Re: [asa] Chance or design?

regularity is based on consistent observations. Life would be quite
impossible or at least quite interesting without regularities.
Of course science is not based on proof but rather on the workability
of its assumptions which are continuously being validated.
It's sufficient to point out that QM does allow for variations on
these regularities. So it is sufficient to allow for a reasonably
regular universe.
Of course one may turn around the argument and argue that the QM
variations on regularity may very well count against a prediction of
an absolute regularity from 'design'.

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 2:39 PM, gordon brown <Gordon.Brown@colorado.edu> wrote:
> 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 19:09:21 2008