Strong Anthropic Principle vs Creationism

[Nine]

I'd be interested to read your thoughts.

Well I have my tin foil hat on so HA!

[vorlon13]

Can I ask some silly back to basics questions?
We know the effect of gravity. We know mass has gravity.
. . .

That is not a silly observation. Einstein realized an extremely profound characteristic of our universe from 'simply' pondering 'mass hass gravity'.

It turns out, gravity has gravity too.


Really.


Near our sun, it's gravity is so strong that an effect of gravity's gravity becomes apparent to astronomers. Energy equals mass times the velocity of light, squared. Turns out the suns gravity represents, by itself, ignoring the sun for a minute, a tremendous amount of energy. That tremendous amount of energy is equivalent to an additional amount of mass and that equivalent amount of mass adds a tiny bit to the 'amount' of gravity we note from the sun.

The effect was already noted by astronomers in a subtle, non-Newtonian variation in the planet Mercury's orbit around the sun, but it took Einstein to figure out what was going on.

Einstein also noted that the positions of the stars we see near the sun are subtly changed by the suns gravity too. So gravity effects light!

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Addenda:

the additional gravity from the sun's gravity is not peculiar to our sun, BTW. It is just that the sun is sufficiently large and close for the effect to be noticeable by astronomers. Everything that has gravity would experience the 'extra gravity effect', it just takes a heap of gravity to make it visible.

[DaFinchi]

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

For that to even be an issue, you'd need to first establish that a universe without this specific set of constants would be a "failure" state. Without the establishment of this universe as the goal for the origins of the universe, your contention doesn't even make sense. You might as well be saying that a hand of cards, randomly drawn, couldn't have been randomly drawn because you could have drawn a different hand. It's a non-sequitur in a universe without a god: yes, things could have been different and the universe could have been devoid of life. Who'd notice?

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.

Even if there were no other possible configurations that doesn't require a multiverse or a god: it could just be that the cascading series of consequences that led to the current state of our universe could only turn out the one way. No need to complicate things further until we find out more.

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.

Which is, again, a nonsensical complaint without the establishment of life as a necessity of goal. To go back to a deck of cards for a moment, the chances of drawing all the aces in a row is quite low in a shuffled deck, but it's also the same chances of drawing any other series of cards. Without the additional symbolic import we give to the four aces, probability does not care.

(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).

And if all that were to happen and the universe falls to nought... who would be around to give a shit?

Thanks for your reply - and apologies to any and all for my misuse of terminology.

I agree that in itself, the existence of life and the capacity of this universe to support it really isn't that significant - the universe would do just fine without us, and in that sense, drawing four aces, to use your metaphor, is only important if you're playing a game - otherwise, any hand of cards will do.

But that's not really my point - my point is the sheer improbability that (assuming no multiverse) there is only one universe and it just happens to be capable of supporting life. As far as we know (important qualifier) there's no reason that the universe couldn't exist in a near infinite range of other states with different physical constants.

In, as far as we know, all of them but this one, life couldn't exist. So it's less like drawing four aces and more like rolling a '1' on a billion-sided die.

That life results is not, per se, significant - it could be any equally unlikely result - the key thing is that life appears to be very, very, very unlikely. Hence multiverse or God.

You're absolutely right that we may yet find out that the constants can only ever fall out one way, in which case it's like rolling a '1' on a 1-sided die, but that in itself is a fairly big assumption.

Saying "who'd notice?" - yeah, I know, if we weren't there, we wouldn't be able to ask where the universe comes from. But that still ignores the infinitessimal probability that in the single instance of the universe we know of, the constants did end up in this configuration.

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I'd be interested to read your thoughts.

Well I have my tin foil hat on so HA!

Bugger.

You'll have to take it off to shower eventually.

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Either Anthropic Principle is useful in generating questions.

And many of those questions are really profound.


Seems like creationism isn't set up to generate (or tolerate) questions much. I know any creationite I have quizzed on the topic has found it annoying.

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Interesting factoid that came up in a similar thread at a science forum:

All electrons in our universe are perfectly identical. I don't recall how they figured that one out, but it is profound for those of us who worried a few might not be.

Yeah, I reckon I saw some with variant paintjobs in Sydney.

It gets freakier than that - apparently, they might all actually be the same electron.

Then, if my deeply flawed understanding approximates correctly, there's Pauli's Exclusion Paradox, where the energy levels of no two electrons in the universe can ever be the same. This has the bizarre effect that if you raise the energy level of an electron in your living room, all other electrons in the universe instantly compensate. Which would seem to violate lightspeed limits on information transfer.

But I digress. I agree that creationists are generally reluctant to discuss such possibilities - probably because the key issue for them is not reason but faith. With a worldview built on such shaky foundations, admitting alternate possibilities might bring the entire edifice crashing down. As a crucial prop in self identity, as religion is for many, the ego defends itself against such a threat.

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Just so we are using the same terms, according to wikipedia:

Strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, for conscious life to eventually emerge. (Tipler is a Theist btw and has come up with some real nonsense).

Weak anthropic principle (WAP) which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld.

The WAP is the Anthropic principle as I remember it being briefly mentioned at university. You don't need multiverses to support either. In fact I'd go as far as to say that the idea of multiverses is neat to a physicist as it provides a sort of symmetry often seen in nature. But it remains at the hypothesis stage for now.

If the universe is fine tuned for humans, then whatever did it didn't do a brilliant job.

Agnostic Atheism is the default position. You don't need to now anything about fine tuning, multiverses, even any physics at all to be an Agnostic Atheist.

I do apologise, you're absolutely right: the SAP says the universe can only unfold this way and the WAP says it's a selection bias - and there's a specific variant of the WAP that rests on multiverse theory.

I don't find the original SAP or original WAP arguments very compelling (as you'll see from my most recent replies) as the former requires a massive assumption (i.e. physical constants can only unfold one way, for which there is no evidence) and the takes no account of probability (i.e. infinitessimal chance that the one universe happened to be one supporting life).

The multiverse variant is neat because it explains away the probability dilemma of the WAP. But a multiverse is also a big assumption.

Though thinking about it now, not necessarily any smaller an assumption than the SAP.

I guess I'd like to be a Gnostic Atheist - one who feels that you can, based on reason and not opinion, reach an atheistic conclusion. Because otherwise, while I can confidently reject the existence of the Bible's God, all I have against a creator vs SAP vs multiverse is... well... my opinion.

Which is why I'm looking for someone to show me why a creator is a bigger and less likely assumption than either the multiverse or SAP.

[Esquilax]

In, as far as we know, all of them but this one, life couldn't exist. So it's less like drawing four aces and more like rolling a '1' on a billion-sided die.

"As far as we know," is a dangerous phrase. Just so long as you keep in mind that our knowledge on this issue isn't complete, so there could in fact be multiple "life" sides on that billion-sided die.

That life results is not, per se, significant - it could be any equally unlikely result - the key thing is that life appears to be very, very, very unlikely. Hence multiverse or God.

Why the false dichotomy? Multiverse or god? How about neither? Like I said, the current state of the universe, as a result, isn't necessarily significant, and so there's no need to form an explanation for why it shook out to form life, as opposed to not. There's no problem here that needs solving (in a theism/atheism debate sense, I mean. I fully accept that we should attempt to find out just as an investigative measure.)

You asked in your OP whether it takes the same sort of leaps of faith to believe in the multiverse as it does to believe in god, and my first reaction is, why believe in either? Accept them as possibilities, sure, but I don't really know why you keep bringing up the unlikelihood of life as though it entails one or the other, especially when we don't even know the likelihood of life to begin with.

Saying "who'd notice?" - yeah, I know, if we weren't there, we wouldn't be able to ask where the universe comes from. But that still ignores the infinitessimal probability that in the single instance of the universe we know of, the constants did end up in this configuration.

What's the issue you're actually having with the probability, here? Because I'm really not seeing it.

[FreeTony]

I do apologise, you're absolutely right: the SAP says the universe can only unfold this way and the WAP says it's a selection bias - and there's a specific variant of the WAP that rests on multiverse theory.

I don't find the original SAP or original WAP arguments very compelling (as you'll see from my most recent replies) as the former requires a massive assumption (i.e. physical constants can only unfold one way, for which there is no evidence) and the takes no account of probability (i.e. infinitessimal chance that the one universe happened to be one supporting life).

The multiverse variant is neat because it explains away the probability dilemma of the WAP. But a multiverse is also a big assumption.

Though thinking about it now, not necessarily any smaller an assumption than the SAP.

I guess I'd like to be a Gnostic Atheist - one who feels that you can, based on reason and not opinion, reach an atheistic conclusion. Because otherwise, while I can confidently reject the existence of the Bible's God, all I have against a creator vs SAP vs multiverse is... well... my opinion.

Which is why I'm looking for someone to show me why a creator is a bigger and less likely assumption than either the multiverse or SAP.

You really don't need there to be multiverses for the WAP to hold.

With the WAP you can't possibly put a probability on it (see Bayes Theorem). For instance it might be true that any universe must always have these fundamental constants. Could a universe exist where Pi is not 3.14? We have no idea.


You don't need to have the exact answer to a question in order to filter out the incredibly unlikely hypotheses.

[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.

[vorlon13]

All kinds of weird questions come up. Were I younger (and not a 12 Stepper) it might be rather fun to get some materials together, have a couple of the right friends stop by and drop some acid.

Does 'time' exist if you don't have a universe for it to impinge upon ??

Is our 'notion' of time fixed in all possible universes, or do other forms of time possibly exist ??

Is our current universe separated in time from one or more preceding universes ??

When matter and anti-matter are combined (in our universe) we get a blaze of energy. Is a form of matter possible that when added to matter, the yield is 'nothing'? And if there is such a form of 'converse' matter, what happens if it contacts anti-matter ??

Is it possible for an alternate universe to exist, identical to ours, except in that one, Joseph Smith and Mormonism are in fact 'true' ??

Is 'knowledge' fractal in character, and therefore, no matter how long humanity exists, no matter how advanced our computers become, we will never know everything ??

Why does my cat keep losing his favorite toy under the stove ??

[The Grand Nudger]

-and just what did happen....to all of those left socks?

Welcome aboard.

[FreeTony]

All kinds of weird questions come up. Were I younger (and not a 12 Stepper) it might be rather fun to get some materials together, have a couple of the right friends stop by and drop some acid.

Does 'time' exist if you don't have a universe for it to impinge upon ??

Is our 'notion' of time fixed in all possible universes, or do other forms of time possibly exist ??

Is our current universe separated in time from one or more preceding universes ??

When matter and anti-matter are combined (in our universe) we get a blaze of energy. Is a form of matter possible that when added to matter, the yield is 'nothing'? And if there is such a form of 'converse' matter, what happens if it contacts anti-matter ??

Is it possible for an alternate universe to exist, identical to ours, except in that one, Joseph Smith and Mormonism are in fact 'true' ??

Is 'knowledge' fractal in character, and therefore, no matter how long humanity exists, no matter how advanced our computers become, we will never know everything ??

Why does my cat keep losing his favorite toy under the stove ??

I'd suggest doing a degree in Physics, rather than drugs, would help more for many of those.

[ignoramus]

I also wonder with the BB singularity, how could that in itself not also be a norm.
Do we assume that's a one off? If not, then why should they be happening and creating other universes constantly?