High School Student, Forbidden From Wearing Rosary For His Grandma

[jem]

Quote from Mav88:

jem, you didn't understand what I said. There is no fine tuning argument until all the physics is known. In other words how can we possibly know if something is tuned until we understand what that something is?

at some point you have to dig into the science and see why all these famous scientists are saying our universe appears finely tuned?

Have you tried to understand what penrose is saying?
what weinberg says about the appearance of the tuning of the comological constant or dark energy?

Yes it could change, science could find a theory of everything which explains why the constants had to be tuned this way... but given where our science is...

is hawking wrong?

when he says in the bottom up (traditional) approach to science you either postulate the fine tunings are caused by a third part or you speculate eternal inflation which means you can't make any predictions.
or

Carr? when he says tunings ( which suggets Tuner) or mulitiverse
Martin rees - whose books advance the argument about the tunings of 7 constants.

Susskind - when he says our unverse appears incredibly fine tuned but suggested that there could be a multiverse



these guys?

Quote from jem:

.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/WhGdVMBk6Zo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

or this in which dawkins state there are physicists who say there appear to be fine tuings.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mlD-CJPGt1A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So I am not saying this means there is a tuner... I am saying the top guys in the field state the universe appears designed.

 

[stu]

Quote from jem:

1. surprise!!!! stu slanting definitions and misrepresenting fact or science..
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agnostic

agnostic

: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
2
: a person who is unwilling to commit to an opinion about something <political agnostics>
— ag·nos·ti·cism noun
-----------------------

Science is very concerned about how things began, especially the big bang. in absence of proof that it was created by random chance... Creator is one of the best leading explanations....the apparent fine tunings may have needed a Tuner.

Lol Congratulations. Neither of those definitions apply.

Science isn't about stating anything is unknowable. Quite the opposite. So that one's a non starter.
Neither is there anything rational that commits science to be willing or unwilling to consider the supernatural. The mythical isn't even in the realm of science. Any different and simply it is not science.

To be agnostic about God or gods or creators is to commit to the confines of religious argument. Not science and not scientific.

The absence of scientific proof does not mean any and all non-scientific non-explanations for silly tuner creators will work instead. duh!

 

[stu]

Quote from jem:

at some point you have to dig into the science and see why all these famous scientists are saying our universe appears finely tuned?

Yet possibly the most famous of all says even if you want to describe the universe as fine tuned or designed, then it is done so by gravity. No god or other forms of tuner required. Another very famous one says there doesn't seem to be any and even if there did it could be explained by other means.

Your flimsy arguments rely only on an appearance of something that has no information to support it.
The creationists' equivalent to the appearance of fine tuning is the levelists' appearance of a flat Earth.

 

[stu]

Quote from Tsing Tao:

I will never understand the desire to argue something that is both impossible to prove and impossible to "not prove".

Just let everyone believe what they want and we're all happy.

You mean just let there be a complete failure of human reasoning.

Proof and belief are two different things. I don't think the former should be sacrificed to the latter.

 

[jem]

Quote from stu:

Yet possibly the most famous of all says even if you want to describe the universe as fine tuned or designed, then it is done so by gravity. No god or other forms of tuner required. Another very famous one says there doesn't seem to be any and even if there did it could be explained by other means.

Your flimsy arguments rely only on an appearance of something that has no information to support it.
The creationists' equivalent to the appearance of fine tuning is the levelists' appearance of a flat Earth.

Why lie about science Stu? Why turn conditional statements into absolute statements and mis represent Hawking? What is the purpose?

.
Hawking says you may explain the fine tunings by coupling the speculation of a multiverse with his speculation of top down cosmology... within that speculation you could say Gravity selected your line of universes.

 

[jem]

Quote from stu:

You mean just let there be a complete failure of human reasoning.

Proof and belief are two different things. I don't think the former should be sacrificed to the latter.

Then why do you mispresent science... repeatedly - to serve your atheist meme.

 

[jem]

Lol you were the troll who misrepresented the definition of agnostic.
I was the one who basically stated what you are now writing... Why the fuck did you argue with that and bullshit about the definition of agnostic?

Quote from stu:

Lol Congratulations. Neither of those definitions apply.

Science isn't about stating anything is unknowable. Quite the opposite. So that one's a non starter.
Neither is there anything rational that commits science to be willing or unwilling to consider the supernatural. The mythical isn't even in the realm of science. Any different and simply it is not science.

To be agnostic about God or gods or creators is to commit to the confines of religious argument. Not science and not scientific.

The absence of scientific proof does not mean any and all non-scientific non-explanations for silly tuner creators will work instead. duh!

 

[Mav88]

at some point you have to dig into the science and see why all these famous scientists are saying our universe appears finely tuned?

Have you tried to understand what penrose is saying?
what weinberg says about the appearance of the tuning of the comological constant or dark energy?

Have you dug? no you have not, let's look at what weinberg says in its entirety http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html

MR. WEINBERG: I don't see any clear evidence that the laws of nature or the constants of nature as we know them are fine tuned to allow life. I mean, certainly the laws of nature do allow life. But I don't see anything clearly in them that looks like a spectacular coincidence. I'm not convinced by any of those arguments.

There are some things that are quite mysterious in our understanding of nature as we know it now. There is a constant called the "cosmological constant", which if I didn't know anything I would make an estimate of what its magnitude would be just on the basis of guess work from what I know about the laws of nature. The correct value is less than that estimated value by something like 120 orders of magnitude. That looks like some kind of fine tuning. And we don't know. It may be that that number is simply zero, and it's zero for some fundamental reason that we will discover. And so it isn't fine tuned. It's also possible that the universe is bigger and more complicated than we had thought, and that what we call the universe, is just part of the universe, and that what we call the laws of nature differ from one part to another, and that we are living in a part of the universe where what we call the laws of nature, including the value of this constant, allow life to appear. In that case we wouldn't imagine that any supernatural agency fine tuned the laws and constants to make us possible, any more that we imagine that a supernatural agency arranged that the Earth had a temperature which allows life. Out there, there are doubtless millions of planets in the galaxy, and we live on one that allows life. That doesn't imply to me that it has been specially arranged to allow life

I can't believe you would want to discuss Hawking, probably the most hard copre atheist out there

Yes it could change, science could find a theory of everything which explains why the constants had to be tuned this way... but given where our science is...

is hawking wrong?

you mean the atheist Hawking that is misrepresented by theists? http://debunkingdenialism.com/2011/...of-hawking-on-expansion-rate-of-the-universe/

A more or less representative case of a creationist who quotes Hawking out of context is the popular Christian apologist William Lane Craig. He may be the most prominent Christian apologist alive today. This does not, of course, mean that he is necessarily right, but it goes to show how popular he is and how many people he influence. Here is the relevant passage that he often repeats, almost verbatim, in many of his debates:


During the last 30 years, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. We now know that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than any life-permitting universe like ours. How much more probable?

The answer is that the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable. For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball

The reference for this claim is page 126 in Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1996 edition) and the relevant quote from Hawking is:


If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, they universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size

This sounds like Hawking is accepting that the expansion rate of the universe is fine-tuned. However, this quote is taken out of context. Hawking is actually asking a couple of intriguing questions that he later answers with, among others things, cosmological inflation (an initial, very rapid expansion of the universe compared with today). Hawking explain what he means (p. 133):


Moreover, the rate of expansion of the universe would automatically become very close to the critical rate determined by the energy density of the universe. This could then explain why the rate of expansion is still so close to the critical rate, without having to assume that the initial rate of expansion of the universe was very carefully chosen.

That is, cosmological inflation solves the supposed fine-tuning of the expansion rate of the universe. Hawking is then saying the exact opposite of what the proponents of fine-tuning claim that he is. The context stretches out over the chapter, so perhaps we should be charitably and say that maybe Craig and others just missed that part of the book? I doubt it.

More name dropping without understanding....

Carr? when he says tunings ( which suggets Tuner) or mulitiverse
Martin rees - whose books advance the argument about the tunings of 7 constants.

Susskind - when he says our unverse appears incredibly fine tuned but suggested that there could be a multiverse

these guys?

and again you misrepresent the fine tuning argument of Susskind which has nothing to do with theism, although at least you admit he is multiverse sort of guy http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/leonard-susskind

So it's not that the universe is somehow contorting itself to accommodate us; it's just a diverse place and we find ourselves in a friendly corner. Is that right?

Right! But it's not a done deal. The question of whether the universe is a crazy quilt or a mono-colored blanket is still not definitively answered, although things are pointing toward the crazy quilt. I doubt that it will be settled for a good long time.

So yes I have dug, should I ignore that most all these people you quote don't support the theist viewpoint of a creator designing the universe?

Why do you ignore the important recent work of Stenger and Barnes? Are you not being honest and digging enough?

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647.pdf

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Fallacy/Misrep.pdf

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Fallacy/DefendFallacy.pdf

Extreme examples explained, Without which it is claimed any form of life would be
impossible.
Ratio of electrons to protons!! ! ! ! 1 part in 1037
charge conservation
Ratio of electromagnetic force to gravity! 1 part in 1040
low mass of elementary particles
Expansion rate of the universe ! ! ! 1 part in 1055
inflation
Mass density of the universe!! ! ! ! 1 part in 1059
inflation
Cosmological constant!! ! ! ! ! ! 1 part in 10120
holographic universe?

 

[jem]

Where did I say these guys were arguing for theism. I stated they have stated the universe appears finely tuned. This is the argument for Carr.

But... it is offensive that you think I do not know what these guy are saying. You are the one who is ignorant of the discussion.

here is Bernard Carr laying it out for you.





"Bernard Carr is an astronomer at Queen Mary University, London. Unlike Martin Rees, he does not enjoy wooden-panelled rooms in his day job, but inhabits an office at the top of a concrete high-rise, the windows of which hang as if on the edge of the universe. He sums up the multiverse predicament: “Everyone has their own reason why they’re keen on the multiverse. But what it comes down to is that there are these physical constants that can’t be explained. It seems clear that there is fine tuning, and you either need a tuner, who chooses the constants so that we arise, or you need a multiverse, and then we have to be in one of the universes where the constants are right for life.”

But which comes first, tuner or tuned? Who or what is leading the dance? Isn’t conjuring up a multiverse to explain already outlandish fine-tuning tantamount to leaping out of the physical frying pan and into the metaphysical fire?

Unsurprisingly, the multiverse proposal has provoked ideological opposition. In 2005, the New York Times published an opinion piece by a Roman Catholic cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, in which he called it “an abdication of human intelligence.” That comment led to a slew of letters lambasting the claim that the multiverse is a hypothesis designed to avoid “the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.” But even if you don’t go along with the prince of the church on that, he had another point which does resonate with many physicists, regardless of their belief. The idea that the multiverse solves the fine-tuning of the universe by effectively declaring that everything is possible is in itself not a scientific explanation at all: if you allow yourself to hypothesize any number of worlds, you can account for anything but say very little about how or why."

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=137

Quote from Mav88:

Have you dug? no you have not, let's look at what weinberg says in its entirety http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html



I can't believe you would want to discuss Hawking, probably the most hard copre atheist out there


you mean the atheist Hawking that is misrepresented by theists? http://debunkingdenialism.com/2011/...of-hawking-on-expansion-rate-of-the-universe/




More name dropping without understanding....



and again you misrepresent the fine tuning argument of Susskind which has nothing to do with theism, although at least you admit he is multiverse sort of guy http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/leonard-susskind



So yes I have dug, should I ignore that most all these people you quote don't support the theist viewpoint of a creator designing the universe?

Why do you ignore the important recent work of Stenger and Barnes? Are you not being honest and digging enough?

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647.pdf

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Fallacy/Misrep.pdf

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Fallacy/DefendFallacy.pdf

 

[jem]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind

The Cosmic Landscape
Main article: The Cosmic Landscape
The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design is Susskind's first popular science book, published by Little, Brown and Company on December 12, 2005.[25] It is Susskind's attempt to bring his idea of the anthropic landscape of string theory to the general public. In the book, Susskind describes how the string theory landscape was an almost inevitable consequence of several factors, one of which was Steven Weinberg's prediction of the cosmological constant in 1987. The question addressed here is why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Susskind explains that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist.

----
How do you respond to critics who see the anthropic approach as quasi-religious or unscientific?

I cannot put it better than Steven Weinberg did in a recent paper:
1. Susskind from your cite...

How do you respond to critics who see the anthropic approach as quasi-religious or unscientific?

Finally, I have heard the objection that, in trying to explain why the laws of nature are so well suited for the appearance and evolution of life, anthropic arguments take on some of the flavor of religion. I think that just the opposite is the case. Just as Darwin and Wallace explained how the wonderful adaptations of living forms could arise without supernatural intervention, so the string landscape may explain how the constants of nature that we observe can take values suitable for life without being fine-tuned by a benevolent creator. I found this parallel well understood in a surprising place, a New York Times op-ed article by Christoph Schönborn, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna. His article concludes as follows:

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human nature by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.