I don’t “believe in it” either. I’m waiting for the cosmologists to figure it out.
I expect nothing of any value whatsoever to come from the various theologians and apologists who, for inexplicable reasons, consider themselves qualified to opine on this topic.
You may not “believe in it”, multiverse theory, but you have revealed yourself to be an apparent believer in scientism.
Maybe because some are better equipped than a hyper-specialized Ph.D. to understand the philosophy of science, ontology and epistemology.
No, I simply accept that science is often able to answer the questions it purports to address.
If there was even one single example, from the entire history of humanity, of theology or apologetics doing the same, I would change my opinion. But there is no such example.
@PdotdQ, @dga471, any others that might know.
Say the multiverse is real. This does not necessitate an INFINITY of universes right?
Say that in order to get going, there sputtered out several billion universes. Is there any reason to think this production of universes would continue forever?
It seems that the FTA would be slightly undermined but not destroyed. Wouldn’t you just subtract the possible number of universes produced from the original FT parameters and then arrive at a slightly lower number of fine tuned constants and quantities?
And I’d like to add to Mark’s questions. Is it necessarily a function of multiverse models that the universes are dissimilar in terms of their properties such that this one, unlikely universe was different from the other more likely (or other unlikely) universes? Why would they not all be the same, or similar to one another?
Things are not as complicated as you are making them out to be.
The FTA depends on ours being the only universe that exists.
That the multiverse is even a possibility means that assumption no longer holds, so the entire argument is no longer valid.
Simple as that.
This makes God contingent. A particular universe has to exist so that it can give rise to God?
Why does it depend on this? Would it be invalid if there was only 2 universes?
Ockham’s razor actually removes any need to invoke a “beginner” (funny, God is a beginner. All beginners suck, come back when you’ve gained more experience).
Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose the universe transitioned out of some conceptual nothingness, as that is a metaphyscial extrapolation that no empirical data supports.
Even the existence of a singularity, a state of infinite density and curvature of spacetime, is fundamentally an extrapolation.
Nevertheless, a singularity isn’t nothing, or non-being in the metaphysica/philosophical sense. It’s something. If the first moment of time was in fact a singularity, then it is true that there has always been something (all the energy of the universe, and spacetime). So if the dimension of time goes back a finite amount of time, it comes to a first moment(the moment of infinite density and curvature), before which there is not any thing, not even time. Hence it is meaningless to speak of a “before” the first moment of time itself, in the same way it is nonsensical to speak of a position further north of the north pole. Hence there was never a time at which there was “non-being”.
That means there was never a transition from non-being to something, because the state of the world was never “non-being”, so no “beginner” is required to cause or facilitate any such purported transition from non-being into something. Rather, the singularity exists at the first moment of time, and then has been expanding ever since.
Your inscrutable God is not required, and positing it violates Ockham’s razor.
Unfortunately, most things are not that simple. For example, you still have the problem of Boltzmann brains, the fine tuning of sort of mechanism capable of generating universes, fine tuning for discoverability, and other things.
Your seeing in things in black and white makes me trust your statements much less. The world is much more nuanced than you make it out to be. Your statement resembles the Christian fundamentalist saying:The bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.
The world is not as simple as you or fundamentalists make it out to be. And thank God it isn’t!
Your post is marked as a response to me, but you write @Faizal_Ali in it?
Yeah it was to him, not you
Thanks for your respectfulness, here at Peaceful Science.
You’re a big boy, you can take a joke.
I’ve seen your graciousness elsewhere.
Let me try answering your questions. So you know, here is my bias: I do not think that the Fine Tuning Argument(s) is well-posed, and is fun to talk about but has no actual philosophical merit.
Also, there are many types of multiverses, and the multiverse coming from inflation that is discussed in the OP article is just one type of multiverse. In this post I will only talk about multiverses coming from inflation, and not other types of multiverses!
Just to be clear, contrary to Ethan Siegel’s article, this is not guaranteed by inflation. I gave some references previously:
Now, suppose that we do have multiverses coming from inflation. In order for it to solve the Fine Tuning Problem (e.g. the supposed fine tuning of the ratio of the strengths of gravitational to electromagnetic interactions, often called N), it has to be married with ideas from quantum gravity. The most popular form of the argument invokes the String Landscape from string theory.
For our purposes, you can think of the String Landscape as a set of all the possible laws of physics and fundamental constants of nature (like the aforementioned N) that is allowed by string theory. The idea is that every universe in the multiverse picks a random point in the String Landscape. So, for example, one universe can have N=0.01, others can have N=10, etc.
The possibilities allowed in the String Landscape is not everything! For example, it does not allow for the existence of a “god” in some universe that can then affect other universes (as some people in this thread claimed). Another example: it does not allow the generation of universes with logic systems that are different from our own. It just allows for all the possibilities that is in the String Landscape of your particular brand of string theory.
Another caveat: there is no evidence that string theory is correct, and even within string theory, the existence of the String Landscape is not guaranteed! If these ideas are false, then one is not guaranteed to solve FTAs with the inflationary multiverse.
With all those caveats, the answer is no - the predicted number of universes generated by inflation is infinite.
Yes, the production of universes would continue forever. Indeed, this theory is called Eternal Inflation.
We do not know. This goes to the heart of why I think Fine Tuning Arguments are not well posed. We simply do not know how to assign probabilities to what sort of universes are going to pop out from the inflationary multiverse.
This is so helpful! Thanks very much. As with so many aspects of science, we laypersons have just enough knowledge to get ourselves into trouble some times.
When you mention that you do not believe that the FTA is well-posed, are you speaking specifically of the balances of forces, or do you also include some of the other just-so aspects that seem to have helped life be possible such as our position in our galaxy, the over-sized moon, the earth’s wobble causing the seasons, and those kinds of things?
To me, I can see how some of the fortuitous aspects could be put into these two categories (of sorts) wherein one of them might potentially be explained away by the multiverse, but others (such as our moon) may not have anything to do with it.
Forgive me if I have phrased this poorly. I’m happy to clarify if necessary.
I had things like the balances of forces in mind, though it is not the only example. In particular, I was thinking of the fine-tuned Universe problem, instead of the fine-tuned Earth. The fine-tuned Universe specifically refers to the collection of fundamental physical constants that have values that are “just so” for life.
Edit: That said, I do not think that the fine-tuned Earth (which simply refers to the Solar system being rare) is a problem. We do see a lot of variety in exoplanetary systems, and we know that the number of planets in the Universe is large.
What makes Geological fine-tuning arguments appealing is the number of seemingly unrelated events that had to happen at not only the right time, but also at the right location, and at the right amounts. This is something I’m working on now. I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet
It seems almost trivial to me to say that the present is a consequence of some unique series of past events. Of course, the same would be true had other events happened and other things evolved instead, then that outcome would have been equally “special” and in need of an explanation invoking some long series of seemingly serendipitous “coincidences”.