What you’ve presented here is essentially a description of the …

Comment on The Creator of Time by Sean Pitman.

What you’ve presented here is essentially a description of the multiverse hypothesis… which makes everything equally likely. It would make the universe inherently incomprehensible – entirely magical. In other words, you shouldn’t be surprised by anything that you see in this universe because anything is not only possible but probable from the multiverse perspective. The following interview with Lawrence Krauss is rather enlightening in this regard – especially concerning the actual philosophical motivations for those who go around promoting the multiverse concept (Link).

In short, I just don’t believe that you believe your own argument – not really. How is that? Well, you generally seem to be a fairly reasonable person who appreciates science and rational thought. Therefore, I contend that if you really followed your proposed path to where it actually leads, you would eventually give it up since it will eventually lead you to a place that undermines the very basis of science and rational thought itself… i.e., predictability and falsifiability.

Scientific thinking is based on determining the relative probabilities of various hypotheses to see which one is the more likely explanation of the phenomenon in question. The problem here is that one can’t do that given the argument you’ve just presented. Given your argument, how would you be able to tell the difference between a random-appearing pile of driftwood and the driftwood horses I’ve previously showed you? – or the stack of rocks that I showed you before vs. a random-appearing pile of rocks.


Do you or do you not see these as obvious examples of intelligent design? – vs. the random product of a randomly chosen universe? – regardless of where they might happen to be found in our universe? Upon what basis? – certainly not given the truth of the argument you’ve just presented here…

See the problem? Your argument undermines all the sciences dealing with the investigation of our world and universe. How then is your argument rational? How can you see, from the argument you just presented, our world or universe as rationally understandable entities? – that it’s not “all magic”.

Rather, the true magic of our universe is that it is rationally understandable and predictable – even written in the language of mathematics. The fact is that our universe didn’t have to be created this way. It didn’t have to be such a rationally understandable place. However, the fact that it is a rationally understandable place, as mysterious as that fact actually is from a naturalistic perspective, means that science and rational thought actually work here…

As Eugene Wigner once pointed out:

    “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

        “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, February 1960, final sentence.

    Einstein said basically the same thing:

    The actual existence of such amazing comprehensibility is best explained as a deliberate setup of intelligent design. All other options undermine the basic assumptions behind science and logic – that we can explain our world and universe by thinking reasonably about it.

    The multiverse argument would be like characters in a novel arguing about the order that exists in their world being the result of infinite explosions in a print shop where one of these explosions happened to produce their world. However, we know that the best explanation for their existence is their deliberate creation in the mind and through the creative power of a novelist – a novelist who lives and exists outside of their time and place. The random explosion argument, on the other hand, undermines their own ability to think meaningfully about their own world… since nothing would be unexpected given such an argument.

    Sean Pitman Also Commented

    The Creator of Time
    It’s been enjoyable having you. I wish you all the best. Someday, if I’m right, everything will be made clear and you will see your Maker face-to-face. Of course, if I’m wrong, neither one of us will be the wiser…

    By the way, I am not a “young Earth creationist” or “YEC”, but something a bit different – a young life creationist (YLC). Of course, from your perspective it makes little difference. 😉


    The Creator of Time
    A “Rational Wiki” quote? – about proof and disproof? 😉

    First off, science isn’t about absolute proof, but the weight of evidence. Nothing can be absolutely proved in science – only disproved. The power of science is in the ability for the hypothesis in question to resist disproof, thereby gaining predictive value. This means, of course, that a valid scientific hypothesis must be testable in a potentially falsifiable manner.

    Now, as far as the particular claim that ID hypotheses are not and cannot be falsifiable (and by extension any notion or hypothesis of God-like activity isn’t falsifiable either), it’s clearly not true or modern sciences that actually detect ID wouldn’t be possible – like forensics, anthropology, and SETI. As previously noted for you, the ID-only hypothesis can be tested in a potentially falsifiable manner – quite easily. All you have to do to falsify the ID-only hypothesis is show how something else could more reasonably explain the phenomenon in question – and the ID-only hypothesis is neatly falsified.

    For example, if you can find a mindless naturalistic mechanism that can reasonably explain the origin of a highly symmetrical granite cube, you would neatly falsify the hypothesis that only ID can explain the origin of the cube. Short of this, however, the ID-only hypothesis gains a great deal of predictive value based on the strong weight of evidence that is currently in hand. That is why it is possible to tell the difference between the most likely origin of such a granite cube vs. a snowflake or the like.

    The same is true for the God-only hypothesis. As I’ve explained for you multiple times now, there are various levels of phenomena that require various levels of intelligence to explain. As higher and higher level phenomena require higher and higher levels of intelligence and creative power to explain, one eventually comes to a point where the level of required intelligence and creative power is so high that it cannot be readily distinguished from what one would normally attribute to a God or God-like being. It is for this reason that if you yourself saw someone you knew was dead and decaying in the grave, raised to life at the word of someone claiming to be God, even you would tend to believe this claim – and rightly so. That means, of course, that the detection of God-like creative power is rationally detectable, at least in theory, given the presentation of such evidence.

    Philosophical naturalism, on the other hand, is not at all testable in a potentially falsifiable manner. It is not even theoretically possible to falsify a theory that is dependent upon evidence that you have yourself proposed will show up at some undetermined time in the future. It is therefore not a science or otherwise rational, but is on the same level as wishful thinking – just not helpful.

    _______

      As an aside, I have to also point out that the claims for the creative potential of the evolutionary mechanism presented on this particular “Rational Wiki” webpage are not backed up by demonstration or reasonable statistical analysis or workable genetic theories – at least not beyond very low levels of functional complexity. They’re nothing but just-so stories. I mean, why hasn’t James Tour been convinced by this stuff? Because, there’s simply no science here… as you would know if you did your own independent research into the potential and limits of the evolutionary mechanism. Their claims regarding “flagellar evolution” are a case in point when it comes to glossing over the details and not understanding the exponentially growing problem of finding novel beneficial sequences in the vastness of sequence space with each step up the ladder of functional complexity: Link


    The Creator of Time
    How long should you look for a mindless naturalistic mechanism to explain a highly symmetrical granite cube before it becomes obvious that such a mechanism will most likely never be discovered? – that intelligent design is by far the most likely reason for its existence regardless of when or where such a cube might be found? – even if found on an alien planet like Mars?

    Suggesting, at this point, that a mindless mechanism must be the answer for the origin of our granite cube, and that one day such a mechanism will be discovered, is not science – but faith that is deliberately blind to the strong weight of evidence that is currently in hand which puts a clear statistical limit on what all known mindless mechanisms are able to achieve, or are ever likely to achieve this side of eternity, with the material of granite.

    Likewise, any religion that is based on the same blind faith, faith that is directly opposed to the weight of empirical evidence that is currently in hand, is no more helpful or trustworthy than the religion of philosophical naturalism. Such a religion would be “effectively indistinguishable from atheism” (William Provine, 1987).

    As with science and any helpful hypothesis or theory, any useful religion which aims to establish a solid hope in rational people must be based on the weight of evidence which establishes the credibility and predictive power of the religion. If God exists, He is the creator of rational thought and scientific investigation and would not give these reasoning powers to us if He expected us to “forgo their use” (Galileo, 1615) – particularly when searching for Him and His signature in the works of nature or the inspiration of texts claiming to be derived from Him.


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