. For either, design, or "fine-tuning". Something testable.
See above.Got anything? If not, say so.
Doubt? It is my understanding that to obtain the numbers needed for the math one would need access to a large number of alternate universes. Do you think the authors of that book had access to alternate universes?
I totally agree.I still don't see the correlation, other than many, if not most, of the people of that time were religious. And they did science. Religion is still religion.
My point was that the earliest modern scientific endeavors were from men who did believe that God made a universe that was uniform and mathematical in nature. Science rests on this assumption as well.
Interesting that I left out a quote from a different post? You'll have to explain that one. Did you get the post # incorrect?
In *my* naturalistically explained universe*? I didn't even know I had one.You are the one that is unclear on this. Man describes the force by its effect. It is a gap in your naturalistic explained universe. It makes the naturalistic origin of the universe inconsistent.
Yes, the "gaps".From the onset of the conversation I repeatedly denied that I was using god-of-the gaps. I am trying to show that in each position there are things that are not in evidence.
If your arguments look like god-of-the-gaps, and sound like god-of-the-gaps...The difference comes when the materialist/naturalist/empiricist claim that they only accept empirical evidence for their worldview. I am not filling the gap, I am showing that the gaps are not looked upon by the (m/n/e) as a problem within their own worldview.
What has that to do with the veracity of your claims?They demand it of ours but do not hold themselves to the same rigor in their own.
And it is understood to be metaphysical. So?We can test the universe and from those finding we can determine whether those findings support a purely materialistic explanation. That is why scientists are looking for the mutliverse. They can't explain it happening naturally within this universe. They have to go to the metaphysical to explain it.
I ask yet again, do you have testable criteria, for either design, or for "fine-tuning"?See above.
Really? Do you think the authors of that book might have had access to alternate universes?I believe your wrong but I am researching it more fully.
Actually the scientific assumption is that we expect mindless particles to act in regular and potentially comprehensible ways because we assume no supernatural entity is changing their behavior.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?