"Proof" of the Anthropic Principle?

[brahaminda]

Yep for sure.

Regarding counting angels - I'm a bit of a fence-sitter here.

I do object to a lot of it. Particularly in areas like this thread's subject, where it seems as though science is being used to justify.

But is it really fair to expect scientists to remain absolutely scientific at all times? Shouldn't they also be allowed to be philosophers if they want to? When you're working on mind-blowing stuff like cosmology and quantum physics, I'm sure it must be really very difficult to keep your mind free of cosmic implications ...

Yeah, but its that lahdy dah airy fairy philosophising that's put back things like teleporters, and warpdrives and mars colonies.
I want my holiday on Mars. Now.

 

[kyser_soze]

GRRRR...just wrote a post and got signed out by the board and lost it...grrr

Anyhoo...my basic point is the AP is bollocks. The Sun has only been around for 1/3 of the universe's age so at the very least the circumstances to support carbon lifeforms in this sector of the cosmos is very recent cosmologically speaking.

Besides, if you were to use the AP as an argument about God...

A. Why would you wait 8 billion years after creating your universe before life
B. Why wouldn't you create the universe with all the heavy elements etc in it from the word go, thus enabling the universe to support human life, blah blah blah
C. Why would you, as a deity, allow events like supernovas and gamma ray bursts which can sterilise whole planets without them even knowing what hit them?

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Catch-all pseudomystical cryptic cop-out answer number two: God moves in mysterious ways.

I'm an antitheist but I can answer those questions in a way guaranteed to annoy myself:

A. Because time is irrelevant to Him. He's omnipresent - presumably that includes the temporal dimension.
B. Because that's the way It Has To Be. (cf. AP)
C. Because that's all part of his plan. Maybe He wants us to be a roving interstellar species.

 

[kyser_soze]

I realise He can move in mysterious ways but still, He can't be all that when it comes to creating things from the ether if it needed 11.8 billion years to get to a point where a bunch of talking upright monkeys can sit around in front of PC screens debating His existence or not while other monkeys go around a single insignificant spec of dust killing each other over the same debate.

God exists - and He's fucking incompetent.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Always rather liked this one myself:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" - Epicurus

Mind you all it takes to mess that one up is for a Taoist to come along and say he's both and neither willing and not willing, and both and neither able and not able.

 

[ZWord]

In my opinion a great deal of the anthropic principle is based upon lack of imagination and a supposition that our kind of life is the only kind.

The anthropic principle states in essence:
"if any of a hundred parameters were to change by a small amount life would not be able to exist"

Of course what they are really saying is:
"if any of a hundred parameters were to change by a small amount the forms of life found on earth would not be able to exist"

I don't think you've got this entirely right. As I heard it, scientists say if the explosion for the big bang had been just a tiny bit less powerful, everything would have fallen back in on itself, and if it had been just a tiny bit more powerful, then no suns solar systems or planets would have ever formed.

Similarly, if the universe wasn't arranged in this bizarre way where time and space appear to change in order to support the principle that nothing can move away from anything else faster than the speed of light, you wouldn't be able to see any starry firmament, and the sky would look pretty messy.

That said, I do agree with you in thinking it's some sort of anthropocentrism to think that organic life is the only kind of life that can exist.

But thinking about the anthropic principle, or the subject of the thread, I think it's an interesting subject. And I support both versions of the argument.

On the one hand, you have people saying, it's fantastically unlikely that the universe and we exist. And on the other hand, you have people saying, no it's not unlikely at all, because we do exist, and so the probability of the universe being the way it is, when we're here to observe it is 1, it's a certainty that it's this way. And they're both true.

It's a bit like - it's very unlikely that Iran will win the world cup. But if they did win, then there's a question about whether their win was still unlikely. On one argument, it just proves that everyone underrated Iran, and actually, since they did win, their win was actually quite likely, or even a certainty. Certainly, once Iran won, their win would be a certainty. And so would it still be true to say, actually it was very unlikely .

Or, if you drew a straight flush in five card draw. Well it's fantastically unlikely, but equally, in the case when it happens, it's actually a certainty. As the cards just were in that order, when they came to be dealt.

 

[Santino]

A better analogy is a raffle in which every person on the planet has one ticket. The odds of any one particular person winning are fantastically improbable, and yet someone is going to win. It would be a sort of rational reaction if you did win to think that there was some force somewhere that wanted you to win given the tiny chance you had, and yet it was inevitable that one of us win. So.

 

[ZWord]

I don't see how that's a better analogy at all.

The analogy would have to mean that each raffle ticket was one possible universe, and if you believe in multiple possible universes - of which this is one then you pretty much believe in some creative force, which is an infinite improbability drive. ..

heart of gold.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Wasn't long before I ran into an article using Anthropic Principle(s) to back up God ...

Today, numbers from astronomy, biology, and theoretical mathematics point to a rational mind behind the universe. To be sure, they do not point to the personal God of the Bible as such. Yet they are not inimical to the biblical God, either. The apostle John prepared the way for this conclusion when he used the word for logic, reason, and rationality—logos—to describe Christ at the beginning of his Gospel: "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God." When we think logically, which is the goal of mathematics, we are led to think of God.

Uhhuh. The article cites the strength of gravity and the "existence" of e, pi and i as evidence of a creator's handiwork. It also tries to rubbish Darwin along the way by claiming that there hasn't been enough time for evolution to happen, which is a bit rich coming from people who reckon it took 7 days ...

 

[brahaminda]

The Beckenstein-Hawking formula is too complicated to discuss here,

You mean it doesn't say what you want it to say if you look at it closely enough.
It'd make you laugh if it didn't make you sick....

 

[kyser_soze]

Here's one reason the universe wasn't created around us, for us or any other reason:

Universe begins - 11 - 14 billion years ago
Mankind begins - 1 million years ago.

We fit into this universe, not the other way around. As for things like pi...well, all it is is a ratio that leads to something we call a circle in a system of representing the universe that we call mathematics. All it shows is that human beings, through our own cleverness, worked out a way of calculating a ratio that ensures you can work out the properties of circles, spheres etc.

There is certainly an argument somewhere about how amazingly well suited this specific reality was to the creation of organic lifeforms - but then it's not that great cos all it would have taken is a nearby supernova or other GRB emitting stellar object and this little ball of dirt would be sterilised permanently.

Organic life happened to fit into the template this reality created - to suggest otherwise is to suggest that there is/was some form of consciousness (besides which, given that the universe of 1billion years post BB was unlikely to be supportive of organic life (something to do with the lack of elements in the periodic table that only came about after a few cycles of starbirths and deaths that create elements like gold and stuff)

I remember a New Scientist a while back talking about the possibilty that 'micro' big bangs happen all around us, and the BIG bang was simply a highly unlikely quantum event - kinda like the sting theory idea that while most of them will be teeny, there may be one or two that are cosmic scale...or that this universe itself is a giant string, vibrating with others near to it in some kind of pan-dimensional cosmic symphony...anyway, that's one theory of the BB.

 

[Crispy]

this universe itself is a giant string, vibrating with others near to it in some kind of pan-dimensional cosmic symphony

Fucking hippy

 

[kyser_soze]

Recently watched an ep of Next Generation where they had to return a lifeform to a macroscopic string that was about 1000 light years in length...so I'm a fucking hippy geek thanguvermuchly