SINCE THE BEGINNING of my concluding that the then "new atheism" was an important source of danger for the possibility of gaining and keeping an egalitarian democracy, I've looked at the dodgy-at-best practice of arguing the question of God's existence from the physical sciences, especially the dodgy science of cosmology which goes from ultimate extreme to ultimate extreme in predictions about the unseeable future hundreds of billions or, really, jillions of years into the future on the basis of what is known and, really, sorta known now by a tiny fraction of one percent of one species on one small planet in the universe. And, if that tenuous relationship to science isn't vanishingly unlikely to yield secure knowledge, they go back on the other end to the beginning of this one and only universe way beyond where present day physics can actually observe anything much about even the relatively young universe to make sweeping declarations about the beginning and absolute nature of the universe on the same basis.
In looking at both I was struck how a single paper of untestable theorizing could sway the professions of cosmology and physics around like seventeen year olds trying to keep up with the latest early 1960s dance crazes or even younger ones on social media going from worshipful enthusiasm about some demigod to them being universally held to be scuzzy on an even more ephemeral basis.
In short, I did something I've been doing less often these days, listening to Sabine Hossenfelder on the topic. Yesterday it was on a paper debunking the "anthropic principle" on the clever basis of not declaring the conclusions of the likes of Fred Hoyle exactly wrong but in claiming that "life permitting universes" aren't nearly as rare as the antropicists (if that's the word for it) figured. That isn't real universes, that is theoretical life permitting universes existing only in the calculations of the cosmologists, not real ones. One of the things Hossenfelder and I both think it is that all the multiverse nonsense of the past seventy plus years is nonsense. There is literally nothing but that sci-fi written in equations to base a belief in "other universes" on.
She began this way:
Today I have good news. We can finally lay to rest the idea that our universe is somehow especially hospitable for life. It just isn’t. I think it’s good news because this argument has sometimes been used as support for the existence of a creator and, worse, for the idea that we live in a multiverse. Let’s have a look. The Anthropic Principle at first sight seems to simply be a tautologically true statement. We can only observe laws of nature that allow for the existence of observers. It sounds like a joke a 5-year-old might make, but naïve truths can be very revealing. The Anthropic principle is not entirely useless because the observation that the universe is hospitable to life gives us constraints on the laws of nature: They need to be so that we can exist.
I will note that the anthropic principle being used "as support for the existence of a creator" was a response to the far longer use of cosmology by atheists to argue against the existence of The Creator, something which goes back pretty much to the beginning of the written record of atheism in India and Greece and probably in other places. I will also note that I have always held that arguing for the "existence" of God on that basis was foolish because cosmology is such a dodgy business to start with and, at least for the Jewish God which Christianity and Islam believe is the closest human conception of The God Who Is, is removed from any such use by the first few lines of Scripture. God created the heavens and the Earth, God who, as the Creed says, Created all things seen and unseen. As such, God cannot be discerned on the basis of how the universe is or isn't but is intrinsic to any way that the universe is.
As a merely practical matter, spending a lot of time mastering current cosmology so as to make extended arguments about such matters entirely bigger and wider than cosmology is almost certainly time not very well spent because of the propensity of cosmologists, a. not agreeing with each other in the most drastic of ways, quite capable of writing papers supporting their points of view of ultimate radical disagreements, b. changing their minds as drastically, turning in another direction on a dime and, c. having their favorite ideas temporarily overturned by this or that observation which will be instantly and, almost certainly, superficially declared to show this or that or that or that or that . . .
Some of that quickly becomes apparent as Hossenfelder accurately describes the use of mostly atheist-materialist cosmologists and others within science.
The most famous use of the anthropic principle was when the physicist Fred Hoyle predicted the properties of the nucleus of the carbon atom. His argument was that life on earth needs a lot of carbon, but carbon wasn’t produced in sufficiently high amounts in the early universe. So where does it come from? It must be produced in stars by nuclear fusion. And this can only work if the carbon nucleus has a particular property which he predicted. And he was right.
In all fairness, Hoyle’s argument didn't have much to do with life in particular, but just generally with the observed abundance of some chemical elements. But in the end, it doesn’t matter all that much just how physicists get their ideas, so long as they work.
If anything Hoyle's calculation of the improbability of life being possible in other universes was incredibly naive because he based it on such a relatively probable thing. Probability mathematics is a human invention to make things seem more understandable or comprehensible to us but I think sometimes, often, it is treated as if it shows us some absolute aspect of physical reality when it doesn't necessarily do that. How can you come up with a range of probabilities of something existing on the basis of the one and only thing you can observe? Carbon being what carbon is and having its physical and chemical characteristics and that being amenable to how Earthly life uses those features. I don't see how that can be known to be any less than 100% since that's how it happened in the one and only instance we know of it happening, the very thing that gives rise to the ideas and concepts about any of this, from the physics and applied mathematics of reality to the grotesquely speculative probability mathematics that such cosmological speculation is made of, to the far, far more complex and ultimately greater improbabilities involved in the actual construction of living organisms from non-living material on an entirely lifeless Earth. I doubt anyone who thinks about it even a little could conclude from that last range of improbabilities that what happened on Earth lies within the far, far more probable the range of probabilities that go from Hoyle to the ones who wrote the paper that Sabine Hossenfelder was talking about.
I would guess that the actual range of the probability of what did happen on Earth, giving rise to and the successful sustaining of life, giving rise to intelligence (which I think we have good reason to believe exists in many bacteria) up to that which produces a Hossenfelder or a Hoyle makes the ten to the hundred thirty-eight or whatever look tiny. And I don't think you can rely on the so-far entirely elusive finding of "other-life" to lessen those odds by much. It seems to me that such atheists who rely on that make the same mistake that idiots who buy two or a hundred lottery tickets thinking they double or triple of centuple their chances of winning. Two to one in ten to the hundred-thrity-eight isn't much better odds than one in ten to that enormous number. I can understand the idiot who I see buying multiple tickets who probably couldn't add up their convenience store tab making that mistake, I am floored by physicists and cosmologists and other professional scientists and philosophers who do.
By the way, notice I admitted that was a guess, which it is. Which is what all of that other calculated probability babble is based in.
I believe in God because of other reasons, not because of what some cosmologist says in some paper. I will say that I think the only reason anyone ever believed in the multiverse was that purely ideological reaction to the evidence showing that Lamaitre and some others who said that 20th century physics pointed to an absolute beginning of the universe. They knew that such an idea would lead many to conclude that, at least, the first lines in Genesis got that right as opposed to the then current leading atheist-materialist model that held with a steady-state universe. Indeed, many of the more well-known cosmologists, Hoyle to Sean Carroll are still engaged in making some kind of steady-state model seem plausible and it's no accident that all of those I've ever heard of are what Rupert Sheldrake calls "militant atheists." I have noted many times how that one ideology is introduced directly into the literature of science to absolutely no notice even when it is the explicit motive of the scientists who do that. And it isn't just in cosmology, it's pervasive. Atheism is the religious ideology that is most pervasive in both the culture and literature of science, and it has an extremely distorting presence there.
My brother has told me he read Merlin Sheldrake's book about fungi and another book he followed up with on the current science in the properties and uses of fungi to make life better, here and now. I think I've wasted enough time on cosmology and abiogensis and "exobiology" and such related sciency bullshitting and will concentrate on that kind of science in the future. Sabine Hossenfelder and others rightly go on about the crisis in science, and science like politics and journalism are in a crisis, the world is in a crisis. I think those who are engaged in studying fungi are more likely to pull us farther from the brink than the cosmologists and other ideologues are. They're a waste of time, any money going to the Lords of Creation And Ultimate Doom should go to something like finding out how to make sustainable materials out of fungi, especially as a means of carbon sequestration and replacing oil and other extraction industry produced materials. I can't think of anything more important for science to be doing than that, right now, and you could ignore the ideological pollution of other sciences to do it.
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