Strong Anthropic Principle vs Creationism

[Mister Agenda]

Hi all,

This is a question that's been bothering me for a while. I'd be interested to read your thoughts.

Don't the assumption that there's a multiverse in which all possible combinations of physical constraints exist, and the assumption that some form of timeless deity created the universe, both require the same number of unprovable assumptions?

Not all assumptions are created equal. You can't just count them to determine whose position is most unreasonable. It depends on what the assumptions are.

Now in the case of a multiverse, it was not proposed to explain fine tuning, it was proposed to explain scientific findings. As a rule, scientific rationalists do not assume the multiverse, they just recognize it as a viable option given current knowledge. The multiverse hypothesis has one big advantage over the deity proposal: while it may not currently be falsifiable in practice, it is at least falsifiable in principle. There is possible evidence that we may someday be equipped to detect that could tend to support or disconfirm it. Even if the deity proposal is correct, apparently that is something we never get to have with it.

I'm not talking about belief - by belief, I'm an atheist (I found the site intro's breakdown of atheists into agnostic and gnostic very useful) - but I'd like to think my perspective is based on logic and reason. And applying Occam's Razor, it's hard to pick the strong anthropic principle over creationism (specifically, I would hope it goes without saying, a creator that sets everything in motion then stands back and is entirely noninterventionist) because they both require an untestable assumption.

Most here don't agree with the strong anthropic principle, the weak anthropic principle is the most that it seems justified to accept.

Without a logical preference for either option, I have to resign myself to agnostic atheism, which seems a poor option as it's as much based on belief as a theist's position (no offence, you theists).

By definition, atheism is at least about what you don't believe. But an agnostic atheist can believe scientific explanations are more likely than supernatural ones. At least they have math that works.

So please, point out my logical fallacy...

False dichotomy, I think.

Apologies if I've misunderstood the anthropic principle, or if this is a well-discussed topic - a quick search turned up a couple of general threads about universal origins with hundreds of posts.

All the best,

DF

Welcome to the forum, I hope you like it here. You bring up an interesting topic.

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My problem with the weak anthropic principle is that it doesn't address the issue of potentially varying universal constants.

Nothing really does. That the constants are actually variables that would be different if the universe was being re-started is a fun thought experiment, but we don't actually know that they could be anything other that what they are, that is, we don't know that they aren't what they are by necessity. Just because we don't know why they have the values they do doesn't mean it folloows that they are arbitrary. With a sample size of one, we aren't justified in making assumptions about different possible constants because we don't really know they're possible. It's a 'what if' exercise. The conclusions of thinking about what might be the case IF the constants were different, IF they vary by certain amounts, IF their values aren't related to each other...aren't something you can take and claim that 'therefore the universe we find ourselves in is vanishingly unlikely'. It's only that unlikely if all the ifs are actually the case.

It is, of course, possible that somewhere down the line we'll figure out why everything has to stack up exactly as it does and why no other possible configurations can exist, but at present (and this doesn't necessarily mean much) cosmologists are drawing a blank.

Which means we have no way of actually estimating the odds, which means we can't presume they're slim.

The strong principle - or rather, the variant of it that calls on multiverses - seems to be the only one that addresses a regular theist argument - i.e. that the chances of the physical constants of the universe happening to exist in a configuration capable of supporting life are infinitessimal.

That's a claim, not an argument, and the only thing supporting it is speculation. And if it's true, only THEN is the multiverse argument relevant. And there's already some weak evidence that our universe has been impacted by others in the cosmic background radiation. Personally I suspect that there are multiple universes, and that universes like ours aren't that rare because the constants probably have to be close to what they are due to the necessity of an energy budget that adds up to zero.

(That's not to say that other forms of life are impossible with other configurations, but as I understand it, even the tiniest variation would cause atoms to fail to cohere, stars to fail to form, the universe to crunch, etc).

Given an infinite number of possible configurations, there are an infinite number of stable configurations.