beausoleil

Ah, but it doesn't look designed. Because, as I pointed out in said thread, lightless dust cannot perceive. It would appear designed were there any observers, but that our particular universe can support observers is the point in question.

Appearing designed doesn't imply a designer, however.

KeithHarwood

Unfortunately a well designed communication channel looks exactly like TV static to everything except the specific device which decodes it. So, to say that an apparently arbitrary phenomenom is undesigned is an argument from ignorance.

So, we have incredibly complex things which are undesigned and incredibly random things which are designed. Makes it difficult to tell design from undesign, doesn't it? And the only way to do it is via argument from ignorance.

(Trivia note: the first patent on spread spectrum communication channels was granted to Hedy Lamarr, the actor, in about 1948.)

KeithHarwood

See The Unpleasant Profession of Johnathon Hoag by Robert Heinlein.

scombrid

What makes you so sure that the Go For It was re. proselytizing children. Go For It could have been refering to some other important decision du jour, such as, whether not to cross the street, have a bowel movement, go down to the corner market for milk, by a new car, ask out that special someone, etc.... You could've totally misread God's will there. After you proselytized those poor children did you receive any confirmation of a successful mission from the big cheese? If not, you must have done the wrong thing.

joshack

If you are not a Platonist (or believer in "pre-ordained" Laws of Nature), which I admit many physicists are, then an undesigned universe could take on any number of forms. The better question would be what would a designed universe look like. Although the "from who's perspective?" question is a hard one.

scigirl

Where's your proof?

Methinks you are interpreting the Bible out of context yet again. . . Didn't people live like 900 years after the fall? Then for some reason, they stopped living that long? Did God decide to finally punish people for Adam and Eve way way later? Or. . . is the whole chapter of Genesis just a collection of interesting myths?

My vote, as always, is on the latter.

scigirl

DNAunion

DNAunion: Time for one post. I guess it is more things for people to think about and discuss with each other than to debate with me - I ain't got the time or computer to respond.

DNAunion: I take it from your “sarcastic” attitude ("Hey, wait a minute...") that you think the things you listed are useless, and therefore no competent designer would have created them.

First of all, a nit pick. I think contemporary superstring theories posit 7 extra dimensions that are too small to be seen (a total of 11 dimensions in all). Regardless, those 6 or 7 compactified dimensions are essential to superstring theories, one of which may end up being a correct theory of everything.

A few extra kinds of quarks we don’t really need? Are you referring to the charm, strange, top, and bottom quarks? Do you think matter such as protons and neutrons consists solely of ups and downs? What about the virtual quarks – of those “unneeded” flavors - that contribute to particle spins?

Beetles aren’t parts of the Universe itself and are basically off topic (that is, beetles are a topic for entomology, biology, or evolution courses, not cosmology – and the original question, from what I gathered, was concerning design or non-design of the Universe itself).


DNAunion: Neutrinos are essential to our Universe, if it is to have life. They are what interact with the matter in a massive star going supernova, carrying the products of stellar nucleosynthesis out into space. Without neutrinos, carbon and other metals (astronomically speaking) would not be readily available to make life.

Okay, so neutrinos are needed…what about their “flavor switching ways”? Well, you offered it as evidence against design, so what evidence or sound reasoning do you have that a competent designer would NOT create flavor switching neutrinos?


Long PS: Okay, before anyone and/or everyone goes accusing me of being a fundamental Young Earth Creationist again…

I see evidence of fine tuning for life in the Universe’s properties, and it requires an explanation. I see three main possible explanations for our Universe having all the various precise values for expansion rate, matter/antimatter imbalance, particle masses, force strengths, etc. needed to engender and then to sustain life: they fall under two branches depending upon the number of Universes that exist(ed).

1) There is only the one Universe that we can observe and empirically verify.

1a) It is just "dumb luck" that exactly the various values needed to engender and sustain life happened to occur.

1b) A designer (I guess we would have to go with a supernatural one) intentionally set the values

2) There are countless Universes, each with varying particle masses, force strengths, etc. With so many "trials”, one (or a few) of those Universes was bound to have just the right combination of values, and we must find ourselves living in that one (because we couldn't live in one that didn't have those values).


I don’t buy (1a): chance is an unsatisfactory explanation for specified events of small probability (hmmmmm, where have I heard that before?) :-)

That leaves me with 1b and 2. I don’t hold either position, because I have not been presented with sufficient evidence for either one. But unlike many other people, I am OPEN MINDED enough to consider BOTH to be potentially valid: that is, I don’t reject either one because I have not been presented with sufficient evidence against either. Just sitting here on the fence!

But, I am looking for a simple and straightforward answer to the question, "What created the Universe?"

The Big Bang is not an answer: something caused it.

From what I have read, the main view is that a vacuum fluctuation created a submicroscopic Universe which then underwent rapid inflation. This is sometimes said to be the “creation of everything from nothing”. But that description seems misleading to me. The creation of matter via a vacuum fluctuation is a quantum mechanical process that occurs in a given point in space, at a given time, and requires energy. So did space, time, energy, and the laws of nature exist before our Universe did? If so, then it is "everything out of something", and not "everything out of nothing". As such, it would not explain the ultimate origin.

Another “everything from nothing” explanation I have heard about is that the Universe "tunneled" into existence from literally nothing (the quotes surrounding the term tunneled were in the original). But isn’t tunneling also a quantum mechanical process? Wouldn’t that explanation still require at least the laws of nature to exist prior to the Universe? If they were talking about tunneling in the normal quantum mechanical sense, then wouldn't waves, energy, and the laws that govern them need to preexist?

If something else existed prior to the Universe – such as a superverse that spawns countless baby universes, or a single universe that spawned a new universe (ours) via a quantum fluctuation – then where did that preexisting "somethingverse" come from? Is it eternal, without beginning and without end, and without cause?

[ July 05, 2002: Message edited by: DNAunion ]</p>