6 ms·

> This fine-tuned situation suggests that there might be a huge number of universes, all with different doses of vacuum energy, and that we happen to inhabit an

by ythn 9y ago

> This fine-tuned situation suggests that there might be a huge number of universes, all with different doses of vacuum energy, and that we happen to inhabit an extraordinarily low-energy universe because we couldn’t possibly find ourselves anywhere else. At a certain point "God" is going to be a simpler explanation than "infinite universes with infinite cosmological constant variance", etc.

matte_black 9y ago
Or for some, “simulation”.
pdabbadabba 9y ago
Well, this depends on your conception of simplicity. It certainly makes for a shorter explanatory sentence, but at the cost of undermining our ability to truly explain anything at all, since we cannot know whether a given result is due to the laws of nature or is a miracle--or both. And if it's a miracle, we have no reliable access to its reasons for occurring.
- namelost 9y ago
  When physicists (and you guys know who you are!) say things like "the universe arose from an infinite multiverse", they are bullshitting, because structure does not come from "infinity", structure comes from rules (which may generate some structure that is infinite), and if you can't say anything about the rules then the answer is simply "I don't know".
  - pdabbadabba 9y ago
    > structure does not come from "infinity", structure comes from rules I can't say I understand this statement, but I'll venture this friendly amendment: explanations come from rules, or at least a method of description that allows us to say why result A obtained and not result B. (Or maybe an explanation that the process was random, and therefore that this part of the process cannot be explained.) So I think the problem--if there really is one--is with the word "arose" in your sentence, not "infinite." I can see no problem with invoking the infinite in a useful explanation (note that theists do this all the time!), but I can see a problem with having no account of why our universe "arose" and not some other one. Of course, I think that just about every physicist would be happy to admit this! (Those that don't think they have an answer, that is--possibly involving the anthropic principle.) After all, answering questions is their job, so acknowledging an unknown is just the beginning of a research agenda, not an admission of defeat.
bufferoverflow 9y ago
"God" is not an explanation. You're "answering" a mystery with an even bigger mystery. Explaining lightning with Zeus instead of electricity just raises more questions.
- ythn 9y ago
  Neither is "multiverse". That's just as untestable and unverifyable and mysterious as God.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    Sure, but it is provides an explanation that is based on prior scientific work, namely statistics, rather than religion. But yes, your argument is valid: this theory is difficult to test. Many people reject anthropic arguments because they feel that they don't provide any testable answers.
  - bufferoverflow 9y ago
    We don't know if either hypothesis is testable. Multiverse is not as mysterious as "god did it" (a.k.a magic), it's a very specific hypothesis. You can "explain" absolutely anything with god/magic, and many religious people do. Try that with multiverse. It doesn't work.
    - ythn 9y ago
      > Try that with multiverse. It doesn't work. "Life arose because there is an infinite multiverse and we just happened to be in one of the infinite universes where both the cosmological constants that allow life to be possible are the correct values and chemicals randomly combined on the right planet to allow increasingly complex structures to evolve." "The parting of the red sea story happened because there is an infinite multiverse and we just happened to be in the one where atmospheric turbulence whipped up a windstorm sufficiently powerful to move water in the red sea and someone documented it" "Infinite Multiverse" means you can explain away any improbable event with "well, there are infinite universes so the probability actually approaches 1 across all universes"
Terr_ 9y ago
No, "God" will never be "simpler" unless you also redefine the term into something utterly incompatible with most major religions. The instant you drop a god into the mix you're presented with far more questions, and "he works in mysterious ways" is not an answer. ___ Despite it's explicitly Christian focus, I like The Screwtape Letters as a kind of cognitive psychology fable, and this part seems apropos: > I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us [devils], (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]. [...] If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight. ... If you're worshipping a property of physics you're doing it wrong. :)
- ythn 9y ago
  I should rephrase. It's not useful to attribute something to God because then you'll never know how God did it. But maybe instead of approaching every problem with the "how did this happen by chance" angle and answering it with ("infinite possibilities multiplied by infinitesimal probability = 1" i.e. "infinity/infinity = 1") and instead approached it with "how could this have been done intentionally by a sufficiently advanced species" angle, we may make more progress in this and related "mysterious" fields (abiogenesis, for example)
bsder 9y ago
An "explanation" is required to be falsifiable in science. "God" is not falsifiable. This is why so many scientists have heartburn with "anthropic" explanations. They can't be tested.
- notdonspaulding 9y ago
  I tend to think you're right that "God" (in the general sense) is not falsifiable. But, as a Christian, and someone who studies the Bible daily, I can say that at the very least, the God of the Bible is falsifiable. For instance, if you could prove any one of the following statements to be true, the Christian message would fall apart (and indeed, some of these are even called out in the Bible as essential to its message). If you want a roadmap to debate Christians, here you go: - Jesus Christ never existed as a real human being. - Jesus wasn't "sinless" (according to the Biblical definitions of sin). - There exists at least one other person than Jesus who has never sinned. - Jesus wasn't crucified by Roman soldiers at the behest of Jewish religious leaders. - The resurrection of Jesus didn't happen. - Jesus' mother wasn't a virgin. - Jesus never actually claimed to be God. Many falsifiable propositions are made in the Old Testament, too. These may apply to Judaism as well, though I claim no particular expertise in that religion other than where it overlaps Christianity. Proving these propositions false would go a long way to discrediting the God of both the Old and the New Testaments: - The Genesis account of creation. - The Genesis account of a great flood. - The Genesis account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. - That Joseph interpreted a Pharoah's dream and became second-in-command of Egypt. - That Egypt never had a 7-year famine which they survived because of storehouses of grain. - That Egypt never enslaved Israel. - That the plagues mentioned in Exodus never befell the Egyptians (notably the plague of the firstborn). - That Israel didn't walk across the Red Sea. - That the Egyptian army wasn't drowned in the Red Sea in pursuit of Israel. - That Samson never existed. - That Esther never existed. - That Esther wasn't a queen who saved Israel from genocidal annihilation. - That Ruth never existed. - That Jonah never existed. - That Jonah never preached in Nineveh. - That Jonah was never swallowed by a whale/fish. - That Daniel didn't serve in the court of the Babylonian/Medo-Persian empires. - That Daniel didn't accurately predict hundreds of years of political wars and intrigue in the Ancient Near East before it happened [0]. There's lots more than that, of course, but it's a start. In short, Christians believe in taking the Bible at face value. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of claims which the Bible makes which are definitely falsifiable. Claims of particular events happening to particular people living in particular places at particular times. There's nothing stopping you or anyone from falsifying those claims. Not to do your job for you, but consider that there are several ways to do this: - Discredit the Biblical story's internal consistency. - Find contradictory archaeological evidence. - Find contradictory, reputable historical accounts. - Come up with valid textual criticisms. ... and I don't believe that's even an exhaustive list. Good luck and Godspeed! ;-) [0]: https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/869-amazing-prophecy-in-the-book-of-daniel-an https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/869-amazing-prophe...
gort 9y ago
Given how well-suited our universe seems to be for life, I feel like we should admit that one of 2 things is true... (1) There is a God who decides how things are. (2) Many universes exist. Actually I usually feel that the second is simpler than the first, despite my prejudices as a near-Catholic. But I'm increasingly skeptical about efforts to maintain that there's only one, unplanned, universe.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  But our universe isn’t well suited for life, our planet is. So 1) there is a god or 2) many planets exist.
  - gort 9y ago
    "But our universe isn’t well suited for life, our planet is." I suggest that most possible universes would have zero regions containing life.
- lysium 9y ago
  It really looks like some miracle that our universe allows life, but I don't think there is any effort: I can only write this comment because I live in a universe that allows life. It's like marveling about how come that those two (great/ugly/wonderful/annoying/...) people are my parents, given that there are so many people in this world. What are the odds?
  - gort 9y ago
    "I can only write this comment because I live in a universe that allows life." Sure; but my point is, it's really quite unlikely that the one and only unplanned universe would have life, at all. Life then seems like evidence for something... "It's like marveling about how come that those two [...] people are my parents" By contrast, I'm not sure what that would be evidence about.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      There is at least one crackpot theory out there that supposes that life will do something in the future that will influence the properties of the universe earlier in time. The super-civilization that exists in the far-future of the universe--one that is beyond Kardashev Type III--re-engineers the universe to use it for computation, so they can exist inside a simulation (and add cheat codes). In the process, universal constants are tuned for more optimal conditions, and that twiddling ignores time completely. The original version had a lot more religion in it, particularly Christian eschatology. This also leads to the possibility that our universe is actually a simulation running in another universe with different conditions. If you really want to screw up your brain, consider that the universe hosting the simulation of our universe might be the result of a simulation in our universe that hasn't been started yet.
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Assuming you mean God in the Echopraxia "Something that violates/defies current understanding of physics, or the Bolstrom "simulation Hypothesis" I'd accept that position.

by ythn 9y ago

matte_black 9y ago

Or for some, “simulation”.

pdabbadabba 9y ago

Well, this depends on your conception of simplicity. It certainly makes for a shorter explanatory sentence, but at the cost of undermining our ability to truly explain anything at all, since we cannot know whether a given result is due to the laws of nature or is a miracle--or both. And if it's a miracle, we have no reliable access to its reasons for occurring.

namelost 9y ago
When physicists (and you guys know who you are!) say things like "the universe arose from an infinite multiverse", they are bullshitting, because structure does not come from "infinity", structure comes from rules (which may generate some structure that is infinite), and if you can't say anything about the rules then the answer is simply "I don't know".
- pdabbadabba 9y ago
  > structure does not come from "infinity", structure comes from rules I can't say I understand this statement, but I'll venture this friendly amendment: explanations come from rules, or at least a method of description that allows us to say why result A obtained and not result B. (Or maybe an explanation that the process was random, and therefore that this part of the process cannot be explained.) So I think the problem--if there really is one--is with the word "arose" in your sentence, not "infinite." I can see no problem with invoking the infinite in a useful explanation (note that theists do this all the time!), but I can see a problem with having no account of why our universe "arose" and not some other one. Of course, I think that just about every physicist would be happy to admit this! (Those that don't think they have an answer, that is--possibly involving the anthropic principle.) After all, answering questions is their job, so acknowledging an unknown is just the beginning of a research agenda, not an admission of defeat.

bufferoverflow 9y ago

"God" is not an explanation. You're "answering" a mystery with an even bigger mystery. Explaining lightning with Zeus instead of electricity just raises more questions.

ythn 9y ago
Neither is "multiverse". That's just as untestable and unverifyable and mysterious as God.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Sure, but it is provides an explanation that is based on prior scientific work, namely statistics, rather than religion. But yes, your argument is valid: this theory is difficult to test. Many people reject anthropic arguments because they feel that they don't provide any testable answers.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  We don't know if either hypothesis is testable. Multiverse is not as mysterious as "god did it" (a.k.a magic), it's a very specific hypothesis. You can "explain" absolutely anything with god/magic, and many religious people do. Try that with multiverse. It doesn't work.
  - ythn 9y ago
    > Try that with multiverse. It doesn't work. "Life arose because there is an infinite multiverse and we just happened to be in one of the infinite universes where both the cosmological constants that allow life to be possible are the correct values and chemicals randomly combined on the right planet to allow increasingly complex structures to evolve." "The parting of the red sea story happened because there is an infinite multiverse and we just happened to be in the one where atmospheric turbulence whipped up a windstorm sufficiently powerful to move water in the red sea and someone documented it" "Infinite Multiverse" means you can explain away any improbable event with "well, there are infinite universes so the probability actually approaches 1 across all universes"

Terr_ 9y ago

No, "God" will never be "simpler" unless you also redefine the term into something utterly incompatible with most major religions. The instant you drop a god into the mix you're presented with far more questions, and "he works in mysterious ways" is not an answer. ___ Despite it's explicitly Christian focus, I like The Screwtape Letters as a kind of cognitive psychology fable, and this part seems apropos: > I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us [devils], (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]. [...] If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight. ... If you're worshipping a property of physics you're doing it wrong. :)

ythn 9y ago
I should rephrase. It's not useful to attribute something to God because then you'll never know how God did it. But maybe instead of approaching every problem with the "how did this happen by chance" angle and answering it with ("infinite possibilities multiplied by infinitesimal probability = 1" i.e. "infinity/infinity = 1") and instead approached it with "how could this have been done intentionally by a sufficiently advanced species" angle, we may make more progress in this and related "mysterious" fields (abiogenesis, for example)

bsder 9y ago

An "explanation" is required to be falsifiable in science. "God" is not falsifiable. This is why so many scientists have heartburn with "anthropic" explanations. They can't be tested.

notdonspaulding 9y ago
I tend to think you're right that "God" (in the general sense) is not falsifiable. But, as a Christian, and someone who studies the Bible daily, I can say that at the very least, the God of the Bible is falsifiable. For instance, if you could prove any one of the following statements to be true, the Christian message would fall apart (and indeed, some of these are even called out in the Bible as essential to its message). If you want a roadmap to debate Christians, here you go: - Jesus Christ never existed as a real human being. - Jesus wasn't "sinless" (according to the Biblical definitions of sin). - There exists at least one other person than Jesus who has never sinned. - Jesus wasn't crucified by Roman soldiers at the behest of Jewish religious leaders. - The resurrection of Jesus didn't happen. - Jesus' mother wasn't a virgin. - Jesus never actually claimed to be God. Many falsifiable propositions are made in the Old Testament, too. These may apply to Judaism as well, though I claim no particular expertise in that religion other than where it overlaps Christianity. Proving these propositions false would go a long way to discrediting the God of both the Old and the New Testaments: - The Genesis account of creation. - The Genesis account of a great flood. - The Genesis account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. - That Joseph interpreted a Pharoah's dream and became second-in-command of Egypt. - That Egypt never had a 7-year famine which they survived because of storehouses of grain. - That Egypt never enslaved Israel. - That the plagues mentioned in Exodus never befell the Egyptians (notably the plague of the firstborn). - That Israel didn't walk across the Red Sea. - That the Egyptian army wasn't drowned in the Red Sea in pursuit of Israel. - That Samson never existed. - That Esther never existed. - That Esther wasn't a queen who saved Israel from genocidal annihilation. - That Ruth never existed. - That Jonah never existed. - That Jonah never preached in Nineveh. - That Jonah was never swallowed by a whale/fish. - That Daniel didn't serve in the court of the Babylonian/Medo-Persian empires. - That Daniel didn't accurately predict hundreds of years of political wars and intrigue in the Ancient Near East before it happened [0]. There's lots more than that, of course, but it's a start. In short, Christians believe in taking the Bible at face value. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of claims which the Bible makes which are definitely falsifiable. Claims of particular events happening to particular people living in particular places at particular times. There's nothing stopping you or anyone from falsifying those claims. Not to do your job for you, but consider that there are several ways to do this: - Discredit the Biblical story's internal consistency. - Find contradictory archaeological evidence. - Find contradictory, reputable historical accounts. - Come up with valid textual criticisms. ... and I don't believe that's even an exhaustive list. Good luck and Godspeed! ;-) [0]: https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/869-amazing-prophecy-in-the-book-of-daniel-an https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/869-amazing-prophe...

gort 9y ago

Given how well-suited our universe seems to be for life, I feel like we should admit that one of 2 things is true... (1) There is a God who decides how things are. (2) Many universes exist. Actually I usually feel that the second is simpler than the first, despite my prejudices as a near-Catholic. But I'm increasingly skeptical about efforts to maintain that there's only one, unplanned, universe.

ggg9990 9y ago
But our universe isn’t well suited for life, our planet is. So 1) there is a god or 2) many planets exist.
- gort 9y ago
  "But our universe isn’t well suited for life, our planet is." I suggest that most possible universes would have zero regions containing life.
lysium 9y ago
It really looks like some miracle that our universe allows life, but I don't think there is any effort: I can only write this comment because I live in a universe that allows life. It's like marveling about how come that those two (great/ugly/wonderful/annoying/...) people are my parents, given that there are so many people in this world. What are the odds?
- gort 9y ago
  "I can only write this comment because I live in a universe that allows life." Sure; but my point is, it's really quite unlikely that the one and only unplanned universe would have life, at all. Life then seems like evidence for something... "It's like marveling about how come that those two [...] people are my parents" By contrast, I'm not sure what that would be evidence about.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    There is at least one crackpot theory out there that supposes that life will do something in the future that will influence the properties of the universe earlier in time. The super-civilization that exists in the far-future of the universe--one that is beyond Kardashev Type III--re-engineers the universe to use it for computation, so they can exist inside a simulation (and add cheat codes). In the process, universal constants are tuned for more optimal conditions, and that twiddling ignores time completely. The original version had a lot more religion in it, particularly Christian eschatology. This also leads to the possibility that our universe is actually a simulation running in another universe with different conditions. If you really want to screw up your brain, consider that the universe hosting the simulation of our universe might be the result of a simulation in our universe that hasn't been started yet.

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago

Assuming you mean God in the Echopraxia "Something that violates/defies current understanding of physics, or the Bolstrom "simulation Hypothesis" I'd accept that position.