Is Faith impossible? - or - Can God do the impossible?

thethinkfactory

That is a variation on the anthropic principle http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/life.html .

The factors required to support intelligent life seem to require incredible fine tuning and luck. The odds have been calculated as 1 : 10 ^ 42,000 against.
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20276&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=127

To balance out then why are we here you need an infinity of some sort (or just a mind boggling big number to balance out random chance).

The candidates (discussed in several of my other threads) are:

1. Infinite Universe - unending spacetime, matter and energy - (unlikely by all observations and sciences)

2. A Big bang / Big crunch universe model implying infinite time - (more unlikely, no known physics or observations to reverse inflation or acceleration, non zero point energy and the causual disconnection of the Universe combine to swamp any chance of eventual gravitational collapse)

3. Infinite Universes (the M-theory variant) each occupying their own brane of existence - coming in two flavours - static or dynamic (interacting over infinite time). So two branes could have combined to form our new one - via the big bang event. Of course this doesn't answer what are branes and where did they come from!

4. Infinite luck

5. Infinite God - directing and nudging the above to create today's situation.

I'd rule out 1 and 2 and say a combination of 3 (dynamic) plus some 4 and an exploratory 5 thrown in are my intuitions as to why we are here today.

The 10^42,000 number requires some rather questionable assumptions (such as that each variable is completely independent) and a lot of sheer speculation. It is meaningless.

So what are the odds that this incredibly complex god just happens to exist who happens to have the KSAs necessary to create a universe? What are the odds that some sort of energy/matter just happened to be laying around, ready to form into a universe?

Or do you think that God just waved his hand (or whatever) and "poof" - the universe appeared magically out of nothing, with exactly the right values for all of the physical constants, and churned for 13 billion years producing hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of planets, for the sole purpose of producing life on just one of them?

Well Terry, at least that link provides a model to fine tune - which of any of the 31 variables do you feel are interdependent introducing what degree of colinearity? Rather than say its totally meaningless why not find specific fault with it - it was created by fairly knowledgable scientist after all - it deserves better than an out of hand dismissal.

Also odds don't work terribly well for one off events that happen rarely. Ask 3 years and 3 days ago what where the odds for two planes to fly into two buildings less than 200 yards apart within minutes of one another and an insurer would have said astronomical!

Maybe God had the means to select two finely tuned membranes with ideal properties and simply nudged them into resonance to co-join forming our reality.

There is still a HUGE amount we dont know about the first instances after the big bang until inflation stopped. The flatness and relic problems for instance, a great read is here
http://bustard.phys.nd.edu/Phys171/lectures/beyondinf.html

As to why is the Universe so big from a perspective of faith? Hey well that is my inaugral thread!!!!

Terry,

I think the God waving his hand and poof is nearly equal to the universe, creating itself, fully formed, from nothing (or should I say an undefined three space - which is technical for - nothing).

Either way it is 'poof' out of nothing.

TTF

p.s G-day - thanks for your posts. I can't tell now why I am a philosophy professor and not a cosmologist.

Quantum physics can create something out of nothing - it happens on a trully miniture scale every moment - the Cassimir effect - virutal particles pairs and anti-pairs create and annihilate each other in the merest fraction of a second. What I am talking about is almost like a super big, concentration of these moments where there is not instaneous annihilation and a leftover Universe is the result. I guess there are about 10 ^ 80 - 10 ^ 100 atoms in the Universe (if you count all energy as matter for purposes of the calculation). That alot of matter to suddenly go zing into existence!

But if membranes are a reality - then two possibly could be pushed into resonance to transform into a new one - ours. The embronyic M-theory does say such an event could cause a big bang.

Thanks Terry - I wished I had studied Philosophy, its seems an interesting subject. I am just giving a scientists who has a health dose of creationist faith's perspective in here from time to time. I could easily be wrong, just so long as its challenging, well thought through and interesting!

g-day-

Okay, I understand about pairs of virtual particles being created and being destroyed - it is the reason that we see 'emissions' from a black hole, correct? The positive particles loose thier negative pair (due to the gravity of the black hole) and thus seem to be emitted.

However, there is 'space' around for them to exist in. I know space is no-thing, but it is truly not nothing. Nothing is... well nothing and space is a volume with no mass.

Is this not different from the nothing that existed before the universe. What Hawking calls an 'undefined 3-space'?

TTF

Space should be more adaptly called seething Quantum foam. Basically its saying space is a foam of incredibley small and short lived interactions, that are happening on both a size and timescale (10 ^-35 metres and 10 ^ -43 seconds) to make a electron orbiting an atom look guarguatan and dead slow.

So this is welcome to quantum space. The trouble is at the well below microscopic level of study individual reactions happen too fast and possibly too differently for relativity to control them and determine their interactions. It these timescales light itself can only travel less than 10 ^ -30 of a metre, or a trillionith of the radius of an electron!

So welcome to the surreal world of quantum physics. Summed at a macro level you get the reality we see today, but at the quantum level you get turbulent quantum strangeness - probably still ruled by quantum gravity today. We have no strong theories to model this reality yet, and certainly no scientific means that comes remotely close to investigating it. But theoretcial scientists believe it is very real. Hawking uses it as you described above, and to say nowhere in space get you fully reach absolute zero - quantum jostling must prevent you reaching absolute zero - else you'd break the uncertainity principle.

So the major question is this quantum foam only part of our membrane of existance - or does it connect alternate but 'close'membranes of existence - say by gravity leaking between close membranes. The jury is still well and trully out on that one.

The bottom line is all our physics is based on what is an atom and the four forces. We can theorise down to a quark and see their existence in supercolliders - so we know of over 300 boson and lepton combinations that make up all matter and energy so far observed. But we know there is something way below this level of size and energy concentration - perhaps M-theory, perhaps SuSy (SuperSymmetry or String theory). When we unravel that we may have a far grander understanding of reality and what is and isn't possible!