Did Andrei Linde inadventantly destroy the argument from design?

[Nullasalus]

Before I read about cosmic inflation, I thought science has established that time and space came into existence when the big bang singularity expanded. Nope, some cosmologists argue that there is something before that… Cosmology is not as simple as it superfically seems. As Alec pointed out, there are some reasons to doubt eternal inflation.

I would be happy to say “good riddence” to eternal inflation. Actually, if I had to pick a multiverse hypothesis, I would prefer the cyclic model or Smolin black hole reproduction model.

And that’s pretty much what I meant about the application of philosophy by people who are sloppy and, really, out of their depth. Linde’s theory is so premature that we don’t know if it’s even going to turn out right, or if it does turn out right with what caveats, etc. On what basis does he say that the model is more friendly to polytheism or atheism? What understanding is there, other than ‘Well, this is what Linde thinks’, which may well be ‘Well, this is what Linde would like to believe’?

Then he mentions that the laws of the universe work so precisely that no intervention is needed to sustain it. He construes from this the lack of a need for a creator God (Yet, somehow, the idea is friendly to polytheism), without addressing the natural question of whether those laws were themselves designed.

Which is why I said what I did about MWI. I’ve seen it cited repeatedly in discussion as ‘proof against God’ - so much so that I think arguing that MWI supports the idea of God (an eternally creating Creator who not only redeems all that is created, but allows those redeemed to join with Him in a task worthy of the eternal life He grants) would lead to the reaction I described. I see the same reaction by some when anyone both accepts evolution yet sees it as the means by which God created man. They short-circuit, because that’s not what they want the idea to do.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Einstein split the difference. he said science infers the existence of God but not a 'personal" God. .

This way of thinking is simply incomprehensible to me. If there really is a being worthy of being called “God”, indifference on the part of that being to His creation is incompatible with the powers, let alone the nature of the being. What a strange thing He would have to be to have bothered to create the stupfyingly complex preconditions to human life, only to ignore the end product! A God that can create a universe can surely, and without breaking a sweat, be aware of and maintain the lives of the intelligent creatures who know He’s there, entreat HIm and look to Him for their ultimate destinies. Knowing such creatures are there (as He must) what a rotten and uninteresting fellow He would have to be to just look the other way and be more interested in how this atom spins or that cloud of gas coalesces. With all due respect to Einstein, that just makes no sense at all.

 

[Maranatha]

This way of thinking is simply incomprehensible to me. If there really is a being worthy of being called “God”, indifference on the part of that being to His creation is incompatible with the powers, let alone the nature of the being. What a strange thing He would have to be to have bothered to create the stupfyingly complex preconditions to human life, only to ignore the end product! A God that can create a universe can surely, and without breaking a sweat, be aware of and maintain the lives of the intelligent creatures who know He’s there, entreat HIm and look to Him for their ultimate destinies. Knowing such creatures are there (as He must) what a rotten and uninteresting fellow He would have to be to just look the other way and be more interested in how this atom spins or that cloud of gas coalesces. With all due respect to Einstein, that just makes no sense at all.

Why would you think God is indifferent? (Remember, if He exists he has an infinite intellect and we obviously have a limited intellect.)

 

[Maranatha]

I was being serious… for example, you cannot prove casuality using empiricism. All we can sense is corelation, not causation.

You said you believed life evolved naturally without the aid of an intellect. I asked you why you had such faith and you seem to have evaded the question. (I apoligise if you didn’t evade the question and I just didn’t understand you answer.)

 

[jimmy]

Read this: closertotruth.com/topics/universemeaning/105/105transcript.html

Also: stanford.edu/~alinde/

Last time I checked the theory of multiple universes was never supported by any measurable data. They have never seen another universe and they have never measured another universe. I love how some physicists just throw ideas out there that have no supportable evidence.

Even if it was supported it still would say nothing about God. God is beyond the universe and is not contained within it in any way. It is not a matter of God being bigger than the universe. That is an absolutely irrelevant idea because God is not measured by length or width or weight. God does not have physical dimensions. Yes, Christianity does teach that the universe has a beginning, but it also teaches that time and space have a beginning. I once heard a quote about what nothingness is from a protestant apologist, Jonathan Edwards. Someone asked him the question, ‘what is nothingness?’ And he responded by saying that nothingness is ‘what sleeping rocks dream of.’ That gets the idea of what God created space and time from.

 

[Mr.Ex_Nihilo]

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it does anyone well to chalk the origin of life up to God and leave it at that. Maybe there is a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life - but then, ‘naturalistic’ is pretty all-encompassing to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if we someday, somehow, found one.

On the other hand, let’s say there is no naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. How would Gerald Joyce determine that there is no naturalistic explanation for this? There’s no mechanism for it. It would forever be a mystery - something naturalistic happened, and we just haven’t found it yet. Or at least you could take that position.

Excellent point. This seems to indicate that those who hold to this position are expressing a belief that their faith in science will someday reveal the answers to their questions.

 

[freesoulhope]

Even if there is a multiverse, they still follow the laws of cuase and effect, since they are manifestations of eachother needing a first cuase to logicaly justify the cuase and effect of each universe’s that comes in to being. Therefore the multiveres theory is a load rubbish. A wolf in sheeps cloths

 

[hecd2]

The point I always find confusing with discussions is the focus on ‘personal God’. I know that it’s meant to differentiate primarily between a God that is directly concerned with humanity (God of the Abrahamic religions) and one which may have created the universe, yet is utterly detached from it (Deist). But why the distinction has any bearing in the cosmological or evolutionary realms is something I’ve never figured out - at what point does the deity in question switch from looking like the Christian God to the deist god? … So personally, I find Craig’s central claim - that you can look at the universe and at least to a point see intention in its creation, operation, and progression - to at least be reasonable. It doesn’t prove anything, of course - but the logic does leave a lot of room for a reasonable theistic consideration.

Well the distinction is between an eternal personal agent who wills the contingent and temporal universe into existence and a cause which is indistinguisable from the universe itself. Craig is very clear that he is arguing for the former - “I think that it can be plausibly argued that the cause of the universe must be a personal Creator. For how else could a temporal effect arise from an eternal cause?..Thus, we are brought not merely to the first cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator.” It is not I but he who attempts to make this distinction. And as I have said, I find his argument very poor for the reasons I gave in my previous post - his premises are that a temporal effect comes from an eternal cause and he concludes that that cause can only be a personal agent. But, to my mind this is a non-sequitur and it also ignores the relative nature of time. (By the way Craig’s Personal Creator, at least as far as this argument goes, could be deistic in the theological sense - he needs it only to be a personal agent in order to cause the contingent temporal universe).

As for ‘physicists follow the logic where it leads’, I’d agree - but only to a point. They have flaws, personal preferences, philosophies, etc like anyone else. Take a look at Linde - he’s informing people what the philosophical ramifications are if his view of the universe is correct, and doing a sloppy job of it besides.

I agree with you.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[ribozyme]

And that’s pretty much what I meant about the application of philosophy by people who are sloppy and, really, out of their depth. Linde’s theory is so premature that we don’t know if it’s even going to turn out right, or if it does turn out right with what caveats, etc. On what basis does he say that the model is more friendly to polytheism or atheism? What understanding is there, other than ‘Well, this is what Linde thinks’, which may well be ‘Well, this is what Linde would like to believe’?

Then he mentions that the laws of the universe work so precisely that no intervention is needed to sustain it. He construes from this the lack of a need for a creator God (Yet, somehow, the idea is friendly to polytheism), without addressing the natural question of whether those laws were themselves designed.

arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0402/0402051.pdf

One can argue [20] that eternal inflation may alleviate some of the problems of the lowscale inflation. Note, however, that eternal inflation, which naturally occurs in the simplest versions of chaotic inflation and in new inflation, does not exist in many popular versions of hybrid inflation. Of course, models of low-scale non-eternal inflation are still much better than the models with no inflation at all, but I do not think that we should settle for the second-best. It would be much better to have a stage of eternal chaotic inflation at nearly Planckian density, which, if needed, may be followed by a stage of low-scale inflation.

I think you are right, Linde does want to believe in eternal inflation. For example, he calls “hybrid inflation” because it is not eternal, “second-best”.

 

[John_Taylor]

John Taylor, I am curious to hear your definition on “coded information”.

…sorry for the delay in responding…life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans

I was trying to come up with a descriptive term that would communicate in a nutshell the idea from “Information Theory” that information (as observed in the world) comes from “a mind” which uses “code” (arrangements of letters, symbols, DNA to communicate “ideas”. Basically I was just hinting at evidence from Information Theory as support for Intelligent Design:

At the very center of ID theory today is information theory, which currently does explain things in terms of “lawlike generalizations” that are “true in every case.” Dr. Gitt sets forth basic theorems about the fundamental nature of information in his book, In the Beginning Was Information…

Consider the following:

Theorem 1: The fundamental quantity information is a non-material (mental) entity. It is not a property of matter, so that purely material processes are fundamentally precluded as sources of information.

Information is a fundamental entity, like mass and energy. Dr. Gitt asks:

What is the causative factor for the existence of information? What prompts us to write a letter, a postcard, a note, a diary, or a comment in a file? The most important prerequisite is our own volition… In analogy to the material side we now introduce a fourth fundamental entity, namely Will (volition)… Information and will are closely linked…both are of a nonmaterial (mental, intellectual, spiritual) nature.

Theorem 2: Information only arises through an intentional, volitional act.

He goes on to assert: All technological systems as well as all constructed objects, from pins to works of art, have been produced by means of information.

Theorem 6: A code is an essential requirement for establishing information.

Theorem 11: A code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an intelligent origin or inventor).

Theorem 24:* Information requires a material medium for storage.*

He elaborates upon this idea:

If one writes some information with chalk on a blackboard, the chalk is the material carrier. If it is wiped off, the total quantity of chalk is still there, but the information has vanished. In this case the chalk was a suitable material medium, but the essential aspect was the actual arrangement of the particles of the chalk. And this arrangement was definitely not random, it had a mental origin. The same information that was written on the blackboard, could also have been written on a magnetic diskette…The quantity of material involved is appreciably less than for the chalk and blackboard, but the amount of material is not crucial. Moreover, the information is independent of the chemical composition of the storage medium. If large neon letter signs are used for displaying the same information, then the amount of material required is increased by several orders of magnitude.

Theorem 26: The information present in living beings must have had a mental source.

Theorem 27: Any model for the origin of life (and of information) based solely on physical and/or chemical processes, is inherently false.

He then states a really big theorem:

Theorem 28: There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.

Evolution cannot produce information. And therefore, evolution cannot produce any life whatsoever.

From The Scientific Case for Intelligent Design by Tom Phillips at catholicintl.com/scienceissues/tpid.pdf

I’ve just started reading about all this (happened upon The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center at ideacenter.org/) and I’m sure there are counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments to all this (I’ve printed out some of the rebuttals to Michael Behe’s theory of “Irreducible Complexity” and his responses to them) so I’m just a learner in all this. I admit my default position is the Catholic Faith but rather enjoy the battle of ideas over which I’m sure God - however folks may want to define “Him” - will have the last say.

Basically, I would expect “Information Theory” to be poo-poohed by materialists who reject the spiritual nature of “intellect and will” but then I’m not a materialist so I guess that’s why I find the stuff interesting.

I will be getting a copy of the book “In the Beginning was Information”

Keep the Faith
jmt

 

[ribozyme]

…sorry for the delay in responding…life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans

jmt

No, life happens when Darwinian evolution happens in a self-sustaining system.

I will discuss your topic later…

But in the meantime, I think this is somewhat pertinent:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=121539&page=3

Huh, how much biochemistry do you know?

I do not know what “instructional language” is, but I will attempt to define it and say no.

Obviously, the “message” in DNA really do not do anything on its own. It is supposed to be “read”. Usually the DNA will not fold into a catalytically active molecule (the exceptions will be refered to as deoxyribozymes).

First, the message is read by RNA polymerase (RNA polymerase II in eukaryotes), usually a transcription factor is required for this to help the polymerase form a stable complex with DNA.

[Too lazy to add enormous amount of detail… so I’ll try to be brief]

RNA polymerase does this by using Watson-Crick base pairing (and presumably other mechanisms such as exonucleolytic proofreading (the mechanism reported in this paper on T. Aqaticus, the same organism where Taq DNA polymerase used in PCR is derived from, is quite different from DNA polymerase’s mechanism.) and using the minor groove electrons) while using nucleoside 5’ triphosphate substrates.

Next, the RNA is then spliced (if it is spliced), and capped (5’ end) and added a polyadenylate tail (3’ end) in eukaryotic organisms. The RNA might be able to splice itself and if it is able to do that we could call this transcript [insert name for catalytic RNA here].

Let’s forgot about the RNA transcript of the DNA for a while. Amino acyl tRNA synthetases catalyze these reactions:

amino acid + ATP —(Aminoacyl tRNA synthetase)—> amino acid-AMP (an amino acid adenylate) + PPi (inorganic pyrophosphate)

and

aa-AMP + tRNA -----(Aminoacyl tRNA synthetase)—> aminoacid-tRNA (an amino acid attached to the 3’ end of the tRNA) and AMP

ATP is used because forming a peptide bond ain’t a free lunch (i.e. the reaction requires a positive Gibbs free energy change).

Of course, a aminoacyl tRNA synthetase must be able to distinguish between the “correct” amino acid and tRNA. Attaching the wrong amino acid to the tRNA has detrimental consequences. However, the free energy of binding the correct substrate when compared to binding the incorrect amino acid does not ensure accuracy. This is corrected by some aminoacyl tRNA synthetases by having an additional site that hydrolysizes the incorrect aa-AMP complex or the ester linkage on the aa-tRNA complex.

Returning our transcript, the “start codon”, 5’ AUG 3’ , initiate the assembly of the ribosome. The tRNAs then read the transcript and the ribosome, a [insert term for a catalytic RNA molecule here], synthesizes a protein from the amino-carboxyl end. The protein then folds (sometimes with the assistence of a chaperone) after it is synthesized. Protein folding is quite complex but involved the interaction of hydrophobic residues, formation of salt bridges, and hydrogen bonding. Also covalent dicysteine linkages are involved giving the tertiary structure.

Long story short the instructional language is not really a language in the usual sense, it is simply amino acid residues in various enzymes interacting with its substrates. Any anthropomorphization is merely a pedagogical device.

To answer the question, it seems unlikely that the instructional language will change with a single mutation: DNA and RNA polymerases will still copy nucleic acids using Watson-Crick pairing, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases will be able to discern the incorrect and the correct tRNAs and amino acids, the ribosome will synthesize proteins using tRNAs, etc. Single mutations do affect this with detrimental consequences in the context of fidelity and phenotype, but these mutations are unable to profoundly affect the “instructional language”.

If I should source something, just ask me too… I have some interesting (“interesting” is a subjective word) papers on my computer to support these statements.

Anything you would want to discuss in that?