Multiverse Archives – Rational Faith

Multiverse thinking: though magical doesn’t exclude God’s existence – it proves it

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Duane Caldwell

The multiverse – a product of magical thinking.

Many physicists have begun to cloak themselves in what they hope is the protective garment of the theory of the multiverse to protect them from the deluge of evidence that the universe is finely tuned. As I point out in my previous article, that the universe is finely tuned is not a question:

“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” [physicist Andrei] Linde says.

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. …

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse.[1]

Should Christians believe in a multiverse? 7 Reasons Against

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Duane Caldwell

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
2 Cor 4.2

Non-believers will likely consider the above scripture irrelevant and unpersuasive and will ponder the wisdom of starting an article on the multiverse with a verse of scripture. In so doing they will have confirmed the scripture (blind to spiritual truths) while setting up my two points: First – this is not merely a discussion of physics – but of metaphysics. (Metaphysics being those things that lie beyond the realm of observable physical reality and so strictly speaking, are beyond the realm of the questions that physics can answer.) Second, not only is the multiverse “pure metaphysics”[1] as Christian apologist William Lane Craig puts it, but many scientists seem blind to the fact that they are engaging in metaphysics – not physics – when proposing the multiverse as a “scientific” answer to a number of the problems their theories have. They have fallen into the same error that philosopher of science and apologist John Lennox chides theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking for: engaging in metaphysics while failing to recognize he is doing so.[2]

Truth in advertising

Having identified multiverse theories as claims that deal with the metaphysical, we can make the following observations: Continue Reading

Can the big bang explain star formation?

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Duane Caldwell

Scientists do not have a feasible theory on how the sun was formed.

Materialist cosmologists are loath to admit it, but the truth is they have no idea how stars like our sun were formed.

In my previous article on the age of the universe I stated that scientists can’t gauge the age of the universe in part because they can’t gauge one of the yardsticks they use as a comparison: the age of stars. They can’t measure the age of stars because they don’t know how stars form. Thus without being able to nail down the beginning point, they can’t know the total time elapsed between the star’s beginning and now. I provided references to a few quotes from scientists to support the contention that they don’t know how stars form such as:

“The universe we see when we look out to its furthest horizons contains a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these galaxies contains another hundred billion stars. That’s 10²² stars all told. The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form.”¹

Predictably, the big bang brain washed gang don’t believe their own scientists when it comes to statements that contradict their theory, so a number responded by Googling how stars form, and pointed me, ironically enough, to an article on one of NASA’s sites that I had referenced myself. The irony being that the article specifically points out that one problem scientists have with determining the age of stars is their “ignorance” (their word) regarding stellar evolution.² Apparently such people didn’t bother to read the article they presented as counter evidence.

But I suspect that in addition to the big bang brain washed gang, many will find it hard to believe the above statement – that scientists don’t know how stars form. So let me clarify that statement and provide further evidence here.

First, let’s be clear about the claim I’m making. Notice I didn’t say scientists don’t know how stars work. They’ve known how stars shine since 1920 when the brilliant English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington:

“…argued in his 1920 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that Aston’s measurement of the mass difference between hydrogen and helium meant that the sun could shine by converting hydrogen atoms to helium.”³

The process is called nuclear fusion and has been confirmed by the discovery that emanating from the sun is the by products of the nuclear reaction: the hard to detect particles called nutrinos.⁴ So scientists know how stars work. They know what makes them shine. What I’m saying is they don’t know how they form. Or to be more precise, they cannot come up with a naturalistic process – which the big bang requires – that would produce the conditions necessary to create a star and ignite a stable fusion process. And in particular they cannot come up with a scenario that would allow for the creation of the first star using only naturalistic processes, and without invoking hypothetical, magical entities. To understand why, let’s look first at the story currently told by scientists on how stars form.

The Current Big Bang Star Creation Story

Here is how stars form according to the big bang theory as outlined by various scientists and the narrator in “The Universe” episode Life and Death of a Star⁵ Continue Reading

Earth 2.0 and ETs: another scientific pipe dream

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Duane Caldwell

	Some scientists need to be reminded that it’s ill-advised to count your aliens before they’re discovered.
Artist conception of Kepler-452b with Earth for size comparison. Clouds, continents and oceans depicted on Kepler-452b are included though there is no evidence for them.

With the discovery of the earth like planet Kepler-452b, we have the opportunity for a valuable object lesson. Contrary to what scientists are hoping for – this will not be a lesson to Creationists that evolution is true and extra-terrestrial life has been found, thus validating evolution. No, the lesson this discovery affords is a demonstration of the foolishness of trying to disprove anything (much less the Bible) when:
1. Your primary evidence has yet to be discovered; and
2. You’re arguing from a scientific theory that flies in the face of the established laws of science.

The object for today’s lesson will be Jeff Schweitzer’s article in the Huffington Post, “Earth 2.0: Bad News for God“. Schweitzer makes a number of mistakes common to scientists and others trying to debunk the Genesis account of origins. We’ll use his mistakes to identify these common errors so 1. You’re aware these are not unique earth shattering questions, they’ve all been handled before, and 2. You can more easily identify them, and respond appropriately when next you see them. We’ll look first at the problem with his whole approach and in the process answer his objections. Schweitzer believes he has mounted a serious challenge to the Genesis account. He’s seriously mistaken.

1. Lack of Objectivity
Most people believe scientists are objective, impartial promoters of the truth – whatever the truth turns out to be – because that is the image scientists have projected since the dawn of the modern scientific age. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Exhibit one: an example of a scientists who is biased and has obvious preferences as to what the truth is: Schweitzer himself. Schweitzer can’t hide his obvious glee at the mere prospect of proving Bible believers wrong.

I would like here to preempt what will certainly be a re-write of history on the part of the world’s major religions. I predict with great confidence that all will come out and say such a discovery is completely consistent with religious teachings.¹

“Preempt” the world’s religions? In other words he anticipates the world’s religions being wrong, and he wants to afford them no wiggle room to claim they were not, and thus this “preemptive” strike. An attempt to box them in; and to create the strongest case to say “see you’re wrong, and I told you so.” Hardly an objective position for a scientist. But Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists have been saying that the average scientist is neither objective nor unbiased for a long time. Creationist Ken Ham has been making this point for over a quarter century:

Many think of scientists as unbiased people in white laboratory coats objectively searching for truth. However scientists come in two basic forms, male and female, and they are just like you and me. They have beliefs and biases. A bias determines what you do with the evidence, especially the way in which you decide that certain evidence is more relevant or important than other evidence.²

One’s bias is of critical importance because it determines not only what evidence will be accepted³ but also the a-priori assumptions use in interpreting the evidence. For instance some look at the Grand Canyon and see a little bit of water acting over a long period of time (millions of years). Others see a lot of water (as in a world wide flood) acting over a short period of time. Same evidence, but a-priori assumptions determine how the evidence is interpreted. Clearly such assumptions are critical to one’s approach to both science and life.

2. Incorrect a-priori assumptions

Schweitzer is convinced that life exists out there in the universe, and one day we’ll discover it:

As I stated at the beginning, none of this will matter upon life’s discovery elsewhere.⁴

I make the case in the Waning, Great Scientific Hope that the search for life on other planets is a hopeless one, with no chance of success. Why does Schweitzer consider it a certainty, and one day we’ll discover it? It’s based on his a-priori assumptions. Most scientists are naturalists – meaning they will allow only natural causes as scientific explanation. This forces them to adopt an anti-God, pro-Big Bang, pro-evolutionary world view which assumes: Continue Reading

The multiverse and other fairy tales

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Duane Caldwell

A picture supposedly of a fairies dancing before a young girl is examined for authenticity in a scene from “FairyTale: A True Story“

Cosmologists faced with the difficult problems of the fine tuning of the universe and the origin of the singularity have resorted to the fairy tale of a “multiverse” to save a materialistic worldview.

In 1917 in Cottingley, England, 16 and 9 year old cousins Elsie Write and Frances Griffiths believed in fairies and wanted others to believe too. As evidence they produced pictures (viewable here) of what they purported to be real live fairies. By today’s photoshop and CGI standards, the fairies in the pictures appear to be simplistic two dimensional hand colored drawings. But a photo expert of the day declared the negatives had not been tampered with, and the pictures caught the eye of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of famed fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Less widely known is Doyle was a believer in the paranormal¹, and his beliefs included the existence of fairies. Doyle took the photographs as authentic.

Years later, the girls, now women, confessed the photos had been faked. The question is why had so many, including one so obviously intelligent as the creator of Sherlock Holmes been so quick to believe a fanciful story with little or no evidence? Frances, nailed it on the head in a 1985 interview when she said, “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.”²

“They wanted to be taken in.” In other words, they wanted to believe. I don’t fault them or anyone for that. Humans are designed to live by faith, and thus it’s natural to want to believe in something. (This includes atheists, evolutionists and scientists who claim to have no faith.³) The problem comes when you believe based on flimsy or no evidence. That’s always the problem with a fairytale – there is little or no evidence. This also distinguishes the Christian faith – for which there is a plethora of evidences from a variety of fields of study – from fairytales. Furthermore, there are a number of sites dedicated to documenting the evidence.⁴

Segue to the 1980’s. The field of cosmology is in crisis. Scientists realize there are a number of problems with the Big Bang theory. (For a few details see my previous article here.) Einstein had died in 1955 without completing what he had hoped would be his magnus opus: a completed Theory of Everything (TOE) – a single, elegant, unified theory that explained everything about the universe, including the current holy grail in cosmology: the unexplainable (in scientific terms) origin of the universe. The current explanation – the singularity that is itself the big bang – has been recognized as totally inadequate, contradicting the laws of physics. As physicist Michio Kaku put it:

“The fundamental problem of cosmology, is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the big bang. Well people say what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with having the laws of physics collapse? Well for physicists this is a disaster. All our lives we’ve dedicated to the proposition that the universe obeys knowable laws. Laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics. And here we have the centerpiece of the universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law.” ⁵

To make matters worse, science had discovered that the universe is finely tuned. In an article for the Discovery Center Institute for science and culture, distinguished follow and author Jay Richards explains what fine tuning is:

“Fine-tuning” refers to various features of the universe that are necessary conditions for the existence of complex life. Such features include the initial conditions and “brute facts” of the universe as a whole, the laws of nature or the numerical constants present in those laws (such as the gravitational force constant), and local features of habitable planets (such as a planet’s distance from its host star).

The basic idea is that these features must fall within a very narrow range of possible values for chemical-based life to be possible.”⁶

In that article Richards, who prefers to take a conservative approach to fine tuning parameters, lists 21 features of the cosmos that are fine tuned. (As opposed to 200 as the number of parameters that Metaxas cites as finely tuned in his popular article.⁷) Richard’s conclusion: the universe is fine tuned and thus designed.

On the other hand, British cosmologist and astronomer royal Martin Rees examines in depth 6 of those finely tuned parameters in his book “Just Six Numbers.” Though the evidence for fine tuning that results in a world like ours is quite apparent, he refuses to believe that means it points to a designer who fine tuned it. Instead he chooses to believe in an solution as fanciful as fairies, and having the same amount of evidence (none): the multiverse: Continue Reading

Evolution falsified – Again

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Duane Caldwell

The irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum

Darwinian evolution has been falsified many times. With the recent bacterial find, it’s been falsified again.

A recent bacterial discovery once again demonstrates that evolution is false, and that adherents believe it on a faith basis, not an evidentiary, scientific basis. To fully appreciate that point one must understand how faith is expressed. As a Christian, there are certain things that I believe that you will not change my mind on. For instance, I hold the following as true:

God exists
God is good
God is love
Jesus is the image of the invisible God

I have good reasons to believe all these things¹, which makes my belief a rational one. (More on that here.) But the fact that regardless of what you show me, I will still believe them indicates that they are un-falsifiable statements, which make them statements of faith, not of science.

That is precisely how faith is supposed to work. Care must be taken that you place your faith in an object worthy of faith. Such as Jesus and the Bible. Once that requirement is met, you continue to have faith in revealed truth because your object of faith (God) has presented evidence of the truthfulness of what you believe. More importantly he knows more than you do about things you now question, like why or how did __x___ (fill in the blank) happen. God will at some future date resolve your questions and make sense of apparent contradictions, but that which he has made clear – like the fact of his existence²
– he expects us to continue to believe regardless of the nonsense and lies unbelievers present.

On the other hand, science is not supposed to work that way. Continue Reading