IF THE CRITICISM OF STEPHEN HAWKINGS, his co-author of The Grand Design and their sect of scientistic-atheist-materialist phsycisists and cosmologists, those I named in my post such as Sean Carroll among them, that they are driving contemporary science into decadence is an expression of my ignorance, it's rather remarkable that some very eminent scientists share that observation with li'l old me. I mean, George Ellis and Joe Silk aren't considered ignorant dolts in this area.
This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.
Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.
These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.
The issue of testability has been lurking for a decade. String theory and multiverse theory have been criticized in popular books and articles, including some by one of us (G.E). In March, theorist Paul Steinhardt wrote in this journal that the theory of inflationary cosmology is no longer scientific because it is so flexible that it can accommodate any observational result. Theorist and philosopher Richard Dawid and cosmologist Sean Carroll have countered those criticisms with a philosophical case to weaken the testability requirement for fundamental physics.
And impinging on all of those issues where it interacts with the domain of mathematics and its objects, calling out Hugh Everett who is among those who gives the ultimate creative power to far more than mathematics as a whole BUT IN EVERY VARIABLE NUMBER THAT CAN BE PLUGGED INTO AN EQUATION AS WELL AS EVERY EVENT* IN THE UNIVERSE: I really mean that, every possible variable to be plugged into those equations has the actual power to do what these guys mock religious people for believing God has.
The many-worlds theory of quantum reality posed by physicist Hugh Everett is the ultimate quantum multiverse, where quantum probabilities affect the macroscopic. According to Everett, each of Schrödinger's famous cats, the dead and the live, poisoned or not in its closed box by random radioactive decays, is real in its own universe. Each time you make a choice, even one as mundane as whether to go left or right, an alternative universe pops out of the quantum vacuum to accommodate the other action.
Billions of universes — and of galaxies and copies of each of us — accumulate with no possibility of communication between them or of testing their reality. But if a duplicate self exists in every multiverse domain and there are infinitely many, which is the real 'me' that I experience now? Is any version of oneself preferred over any other? How could 'I' ever know what the 'true' nature of reality is if one self favours the multiverse and another does not?
In our view, cosmologists should heed mathematician David Hilbert's warning: although infinity is needed to complete mathematics, it occurs nowhere in the physical Universe.
That distinction between the realm of mathematics which drives physics into this ultimate decadence and the realm of empirical observation which used to be the ultimate judge of scientific validity is important in exactly the way I brought up, it is a self-contradiction of many aspects of scientistic atheistic materialism. If there is something that exists in mathematics which doesn't exist in the material universe, that is another inconsistency in the SAM faith that contradicts its basic claims. And that's nothing compared to what they are demanding does to the integrity of science and its relationship with truth. But, then, and always, the claim of scientism, itself, that science is the only source of all knowable truth, cannot be supported by science to start with so the intellectual decadence of it goes from its own alpha to its own omega.
The actual goal of all of this is, if not originated in, certainly deeply involved in the desire to use science to destroy religion, that has been an explicit goal of materialists going back to the original atomists and they have never really stopped trying to do it. Of course the problem for them is that any description of the material universe will a. be incomplete, b. be limited in what it describes, c. not be inconsistent with the idea that whatever that is God created it. The God who creates the universe of our observation could create an infinity of universes, since that God as articulated by the Abrahamic tradition is infinite, the Creator of power as well as things. Unlike the arrogance of the SAM crowd who believe they have ultimate powers to know things, the Abrahamic tradition admits to the limits of human ability and understanding. The philosophical incompetence of the ideological atheists seems to know no bottom.
And it does matter. In a period when our survival could depend on whether or not there is a general acceptance of valid science and the concept of the truth as being good and fantasy being anything from useless to extremely dangerous, the integrity of science shouldn't be imperiled by the ideological campaign of the Lords of Creation.
The consequences of overclaiming the significance of certain theories are profound — the scientific method is at stake (see go.nature.com/hh7mm6). To state that a theory is so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing in our opinion risks misleading students and the public as to how science should be done and could open the door for pseudoscientists to claim that their ideas meet similar requirements.
It is not possible for these guys to generate every irony with their ideology but they sure can generate a lot of them. Which is probably why they decided to keep ideology out of science - which has certainly been more claimed than achieved. Atheism and its allied ideological accompaniments are the only ones that have been allowed to invade science to this extent. And they're there, in so many instances leading to discredit and disbelief in science as well as, in a more limited population, the derisive rejection of religion. Now that's ironic.
* Just what is an "event" as imagined by Schrodinger to be a discrete entity and as is arbitrarily defined to fit it into an equation? Is every possible division of every movement of of every electron in the universe not definable as an "event" as well as an entire cycle of a wave?
It's like a "trait" in Darwinism, what we consider a trait is just what we define it to be when those exist in organisms with vastly different co-existing "traits" which have different effects in different organisms and that's true even before we get into the varying impacts of changing, dynamic environments and interactions with other organisms and substances.
If these guys want to
divorce their universes from the physics of our universe then it would
seem to me that every definable variation and those that we couldn't
define have to be considered as possibly or even really having real existence whether
or not they have any knowable relationship with physical law as can be
discerned by physicists or cosmologists.
Our use of mathematics to describe continuous existence is, itself, an abstraction, it's not a reproduction of reality, only a lot of atheists seem to need to believe it's far more than a representation of what is really here but that it be given creative power to produce reality.
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