Re: [asa] Anthropic Principle, "proof," and "explanations"

Just a question. Does your sense of creation specifically require "ex
nihilo" per se? Or would it also accommodate the more organizational
sort of action described by John Walton. He portrays the ancient
Hebrew's understanding of God's creative act as one of organizing an
existing something ("chaos" perhaps - whatever it starts as is in God's
realm and need not have an existence as we experience it), followed by
giving it a purpose, and a name. Is "ex nihilo" as it commonly appears
here used as shorthand that would not bother to make this distinction,
or is it used literally. If literally, why is that?

Regards - JimA

Ted Davis wrote:

>The abundant, very detailed, carefully measured evidence for the "fine
>tuning" of the universe, IMO, is most simply and easily "explained" by
>divine creation ex nihilo. Now I believe in the latter independently of the
>BB and fine tuning -- one of the reasons I believe in it is my belief that
>Jesus was raised bodily from the grave, which requires a God powerful enough
>to determine the nature of nature, and therefore powerful enough to have
>created ex nihilo. Nevertheless, I believe that ex nihilo creation is
>actually the simplest explanation for a universe that (to borrow the words
>of Freeman Dyson) "looks as though it knew we were coming."
>
>I do not regard this as a scientific explanation. Period. No science I am
>aware of can "prove" that "God did it," or tell as anything specific about
>God that we don't already believe (such as the idea expressed by Eddington
>that God is a great mathematician).
>
>However, IMO the multiverse hypothesis is equally unscientific -- at least,
>not yet. No more scientific than ID or creation ex nihilo. It makes no
>predictions about our universe that can be tested, and it is actually a far
>more complex hypothesis than the idea of one God creating one world in one
>specific way. That is, it fails Ockham's razor quite drastically, by
>multiplying entities way beyond necessity, so far so indeed that we can't
>even count them. It functions, IMO, as a kind of "god-of-the-gaps" for the
>non-theist, who rules out creation for obvious reasons but still needs an
>infinite (or quasi-infinite) entity to fill in the gaps in the explanation.
>
>Furthermore, I think the multiverse is very much like the ether in the late
>19th century. An interesting exercise would be to read Clerk Maxwell's
>essay on "ether" in Enc Britannica from the late 19th century: note how many
>of its properties were "known" in detail, then reflect on its existence (or
>lack thereof), and think carefully about the multiverse. Maxwell had
>"derived" Maxwell's equations from the hypothesis of a mechanical ether; the
>equations looked darn good, when compared with nature, and it was logical
>therefore to assume the existence of his ether (logical with or without his
>equations, since light was an undulation and the verb "undulate" requires a
>subject). Thus, the ether exists and has these properties. In our
>situation today, the very early universe appears to have undergone
>inflation; inflation makes better sense if there are many (hugely many)
>other universes with different properties (all governed, however, by one
>overall mathematics which must itself therefore be finely tuned, as it were,
>so ultimately no escaping fine tuning). Thus, these universes exist and we
>happen to be lucky enough to find ourselves in the one that just happens to
>have produced us. The parallel with the ether, it seems to me, is obvious
>and ought to give great caution to astrophysicists. Show me some of them
>other worlds, I say, before we start calling this "science." And then, if
>they exist, perhaps we ought to design a few more tests for the ether.
>Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea, after all?
>
>Ted
>
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Received on Fri Dec 7 17:46:52 2007