No Kalamprime Cosmological Argument? 
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; - )
No difference there, Earthprime Craig says: “'’Cats all the way down’remains true no matter how far 'all the way down” is. Still gotta have a Cause, no matter how many cats there have been." Meanwhile, a lone Earthprime Pythagoran Monist said: “Absolute Space and Absolute Time don’t get bigger.”
I wonder if our attachment to that idea comes from our social appreciations … “Oh - you were thinking of me!” which we feel when somebody goes out of their way to do something for us. Intervention has a heightened sense of urgency and intention; even more, apparently, than if somebody had planned so well from the beginning that we find (thanks to them, and their excellent planning) that we still have everything we need now. For some reason that doesn’t count as much in our brains as our appreciation for the immediacy of attention and response. The latter signals “relationship” to us - which is an essential component of any robust Christian life, whether YEC or not. I can’t have any relationship (in any real social sense) with the law of gravity, but I can with an attentive intelligent being. And since our conceptualization of such a being (our conceptualization being all we can ever have mental access to) is necessarily patterned after people, we then imagine that like any parent with a lot of children - the more siblings we have, the less direct parental attention any one of us can get - there being something of a zero-sum process in play for us finite creatures. So in that sense a large cosmos with countless populations may make us feel like we are now a diminished fraction of any “cosmic concern”. Nonbelievers will ask “what cosmic concern?” as they are at zero for that anyway. But for the believer it might be an issue … which once again (if they are a thinking believer) they will realize is nothing new. Millions and billions of people just on this planet alone already make “my share” of any finite god’s time a fraction already pretty close to zero. So might as well throw in some gajillions of other entire civilizations across all time and cosmos while we’re at it. Eventually we all realize there’s something wrong with this picture of God, so we either jettison the whole project or let go of our need to think we could ever completely conceptualize God in the first place.
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I’m reminded of a professor friend and his wife who were in a book club with my wife and me (he had taught her in graduate studies and I had been in classes with his wife). TMI ; - ) He had been a Methodist pastor… Anyway, they had been caught in a dust storm several decades ago when they were driving to California and they had been fearful for their well-being, and he said something to the effect that they were too small for God to notice. My reply was God is too big for him not to notice.
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That’s what I sense as well.
I’ve always liked this quote from Darwin:
"It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers … I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.”
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
It is interesting that some theologians even balked at the idea of gravity guiding the Earth about the Sun, as if this impersonal fixed law was a problem for revealed religion. The realities of the universe are just one more instance of theological expectations running into hard facts.
Humbleness seems a better path than haughtiness.
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Yeah well there were people on team single galaxy too just 100 years ago.
At one point not so long ago there was literally no data one could acquire or even imagine getting that could prove other galaxies existed. I’m not a fan of telling scientists just to quit now because they’ll never be able to test their ideas.
Sounds like an argument from consequences. I think a lot of people reject the multiverse hypothesis because of the fine-tuning argument, but that’s not a good reason to dismiss it. To me, this seems a lot like people who reject the theory of evolution because of the damage it seems to do to the idea of an intelligent designer. Obviously the main difference in this case is that we don’t have a comprehensive theory to explain the beginning of the universe, nor empirical evidence of multiple universes. Though the multiverse does arise as an extension of some other well tested physics.
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The multiverse arises out of Kolmogorov complexity aka common sense. What well tested physics do you have in mind? The nature of the multiverse depends on what other entities one favours to proliferate. The self tuning of nature in the least arcane keys of c, e, G and h is irrelevant to the fact of the multiverse. As Haldane said 95 years ago “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”. Unnecessary God only makes it marginally infinitely queerer.
The multiverse arises from-
- some models of inflation (eternal inflation) lead to a cosmological multiverse. While we have some moderately strong evidence for some kind of rapid inflationary event, eternal inflation lies beyond the scope of what we can presently test.
- the string theory landscape stems from attempts to explain the origin of fundamental particles and their interactions, where it requires multiple compact dimensions to reproduce the standard model. This leads to a large number of potential universes that could exist in this landscape depending on the exact geometry of how the other dimensions wrap around each other. While this may not be the correct approach, it does go to show how multiple universes could arise from some more fundamental theory even if we eventually discard string theory. One goal of string theory is to help formulate novel predictions that can be tested, but presently we aren’t sure if strings even exist.
- the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is an extension of a long-standing question from the Schrodinger equation. Namely, what happens to other wave functions that were originally in a superposition state when you make an observation. They are clearly real objects and waves, but they seem to just disappear as your object like an electron collapses into one single state when you observe it. The problem is that we have no physics to explain the collapse of the wave function and so some physicists postulate that nothing happens to it and it continues existing in Hilbert space. This would effectively create two or more different worlds every time some observation is made, thus leading to a very large number of other universes. In order to really demonstrate this isn’t correct, we would need to figure out the problem of the wave function collapse and how the Schrodinger equation is incomplete. In principle though, you couldn’t observe these other worlds because the rapidly decohere from ours.
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I won’t exhaustively rule it out because we just can’t know but I am not sure how that is relevant. People have had mistaken scientific beliefs throughout history. We agree on that. Maybe the multiverse proponents will turn out woefully incorrect like the single galaxy proponents. But the knowledge and arguments of single galaxy proponents, given information they had access too does not compare to the multiverse. So neither a multiverse or non-multiverse solution is intrinsically more likely. Unless our pattern seeking brain is making a narrative about “getting bigger” and confusing that with some scientific trend that will continue. Maybe the multiverse will be the phlogiston of our time. Maybe it won’t. Pointing out past science mistakes doesn’t help here because science has a strict methodology it must adhere to. Those who object to the multiverse do so on methodological grounds.
The flip side is we know more and have a clearer view of things. We know a lot more and see a lot farther than them. Unless you think humans we will learn an infinite amount about nature sooner or later our knowledge will come to an observational stop based on our finite limitations. There is a lot of stuff out there we can’t see and we never will be able to see. The hallmark of science is observational evidence, collecting data, carefully controlled experiments. Conjuring up mathematically scenarios of events “outside our universe” that might lead to quirks in our universe wouldn’t justify the concept to me. That is not enough science.
I think a lot of people posit the multiverse hypothesis because of the fine-tuning argument, but that’s not a good reason to accept it. But yes there are actually many multiverse suggestions from different areas in science. All speculative and questionable as to whether we will ever be able to gain “empirical evidence” for.
I don’t even think string theory, as interesting as it is, belongs in the realm of science yet. I also abhor the name. Einstein’s theory of general relativity and string theory. Which theory is backed by enormous amounts of observational data? Yet both are called “theory.” Its it any wonder the general public thinks the theory of evolution is just a theory? If we want to educate the public we should be more careful in just throwing the term theory at every conjecture of scientists and instead apply to “well tested explanations.”
I didn’t consider string theory science when I identified as an atheist and I still don’t. I also have no theological issues with a multiverse. God could create 1 or a gazillion universes. It doesn’t change anything and for all we would ever know, every universe in there might be fine tuned for life so God could share his love with more creatures. Unless a scientist can actually go into these other universes and perform experiments, make observations, work out its physical laws and constants, on a universe by universe basis, it is conjecture and nothing more. I like there to be science in my science.
Vinnie
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I agree, of course, on those models of the multiverse, some more absurd (3. in particular: my consciousness isn’t proliferating with every decoherence) than others. I favour 11D branes in bulk beyond string.
But testable?! Inferable certainly. But never, ever testable. Even inflation isn’t, rational tho’ it be.
“Pop goes the universe” created a little bit of a stir… Scientific American, February 2017
The Scientific American article, Pop goes the universe (LINK), elicited an odd response from our colleagues Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, David Kaiser, and Yasunori Nomura. Rather than following the common practice of writing a Letter to the Editor under their own names, they asked 29 leading scientists to co-sign their criticism of our article.
The article is linked above. You can find the response “A Cosmic Controversy” online free with a little digging.
Logically, if the outcome of inflation is highly sensitive to initial conditions that are not yet understood, as the respondents concede, the outcome cannot be determined. And if inflation produces a multiverse in which, to quote a previous statement from one of the responding authors (Guth), “anything that can happen will happen”—it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about predictions. Unlike the Standard Model, even after fixing all the parameters, any inflationary model gives an infinite diversity of outcomes with none preferred over any other. This makes inflation immune from any observational test. For more details, see our 2014 paper “Inflationary Schism”
Also, from 2017 article
Given the issues with inflation and the possibilities of bouncing cosmologies, one would expect a lively debate among scientists today focused on how to distinguish between these theories through observations. Still, there is a hitch: inflationary cosmol ogy, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method. As we have discussed, the expected out come of inflation can easily change if we vary the initial condi tions, change the shape of the inflationary energy density curve, or simply note that it leads to eternal inflation and a multimess. Individually and collectively, these features make inflation so flexible that no experiment can ever disprove it.
A lot to be learned about the big bang still.
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Inflation’s stock has plummeted tremendously in recent times. The Planck satellite was not kind to it and the theory is unfalsifiable today. Defeated by cosmic dust! It can be changed at will to meet any situation though.
You responded to a quote from Klax: “What well tested physics do you have in mind?” How does string theory fit this bill? Have we found the 6 curled up dimensions? As you yourself said at the end, we don’t know that strings exist. You can’t scientifically argue from something that has zero observational evidence in it favor that can’t be falsified. I’m not smart enough to call string theory junk “science” but my gut leans that way.
QM is phenomenal but “shut up and calculate” is my response to that.
There is zero scientific evidence supporting a multiverse at this juncture in time. Zero.
Vinnie
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And there never will be, never can be. So? So what? It is the simplest thing in eternity. So it is so. Linde and Guth can do no wrong.
ANUx ANU-ASTRO4x
Astrophysics: Cosmology
Im doing an edx course on cosmology. They had a section with three interviews from Lawrence Krauss but this was set back in 2014. He is a proponent of inflation but he is extremely honest about what it is and isn’t. The course updated a video from 2020 I think and the professor now thinks the tide has turned against inflation even though it is not dead. But those those three interviews add up to about 20 minutes and they were really good. This was Krauss:
Well, you anticipated what I was going to say, because I want to be clear and KRAUSS: honest about this. Because the predictions of inflation are in great agreement with the structure of the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. But what you didn’t give me a chance to say is that they could have been in agreement even if it had been different. Inflation is a very robust theory. But at some level, it’s malleable. In particular, the nature of fluctuations that are produced depend upon the specific inflationary model. And we don’t know the inflationary model. So if inflation could have agreed with more or less anything we saw, you might say that’s not a very robust test to inflation. But there is a more robust test to inflation. And, in fact, it’s what many people would call the smoking gun that we’ve been looking for. Which is the fact that inflation generates not just density fluctuations, fluctuations in all fields, it generates fluctuations in gravity. And those get turned into gravitational waves. And inflation unambiguously predicts a spectrum of gravitational waves, which is independent of all the detailed models-- the nature of inflationary models.
Of course, the gravity wave prediction was no confirmed. Turned out to be dust with no sign of what inflation proponents wanted.
Well, the answer to that question is yes and no. The point that you should realize is that, look if you’re a particle physicist, there’s lots of things you can just invent to solve problems of cosmology. But the question is, are they well-motivated?
We build the Large Hadron Collider to look at that Higgs particle, but to build a collider to measure the physics that’s relevant at Grand Unification, it would have to have a diameter of something like the Earth moon’s orbit. It’s never going to happen. And so the universe may be the only way to test these ideas. So inflation is well-motivated in principle, but in practice the models are a little contrived, and we don’t yet understand the physics. The only way we’ll understand it-- we theorists can come up with lots of contrived models. That’s what we get paid to do, Brian would probably say. But in fact, we rely on experiment to tell us which direction is the right one, and we don’t know.
Vinnie
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I do agree inflation was “well-motivated in principle.” It could very well be true.It might not. Whatever we believe we just can’t actually claim there is scientific evidence in its favor. There isn’t. Multiverse? I’m not opposed theologically or for any other reason. I am against masquerading contrived arguments against fine-tuning as science.
Vinnie
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Me too. Fine tuning is just the last refuge of ID. The multiverse is so regardless. c is c regardless. It crystallizes out. Damps down. Is the apex, vertex of other planes. Nature self tunes in that key amongst a handful.
PS as we’ll never understand why spacetime expansion is accelerating and which model of the 101% certain multiverse is correct, neither of which even more imparsimoniously requires Love in any way, we’ll never understand how nature self tunes or incidentally makes life and mind. Oh! Sorry. Goddidit.
I don’t really have too much time to respond, but this opening statement would not be an accurate one.
This is also not quite right.
All right I’ll have to come back to this post.
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Looking forward to it.
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