amused wrote:

Shrunk wrote:For that matter, what does a poorly designed, or undesigned universe look like?

I don't really know, but a cold universe filled with nothing but a little dust would qualify as a universe that is poorly designed to support life. Yes, I added a qualifier, sue me.

A lot of people take the built environment for granted, like it's always been here. It takes a lot of very hard work by a lot of people to put it in place. I wonder if that same attitude affects these arguments against any possibility for design in the universe.

Go to a construction site. It's a violent attack on the surface of the planet. All the materials are ripped from the ground, processed, handled by hundreds of people, and forcibly put in place. There's nothing natural about it. The built environment is a temporary affront to nature, a nature that works every day to tear it down.

Top-down cosmology

Stephen Hawking, along with Thomas Hertog of CERN, proposed that the universe's initial conditions consisted of a superposition of many possible initial conditions, only a small fraction of which contributed to the conditions we see today.[22] According to their theory, it is inevitable that we find our universe's "fine-tuned" physical constants, as the current universe "selects" only those past histories that led to the present conditions. In this way, top-down cosmology provides an anthropic explanation for why we find ourselves in a universe that allows matter and life, without invoking the current existence of a multiverse.

Amused wrote: I wonder if that same attitude affects these arguments against any possibility for design in the universe.

amused wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe#Top-down_cosmology

Top-down cosmology

Stephen Hawking, along with Thomas Hertog of CERN, proposed that the universe's initial conditions consisted of a superposition of many possible initial conditions, only a small fraction of which contributed to the conditions we see today.[22] According to their theory, it is inevitable that we find our universe's "fine-tuned" physical constants, as the current universe "selects" only those past histories that led to the present conditions. In this way, top-down cosmology provides an anthropic explanation for why we find ourselves in a universe that allows matter and life, without invoking the current existence of a multiverse.

There's a nicely self-contained mechanism by which a universe can design itself.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:This universe is just one where life is feasible in some tiny spots here and there. A well designed universe that was designed for life would surely be more efficient. If I leave the surface of this earth for only 30 kilometers, I am sucking pretty much on vacuum. Pretty piss-poor design if you ask me. Most of THIS sun's energy is "wasted" on empty space, or dead worlds. Good design?? The universe is not eternal-good design????

Shrunk wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:This universe is just one where life is feasible in some tiny spots here and there. A well designed universe that was designed for life would surely be more efficient. If I leave the surface of this earth for only 30 kilometers, I am sucking pretty much on vacuum. Pretty piss-poor design if you ask me. Most of THIS sun's energy is "wasted" on empty space, or dead worlds. Good design?? The universe is not eternal-good design????

amused can certainly speak for himself, but I think he's making a more subtle and reasonable point than this. He seems to be suggesting that there may be natural forces or factors that favour a dynamic, changing universe settling into a state that allows complex entities, such as living organisms, to arise. Much in the same way that evolution, though proceeding without a defined goal or impetus from a "designer", nonetheless is predisposed to give rise to certain biological structures that give the appearance of design.

If that's not his point, I'll gladly take credit for it. I don't think it's a position I would advocate myself, but it's one that I think is worthy of serious consideration, without just being dismisssed as covert theism.

Shrunk wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:This universe is just one where life is feasible in some tiny spots here and there. A well designed universe that was designed for life would surely be more efficient. If I leave the surface of this earth for only 30 kilometers, I am sucking pretty much on vacuum. Pretty piss-poor design if you ask me. Most of THIS sun's energy is "wasted" on empty space, or dead worlds. Good design?? The universe is not eternal-good design????

amused can certainly speak for himself, but I think he's making a more subtle and reasonable point than this. He seems to be suggesting that there may be natural forces or factors that favour a dynamic, changing universe settling into a state that allows complex entities, such as living organisms, to arise. Much in the same way that evolution, though proceeding without a defined goal or impetus from a "designer", nonetheless is predisposed to give rise to certain biological structures that give the appearance of design.

If that's not his point, I'll gladly take credit for it. I don't think it's a position I would advocate myself, but it's one that I think is worthy of serious consideration, without just being dismisssed as covert theism.

Shrunk wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:This universe is just one where life is feasible in some tiny spots here and there. A well designed universe that was designed for life would surely be more efficient. If I leave the surface of this earth for only 30 kilometers, I am sucking pretty much on vacuum. Pretty piss-poor design if you ask me. Most of THIS sun's energy is "wasted" on empty space, or dead worlds. Good design?? The universe is not eternal-good design????

amused can certainly speak for himself, but I think he's making a more subtle and reasonable point than this. He seems to be suggesting that there may be natural forces or factors that favour a dynamic, changing universe settling into a state that allows complex entities, such as living organisms, to arise. Much in the same way that evolution, though proceeding without a defined goal or impetus from a "designer", nonetheless is predisposed to give rise to certain biological structures that give the appearance of design.

If that's not his point, I'll gladly take credit for it. I don't think it's a position I would advocate myself, but it's one that I think is worthy of serious consideration, without just being dismisssed as covert theism.

Phillip Ball, in naturenews wrote:... “Quantum mechanics forbids a single history.” says Hertog ... in response to a problem raised by 'string theory', one of the best hopes for a theory of everything. String theory permits innumerable different kinds of universe, most of them very different from the one we inhabit. Some physicists suspect that an unknown factor will turn up that rules out most of these universes.
But Hawking and Hertog say that the countless 'alternative worlds' of string theory may actually have existed. We should picture the Universe in the first instants of the Big Bang as a superposition of all these possibilities, they say; like a projection of billions of movies played on top of one another.
This might sound odd, but it is precisely the view adopted by quantum theory. Think of a particle of light reaching our eye from a lamp. Common sense suggests that it simply travels in a straight line from the bulb to the eye. But to make correct predictions about the particle's behaviour, quantum mechanics must consider all other possible paths too, including ones in which, say, the photon bounces around the walls thousands of times before reaching us.
This summation of all paths, proposed in the 1960s by physicist Richard Feynman and others, is the only way to explain some of the bizarre properties of quantum particles, such as their apparent ability to be in two places at once. The key point is that not all paths contribute equally to the photon's behaviour: the straight-line trajectory dominates over the indirect ones.
Hertog argues that the same must be true of the path through time that took the Universe into its current state. We must regard it as a sum over all possible histories.

S. W. Hawking and Thomas Hertog wrote:In particle physics, one usually computes S-matrix ele-
ments. This is useful to predict the outcome of laboratory
experiments, where one prepares the initial state and mea-
sures the final state. It could be viewed as a bottom-up
approach to physics, in which one evolves forward in time
a particular initial state of the system. The predictivity of
this approach arises from and relies upon the fact that one
has control over the initial state, and that experiments can
be repeated many times to gain statistically significant
results.

But cosmology poses questions of a very different char-
acter. In our past there is an epoch of the early universe
when quantum gravity was important. The remnants of this
early phase are all around us. The central problem in
cosmology is to understand why these remnants are what
they are, and how the distinctive features of our universe
emerged from the big bang. Clearly it is not an S-matrix
that is the relevant observable1 for these predictions, since
we live in the middle of this particular experiment.
Furthermore, we have no control over the initial state of
the universe, and there is certainly no opportunity for
observing multiple copies of the universe.

In fact if one does adopt a bottom-up approach to
cosmology, one is immediately led to an essentially clas-
sical framework, in which one loses all ability to explain
cosmology’s central question — why our universe is the
way it is. In particular a bottom-up approach to cosmology
either requires one to postulate an initial state of the uni-
verse that is carefully fine-tuned [10] —as if prescribed by
an outside agency — or it requires one to invoke the notion
of eternal inflation [11], which prevents one from predict-
ing what a typical observer would see.

Here we put forward a different approach to cosmology
in the string landscape, based not on the classical idea of a
single history for the universe but on the quantum sum over
histories [12]. We argue that the quantum origin of the
universe naturally leads to a framework for cosmology
where amplitudes for alternative histories of the universe
are computed with boundary conditions at late times only.
We thus envision a set of alternative universes in the land-
scape, with amplitudes given by the no boundary path
integral [13].

The measure on the landscape provided by no boundary
initial conditions allows one to derive predictions for ob-
servations. This is done by evaluating probabilities for
alternative histories that obey a set of constraints at late
times. The constraints provide information that is supple-
mentary to the fundamental laws and act as a selection
principle. In particular, they select the subclass of histories
that contribute to the amplitude of interest. ...

Largenton wrote:
I think Dawkins made a point against it though with the ant program. I forget the book it was in (The Blind Watchmaker possibly?) but it made a good point on how a simple set of instructions could lead to something unexpected.

Shrunk wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:This universe is just one where life is feasible in some tiny spots here and there. A well designed universe that was designed for life would surely be more efficient. If I leave the surface of this earth for only 30 kilometers, I am sucking pretty much on vacuum. Pretty piss-poor design if you ask me. Most of THIS sun's energy is "wasted" on empty space, or dead worlds. Good design?? The universe is not eternal-good design????

amused can certainly speak for himself, but I think he's making a more subtle and reasonable point than this. He seems to be suggesting that there may be natural forces or factors that favour a dynamic, changing universe settling into a state that allows complex entities, such as living organisms, to arise. Much in the same way that evolution, though proceeding without a defined goal or impetus from a "designer", nonetheless is predisposed to give rise to certain biological structures that give the appearance of design.

If that's not his point, I'll gladly take credit for it. I don't think it's a position I would advocate myself, but it's one that I think is worthy of serious consideration, without just being dismisssed as covert theism.

amused wrote:I'm not promoting any type of creationism that involves a creator separate from creation. I'm wondering out loud if the universe itself has intent, and thus the ability to create itself as it sees fit. Probably a derail from the OP so I'll start a new thread.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:But to have "intent" you have to have consciousness or intelligence, how does that work.

amused wrote:

Shrunk wrote:

PhiloKGB wrote:

amused wrote:I'm SO glad you said that. I'm an architect. I design things. When I see a good design, I recognize and appreciate the hand of the designer. I see a good design in the universe, which implies a designer.

You have an awfully inflated view of the extent of your skill. How does expertise in terrestrial architecture qualify you to detect "good design in the universe"?

For that matter, what does a poorly designed, or undesigned universe look like?

I don't really know, but a cold universe filled with nothing but a little dust would qualify as a universe that is poorly designed to support life. Yes, I added a qualifier, sue me.

A lot of people take the built environment for granted, like it's always been here. It takes a lot of very hard work by a lot of people to put it in place. I wonder if that same attitude affects these arguments against any possibility for design in the universe.

The universe we find ourselves in does work extremely well.

Blitzkrebs wrote: