@oldearthling, welcome to the forum. Thank you for your epic first post! I agree with much. And would add that the Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 creation stories also show evidence of having come from two different people groups, with Genesis 1 having a lot of water imagery, perhaps from a coastal group, and Genesis 2 being a desert people, referencing the lack of rain on the earth. These accounts were both then used by the later compilers in communicating the message God has for us.
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I appreciate the heart of what you, oldearthling, and jammycakes are saying. My personal difficulty is that I am actually prepared to grant that YEC holds the high ground on their âplain meaningâ hermeneutic of the opening of Genesis. Without getting too far into the weeds, I am pretty aware of the evangelical and liberal scholarship bearing on these passages, and over the decades I have made peace with my inability to arrive at a tidy synthesis which wraps up science and exegesis with a bow tie. My faith is that, someday, all will be revealed.
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Hi @jammycakes,
This is a really great presentation and Iâd love to meet Aron someday. Iâll go through some of the slides and offer some thoughts listing the relevant slide number and perhaps he can offer a critique of my short critique here (or others can as well).
- Slide 4: I would pick on the phrase ânarrow range of valuesâ at first. The truth is that while we can aim to diagnose what ranges of values are life-permitting as he does in this presentation, but are these narrow? And is it narrow enough to warrant the claim that it âprovides some evidence that the universe was designed by a Creator who wanted to produce life?â Iâm not sure how anybody would define what range of values is small enough to be evidence for any kind of supernatural being, let alone one that wanted to produce life. We also donât know the underlying probability distribution for these fundamental parameters, which while some of the ranges can be ânarrow,â we donât know what the actual odds are of getting any of them. We would need some kind of more fundamental theory to even begin to talk about these being unusual or narrow.
- slide 5: I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on the most fundamental parameters and dimensionless ones. The trick of the units with dimensions is that one can always write them in different units to make them seem bigger or smaller.
- slide 11: Iâm just not sure where heâs going to go. We have absolutely no clue as to what physics lies beyond the standard model and beyond the earliest moments of the big bang. And then, I would argue itâs a false dichotomy between its this way 'because God created the universe OR âthereâs an underlying physics reason.â
- I think the next part is very clever where he focuses on how some parameters effectively change at small scales (which would be very important in say a theory of quantum gravity). This is similar to the flatness problem where if the universe is approximately flat today in its geometry, it must have been super flat in the past. However in that case, there could be mechanisms driving it to flatness and the same could be true here. We simply donât know any of the physics smaller than certain scales in the âUVâ region of say slide 19.
- Slide 21: Iâm not sure about the scientific reductionism slide. The last bit about SR âseems to predictâ I honestly have no idea about but it seems like its important to his arguments later. But it is somewhat speculative, especially since we really donât yet know if such values are natural or not in some kind of meta theory.
- Slide 29: Iâm not sure why these marginal parameters canât take on live-supporting values because again, if they were too different we wouldnât be here to ask the question.
- Slide 34: I need to do some more learning about the triple alpha process. Here is a recent calculation that makesthe fine-tuning of the light quark masses to 0.5% but the fine structure constant can vary up to 7.5%. However, an interesting critique was made by another Cosmologist Fred Adam who discusses the change to nuclear physics to break the triple alpha process makes Beryillium stable and thus you donât even need the triple alpha process to make Carbon in the first place (see page 97 of this paper if interested).
*Slide 36: Iâm glad he doesnât think the Penrose calculation is a good example of fine-tuning nor the flatness question. I donât either. - Slide 38: âif the universe didnât permit life, we wouldnât be around to noticeâ- I think the baby example is a bad rebuttal because we have previous knowledge of how babies are born. We have no previous knowledge of how universes with particular constants are formed. I would agree though that âno explanation is requiredâ isnât very helpful and even could stop us from asking good questions.
- Slide 39: the we just got lucky rebuttal. I think that both the person who makes the we just got lucky argument and Aron are mistaken when they aim to either make or reject the luck argument. Nobody knows the probability distribution of fine-tuning examples. Not one of them. We donât know what the bounds were for these fundamental parameters nor what the odds of getting each value within those bounds were.
- Slide 41: I think the deeper theory is a good point. I think such an option leads to some sort of infinite regression which I am fine saying that I believe ends in God. However, I would never argue that the lack of such a deeper theory is evidence for God.
- Slide 42: I think there definitely is some unknown physics behind such fundamental parameters. Just because its hard doesnât mean we get to reject this as an explanation.
- No other comments on the rest of it except that I really enjoyed his presentation despite any criticism presented here. I also donât quite share his confidence that any of this tells us anything about any gods or supernatural beings (slides 44 and 45) though do share his belief in such a personal God.
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However, in spite of what I said, Laurence Krauss said in a debate with Hamza Tzortzis (a Muslim apologist) that Occamâs razor is generally not used in science, as the simplest explanation is ânotâ always the most likely
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I think many of us are not understanding the point (edge?) of Occamâs razor here. It isnât a guarantee that the simplest explanation is always the right one. There are at least two caveats in place that people are failing to acknowledge - one of them explicit in the word: âusuallyâ which alone allows for those amazing exceptions, possible conspiratorial situations, and such. The other caveat would be a more implied one with the word: âexplanationâ or âsolutionâ. The presumption (before the razor can be applied) is that the competing explanations both do an equal job explaining something. If the more complicated one explains more data, then it is already the winner without any appeal to Occamâs razor at all merely by being the only solution to have reached that point.
So it may have been most correct to note that âpureâ, âtextbookâ cases of Occamâs razor are probably few and far between since most cases would already have been adjudicated on prior ability of any theory to explain more data. I suppose it finds more general philosophical or religious use in areas where theories arenât trying to generate data - but then asking which one requires the most convoluted explanations or interpretations of texts.
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Humans are already creating new life in a variety of forms, from new bacteria to artificial intelligence and robots. 100 years from now, 1000, 10,000, where will humanity be in this process? I donât think it far-fetched at all to believe that we will be creating new, intelligent, biological forms of life at some point, and even preparing and seeding our own evolution projects, possibly in locations that we ourselves terraformed. Those forms of life could at some point, given sufficient time, start doing their own projects.
Given this, why would humanity disregard the idea that we are someone elseâs project? To claim that we are the first would be an extraordinary claim. How do we know that we are the first? Why would we presume that?
Should we instead be asking the question, âIs there any reasonable argument against intelligent design, i.e., any reasonable argument that we are in fact the first?â
Well in my view it would be important to distinguish âIntelligent designâ full-stop, which every theist affirms due to God being personal and the Intelligent Design associated with the Discovery Institute. I don´t think the latter has too much going for it as a positive theory, though I appreciate the philosophical criticsm of darwinism, which however can be found in other literature not associated with DI, too (also in purely secular literature e.g. Nagel, Stove, Noe, Cartwright, Noble). Generally, the biggest problem I see with it, is that it adapts the mechanistic, reductionistic metaphysics, which I find lacking badly, and tries to find evidence for design there. This is the wrong approach.
I think intelligent design would have a much easier time were it were not for the Discovery Institute also. They have a history and reputation of not being fully above board, even to the name of their anti-evolution and anti-science newletter Evolution News &Science Today. Many of the articles there are just hit pieces with slanted articles, such as this one:Apocalypse Now â More Things Scientists Would Like You to Forget | Evolution News
A classic example of the poor editing and misleading writing in that article is the statement that " The scientific consensus that DDT causes cancer has cost millions of lives." If the writer had read his own reference, he would have seen that the concern was the environmental damage, and that cancer was never a significant factor in DDTâs ban.
Evolutionary Creationists (and creationists of any flavor) pretty much by definition believe in intelligent design in one form or another. They just donât believe it should be in the science class as it remains unexplained and unobserved. Guess it just takes faith to believe it under those circumstances.
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Well I would deny that. It isn´t like the natural world surrounding us forces one to be fideistic about creation, though most here seem to be critical towards natural theology. I can give two examples, which, when accompanied with further arguments, give excellent evidence for classical theism. First of all, everytime when someone speaks of emergence, one implicitly commits him-/herself to something like aristotelian forms. There is no place for emergence within a mechanistic framework, so to hold onto it, one would be forced to reduce the emergent phenomena to the parts, which gets incredible difficult (or in my mind, impossible) when it comes to life itself or mental phenomena, since it would require that life itself or consciousness are purely quantitative, not qualitative, features.
Another one is teleology, as it has been recognized by Aristotle and Augustine. Contrary to the Paleyian picture, where every directedness, due to the mechanistic framework, necessarily has to invoke a designer, while the Aristotelian affirms teleology as following rules. Mass is attracted to each other, the heart function is to pump blood, our thoughts are directed to ward a certain end (When I think about my dog, my thoughts are directed, and about him). All this is recognized by the Aristotelian as examples of teleology. In fact, everytime you speak about function, it is a speak about an objects teleology. Ernst Mayr was one biologist who recognized such basic aristotelian patterns and it becomes popular again in contemporary philosophy of biology.
As you can see, I haven´t made any reference to God or anything like that, but we are already way beyond what the vast majority of naturalists are comfortable with (the appearance of eliminative materialism (Rosenberg, Churchland, Humphrey, Dennett) is no coincidence). But I don´t see how the categories I just described can be denied while keeping the science behind it intelligible.
I just happened upon this thought of yours. Any chance you could further expound? Iâve speculated about something like this myself but have never seen the idea expressed elsewhere.
Phil, in fairness, the linked article was there to reference the claim about millions of malaria deaths, not to support the cancer claim. It seems like general knowledge that at least part of the movement about DDT ban was due to cancer concerns, no?
Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carsonâs book Silent Spring⌠The book claimed that DDT and other pesticides had been shown to cause cancerâŚ
As the article referenced stated, it was about thinned eggshells and such. While there are some possible links to breast cancer, that was really not a big concern at the time, except as perhaps a scare technique.
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Physicists experience and have expressed a great deal of cognitive dissonance when they learn the fundamental facts of quantum physics, that not only do some events apparently have no cause but it is proven that no such cause is even possible within some rather crucial premises of the scientific worldview. It basically puts an end to the possibility of physical determinism. A few physicists like David Bohm have even stubbornly clung to determinism by discarding some of the premises such as local causality (from relativity). But that is rather against the spirit of scientific inquiry which accepts the conclusions of experimental results.
Philosophically these results certainly do not prove that determinism is wrong or that these events have no causes outside the premises of the scientific worldview but it rather leaves a wide open hole in the presumption of naturalism that the scientific worldview is the limit of reality itself. To be sure the naturalist can simply embrace indeterminism, that not all events have a cause. But even if you accept indeterminism as I do (that not everything happens for a reason), that doesnât actually close the possibility of causality from outside the scientific worldview.
In the big picture, if you are asking why the universe is the way it is, then quantum physics is a gaping hole in the naturalist idea that natural law can provide all the reasons you need. In particular, the question of why quantum physics would be the hardest to find a justification for. Unless⌠suppose the universe was created by a deity, a universe which is to operate almost entirely by a set of fixed rules which we call the laws of nature, possibly because this is a requirement of life by its basic nature which has to do things for its own reasons rather than by design. But the creator doesnât want just a big wind up toy but something with which He can have an ongoing relationship where He continues to influence the course of events. Well, it would seem to me then that such a deity would need something just like quantum physics where the laws of nature donât quite control absolutely everything all the time, but that there are limits which allow God to intervene without actually breaking the laws of nature which He created to govern the universe.
So how does this work? We know that everywhere all the time there is a non zero probability for energy to simply appear and even create what we call virtual particles to interact with things as long as that energy is paid back in the amount of time allowed by the time-energy uncertainty principle. Thus God can alter the course of sub-atomic events and we know that chaotic dynamics means that not all such events average out to no effect, but that some can alter the course of macroscopic events like a butterfly creating a hurricane (much later and farther away). The result is that quantum physics allows God to influence the course of events when He chooses without breaking the laws of nature He created.
To be sure it would make it impossible to prove that God actually altered the course of events because that and anything else attributed to Godâs interference can be dismissed by the skeptic as coincidence due to random effects. But people are likewise free to believe that God does have a hand in events because the skeptic cannot prove that this is not the case.
The writer actually claimed that a âscientific consensus that DDT causes cancer has cost millions of livesâ? Do you think thatâs true?
I have no idea, I wasnât alive then, and I have no interest in so researching the question. I observe that Rachel Carson certainly believed it did, and her book was certainly influential, so the author is not entirely baseless, even if misleading. For now I take Philâs word for it that the original author was unwarranted and misleading in the exaggerated claim.
I was only noticing that the author referenced that particular article to back up the claim that millions of lives were lost to malaria (supporting the claim, highlighted as the hyperlink, that it âhas cost millions of livesâ), not as a reference to support the claim about cancer fear being the reason.
I was not alive at the time, and have little knowledge, but if I trust Wikipedia, Rachel Carson seemed to believe there was such a connection? Sounds like it may have been she that was engaging in the âscare techniqueâ?
Wikipedia also seems to suggest her cancer connection was controversial at the time, so I certainly concur with your critique of the discovery article on that point. Sounds misleading at best to say that cancer from DDT was a âscientific consensusâ.
It is also worth noting that concerns about DDTâs safety had little to do with the collapse of the malaria eradication campaign in the 1960s. The campaign was designed to be a short-term effort and was wildly optimistic. When it became apparent that the simplistic approach being used wasnât going to cut it in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, enthusiasm waned and funding started to dry up. Combined with growing resistance to DDT in mosquitos (thanks mostly to agricultural use of DDT) and resistance to chloroquine in the parasites themselves, in many places the gains were quickly lost.
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I wrote a fictional book with three or four key insights that entered my mind recently about intelligent design. I wrote it in book form because it is difficult to explain to people who are not open to nouvelle concepts. I would like to hear what people think about the topic.
You can read the first four chapters online at
The first four chapters, though there are other plots wrapped around the creation content, gives a decent intro to the key insights dealing with God the Scientist, project manager and inventor. The rest of the book has people of various intelligences discussing the topics.
Thanks
David:
Okay, website maintenance is done. Where are the freebie pages?
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God, by implicit definition, is, needs to be, none of those things.
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