Re: Cosmic fingerprints pt. 3

Ian | 9 August, 2008 | 08:00

We return to the “proof” of god by Perry Marshall to an email etitled “Why the Big Bang was the most precisely planned event in all of history.” (Part 1 and Part 2)

Now we get interesting. In this installment, Marshall pushes the fine-tuning ideas, saying:

If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like fine mist from a water bottle – so fast that a gazillion particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even form a single star.

If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the material would have dribbled out like big drops of water, then collapsed back where it came from by the force of gravity.

A little too fast, and you get a meaningless spray of fine dust. A little too slow, and the whole
universe collapses back into one big black hole.

The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference is. To strike the perfect balance between too fast and too slow, the force, something that physicists call “the Dark Energy Term” had to be accurate to one part in ten with 120 zeros.

If you wrote this as a decimal, the number would look like this:

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

In their paper “Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant” two atheist scientists from Stanford University stated that the existence of this dark energy term would have required a miracle… “An unknown agent” intervened in cosmic history “for reasons of its own.”

Just for comparison, the best human engineering example is the Gravity Wave Telescope, which was built with a precision of 23 zeros. The Designer, the ‘external agent’ that caused our universe must possess an intellect, knowledge, creativity and power trillions and trillions of times greater than we humans have.

Absolutely amazing.

That was just the first half of the email.

First: he doesn’t name these “atheist scientists.” Up until now every quote has been credited, do me a favour Perry, tell me who they are (not so we may sick the machine on them). For all we know the “scientists” could be undergraduate psychology majors who were asked at a bar while inebriated (no offense to Stanford’s drunken undergraduate psychology majors intended).

Second: he doesn’t tell us who says the dark energy term is that fine tuned, and in fact there are some who state that when you look at a large number of the supposedly “fine-tuned” physical constants, there is no evidence to call them as such. Many times the constants are called fine-tuned since the theorist only adjusts one while holding others constant, this produces a small range where one constant can fluctuate, however, by fluctuating multiple constants there exists potentially many possible universes that could exist.

Marshall then attacks multiverse theories:

Now a person who doesn’t believe in God has to find some way to explain this. One of the more common explanations seems to be “There was an infinite number of universes, so it was inevitable that things would have turned out right in at least one of them.”

The “infinite universes” theory is truly an amazing theory. Just think about it, if there is an infinite number of universes, then absolutely everything is not only possible… It’s actually happened!

It means that somewhere, in some dimension, there is a universe where the Chicago Cubs won the World Series last year. There’s a universe where Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t get cement shoes; instead he marries Joan Rivers and becomes President of the United States. There’s even a
universe where Elvis kicks his drug habit and still resides at Graceland and sings at concerts. Imagine the possibilities!

I might sound like I’m joking, but actually I’m dead serious. To believe an infinite number of universes made life possible by random chance is to believe everything else I just said, too.

However, he confuses the word “infinite” with what physicists usually mean, as it “a really big number.” And besides, Don Page (theoretical cosmologist at the UofA) can wrap his evangelical head around tieing multiverse theory to his faith.

Finally, Marshall finishes with this;