Crosswords1 min ago
Intelligently Designed Universe?
Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it’s remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here at all. The sun couldn’t be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here.
Or what?
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Yes, we're all having to guess at the game God is playing 🙂
Quantum mechanics is leading us it to a new and radically different view of reality. Here are six scientifically realised & scientifically endorsed, 'impossible things';
One. The world does not exist unless you look at it.
Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.
Three. Everything that could possible happen, in an array of parallel realities.
Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened & we only noticed part of it.
Five. Everything influences everything else instantly as if space does not exist.
Six. The future influences the past.
On the *specific* example Naomi gives in her earlier link, it's worth noting that this result is disputed -- although, so far as I can tell, the question isn't settled yet.
However, that if anything serves to highlight the general point being made. We haven't finished, and aren't even close to finishing, our journey towards understanding the universe. In fact, we never will finish this journey. So any design argument from fine-tuning is fatally flawed because it assumes, entirely falsely, that there's nothing further to be said about things we are still only beginning to investigate.
Depends, I suppose, on how you define "settled". Some physical questions are settled in practice, in the sense that while our theories or models are known to be incomplete, they are at least "correct" (as in, you get useful predictions out of them that happen to explain observations) within known limitations.
This is at the whole other end of the spectrum. But what I suppose I mean as "settled" here would be either that (i) another group has independently reached the same result, or (ii) it's universally accepted that there was a flaw in the methods of the original paper that renders its results invalid. Although, even then, further work might change the picture again.
So as an example you can think of the "faster than light neutrinos" 'result' from a little over a decade ago. It's now settled that the original paper was flawed; I forget how exactly, but something to do with not taking properly into account the length of a key wire in the measurement process. It doesn't matter that a future experiment might reveal that neutrinos do travel faster than the speed of light; what's settled is that this particular experiment was wrong to claim that.
It doesn't seem quite real at all.
Clearly any number of combinations can create a universe (or part of a universe) where life doesn't appear, or if it does, doesn't develop the ability to wonder at the universe.
Where such life does appear then the general area inevitably has to be ideal for it to have developed, which can be by chance as much as any other conjecture.
And if the universe varies over an infinite space, or if there are infitine universes as they get created all the time, then the possibility of finding a local area like this is an absolute certainty. It shows no need for deliberate design.
This doesn't prevent you believing in ID if you wish, it's just that there's no feasible evidence for it. Just a lack of understanding of how reality works.
The famous Kalam cosmological argument is a three-part argument that the universe requires a first cause. (Its name reflects its roots in Islamic thought.)
1. Anything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a First Cause.
There is an 'answer' to that, but neither I nor anyone else Knows, or will probably ever know, what it is & really, why should we when all we have to work with is a couple of pounds of grey matter behind our eyeballs which originated for our survival on the African Savannah ?
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