Pick a universe, any universe...
James Garner, (Bret Maverick)Jack Kelly
(Bart Maverick) tv shoiw "Maverick"
58-62. They gamble.
The Multiverse argument (MV or MVA) is an answer to the Christian apologetic argument called"fine tuning" (FT or FTA); I also refer to FT as anthroipic coincidences. Anytime atheists argue about scientific things with Christians they charge "you don't understand it because you don't agree." I illustrate my understanding of the multiverse argument with the following analogy. The conventional deck of playing cards consists of 52 cards. There is a finite number of cards so it is possible to get the combination called "royal flush" at some point although it is rare because there are 52 different possible cards but the total combinations are limited. Now that means getting 10 Royal flushes in a row is so totally unlikely it almost seems impossible.It's not impossible but extremely unlikely (understated). But suppose we have an infinite number of cards (each card being a chance)? Given an infinite number of chances it is certain one will eventually get 10 royal flushes in a row, although it might take a million years, but hey in evolution we have lots of time.
We are talking about evolution because the analogy above is really about fine tuning of the anthropic coincidences that make a life-bearing universe possible (10 royal flushes in a row because hitting all the target levels for coincidences is so rare). The fine tuning (FT) argument says life is so extremely rare it;s a good indication the game is fixed,that we need God to account for it. The multiverse argent (MV) says ah but if we have infinite chances (infinite cards) it is certain we will eventually get a life-bearing universe,so the overwhelming odds are not so great when we consider the MV because that infinite chances at for a life-bearing Universe. The important point here is that those who make this argument want to assert that it is the mere possibility (and the certainty that extends from the possibility) that kills the FTA). Proving there is a MV is irrelevant because it;s possible there is one so the FT doesn't prove God. Because it is possible the universe might be just the natural consequence of infuriate chances. In atheist reasoning that possibility might as well be a certainty. All they need is an excuse not to believe and this is one.
There are two problems with this kind of thinking. First. it is subsumed in the standard assumption. That is we know up front there is a possibility that the coincidences could be natural,that the target levels are hit just amazingly amazingly amazing convinces, That's assumed in the argument. The argument doesn't claim to prove God absolutely. It was originally proposed as a tie breaker. It has been used mostly as a probabilistic argumemt. Of course, my standard assumption in making any God argument is that we don't have to prove the existence of God but merely indicate a good reason to believe in God. Of course it's possible that the anthropic coincidences could merely be amazingly huge coincidences, But there may good reasons not to assume that. This leads us to the second problem with the MVA: Secondly, it assumes absolute proof of God. Of course atheists will always deny that they demand absolute proof and they will continue asserting that all the while demanding more and more proof until it becomes absolute. My arguments all assume we can't prove God. Proof is for mathematics or empirical evidence. God is a reality not mathematics,, God is not given in sense data so there can be no scientific evidence to prove or disprove God. Scientific evidence is largely irrelevant to the existence of God. It does give us some hints as with FT. There are good reasons to reject the idea that a possibility negates FTA.
Here are my 10 reasons MVA is not an automatic take down for FTA
The argument is that none of these forces and examples really prove design because given infinite chances there will eventually be a universe that gets it right, we just happen to be it. Now scientists theorize that there are billions or even an infinite set of alternate universes arising all the time. That gives us the infinite chance
I. Have to know hit rate for life bearing universes
Unless we know the rate at which life bearing is produced, just having a bunch of universes proves nothing.
This applies both to parallel universes and to planets of our own universe. The new research puts the estimate at 22% of stars that have earth=like planets. [1] That certainly seems like a disproof of the FTA since it makes life-bearing planets common. The problem is as has been hinted at we can't say these are life bearing. Earth-like just means size and temperature...size can very and fool us temperature is very important to know too.
The temperature of the planet is important, of course, and depends on how much light the planets gets from its star. As a range, they looked for planets that received no more than four times the light the Earth receives from the Sun, and no less than 0.25 times as much. That should bracket the warm and cool edges of the “habitable zone”, where water can exist. This range may in fact be much broader; a planet can be much farther from its star and still have liquid water (see Enceladus as an example), but they wanted to be conservative.[2]Dr. Batalha said, “We don’t yet have any planet candidates that are exact analogues of the Earth in terms of size, orbit or star type.”[3]
II.We can never know if other universes exist or not.
One might be tempted to think that doesn't matter because the statistics indicate there must be lots of life bearing planets out there. Yet the important point is the atheists are the one's saying don't believe without empirical proof. They will challenge the believer to show "just one" fact supporting God. Yet they believe this with no empirical proof!
"yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became...even infinity old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them." (astronomy café) [4]
Robert Koon's, philosopher Univ. Texas said,"Note how the situation has changed. Originally, atheists prided themselves on being no-nonsense empiricists, who limited their beliefs to what could be seen and measured. Now, we find ourselves in a situation in which the only alternative to belief in God is belief in an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes! You've come along way, baby!
III. Multiverse Requires Fine Tuning
Futhermore, the best mechanism for multiverses that last, actually requires fine-tuning itself. The chaotic inflationary model - which seeks to avoid fine-tuning by positing that the initial conditions vary at random over the superspace of the Higgs fields - also fine-tunes its parameters, as Earman has pointed out: "The inflationary model can succeed only by fine-tuning its parameters, and even then, relative to some natural measures on initial conditions, it may also have to fine-tune its initial conditions for inflation to work."[5]
co-author in inflationary theoryPhysicist Paul Steinhardt agrees:
“The whole point of inflation was to get rid of fine-tuning – to explain features of the original big bang model that must be fine-tuned to match observations. The fact that we had to introduce one fine-tuning to remove another was worrisome. This problem has never been resolved."[see fn for more][6]It is true they were not talking about answering the FTA for God but using FT of a sort in builig inflationary theory. But the application it has here is that the theory of MV requires inflation, and if that theory itself requires fine tuning they can hardly balk at the concept of fine tuning. But they have no mechanism to tune things. This puts inflationary theory in question and thus MV.
IV. Multivrese is Inverse of Gambler's fallacy
The whole issue of the objection to the multiverse is nothing but an inverse of the gambler's fallacy: " Some people think that if you roll the dice repeatedly and don't get double sixes, then you are more likely to get double sixes on the next roll. They are victims of the notorious gambler's fallacy. In a 1987 article in Mind, the philosopher Ian Hacking sees a kindred bit of illogic behind the Many Universes Hypothesis. Suppose you enter a room and see a guy roll a pair of dice. They come up double sixes. You think, "Aha, that is very unlikely on a single roll, so he must have rolled the dice many times before I walked into the room." You have committed what Hacking labels the inverse gambler's fallacy."[7]
V. Incredulous logic of Multiverse begs question
Plantinga puts it as follows: "Well, perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? "Waal, shore, Tex, I know it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet yore yap, ya dumb galoot."[8]
VI. Violation of Occam's Razor
The multiverse is a desperate catch-all explanation that could explain away any evidence for anything by simply inflating the probabilistic resources to infinity, and it is also the most flagrant violation of Occam's razor ever. Occam really said "do not multiply entities beyond necessity," yet the Multiversers are doing just that merely for the purpose of answering this argument.
I wrote a whole blog piece on this one, Metacrock's Blog: Occam's Razor shaves multi-verse.[9]
:what this really means is that FT should have presumption as long as no empirical evidence for MV.
The multiverse is a desperate catch-all explanation that could explain away any evidence for anything by simply inflating the probabilistic resources to infinity, and it is also the most flagrant violation of Occam's razor ever. Occam really said "do not multiply entities beyond necessity," yet the Multiversers are doing just that merely for the purpose of answering this argument.
I wrote a whole blog piece on this one, Metacrock's Blog: Occam's Razor shaves multi-verse.[9]
:what this really means is that FT should have presumption as long as no empirical evidence for MV.
VII. Multiverse is Arbitrary necessity
See argument one. Arbitrary necessities are illogical. That is one a contingency is put over as a necessity. That is what is being done with the multiverse, they are pretending that this whole mutliverse needs no explanation, it's just bound to happen, it's necessary. But it's really just magnifying a string of endless contingencies into a giant arbitrary necessity.
This argument can't disprove the multiverse because there are reasons to consider it, but it does there's a good reason to disbelieve it as long as there's no empirical evidence for it.
As philosopher of science Quentin R. Smith admits, "A disadvantage of . . . theories that postulate a background space from which the universe fluctuates, is that they explain the existence of the universe but only at the price of introducing another unexplained given, viz., the background space"[10]
VIII. Rules Change
The basic idea is that inflationary theory (the mechanism to explain MV under current conditions necessitates alternate universes with different rules, rules we can't know. If we can't know the rules we can't make predictions, we can't explain things. Science loses explanatory power, which necessitated the assumption of uniform rules.This is coming from the guy who helped invent the theory. The principle that makes life bearing universe a certainty makes rules change a certainty:all logically possible options come to fruition given infinite chances,
IX Inflationary Model Not Parsimonious, not simple, explanatory or predictive.
Steinhardt:
X. Multiverse proves existence of God!
At this point we can bring in Platinga's Possible words argument. Is it possible that in one of those other universes there would be a God like the one Anselm speaks of? The answer as to be "yes." If not the atheist must show why not. After all they want to push the dictum that the mutliverses must exist because there are infinite chances for them to exist and it's Soooooo illogical to think that they would not. But the same logic applies, there must be a God in one of those infinite universes. And yet it is absurd to think that a necessary being would be limited to just one reality. God has to be God in all reality.
Concluson: All Design arguments are like the glass of water half empty or half full. The believer thinks he/she sees it half full, the skeptic sees it half empty. But the anthropic argument is different, it offers a comparison between designed and undersigned features because we can understand the range of probabilities which might have been to form a non-life bearing universe. We know that the universe did not have to be as it is, and we know that it is extremely improbable. While this may not be absolute proof, it is good probabilistic proof.
Fine Tuning Part 3 Earth-like Planets
Sources
[1] Dennis Overbye, "Far Off Planets Like Earth Dot the Galaxy," space and Cosmos, NY Times. Nov 4, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html?_r=0
[2] Phil Plait "The sky may be filled with Earth like Planets,"Slate, nov 4 2013 on line copy:http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/11/04/earth_like_exoplanets_planets_like_ours_may_be_very_common.html
See argument one. Arbitrary necessities are illogical. That is one a contingency is put over as a necessity. That is what is being done with the multiverse, they are pretending that this whole mutliverse needs no explanation, it's just bound to happen, it's necessary. But it's really just magnifying a string of endless contingencies into a giant arbitrary necessity.
This argument can't disprove the multiverse because there are reasons to consider it, but it does there's a good reason to disbelieve it as long as there's no empirical evidence for it.
As philosopher of science Quentin R. Smith admits, "A disadvantage of . . . theories that postulate a background space from which the universe fluctuates, is that they explain the existence of the universe but only at the price of introducing another unexplained given, viz., the background space"[10]
VIII. Rules Change
The basic idea is that inflationary theory (the mechanism to explain MV under current conditions necessitates alternate universes with different rules, rules we can't know. If we can't know the rules we can't make predictions, we can't explain things. Science loses explanatory power, which necessitated the assumption of uniform rules.This is coming from the guy who helped invent the theory. The principle that makes life bearing universe a certainty makes rules change a certainty:all logically possible options come to fruition given infinite chances,
IX Inflationary Model Not Parsimonious, not simple, explanatory or predictive.
Steinhardt:
But my concerns really grew when I discovered that, due to quantum fluctuation effects, inflation is generically eternal and (as others soon emphasized) this would lead to a multiverse. Inflation was introduced to produce a universe that looks smooth and flat everywhere and that has features everywhere that agree with what we observe. Instead, it turns out that, due to quantum effects, inflation produces a multitude of patches (universes) that span every physically conceivable outcome (flat and curved, smooth and not smooth, isotropic and not isotropic, scale-invariant spectra and not, etc.). Our observable universe would be just one possibility out of a continuous spectrum of outcomes. So, we have not explained any feature of the universe by introducing inflation after all. We have just shifted the problem of the original big bang model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities that could emerge from the big bang?) to the inflationary model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities could emerge in a multiverse?).
To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation….Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.[Steinhardt interviewed by John Horgan, op cit--see above] [see fn 6 for more]
X. Multiverse proves existence of God!
At this point we can bring in Platinga's Possible words argument. Is it possible that in one of those other universes there would be a God like the one Anselm speaks of? The answer as to be "yes." If not the atheist must show why not. After all they want to push the dictum that the mutliverses must exist because there are infinite chances for them to exist and it's Soooooo illogical to think that they would not. But the same logic applies, there must be a God in one of those infinite universes. And yet it is absurd to think that a necessary being would be limited to just one reality. God has to be God in all reality.
Concluson: All Design arguments are like the glass of water half empty or half full. The believer thinks he/she sees it half full, the skeptic sees it half empty. But the anthropic argument is different, it offers a comparison between designed and undersigned features because we can understand the range of probabilities which might have been to form a non-life bearing universe. We know that the universe did not have to be as it is, and we know that it is extremely improbable. While this may not be absolute proof, it is good probabilistic proof.
Fine Tuning Part 3 Earth-like Planets
Sources
[1] Dennis Overbye, "Far Off Planets Like Earth Dot the Galaxy," space and Cosmos, NY Times. Nov 4, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html?_r=0
[2] Phil Plait "The sky may be filled with Earth like Planets,"Slate, nov 4 2013 on line copy:http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/11/04/earth_like_exoplanets_planets_like_ours_may_be_very_common.html
[3] Denis Overbye. "Far off Planets like Earth Dot The Galaxy." New York Times (Nov 4,2013) https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html (accessed Jine 8.2019)
[4] Sten Odenwald, (Raytheon STX) for the NASA IMAGE/POETRY Education and Public Outreach program
http://sirius-c.ncat.edu/space/Space-Weather/poetry/ask/a11215.html (accessed Jine 8.2019)
[5] John Earman. Bangs, Crunches, Wimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995., p. 156) So rather than avoid fine-tuning, the multiverse pushes it up a level.
[6] John Horgan, “Physicist slams Cosmic Theory he Helped Conceive,” Scientific American Blogs, December 1, 2014. on line, URL http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-slams-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/ accessed 10/5/15. Horgan interviews Steinhardt.
extended quote from the article:
[6] John Horgan, “Physicist slams Cosmic Theory he Helped Conceive,” Scientific American Blogs, December 1, 2014. on line, URL http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-slams-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/ accessed 10/5/15. Horgan interviews Steinhardt.
extended quote from the article:
Horgan: You were one of the originators of inflation theory. When and why did you start having doubts about it?
Steinhardt: From the very beginning, even as I was writing my first paper on inflation in 1982, I was concerned that the inflationary picture only works if you finely tune the constants that control the inflationary period. Andy Albrecht and I (and, independently, Andrei Linde) had just discovered the way of having an extended period of inflation end in a graceful exit to a universe filled with hot matter and radiation, the paradigm for all inflationary models since. But the exit came at a cost -- fine-tuning. The whole point of inflation was to get rid of fine-tuning – to explain features of the original big bang model that must be fine-tuned to match observations. The fact that we had to introduce one fine-tuning to remove another was worrisome. This problem has never been resolved....
But my concerns really grew when I discovered that, due to quantum fluctuation effects, inflation is generically eternal and (as others soon emphasized) this would lead to a multiverse. Inflation was introduced to produce a universe that looks smooth and flat everywhere and that has features everywhere that agree with what we observe. Instead, it turns out that, due to quantum effects, inflation produces a multitude of patches (universes) that span every physically conceivable outcome (flat and curved, smooth and not smooth, isotropic and not isotropic, scale-invariant spectra and not, etc.). Our observable universe would be just one possibility out of a continuous spectrum of outcomes. So, we have not explained any feature of the universe by introducing inflation after all. We have just shifted the problem of the original big bang model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities that could emerge from the big bang?) to the inflationary model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities could emerge in a multiverse?)....
I have to admit that I did not take the multiverse problem seriously at first even though I had been involved in uncovering it. I thought someone would figure out a resolution once the problem was revealed. That was 1983. I was wrong. Unfortunately, what has happened since is that all attempts to resolve the multiverse problem have failed and, in the process, it has become clear that the problem is much stickier than originally imagined. In fact, at this point, some proponents of inflation have suggested that there can be no solution. We should cease bothering to look for one. Instead, we should simply take inflation and the multiverse as fact and accept the notion that the features of the observable universe are accidental: consequences of living in this particular region of the multiverse rather than another.
To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation.
Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.
[7] Jim Holt, "War of the Worlds: Do you believe in God? Or in multiple universes?" Lingua Franca, December 2000/January 2001
[8] Alvin Plantinga, "Darwin, Mind, and Meaning", May/June 1996 issue of Books and Culture
[9] Joseph Hinman, "Occam's Razor Shaves the Multiverse," Metacorck's Blog. (June 12, 2013) http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2013/06/occams-razor-shaves-multiverse.html
(accessed Jine 8.2019)
[10] Quentin R. Smith (1988), "The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe," Philosophy of Science 55:54
Fine Tuning Part 3 Earth-like Planets
