Re: [asa] Chance or design?

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008, PvM wrote:

> Why would a designed universe be regular? However in both cases one
> can make some assumptions. For instance, only regular universes are
> likely to result in life evolving. You claim that "Regularity is a
> huge restriction on the set of theoretically possible universes.". How
> was this established? And even if it were a huge restriction of
> theoretically possible universes, there is no reason to reject
> regularity as a valid explanation. Surely, Moorad's arguments fail due
> to a flawed dichotomy. If we now want to explore the probabilities of
> a designed versus undesigned regular universe, then at least we can
> proceed from a valid presumption.

I sort of expected that someone would invoke something like an anthropic
principle argument, which seems to be what Pim has provided. This implies
that we should be in a universe that is at least very close to being
regular, but to make it precisely regular we would have to appeal to
something like Occam's razor, which is really a matter of faith.
Regularity appeals to us because it would be hard to do science without
it. We have described the working of the physical universe in terms of
equations, and we assume that the constants in those equations really are
constant, but we can't prove that they don't vary by an amount too small
for us to detect. If we do an experiment on a million samples and obtain
the same result every time, we assume that we would also get the same
result every time if we did the experiment on a billion samples. It would
be just about as consistent to have three or four exceptions out of a
billion since those three or four are unlikely to have been included in
the particular million that we tested. This points up a regularity
assumption that we make without proof, and even most atheistic scientists
presumably do the same.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

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Received on Fri Jun 20 17:39:20 2008