Actually, given the logical point that the Creator would have created time as well, there is no point involved for the definition of "the time it would take to create this universe". Before the creation of the universe "time" itself would not exist. We apparently define time as something that we sense in order to differentiate between events in this universe. Thus, "before" the big bang is a meaningless concept. Similarly, we cannot say that there is a certain amount of "time" in between creations.

Actually, there is no reason for G0d to have created the universe at any particular "moment" in its existence. He could have created it five seconds ago with this message on your computer screen, or 5 billion years ago and allowed it to continue until the current moment, or 5,771 years ago in order to start things moving with the advent of Mankind as we know it. Since the definition of the Creator includes Omnipotence, and there is nothing in the rules of the Universe to prevent it, we cannot argue for any particular "moment" of creation.

This is like starting a computer model with all variables set to 0, or starting it with the variables set to what they would be after a particular run. Given no round off errors, once the simulation starts running, there would be no way of determining at which point it actually started, aside from the log records which would not "exist" within the universe of the simulation.

Actually, for free will to exist (and one of the beliefs in Judaism is that free will is part of the purpose of the universe), it is a requirement that there be no absolute proof of creation. If such absolute proof (as opposed to valid arguments) existed, it would remove our free will.

But we still cannot conclude that it's a "somebody," not a "something," because there is yet another possible explanation for the non-randomness of physical constants and the bias towards life-friendly universes:

* If the cyclic Multiverse sits within a larger "Metaverse," and if that Metaverse has its own rules and physical laws... do those external laws limit or constrain the possible values of the physical constants, so that it's much more probable that life-friendly universes will form than we have been imagining? In other words, is the emergence of life-friendliness driven by the physical laws of the Metaverse, such that the emergence of life-friendliness is not a random function?

In your hometown, you have probably noticed a curious phenomenon that appears not to be altogether random: Over a six-month period, temperatures tend to get warmer and warmer; but then, over the next six-month period, they tend to get cooler and cooler. Clearly this is not random; if temperatures changed entirely by random, you would expect periods of several years of hotness, followed perhaps by a cooling period of only six days, before things start to heat up again.

It's tempting to conclude that the Temperature Gods simply like to make the thermometer go up and down in a fairly regular fashion. But there is an alternative explanation: Your hometown sits within a larger system -- planet Earth, whose axis tilts with respect to its orbit around our sun, Sol.

This argument does not deal with creation because the creation claim is then set back to involve the "Metaverse". A similar argument was once proposed by Isaac Asimov stating that the Big Bang could have occurred because of the collision of two protoUniverses. He then went back several more levels. However, what he did not seem to realize was that no matter how far he went back, he was still left with the creation of the original setup.

This is like various fantasy stories or mythologies involving "gods". Since they do not fit the definition of G0d, (omnipotent, omniscient, etc), all this does is push the existence of G0d back a level. For example, if gods created this universe, then G0d would be the Creator of the Universe that contained gods who had the specified powers.

I'm still looking for an explanation of how a different value for Planck's constant, or the speed of light, would make a universe "life friendly" or not. I can see how such things might make a particular planet uninhabitable, or habitable, but in our galaxy alone there are a very large number of life-friendly planetoids, and one assumes a very large number that are "near habitable" should their environment change for any reason.

I'm a young-earth creationist, but I don't rely on a "God of the gaps" mindset. That's too much like convicting everyone who comes before the court without an alabi: guilty before proof. There are too many examples of that mindset failing to be reliable. (Ben Franklin's lightning rod, and churches' refusal to install them, is the primary modernist myth of this sort, whatever its historicity.)

Creation science is primarily forensic and social, and thus circumstantial. There are examples of faith healings which any mentalist or hypnotist would recognize instantly as belonging to their disciplines. That's not to say God wasn't involved, but rather God may have arranged things so that an "accidentally" invoked hypnotic trance caused a psychosomatic healing. That's also not to say the black swan, a physical miracle, doesn't exist.

Cosmologically, if we assume the existence of sequence as something present universally, we have three options:
1. "The world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise" and from there it's "turtles all the way down" (infinite regress of finite variety).
2. "The world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise" supported by a mammoth, a Brachiosaurus, an airplane, a bowling ball, Atlas, a pair of roller skates, and so on down (infinite regress of infinite variety).
3. The unmoved mover, sentient or not, sapient or not, involved or not, exists.

If sequence itself, as something that can be recognized logically, simply does not exist "outside" of our universe/multiverse/metaverse/omniverse, then all bets are off.

Sabba Hillel:

We're using a lot of loose shorthand here, but cosmologists have more rigorous formulations.

For time in a Multiverse, substitute Multitime, a measure of duration of the cycle itself. The questions are (a) whether Multitime has already been running for an infinite or finite duration as of a particular moment; and (b) if Multitime has only achieved finite duration, then has has it been long enough to allow the cycle to have already produced such a large number of random universes that it's plausible one could have had, through sheer random chance, physical constants that allow for the formation of life.

For the turtles-turtles-turtles objection, bear in mind that the Metaverse -- in which some Multiverse is (or Multiverses are) cycling through creation of many universes -- might have different physical laws from the interior universes that emerge.

That's my point: What seems not only random but wildly improbable within an individual universe might be, not merely likely, but absolutely determined by the larger Metaverse that contains the smaller universes.

We must consider these possibilities in order to be (reasonably) complete in our reasoning.

Snochasr:

I already gave one example, but I'll alter it slightly: If you change the value of the Gravitational Constant, you can end up with gravity so intense that the universe would expand after the Big Bang, slow, then contract back into the Big Crunch in a very short period of time. That time could be too brief to form the coherence of solar systems and planets, let alone allow sufficient time for life to form.

Contrariwise, you could make gravity so tenuous a force that those structures never form, because gravity cannot overcome the initial momentum imparted to each molecule by the Big Bang. You get a semi-uniform smear of molecules fairly evenly distributed throughout the universe; I cannot see how life could form under such circumstances.

Planck's Constant is basically a measure of the energy quantum: If it were larger, so that particles had to build up a much larger batch of energy before being able to emit any of it, then particles might not be able to exchange energy. That might mean no molecules could form, electrons couldn't move up or down their electron shells, and so forth. Or if Planck's Constant were much smaller, the exchanges might become so continuous that again, structure could not form, as everything would be breaking up and reforming too rapidly for any coherence.

The speed of light sets the upper limit of relative velocity. If it were much faster, particles would have hurried away from their fellows so quickly, they would get out of range of gravity and could not be tugged back to form stars and planets. Contrariwise, if the speed were too slow, it would take so long for photons created by stellar fusion at the core of a star to random-walk their way out to the surface that the universe would be entirely dark... possibly long enough that the star would have already burned out and collapsed before the first photon could escape.

See, you monkey around with those constants and everything falls apart. There are, of course, ranges within which everything can still be made to work, such that life (as we know it) can exist; but the ranges where this is not possible are very much larger.

Dafydd

And a major part of the "fine tuning" argument assumes that the range of possible values for these variables is very large compared with the "life-friendly" range. It may be that according to as-yet-undiscovered laws, the value of the gravitational constant is constrained to either "life-friendly" values or very close.

In a recent issue of Sci-Am, it turns out that varying one parameter gives you a universe capable of supporting life only in one narrow region, if you vary more than one at once, you get other islands of life-supporting universes. The universe may be fine tuned, but there may be more than just the one station available.

And of course we're defining life solely in terms of chemistry. In a universe where matter is diffuse but universally dense, an electromagnetic pattern might result from Brownian motion and eventually evolve into sentience. As long as motion and potential difference can exist, goes the theory, life might appear vastly different than we've ever seen.

As a Christian, I don't expect it, but there are a lot of things I've been told not to expect which I have seen.

I'm getting quite an education, but I think I also need a lot of imagination to envision how some of these "constants" could ever be other than what they are. Why do we consider these "constants" as mere "variables" that are set to a random initial value (or perhaps at some "Designer's" whim) at the time the whole universe is set in motion? Why wouldn't the gravitational constant ALWAYS be as the square of distance? A 10-dimensional universe I can understand, with one of those dimensions being the "brane number," but the other dimensions would need to be the same, therefore producing the same physical constants across (this form of) the multiverse, would they not?

Sabba Hillel, we can equally well ask where God came from. The traditional answer is that he is an unmoved mover, which is indeed the only way to terminate the infinite regress, but there's no reason to believe that an unmoved mover, a first cause, must necessarily be a sentient entity, let alone of all the properties attributed to God. The attempted proofs of that are riddled with gaps, bridgeable only by faith.

The whole line of argument used in the book being discussed appears to be misunderstanding probabilities at a basic level. You have to specify the outcome you're looking for, before tossing the coin, rolling the dice, or whatever.

Suppose I toss a coin 1000 times, taking maybe 20 minutes. There are approximately 10^100 possible outcomes, 1 followed by 100 zeroes, so the chance that any one of them happens is 1 in 10^100, ludicrously small. If everyone in the world tossed coins non-stop until the sun dies, the chances of anyone duplicating my coin toss sequence are still only around 1 in 10^80.

Clearly, since my coin toss sequence is so ludicrously improbable, it can't be the result of pure chance. Something must have intervened to pick the sequence -but this logic is false. Whatever sequence I came up with would be equally unlikely. If I had specified the sequence in advance, then we could safely concluded the coin was rigged, and only if I had.

Howe, results like the proportion of heads tossed, or the proportion of time the coin came up the same way twice running, are meaningful ultimately because of averaging.

Applying this logic to the state of the universe, we see we have to be very careful about what we measure the probability of. Looking for the chances of getting a universe exactly like ours si like looking for the chance of a particular sequence of coin tosses, the wrong type of question. What we need to know if the probability of ending up in a universe that can support life of any kind, not necessarily as we know it, and that calculation is currently beyond us.

Robert:

Suppose I toss a coin 1000 times, taking maybe 20 minutes. There are approximately 10^100 possible outcomes...

I believe it's actually closer to 10^301:

1. We begin with the exact number of outcomes, which is 2^1,000;
2. To estimate this, we can use the fact that, by definition, 2 = 10^(log 2);
3. The log of 2 just about = 0.301;
4. So 2^1,000 = (10^0.301)^1,000;
5. Which = 10^(0.301 x 1,000);
6. Which = 10^301.

That is, the total number of possible outcomes from flipping a coin 1,000 times is just about ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion... which by a curious coincidence is almost exactly how many counterfeit dollars Barack H. Obama will have spent by January 20th, 2013 -- his last day in office.

On a more serious note, suppose we define a "habitable universe" as one that can support life as we know it; and suppose that habitable universes correspond to those in which that thousand-flip coin toss yields a sequence that contains at least 800 heads.

I'm not willing to sit down and calculate the odds of one of those uinverses (sequence of coin flips) coming up habitable (containing >= 800 heads). But I am willing to bet $50 that the odds of a habitable universe popping up in even 10^100 trials of the thousand-flip coin toss is less than the odds that all the air molecules in my office will randomly, simultaneously move to the right side of the room, leaving the left side in vacuum. Any takers?

Therefore, if you try your thousand-flip coin toss a few times, and a habitable universe pops up... you can bet your bottom dollar that the coin is unfairly weighted, biased in favor of habitability, instead of being truly random.

That is the syllogism; the trick is to make a reasonable estimate of the odds of each vital constant being within the habitability range, then combining all those odds into one probability that all vital constants simultaneously fall into the habitability range.

Dafydd

It is 10^300, that was an arithmetical slip.

More importantly justify looking only at the odds of life as we know it, not of all life? I think not.

Like any specific coin toss sequence, life as we know it can only be identified as special after the fact. There's not to single it out, other than the fact that we're an example of it, just as there's nothing to single out a specific coin toss sequence, other than that I happened to toss it.

For meaningful results, we must consider only those outcomes which could have been identified as special before the fact, like getting 1000 heads. That's a significant result, because the total number of heads will be normally distributed, so is much more likely to be 500+/-30 than to be 1000. In the case of a random distribution of universes, life in general is something that can be picked out as special before the fact; life as we know it isn't, not unless there are only a finite number of forms of life that can exist, a claim which would not be easy to prove.

Incidentally, the chance of the air molecules in your room end up in the same half is something like 2^(10^28) - 6*10^23 molecules per litre, i.e Avogrado's number, 1000 litres in a cubic metre, a room 2x4x2 metres. 2^(10^28) = approx 10^(3*10^27). The chance of getting over 800 heads from the thousand flips is at 1/2^(10^3), the chance of getting exactly 1000 heads, so it is massively greater than the odds of the air in your room doing that. You'd lose that $50 dollar bet.

This aside, the arguments for the smallness of the habitable zone for life as we know it are pretty weak. As noted by Karl, it's it tacitly assumed that only one parameter is varied at a time. If the points supporting as we know it lie near some curve, or even a straight line askew to these parameters, varying just one at a time will massively underestimate the proportion of habitable universes, and there's no good reason to think that they don't.

The other problem is the neglect of feedback effects. Above you mention the case of weaker gravity. It doesn't matter how weak gravity is, a uniform distribution of matter is unstable, and will collapse. (Look up the Jeans Instability). This collapse will only stop when the central pressure is high enough. You can then calculate from there what happens for weaker gravity. It turns that that over a significant range, the central pressure gets high enough to cause fusion, hence stars as we know them.

Because gravity is weaker, the stars end up being cooler than in our universe, and lasting longer. At a rough estimate, if gravity were 10 orders of magnitude weaker, the result would be be stars weighing about 10^15 solar masses, just enough to compress their cores to fusion heat, with a life span around 10^20 years, and 10^5 times the radius and brightness of our sun, but only slightly cooler than our sun. Orbiting at around 300 AU would give comfortable earth-like conditions for a 100 quintillion years.

Make gravity too weak, and the stars won't ignite at all. If some of the other parameters vary too, you might find matter decaying before the stars have time to collapse, and there are many other complications.

However, the simple fact remains that something determined by negative feedback, like the core temperature of stars, isn't going to be sensitive to physical parameters. A star will always be exactly hot enough to produce pressures high enough to support its own weight - any hotter and it expands, cooling itself; any cooler and it contracts, warming up - and this would remain so even if neutrons were 10% heavier.

Life, of course, is a prime example of a process dominated by negative feedback.

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)

(If you haven't hissed a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Hang loose; don't shed your skin!)

URL:
Remember me unto the end of days? AyeNay!

Comments: (Sssselect text and bite a button to apply HTML tagssssss...)