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January 25 - February 1, 2023
Posterior conditional probabilities also allow us to express the relative probability of one hypothesis compared to another. In the case that some evidence E gives hypothesis A a much higher probability than hypothesis B, Bayesians express that fact symbolically as P(A | E) >> P(B | E). In Bayesian probability, formulas allow philosophers and scientists to calculate how likely a hypothesis is to be true (i.e., the probability of a hypothesis given the evidence) if they can estimate how much we ought to expect the evidence in question (i.e., the probability of the evidence) given the
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Naturalism fails to explain the origin of the universe because it denies the existence of any entity external to nature, but theism postulates the existence of precisely such a transcendent entity as a cause.
Thus, theism posits the one kind of entity—a free personal agent—that can initiate new sequences of cause and effect without itself being caused to do so and without, at the same time, undermining confidence in either human rationality or the intelligibility of the physical world. In so doing, it resolves the explanatory puzzle that confronts naturalism as the result of the evidence that supports the universe having a beginning in time.
Though a pantheistic worldview affirms the existence of a god, it fails to explain the origin of the universe for much the same reason that naturalism does. The god of pantheism exists within, and is coextensive with, the physical universe. Thus, god as conceived by pantheists cannot act to bring the physical universe into being from nothing physical, since such a god does not exist independently of the physical universe.
Major Premise: If God acted to design the universe, we would expect evidence of fine tuning from the beginning of the universe. Minor Premise: We have evidence of fine tuning from the beginning of the universe. Conclusion: We have reason to think that an intelligent agent that transcends the universe—also known as God—acted to design the universe in a way that makes it conducive to life.
The very idea of fine tuning implies that some conditions or parameters were precisely and improbably set to achieve a purpose—one that points, based upon our uniform and repeated experience, to the action of a purposive or intelligent agent.
Just as the billiards player can clear the table with one shot, God can create everything (the universe and life) with an initial act of creativity in which he arranges matter just right at the beginning and then lets it unfold deterministically in accord with the laws that God also established then.
Information is conveyed whenever one event among an ensemble of possibilities (as opposed to a sole necessity) occurs. The greater the number of possibilities and the greater the improbability of any one possibility occurring, the more information is transmitted when a particular possibility is fixed, specified, or elected.
Since natural laws describe situations in which specific outcomes follow specific conditions by necessity, they do not generate, or describe the generation of, new information. Indeed, to the extent a sequence of symbols or a series of events results from a predictable law-bound process, the information content of the sequence will be limited or effaced by redundancy. Thus, natural laws cannot in principle generate or explain the origin of information, whether specified or otherwise.
Thus, of these two worldview hypotheses, theism provides a better overall explanation than deism of the three key facts about biological and cosmological origins under examination: (1) the material universe had a beginning; (2) the material universe has been finely tuned for life from the beginning; and (3) large discontinuous increases in functionally specified information have entered the biosphere since the beginning. Deism can explain the first two of those facts; theism can explain all three.
The inflationary multiverse envisions new universes emerging from older universes. To explain the rapid expansion of space (in all universes), it posits the existence of an inflaton field. To explain the origin of these new universes, it further posits that when the energy of the inflaton field shuts off in precise ways in local areas of individual universes, new “bubble” universes will emerge. Though these new universes would not have different laws and constants of physics, they could, according to proponents of this model, have quite different configurations of mass and energy, making the
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According to string theory, the fundamental units of matter are composed of vibrating filaments of energy called “strings.” Elementary particles or “fermions” are made of “closed” strings. The particles called “bosons” that transmit the fundamental forces of physics are made of open strings.
According to proponents of the string theoretic landscape, each solution to the string theoretic equations corresponds to a multidimensional compactification of space containing different strings of energy. Proponents of the string landscape theorize that each of these compactifications (or vacua) could also correspond to a different universe with different laws and constants of physics.
When electrons or light with a specific frequency pass through two different slits, they produce an interference pattern on a terminal screen placed at a specific distance behind the slits. This pattern is the result of the waves from each slit either adding together or canceling each other out to form the corresponding light and dark lines. If a series of individual electrons or photons are emitted over time, the interference pattern will gradually appear. The individual electrons or photons passing through one of the slits act as though a wave has passed through both slits.
That then gives us a total of three distinct ways of thinking about the relationship between the mathematics of quantum cosmology and the material universe: (1) these mathematical expressions exist solely in the human mind and somehow produce a material universe; or (2) these equations represent pure mathematical ideas that exist independently of the human mind in a transcendent, immaterial realm of pure ideas; or (3) these equations exist in and issue from a preexisting transcendent mind.
Math can help us describe the universe, yet we have no experience of mathematical equations creating material reality.
Thus, these quantum cosmological models inadvertently confirm a major theme of this book: it takes a mind to generate specified or functional information, whether in ordinary experience, computer simulations, origin-of-life simulation experiments, the production of new forms of life, or, as we now see, in modeling the design of the universe.
First, Newton did indeed believe that God sustains the orderly concourse of nature in what we call the laws of nature. Thus, he stated in the General Scholium of the Principia: “In him [God] are all things contained and moved.”23 Second, Newton also believed that God could act, and had acted, in more discrete and special ways at specific times in the past history of the universe and of life. He argued that both living organisms and the solar system exhibited evidence of special creative acts distinct from the constant exercise of the divine power that, he thought, maintains the laws of nature.
Thus, in the General Scholium of the Principia, Newton argued that these laws could preserve the stability of the planetary orbits in the solar system, but only the design of “an intelligent and powerful Being” could have at first established the “position of the orbits.”24 Newton made similar design arguments in a later book, the Opticks, based upon the qualities of light and the exquisite functional integration of the many parts of the eye.25 Thus, in his work Newton affirmed what theologians since the Middle Ages had conceived of as two complementary but distinct powers of God: (1) the
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