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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
 Posted - 03/30/2007 : 14:09:44
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This interview was brought up at the Church of Reality discussion forum.
It just seems like a lot of gobbledygook to me. Most of you here are smarter than me in most things and I figgered someone more articulate than me could say more than it's just a bunch of gobbledygook.
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0703/frontpage/godtheory
quote:
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TIKKUN: What is the central theory of your book, The God Theory?
BERNARD HAISCH: You can be a science-oriented person, perfectly comfortable with the Big Bang origin of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, a 4.6 billion year old earth, Darwinian evolution, and still believe that there is room for a God behind it all, and that there is no contradiction. Once you go past the Big Bang and ask yourself what might be the ultimate origin of things, you have a choice. You can choose to assume that there pre-exists quantum fields or inflation fields or quantum fluctuations, and out of those the universe was born. But then there has to pre-exist some form of law or tendency, because if nothing at all existed, nothing at all would happen. So you still have to assume there is something there, some sort of laws of nature pre-exist. Well, then you ask, where did those come from? Or, you can assume that behind it all there is intelligence. That intelligence could be assumed to have a purpose in doing this.
In the last twenty years there have been a number of discoveries about the fundamental properties of the universe. If some of these fundamental constants had been much different, we wouldn't be here.
First there is the ratio of gravitational to electrical force. If that ratio were much different, there wouldn't be planets and stars that were the right size to have evolved on the same kind of timescale to produce a favorable environment for life.
Then we have the strength of nuclear force. If the nuclear force were maybe 10 percent stronger than what it is, all of the hydrogen at the beginning of the universe would have been used up in the heavy elements and you wouldn't have the basic ingredients of stars anymore. If the nuclear force were much weaker, you wouldn't have thermonuclear reactions in stars because you wouldn't be able to have the chain that powers hydrogen into helium, which is what powers stars; therefore, we wouldn't have planets, and we wouldn't have life.
There's the strength of the dark energy that is accelerating the universe. It was only discovered in 1998 that the universe is actually accelerating. Now if that dark energy, whatever it is, were twice as strong or ten times as strong as it is, the universe would be blowing apart, and, again, we wouldn't have the conditions necessary for life. Similarly, if the amount of dark matter were much greater than it is, you wouldn't get a compact universe that would evolve through its lifetime in thousands or millions of years.
There's the cosmic microwave background. A few weeks ago a Nobel Prize was given to scientists who measured this in detail fifteen years ago. They found tiny fluctuations from point to point in the sky, which could be traced back to the beginning of the universe. If these fluctuations were much greater, you would probably have regions of density in the universe where you would have black holes instead of galaxies. So, again, the amount of dark matter has to be within a certain range, and, more importantly, if you run this back in time, how critically this has to be a certain value gets much, much more tightly constrained by about a factor of a billion times a million.
Then, there are a couple of peculiarities about some chemical elements. Life is composed of carbon primarily. Carbon is manufactured in the cores of very hot stars and what you end up with is a reaction that leads to helium, and then a reaction that leads to beryllium formation, and helium plus beryllium combine to form carbon and sta
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I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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R.Wreck
SFN Regular
USA
1191 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2007 : 14:40:58 [Permalink]
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quote:
I'm just pointing out that there are two equally likely possibilities at this point in time.
I'd like to know how he calculated that there are only two possibiities and that they are both equally likely. Sounds to me like he's talking out of his ass. |
The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibliities of knowledge.
T. H. Huxley
The Cattle Prod of Enlightened Compassion
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2007 : 14:50:20 [Permalink]
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After attending a Creationist ID conference, Jason Rosenhouse addresses the fine tuning argument which was presented there.
quote:
Things got off to a bad start. The portion of the video being shown was discussing the various physical parameters that have to be just right for intelligent life to be possible on Earth. We have to be orbiting a star with the correct physical properties (not too hot, not too cold), we have to have a moon of the right size to stabilize our orbit, and on and on. At this point an equation appeared on the screen. On the left hand side of the equation was the probability of the Earth having all the correct physical properties. On the right-hand side was a list of thirteen symbols, each one apparently representing the probability of some specific physical parameter being precisely what it needed to be. I say apparently because the clip never identified what the symbols meant.
Someone identiifed as a physicist came on the screen and informed us that if we now conservatively estimate each of the terms on the right-hand side to have a value of 1/10, and then multiply them all together to get the probability of all of the necessary events occurring at once, then we very quickly get a vanishingly small probability.
I was somewhat distressed to find that the people sitting near me were murmuring with approval. Personally, I was gagging. This childish argument is wrong for three obvious reasons:
First, they had no basis for their assertion that a value of 1/10 represented a conservative estimate of the probabilities in question. That was simply a made-up number. Frankly, it is not even clear what it means to talk about the probability of the universe having a certain property. Probabilities are things that typically apply to outcomes of repeatable experiments. Is the idea that if we replayed the Big Bang over and over again, the universe would show the relevant properties one time out of every ten? I can't imagine how the folks in the video defend any of their probability assertions.
Second, the business about multiplying probabilities of individual events to obtain the probability of all the events happening simultaneously only applies to independent events. If the events are not independent, then it is simply incorrect to evaluate their joint probability in this way. Suffice it to say that the question of independence was not addressed in the video clip. (Richards casually asserted later in his talk that the events were independent, but provided absolutely no justification for this).
Let us suppose that it really is very improbable to have all the necessary physcial characteristics on one planet. What would that prove? Only that something very improbable had occurred. So what?
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
| Edited by - H. Humbert on 03/30/2007 14:50:43 |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2007 : 15:01:37 [Permalink]
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Gorgo, it all seems to me to boil down to, "Since I don't understand it, God did it." But it's stated in much more intellectual and intentionally baffling terms.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/30/2007 15:02:50 |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 03:43:15 [Permalink]
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| Great. Thanks. |
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9687 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 14:56:36 [Permalink]
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Basically, he sums up the Weak Anthropic Principle, and attributes the initial cause to God instead of chance.
He also throws in half a piece of Pascal's Wager.
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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Vegeta
Skeptic Friend
United Kingdom
238 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 15:46:11 [Permalink]
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| and there's a fair slice of "the universe was designed perfectly for us", rather than "we obviously wouldn't be here if our environment didn't suit us...or we would be something else" |
What are you looking at? Haven't you ever seen a pink shirt before?
"I was asked if I would do a similar sketch but focusing on the shortcomings of Islam rather than Christianity. I said, 'No, no I wouldn't. I may be an atheist but I'm not stupid.'" - Steward Lee |
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furshur
SFN Regular
USA
1536 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 18:33:53 [Permalink]
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All of the constants are just right for life to exist - in this universe. My guess is that in the vast majority of the universes the constants are not right and life does not exist in them. So the probability calculation the physicist did is simply an estimated number of universes.
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If I knew then what I know now then I would know more now than I know. |
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Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 23:33:01 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by H. Humbert
After attending a Creationist ID conference, Jason Rosenhouse addresses the fine tuning argument which was presented there.
quote:
Things got off to a bad start. The portion of the video being shown was discussing the various physical parameters that have to be just right for intelligent life to be possible on Earth. We have to be orbiting a star with the correct physical properties (not too hot, not too cold), we have to have a moon of the right size to stabilize our orbit, and on and on. At this point an equation appeared on the screen. On the left hand side of the equation was the probability of the Earth having all the correct physical properties. On the right-hand side was a list of thirteen symbols, each one apparently representing the probability of some specific physical parameter being precisely what it needed to be. I say apparently because the clip never identified what the symbols meant.
Someone identiifed as a physicist came on the screen and informed us that if we now conservatively estimate each of the terms on the right-hand side to have a value of 1/10, and then multiply them all together to get the probability of all of the necessary events occurring at once, then we very quickly get a vanishingly small probability.
I was somewhat distressed to find that the people sitting near me were murmuring with approval. Personally, I was gagging. This childish argument is wrong for three obvious reasons:
First, they had no basis for their assertion that a value of 1/10 represented a conservative estimate of the probabilities in question. That was simply a made-up number. Frankly, it is not even clear what it means to talk about the probability of the universe having a certain property. Probabilities are things that typically apply to outcomes of repeatable experiments. Is the idea that if we replayed the Big Bang over and over again, the universe would show the relevant properties one time out of every ten? I can't imagine how the folks in the video defend any of their probability assertions.
Second, the business about multiplying probabilities of individual events to obtain the probability of all the events happening simultaneously only applies to independent events. If the events are not independent, then it is simply incorrect to evaluate their joint probability in this way. Suffice it to say that the question of independence was not addressed in the video clip. (Richards casually asserted later in his talk that the events were independent, but provided absolutely no justification for this).
Let us suppose that it really is very improbable to have all the necessary physcial characteristics on one planet. What would that prove? Only that something very improbable had occurred. So what?
Of course what this argument does is ignore the numerator in the fraction. The odds of earth having the conditions for a life are one in a gazillion but if there are 1000 gazillion stars in the universe then there will be about 1000 planets capable of supportine our kind of life.
I liked this one (from a religous studies professor)
quote:
This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.
It is good thing for these ID clowns that they live in society with mechanized transport - if they had to rely on draft animals they wouldn't get anywhere because they always put the cart ahead of the horse.
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"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
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God Theory
