Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth's human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator. Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not "arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature." Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was "created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition." The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Everything in the universe follows laws, without exception. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test-in other words, modern science.Īlbert Einstein said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." He meant that, unlike our homes on a bad day, the universe is not just a conglomeration of objects each going its own way. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason-with a good dose of intuition-to decipher their universe. Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world-no gods required.Īccording to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. In other words, the laws of the Universe are the way they are because if they weren't, no intelligent beings would be able to consider the laws of the Universe at all." Or, try this: The SAP "implies that if the laws of the Universe were not conducive to the development of intelligent creatures to ask about the initial conditions of the Universe, intelligent life would never have evolved to ask the question in the first place. The "strong anthropic principle" (SAP) argues that the fine-tuning coincidences ("anthropic coincidences") are more than coincidences instead, "the universe must be such as to admit the production of intelligent life at some time." (See here.) "In this sense, the act of the observer is necessary in order to bring the universe into being at all." (Ib.) The fact that we are observers means that, if the production of life is at all a rare event, any universe that we can see is virtually guaranteed to display bizarre and apparently improbable coincidences." What the weak anthropic principle points out is that only those members of the ensemble that are constructed so as to admit the production of intelligent life at some stage in their evolution will ever be the subject of cosmological enquiry. On WAP, see here, e.g.: "Suppose we imagine some process that produces an ensemble of a large number of universes with widely varying properties or even physical laws. Note John Leslie's "firing squad" objection to multiverse theory.) (For a version of the fine-tuning argument, see here. There is therefore no need, the criticism goes, to explain the fact that the universe is observed to be such as to permit life it couldn’t have been observed to be any other way. It is impossible to observe a universe that does not permit the existence of observers only a universe that permits the existence of observers could be observed. It says: the ways that the universe might be observed to be are limited by the fact that observation requires the existence of observers. The "weak anthropic principle" (WAP) is used to respond to the fine-tuning argument for God's existence. Here is the Wall Street Journal's book excerpt from The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow. Nevertheless, here's Stephen Hawking on the WAP - this is a re-post.) The version I am using (Robin Collins) is not subject to that criticism. (In my philosophy of religion class today one of my students presented the anthropic principle objection to the fine-tuning argument.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |