Thinking Christian

This is going to be interesting to watch:

During the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.

[Link: Cosmologists Aim To Observe First Moments Of Universe]

Alan Guth’s cosmic inflation theory is already a leading candidate for explaining how our universe came to be the way it is from a Big Bang beginning. If a certain kind of gravity wave is detected, it will provide the theory strong support.

This also will be interesting to watch: If the test provides the hoped-for support, will observers conclude that the “microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time” must have been “random”? On what basis would they do so? Will observers conclude that Guth was also correct in saying that with inflation theory comes infinite multiple universes? Will they bear in mind that:

Unfortunately, cosmologists have no way of testing this prediction.

“Since these are separate universes, by definition that means we can never have any contact with them. Nothing that happens there has any impact on us,” said [Scott] Dodelson, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

Even with a confirmation of inflation theory, multiverse theory remains in the realm of philosophy, theology, and/or speculation. Its philosophical problems (here, for instance) and its intellectual prejudices (see the Carr quote at the end) need to be kept squarely in mind.

But none of that displaces the genuine fascination of learning more about the one universe we actually do live in.

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In his critical review in The New Republic of two theistic evolutionists, anti-theistic biologist Jerry Coyne speaks about various views of our fine-tuned universe. Contrasting materialist science with theism, he writes,

Also, scientists have other explanations, ones based on reason rather than on faith. Perhaps some day, when we have a “theory of everything” that unifies all the forces of physics, we will see that this theory requires our universe to have the physical constants that we observe. Alternatively, there are intriguing “multiverse” theories that invoke the appearance of many universes, each with different physical laws; and we could have evolved only in one whose laws permit life.

“Perhaps some day,” he writes; or alternatively, perhaps, his hope is in “intriguing ‘multiverse’ theories,” which he fails to point out are unlikely ever to be scientifically demonstrable, as far as we know now. He says “a few predictions” consistent with multiverse theory have been confirmed. As to the rest, well, he’s a man of great faith, isn’t he?

Later he writes,

Contrary to Miller’s claim, the existence of multiverses does not require a leap of faith nearly as large as that of imagining a God.

I wonder how he measured that difference?

In regard to this faith of his, I must grant him this:

It may be wrong, but wait a decade and we will know a lot more about the anthropic principle. In the meantime, it is simply wrong to claim that proposing a provisional and testable scientific hypothesis–not a “belief”–is equivalent to religious faith.

That’s right: it’s not equivalent to religious faith. Religious faith is a certain kind of faith, while belief that science will displace all religious claims is another kind of faith. It’s still highly unproved, and unprovable. Any conviction of that sort deserves to be called a faith.

Recent Related Posts:
Jerry Coyne’s Line In the Sand
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Whose Rhetorical Maneuvering?

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Discover Magazine tackles the fine-tuning problem in its December 2008 issue, in an article titled “A Universe Built For Us.” It’s not available online, unfortunately, unless you’re a subscriber [update 11/10/08, courtesy of Todd: it actually is online here. You might enjoy buying a copy to discover what they’ve wrapped around this enticing introductory material:

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet…. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse.

That’s remarkably well stated. It highlights how physicists (for which we must surely read some physicists; I’m having breakfast tomorrow with one who would strongly disagree) want to run as fast as they can from the idea of God, the possibility that “life is somehow central to the universe.”

And so, says the article, the work is proceeding in the area of string theory to try to provide some evidence for the vast multiverse. Discover is refreshingly honest about the current status of the work: “evidence … is still lacking;” “Linde’s ideas may make the notion of a multiverse more plausible;” “still very much a work in progress.”

This I find disingenuous, however:

When I ask Linde whether physicists will ever be able to prove that the multiverse is real, he has a simple answer. “Nothing else fits the data… we don’t have any alternative explanations…”

There is an alternative explanation, one that can only be fully ruled out if you “like even less the notion that life is central to the universe.” The article makes a nod toward that other explanation, referring to John Polkinghorne’s objection to the multiverse. (Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest and philosopher, a theist, and not incidentally was also at one time a theoretical particle physicist at Cambridge.) He says that with the multiverse,

“you can explain anything” . . If a theory allows anything to be possible, it explains nothing; a theory of anything is not the same as a theory of everything.

Discover does not actually explain why that is a problem, but I suspect Polkinghorne was referring to a point that I have also made. I believe it actually renders the multiverse theory trivial—at least the infinite universes version of the theory.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, an atheist, is also quoted on the matter of God.

“I don’t think that the multiverse idea destroys the possibility of an intelligent, benevolent creator. . . What it does is remove one of the arguments for it.”

Interesting how that works. Evidence for the multiverse is completely lacking right now; its theoretical foundations are “still very much a work in progress,” but “nothing else fits the data.” Nothing else fits the data, that is, if we exclude the possibility of a creator. So having excluded that possibility, we infer a multiverse instead. And what the multiverse does is remove one of the arguments for a creator.

It seems rather a waste of energy for Weinberg to think of removing arguments for a creator, since the whole thing already seems rather handily to have assumed him right out of existence, on the grounds that (some) physicists dislike “the notion that life is somehow central to the universe.”

The psychology, the motivation for it all could hardly be clearer than it is in this from cosmologist Bernard Carr. “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”

“Don’t want God.” Indeed.

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