luvluv

Granted, but for the initial purpose of confronting naturalism, any Designer is a sufficient first step.


Yeah, but you do need space for life to get a secure foothold. I mean say you have life starting on a crust of earth that is the size of a football field. If the lava level raises a few feet in that area, good bye life.

No one can establish a strict mathematical probability for the emergence of life, but one can assign likliehoods given life's requirements and pre-existing conditions. We can definitely say, given certain parameters that are necessary, that from the outset of the universe life of any kind is an unlikely proposition. It is unlikely enough that on the planet with the best conditions for producing life that we know of, it no longer occurs.

But this is the kind of argument that a person who is committed to atheism will make, so I'm content for us to agree to disagree on this point. I am more than willing for a rational impartial observer to listen to both of our defintions and make up their own minds. I think theism will come out all right in that case.

The basis of the anthropic principles is that certain values for the constants allow life to exist. I'm saying that if we were a form of this "different form of life" that you appeal to, that perhaps did not need carbon or atoms heavier than helium or planets or stars to exist on, then the constants would not seem to be relevant one way or another. The particular form of life we are however, the only life form that we have any reason to assume exists, would be eliminated under slightly different values of the constants.

Ross expressly stated he was talking about astronomers, not physicists. It is telling, though, when an entire branch of science draws such a claim is it not?

What happened to:

Are you removing yourself from the ranks of the prudent thinkers?

Well, for one, the constants don't have to be as fine-tuned as they are for the lightning bolts in the clouds of Jupiter I believe.

But again, on this point I am more than happy to agree to disagree with you. I'd take my chances when dealing with people who are not strongly committed to theism or atheism as to whether or not a Creator would be interested in people or lightning bolts.

luvluv

Their holy books, at least according to Ross, repeatedly refer to a universe of infinite of infinite duration or a recycling universe. They claim that the universe was uncreated.

beausoleil

The problem is that we do not know why the parameters of the universe ('natural laws') are as they are. It is also not clear that we can in principle never know why they are as they are. We do not know for certain under what circumstances life can exist. However, it seems reasonable to postulate that reasonable amounts of elements heavier than helium are necessary. If you can make a living organism out of hydrogen alone, where are they?. Even this universe is mostly hydrogen, after all. As I said, no guarantees but our best current guess.

The natural laws of this universe are 'fine tuned' to produce carbon from helium to a remarkable degree. See under 'triple-alpha process'.

Of course, any universe contains things that are fine tuned to that universe. The question is, why should the 'fine tuning' of this universe support complex chemistry?

One possible explanation is a creator. Another is coincidence. The other is 'multiverse' - there are so many instances of a universe, each with a different set of natural laws, that it is inevitable that one occurs which allows production of heavy elements.

It may be in the future that we explain what we currently see as natural laws in terms of more fundamental principles. Will this solve the problem or will it simply remove the problem to the process that set these more fundamental principles?

I like the multiverse option best. The creator option still gets stuck in the 'well, who created that?' problem (in a sense it's just a special case of the 'more fundamental principles' option - the creator is the more fundamental set of principles that determined what our natural laws are.) Coincidence can never be argued against, really, but I don't find it very convincing.
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The age of the Earth thing is not clear. Sure it is very hard to extinguish life with the sort of impact we get today, but remember that the impactors around back then were a lot bigger - you can see the basins they created every time there's a full moon. The mare stand out now because they filled up later with dark basalt, but originally they were the craters from the end of the cataclysm about 4 Ga ago.

In fact there are competing explanations for the notion that the latest common ancester was some sort of extremophile (people keep telling me this is so but I'm not sure of the evidence for myself) - either it got going around a black smoker or similar, or life originated somewhere else, colonised black smokers and later survived only there because the bottom of the ocean was the place least affected by the impacts.

The oldest rocks are about 3.9 Ga, but evidence from zircons suggests that there were rocks before this, so the idea that life necessarily only had 40 million years is a little flawed, certainly if it relies on the notion that the crust was molten up to 3.9 Ga.

But even if it was, it doesn't strike me as implausible that primitive life could get going on the early Earth in ~100 Ma.

beausoleil

Oh, I should add, the anthropic principle cuts both ways. If you think life is unlikely in circumstances like the early Earth, you need to remember that there definitely are a myriad planets that are similar to the Earth and went through a similar history. So is it surprising that we observe one in which life got going quickly? If it hadn't, we wouldn't be here, one could argue, but we would be somewhere whereit had happened.

Unusual, even impossibly unlikely events in the history of life on Earth are of absolutely no significance in arguing for a creator. Either we can only be on a planet where the dice rolled that way, or they were not relevant for the emergence of humanity.

The anthropic principle works better with planets/solar systems because we know for sure there are a huge number of instances. We do not know that there are other universes.

luvluv

eh:

I'm finding this inflation stuff a little hard to follow. Ross did mention scalar fields in his book (though I don't remember him using the word inflation). I thought he said something about them being purely theoretical attempts to get around the limitations of quantum mechanics and that there was no evidence that they existed. I'm telling tales out of school at this point because I am pulling from memory, but I believe this is what he said. Do you think that's true?

I'll keep reading but I would appreciate a helping hand with this stuff.

This might also be a stupid question but if the we are supposed to imagine that the universe is the skin on the outside of an expaning balloon, then how is space-time "flat". Wouldn't space time be round if this were the case? (Be gentle with me, I was a film major).

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

funnyguy

Assuming that you read the book, where exactly do think he made an error in physical laws? In which of 6 constants do see the flaw in in his science?

beausoleil

"A universe that operates by selection processes working under natural law will always appear to be fine-tuned."

People say this a lot round here but it's a fallacy. Any universe would appear fine tuned if it could be observed - but only some of them can be observed (under assumptions as posted above). The argument rests on that it can be observed, not what it would look like if it could be observed.

This doesn't necessarily place observers at the centre of the whole thing though. If you want to reason from the anthropic argument to a desired end in the universe, the end can be anything that requires the same degree of 'complexity' (for want of a better word) as observers do. Say paperclips.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: beausoleil ]</p>

Ion

Ross is scientifically incorrect:
in the Relativity Theory, time and length are not "...independent of the time dimension of the univerese.", but they are changing depending on the relative environment of traveling speed.
At light speed, the theory speaks -as I learned it in French language- of:
"Contractions des durees, agrandissement des distances.".
Note that the Relativity Theory, is a theory of nature's interpretation by humans, with some but few facts empirically tested so far.
The Relativity Theory is a work in progress, but so far Ross is incorrect about the "...time independent...".
Nice theory about creation, but it's just that: theory about creation, and no proofs.

Meanwhile, the Bible is disproved in places galore, outside of the creation, by lots of scientific branches, more established empirically than the Relativity, which I pointed out has beginning unlike Ross misinterprets.

Doubting Didymus

I would like to see the fine tuning supporters qualify their assertion that a slightly different universe would not support life. It just seems to be taken as given.

If Earths gravity was greater for example, or the temperature hotter, or the winters far longer, or something like that, life would still have evolved. Its not as fragile as all that.

Even if the planet earth never even existed, there only needs to be some planet, somewhere in the whole universe that can support life and the FT argument is invalidated. I can envisage the universe in a whole variety of very different forms that still support life somewhere.

You would need to have a very different universe, not just slightly different, before life is prevented.

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by beausoleil:
[QB]"A universe that operates by selection processes working under natural law will always appear to be fine-tuned."

People say this a lot round here but it's a fallacy. Any universe would appear fine tuned if it could be observed - but only some of them can be observed (under assumptions as posted above). The argument rests on that it can be observed, not what it would look like if it could be observed.

You seem to have mis-read it. The argument rests on what it would look like if it were observed. Perhaps I should have been clearer --assuming an observer like us, any universe with natural laws and selection processes would appear fine-tuned. The argument applies independently of the existence of an observer.

....the end can be anything that requires the same degree of 'complexity' (for want of a better word) as observers do. Say paperclips.

Yes, that is the fundamental problem that LinuxPup and Luv have dodged during their time here. Since every object in the universe is the unique result of these parameters, how do they know that life was goal, and not some other object in the universe?

Vorkosigan