A bizarre new post at UD had me checking the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.
In it, commenter ‘nullasalus’ explains that although he doesn’t think the multiverse is plausible, he nevertheless thinks “it’s a good idea, from an ID perspective, to accept and take part in multiverse speculations,” and offers these four reasons, which I have quoted verbatim:
1. If we live in an infinite multiverse, Intelligent Design is no longer a possibility – it is a certainty.
2. While Intelligent Design becomes a certainty (at least somewhere), Darwinism becomes obsolete and obscure.
3. Theism becomes true on the spot – specifically, polytheism.
4. If ID proponents embrace the multiverse, there’s a good chance the scientific community will drop it like a hot potato.
That last one is especially funny. Enjoy!
They have no comprehension of why scientists find the multiverse interesting.
So, maybe somewhere, in some branch of the multiverse, ID is true and evolutionary biology is false.
They still have the evidence problem. What might happen somewhere in the multiverse does not tell us what is happening in the particular branch of the multiverse that we are occupying.
Isn’t that the reason we gave up physics? Well, no, actually we’re not being driven by pseudoscientific distortions of science, particularly not the bizarre notion that the multiverse idea has anything to do with biology.
I guess in their minds it can all be about them, though…
Glen Davidson
Some of the people at UD have made at least a cursory effort to understand some of the science of evolution, at least so they can attack it, but they haven’t bothered to do even five minutes reading when it comes to the multiverse.
There is no motivation in cosmology to think that theism is true in any universe.
I think even among ‘materialists’ the multiverse licenses some odd thinking. It would seem that once you get your head around the concept of infinity, absolutely anything possible can occur. But this does not mean that all ‘possible’ points in the phase space are accessible. It is not enough to be a legitimate configuration, it has to be achievable from a start point (one could get round that by making the start point one second prior to the desired configuration, but is that possible?).
Nullasalus just assumes that the multiverse licenses each and every speculation in addition. Even in a multiverse, the number of instances where Life was generated by non-living intelligence may be zero.
This discussion triggers in me the thought of Douglas Adams’ whale. God as a Boltzmann Brain.
This is a good point that is probably lost on most non-specialists: the multiverse as a cosmological theory isn’t the same as “all possible worlds,” in the sense that matters to logicians.
For in the logician’s sense, there surely is a possible world in which life was generated by a non-living intelligence, simply because the claim “life was generated was a non-living intelligence” does not violate any laws of logic.
Whether one should accept modal realism is an interesting issue, but it seems fairly clear to me that one could accept the multiverse theory as a cosmological, hence a posteriori concept and still reject modal realism as an a priori thesis about how to understand our use of the terms “possibility” and “necessity”.
Allan, KN,
Don’t you really mean “non-physical intelligence”, as opposed to “non-living intelligence”?
This is so dumb it boggles the mind. Everything is wrong with every point he makes. Holy FUCK this is dumb.