Does the Flying Spaghetti Monster Exist?

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In my never ending quest to provide service to my readers I now go the extra mile and respond to  my most obvious non-reader, the washed-up pop-music scribbler, Steve Simels.  Or, at least, the person who posts comments here as "Steve Simels".   Since someone using that same name has been caught by different people using other identities in order to attack people, on a number of  blogs - me being one of those-  it's possible that the "Steve Simels" who has been trolling me here isn't the washed-up pop-music scribbler but some other witzbold  in his own mind who is assuming his identity for some purpose.   Which would be called "satire" if someone with the technical ability traced him, or his sock puppets, to a less deniable identity.  Though it would be surprising if someone voluntarily chose him to impersonate.  It would be like  choosing Cisco Red or MD 20/20 when you could choose something a bit higher up on the wine list at the convenience store.

Now, to start with, and, I suspect to his bitter disappointment, I wouldn't hold that Steve Simels is God.  Though such an hypothesis might help us to understand The Problem of Pain and other such mysteries if that were the case, the theory fails on other tests.   Such a god would have to be demoted far down from all knowing, all wise, and any number of other, partial definitions of God as believed in by most believers.   The sometimes ventured speculation that God had a sense of humor would have to go too.  I mean, God would have to have more of a sense of humor than someone who can't even come up to the level of Soupy Sales and Stubby Kaye.  Not even by stealing their material.  Soupy had some sense of timing, mostly when to not repeat the pie in the face for the 98,457th time in order to avoid his audience noticing it had gotten unacceptably old .   If I had a dime for every time that "Steve Simels" has pulled out the lamest of lame satirical cliches, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'd be able to bribe the guy with the hook to get him off stage permanently.

God, the creator of the universe is definitely beyond human definition, as is the universe.

I will pause here to point out that any human conception of God, individually or collectively,  is inevitably incomplete and inadequate.  In that sense, any idea we have about God might be reasonably considered an idol.  Forgetting human inability to conceive of God leads religion and the religious into some of their most serious sins.

Now, remember one of my proudest achievements, getting Sean Carroll to admit that there was not a single object, not the most humble and common molecule, atom or subatomic particle, which physics knows comprehensively and exhaustively.  Since physics doesn't know even one object in the universe completely, it will not soon encompass the entire universe no matter how fashionable the talk of a "Theory of Everything" is among the trendy and sciency.  I think that when someone claims to have one of those, even as it is taught as such at universities around the world and touted by science reporters who don't have the foggiest idea of what it really means, it will be a relatively short time before the holes, lapses and discrepancies in that materialist desideratum are identified.  There will be lots of physicists with the ability to understand the issues who will be wanting to make a name for themselves.   With them on the case, I have a feeling that the expiration date of theories of everything will be rather briefer than the Newtonian Universe was when, as I mentioned last week, Lord Kelvin declared the first End of Physics in the 19th century.

The universe, the creation of God would seem to not be entirely comprehensible by the brightest of the Brights, so many of who don't seem to understand the wisdom of being rather more modest about their products than they are.   Eddington understood the problem of overestimating how much of even the physical universe was vulnerable to discovery by human abilities.   In a quote already given here he said:

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them.

Reason is a means of people to make reliable assumptions about the nature of their world of sense. It is applied to levels of the universe that aren't vulnerable to our everyday senses and used to construct ways of understanding things at those levels, with some success, though often with far less than complete success.  What often gets included in the corpus of ideas held to comprise "science" is later found to be, as they say, mistaken.   Often reason lets us down, often due to reliance on incomplete knowledge or understanding, it's no better than the people applying it and their ability to understand what they see.  And no one can see more than they can.  Reason has limits.

As Eddington says, there might well be "laws" of the universe that are irrational - that is not vulnerable to discovery by human reason -  and which would always elude our reason.  Always.  It's pretty amusing to think about that when you consider how many of the true believers that we are on the verge  of the day when the great and true Theory of Everything, never stop asserting that we're just like other animals or, even worse, computers who I doubt they'd suspect have the capacity to even observe, never mind understand the entire universe.  I mean, even if you've got a really groovy and powerful computer, do you not find it often doesn't seem to even understand its own instructions?   I'm extremely skeptical of the plainly absurd idea that science hasn't rendered us quite different from other animals, and, having eaten from that tree of most efficacious knowledge, far more capable of depravity and the most irrational acts of murder and destruction.   But I really don't think we're more capable of a comprehensive observation of the universe than a bacterium that shows some response to its environment.   Comprehensive means, well,  absolutely comprehensive.  Anything that isn't comprehended could not be included in the "everything" in a "Theory of EVERYTHING".

Since it would seem to be wise to be skeptical of the idea that even such Big Thinkers as Sean Carroll are on the verge of understanding the entire universe, the idea that they understand God who created the universe, would seem to be even less wise.   Even the most popular current hero of physics and cosmology, Steven Hawking, hasn't got that ability.  As Peter Woit has pointed out, he's given up* on the quest to explain even physical reality,  demanding to change the rules to remove the exigencies of the subject of physics as a test for the ideas of "physicists".

We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.

or, considering the proposal to replace the verifiable physical universe with sci-fi written in equations, once they've divorced the observable universe from their "discipline, at least people who get called "physicists" for purposes of filling important chairs at important universeities.   It was reading Hawking's recent stuff that convinced me physics, though likely not at an end, was certainly well into a decadent phase.  I suspect it is exactly the Cervantine cosmological quest for what can't be had which has helped lead it there.  Even as modest, sober and aware a scientist as Eddington made a more modest version of that mistake with his Fundamental Theory, and Hawking and Carroll ain't exactly modest.  That the quest to use physics, the study of the physical universe, in the attempted hit job on God, is done by some of the same guys doesn't give my powers of deduction much of a workout.

If the Big Thinkers of atheism can't come up with what is necessary to convince people to give up God, I doubt that Bobby Henderson's claim to fame will do it.  Flying Spaghetti Monster is pretty lame satire, even by pop-atheist standards.  So, after making Simels suffer through skimming through this piece in search of references to himself,  FSM exists as a really stupid example of what gets called satire in this post-literate age, more like something a 5th grader might scribble out in a fantasy of him eating the mean teacher who gave him a D - on his history paper.   It doesn't eat the teacher and it doesn't eat God.  No more than Hawking's imaginary universes "not demanded by logic or physical principle".   If physics doesn't have to follow the exigencies of those, and as committed a "naturalist" as Sean Carroll doesn't have any objection to it, their war machine against God and religion has disappeared.  Though it seems that they're even willing to sacrifice physical science in their quest to do that.


* David Gross has in the past invoked the phrase “never, never, never give up”, attributed to Churchill, to describe his view about claims that one should give up on the traditional goals of fundamental physics in favor of anthropic arguments invoking a multiverse. Steven Hawking has a new book out this week, called The Grand Design and written with Leonard Mlodinow, in which he effectively announces that he has given up:


"We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes."

Thirty years ago, in his inaugural lecture as Lucasian professor, Hawking took a very different point of view. He argued that we were quite close to a final unified theory, based on N=8 supergravity, with a 50% chance of complete success by the year 2000. A few years after this, N=8 supergravity fell into disfavor when it was shown that supersymmetry was not enough to cancel possible ultraviolet divergences in the theory. There has been a recent revival of interest as new calculational methods show unexpected and still not completely understood additional cancellations that may fully eliminate ultraviolet divergences. Hawking shows no interest in this, instead signing on to the notion that “M-theory” is the theory of everything. The book doesn’t even really try to explain what “M-theory” is, we’re just told that:

"People are still trying to decipher the nature of M-theory, but that may not be possible. It could be that the physicist’s traditional expectation of a single theory of nature is untenable, and there exists no single formulation. It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations"


The book ends with the argument that

Our TOE must contain gravity.
Supersymmetry is required to have a finite theory of gravity.
M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity.
ergo

M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find. The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.

This isn’t exactly an air-tight argument…

UPDATE:  I don't know if the urgent e-mail I just got demanding that I change the reference of  Stubby Kaye to Dennis Miller, on threat of a lawsuit, is authentic.  I will stipulate that it wouldn't work because "Simels" can match Dennis Miller.  I'd assert that he doesn't appear to have much of a choice, in that.  I've never seen Simels,  though I wonder if he and Miller have ever been seen together.   Anyone know?