In recent days, there has been a considerable stir in the blogosphere, as  prof Don Page of the University of Alberta has issued two papers and a slide show that purport to show the death of — or at least significant evidence against — the fine-tuning cosmological argument. (Cf here and here at UD. [NB: A 101-level summary and context for the fine-tuning argument, with onward links is here. A fairly impressive compendium of articles, links and videos on fine-tuning is here. Video summary is here, from that compendium. (Privileged Planet at Amazon)])

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However, an examination of the shorter of the two papers by the professor, will show that he has apparently overlooked a logical subtlety. He has in fact only argued that there may be a second, fine-tuned range of possible values for the cosmological constant. This may be seen from p. 5 of that paper:

. . . with the cosmological constant being the negative of the value for the MUM that makes it have present age

t0 = H0^- 1 = 10^8years/alpha, the total lifetime of the anti-MUM model is 2.44t0 = 33:4 Gyr.

Values of [L] more negative than this would presumably reduce the amount of life per baryon that has condensed into galaxies more than the increase in the fraction of baryons that condense into galaxies in the first place, so I would suspect that the value of the cosmological constant that maximizes the fraction of baryons becoming life is between zero and – LO ~ 3.5 * 10^- 122, with a somewhat lower magnitude than the observed value but with the opposite sign. [Emphases added, and substitutes made for symbols that give trouble in browsers.]

Plainly, though, if one is proposing a range of values that is constrained to within several parts in 10^-122, one is discussing a fairly fine-tuned figure.

Just, you are arguing for a second possible locus of fine-tuning on the other side of zero.

(And, that would still be so even if the new range were 0 to minus several parts in 10^-2 [a few percent], not minus several parts in 10^-122 [a few percent of a trillionth of a trillionth of . . . ten times over]. Several parts in a trillion is rather roughly comparable to the ratio of the size of a bacterium to twice the length of Florida or the lengths of  Cuba or Honshu in Japan or Cape York in Australia or Great Britain or Italy )

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The blogosphere is abuzz with reports about a physics paper, Evidence against fine-tuning for life, written by an evangelical Christian physicist named Don Page, professor of physics at the University of Alberta. The paper is surprisingly non-technical and very easy to read. Also worth reading is Dr. Don Page’s non-technical online presentation, Does God so love the multiverse? Professor Page has since rewritten this presentation as a 26-page scientific article, available here.

The gist of Professor Page’s latest paper is that in an optimally designed fine-tuned universe, we’d expect the fraction of baryons (particles composed of three quarks, such as protons and neutrons) that form organized structures (such as galaxies and eventually living things), to be maximized. However, the facts do not bear this out. In our universe, the observed value of the cosmological constant, lambda-0, is very slightly positive – about 3.5 x 10^(-122) – whereas in an optimally designed universe, the cosmological constant (lambda) should be very slightly negative – somewhere between zero and minus 3.5 x 10^(-122):
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Just received an email from the Templeton-funded Metanexus group. The big announcement is the unveiling of a new website: www.evolutionarychristianity.com You knew it was going to happen, and now it’s here. “Evolutionary Christianity” — a phrase that rolls off the tongue and inspires theological confidence. The gallery of people on the homepage features quite an assortment of thinkers making common cause — theological differences aside, the science of Darwinian evolution must be kept sacrosanct! It will be interesting to see whether this strategy to mainstream evolution among evangelicals succeeds. Granted, the Christian Colleges have by and large embraced “Evolutionary Christianity.” But “evolution” remains a dirty word among many evangelicals. Will the Templeton-inspired PR campaign that’s evident on this website succeed? Read More ›

At Slashdot “News for Nerds.Stuff that Matters” we learn:

eldavojohn writes
“A common argument one might encounter in intelligent design or the arduous process of resolving science with religion is that the physical constants of our world are fine tuned for life by some creator or designer. A University of Alberta theoretical physicist claims quite the opposite when it comes to the cosmological constant. His paper says that our ever expanding universe has a positive cosmological constant and he explains that the optimum cosmological constant for maximizing the chances of life in the universe would be slightly negative: ‘any positive value of the constant would tend to decrease the fraction of matter that forms into galaxies, reducing the amount available for life. Therefore the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is positive, is evidence against the idea that the constants have been fine-tuned for life.'” [Links at site.]

Well, when we find a good many of Stephen Hawking’s other universes, we can see whether any are negatively constanted, and if so, whether they have more life.

Thoughts?

More from Colliding Universes, my blog on competing theories of our universe: Read More ›

Just added to the web, the linked article aims to give a short, non-technical, beginner’s answer to the question: “What has Christianity got to do with Mathematics?”

The Scientist recently published “Top Ten Retractions of 2010″ (16th December 2010), among which is

3. Cognition expert takes hard look at his data

Basically, it isn’t true that monkeys mimic human capacities. Hauser had apparently come to believe this, with bad results for himself and his lab:

Well-known psychologist and author of the book “Moral Minds” Marc Hauser is taking a year of leave from his position at Harvard University after an internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct. The questionable data also led to the retraction of a 2002 Cognition paper, cited 38 times, which demonstrated that, like human infants, cotton-top tamarins have the capacity to generalize patterns.

For more retractions, go here.

I suspect that contentious areas like Apes ‘R Us – where one side is lavishly supported – breed overconfidence, hence more aggressive claims, hence more frequent retraction.

More on Marc Hauser: Read More ›

I commend to our readers David Bentley Hart’s article, A Philosopher in the Twilight, in the February 2011 First Things.  Dr. Hart muses over Martin Heidegger’s late philosophy, especially his views regarding the connection between the Western intellectual tradition and nihilism.  I admire and respect Dr. Hart greatly.  His new articles is, as usual, full of thought provoking insights displaying his all-too-rare combination of deep learning, wisdom and the ability to write engaging prose.  The following passage from the article is puzzling to me though: It simply cannot be denied that the horrors of the last century were both conceptually and historically inseparable from some of the deepest principles of modernity’s founding ideologies. The ‘final solution’ was a kind of Read More ›

At honest broker of media releases ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2011), we learn that “Catfish Study Reveals Multiplicity of Species” — Peer into any stream in a South American rainforest and you may well see a small shoal of similar-looking miniature catfish. But don’t be fooled into thinking that they are all the same species. Promise, I won’t be fooled. An extensive investigation of South American Corydoras catfish, reveals that catfish communities- although containing almost identically coloured and patterned fish, could actually contain three or more different species. Establishing for the first time that many species are mimetic; that is, they evolve to share the same colour patterns for mutual benefit- the research also established that each individual community of similar Read More ›

It has been said that “Intelligent design (ID) is the view that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection” . . .”  This puts the design inference at the heart of intelligent design theory, and raises the questions of its degree of warrant and relationship to the — insofar as a  “the” is possible — scientific method.

Leading Intelligent Design researcher, William Dembski has summarised the actual process of  inference:

“Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity [i.e., natural law], chance, and design.” When attempting to explain something, “regularities are always the first line of defense. If we can explain by means of a regularity, chance and design are automatically precluded. Similarly, chance is always the second line of defense. If we can’t explain by means of a regularity, but we can explain by means of chance, then design is automatically precluded. There is thus an order of priority to explanation. Within this order regularity has top priority, chance second, and design last”  . . . the Explanatory Filter “formalizes what we have been doing right along when we recognize intelligent agents.” [Cf. Peter Williams’ article, The Design Inference from Specified Complexity Defended by Scholars Outside the Intelligent Design Movement, A Critical Review, here. We should in particular note his observation: “Independent agreement among a diverse range of scholars with different worldviews as to the utility of CSI adds warrant to the premise that CSI is indeed a sound criterion of design detection. And since the question of whether the design hypothesis is true is more important than the question of whether it is scientific, such warrant therefore focuses attention on the disputed question of whether sufficient empirical evidence of CSI within nature exists to justify the design hypothesis.”]

The design inference process as described can be represented in a flow chart:

Fig. A: The Explanatory filter and the inference to design, as applied to various  aspects of an object, process or phenomenon, and in the context of the generic scientific method. (So, we first envision nature acting by low contingency law-like mechanical necessity such as with F = m*a . . . think of a heavy unsupported object near the earth’s surface falling with initial acceleration g = 9.8 N/kg or so. That is the first default. Similarly, we may see high contingency knocking out the first default — under similar starting conditions, there is a broad range of possible outcomes. If things are highly contingent in this sense, the second default is: CHANCE. That is only knocked out if an aspect of an object, situation, or process etc. exhibits, simultaneously: (i) high contingency, (ii) tight specificity of configuration relative to possible configurations of the same bits and pieces, (iii)  high complexity or information carrying capacity, usually beyond 500 – 1,000 bits. In such a case, we have good reason to infer that the aspect of the object, process, phenomenon etc. reflects design or . . . following the terms used by Plato 2350 years ago in The Laws, Bk X . . .  the ART-ificial, or contrivance, rather than nature acting freely through undirected blind chance and/or mechanical necessity. [NB: This trichotomy across necessity and/or chance and/or the ART-ificial, is so well established empirically that it needs little defense. Those who wish to suggest no, we don’t know there may be a fourth possibility, are the ones who first need to show us such before they are to be taken seriously. Where, too, it is obvious that the distinction between “nature” (= “chance and/or necessity”) and the ART-ificial is a reasonable and empirically grounded distinction, just look on a list of ingredients and nutrients on a food package label. The loaded rhetorical tactic of suggesting, implying or accusing that design theory really only puts up a religiously motivated way to inject the supernatural as the real alternative to the natural, fails. (Cf. the UD correctives 16 – 20 here on. as well as 1 – 8 here on.) And no, when say the averaging out of random molecular collisions with a wall gives rise to a steady average, that is a case of empirically  reliable lawlike regularity emerging from a strong characteristic of such a process, when sufficient numbers are involved, due to the statistics of very large numbers  . . . it is easy to have 10^20 molecules or more . . . at work there is a relatively low fluctuation, unlike what we see with particles undergoing Brownian motion. That is in effect low contingency mechanical necessity in the sense we are interested in, in action. So, for instance we may derive for ideal gas particles, the relationship P*V = n*R*T as a reliable law.] )

Explaining (and discussing) in steps:

1 –> As was noted in background remarks 1 and 2, we commonly observe signs and symbols, and infer on best explanation to underlying causes or meanings. In some cases, we assign causes to (a) natural regularities tracing to mechanical necessity [i.e. “law of nature”], in others to (b) chance, and in yet others we routinely assign cause to (c) intentionally and intelligently, purposefully directed configuration, or design.  Or, in leading ID researcher William Dembski’s words, (c) may be further defined in a way that shows what intentional and intelligent, purposeful agents do, and why it results in functional, specified complex organisation and associated information:

. . . (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. (No Free Lunch, p. xi. HT: ENV.)

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No more smidgeons of evidence puffed up and blazoned everywhere, then retakes and this-time-it’s-trues, all in the gloriouscause of lighting a shining path to the future – endless worship at Darwin’s shrine! This Tiktaalik story, for example, mainly shows how much hasty-wrong-conclusion evolutionary science is simply a Darwin cult (too bad the cult practises human sacrifice too). Skinny: “Missing link “Tiktaalik wass actually Johnny come lately, the new kid in town. So where are the fish that turned into tetrapods? According to Nature, they must exist in the “‘ghost range’ — that is, a period of time during which members of the groups should have been present but for which no body fossils have yet been found.” Shubin’s arguments that Read More ›

A common retort from evolution’s defenders is that all those scientists can’t be wrong. Is it conceivable that so many scientific papers and reports, with their conclusions about evolution, are making the same mistake? Before answering this we first must understand the hierarchy of the evolution apologetics literature. At the base of the pyramid are the scientific papers documenting new research findings. Next up are the review papers that organize and summarize the state of the research. And finally there is the popular literature, such as newspaper and magazine articles, and books. Across this hierarchy evolutionists make different types of claims that should not be blindly lumped together. Yes, there are problems across the spectrum, but they tend to be Read More ›

As a preliminary step to a discussion [DV, to follow] of the significance of and warrant for the design inference, let us now symbolise how we interact with and draw inferences about signs and symbols (generally following Peirce et al [Added, Feb 28: including P’s thought on warrant by inference to best explanation i.e. abductive reasoning; where also warrant can be understood on Toulmin, Plantinga, Gettier and others (cf broader discussion here )]): __________________ Signs: I observe one or more signs [in a pattern], and infer the signified object, on a warrant: I: [si] –> O, on W a –> Here, as I will use “sign” [as opposed to “symbol”],  the connexion is a more or less causal or natural Read More ›

P. Z. Myers is one of the 25 most influential living atheists. He is also on record as saying that he doesn’t believe that newborn babies are fully human, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t regard them as persons, either. Almost no-one noticed when P. Z. Myers made these utterances, because they were made in a comment on one of his recent posts. (See here for P.Z. Myers’ post, here for one reader’s comment and here for P. Z. Myers’ reply, in which he makes his own views plain.) So, what exactly did P. Z. say? In response to a reader who claimed that there is one very easily defined line between personhood and non-personhood – namely, birth – P. Z. Myers replied:

Nope, birth is also arbitrary, and it has not been even a cultural universal that newborns are regarded as fully human.

I’ve had a few. They weren’t.

Let me state at the outset that I have no doubt that P. Z. Myers is a good father; but that is not the issue here. His views on newborn babies are the issue.

For the benefit of readers, here is a list of the 25 most influential living atheists:

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Peter Singer, Steven Weinberg, Paul Kurtz, Lawrence Krauss, Edward O. Wilson, P. Z. Myers, James Randi, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Peter Atkins, John Brockman, Philip Pullman, Barbara Forrest, David Sloan Wilson, Ray Kurzweil, William B. (“Will”) Provine, Kai Nielsen, Susan Blackmore and Richard Carrier.

The purpose of my post today is to ask each of the 25 most influential living atheists five simple questions:

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? Yes/No (please see Question 1 below if you find it difficult to give a clear answer to this question).

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? Yes/No (please see Questions 1 and 2 below if you find it difficult to give a clear answer to this question).

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? Yes/No (please see Questions 1 and 3 below if you find it difficult to give a clear answer to this question).

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? Yes/No (please see Questions 1, 4, 5 and 6 below if you find it difficult to give a clear answer to this question).

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? Yes/No (please see Questions 1 and 7 below if you find it difficult to give a clear answer to this question).

I’m asking these questions, because I think the world has a right to know how the 25 most influential living atheists view newborn babies. The moral status of newborn babies is an ethical issue of vital importance, and I’d like to know what the world’s leading atheists think about this subject. Because I’m a generous person, I’m giving them four days to answer my five simple questions. The countdown ends at 12:01 a.m. (one minute past midnight) on Friday, 21 January, 2011, Greenwich Mean Time (UTC). I think that’s quite enough time for the word to get around, and for people to respond.

And in case some of these atheists object that they’re too busy to respond, let me state that I will happily accept, in good faith, responses written on their behalf by friends, acquaintances, personal assistants or people who have read their books and can quote relevant passages, complete with publication details and page numbers. If someone responding on behalf of an influential atheist wishes to preserve his/her anonymity, he/she is free to use a pseudonym. Please note, however, that I will not be imputing views to influential atheists on the basis of anonymous responses. That would be irresponsible.

To respond to my five questions, all you need to do is write a brief comment at the end of this post – for example:
(a) Yes. (b) No. (c) No. (d) No. (e) No.
Note: If you are replying on behalf of an influential atheist, please list his/her name, your name (if you are willing to give it) and your connection with the atheist in question.

Here are my answers to some questions which I anticipate that people will ask about my quiz: Read More ›

It’s so hard to keep up with the way ID concepts zip around popular culture now. Doesn’t matter what people think of them, it seems they do. So load up on something a friend noticed: There was a TV programme in the UK over Christmas called ‘Unintelligent Design’. It was nothing to do with ID – in fact, it was a documentary about a situation comedy! – but it’s encouraging that the makers clearly assumed that most viewers would be familiar with the term. As I said, logging another find, I can remember googling “intelligent design” a decade ago and coming up with the Web sites of firms selling non-walloping window blinds. Now I am practically drowning in relevant info. Read More ›