For those of you who have dedicated your professional lives to finding answers to the big questions, and can still see the wood for the trees, what do you think? Intelligent design doesn't have to mean "designed for life"; but when you get to the keen edge of science do you see a hand of creation? (this isn't a question over religious beliefs)

It certainly smells like a religious question. Science cannot address those types of questions.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

DrWho with respect, if science isn't trying to address this type of question what is it trying to address? (Wood and trees). In time, possibly in our lifetime, we may see workable theories behind Dark Matter, Quantum Mechanics.. maybe a unified theory. I was just wondering whether anyone was brave enough to put an informed opinion forward without any current empirical evidence.

Just for clarity, I am a scientifically-minded agnostic, I have no agenda.

How would you detect such a thing as "design" scientifically? A somewhat rhetorical question, the Intelligent Design crowd have been trying to come up with a way for many years, but AFAIK no "design"-test has been found yet.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

That will teach me to ask a "informed opinion" question to a bunch of Scientists. I honourably retract it, my epiphany will have to wait...

I don't. But I'm not sure how you would see the difference. See, you are asking an incredibly difficult question. How would you possibly know if the universe was designed as it is for a purpose, or if it just happened to emerge the way it was by coincidence? That is the difficult point here. I'm not discouraging thinking about these kinds of things -- I do it myself -- but we have to recognize that it is hard to come up with an answer.

See, personally, I think that whether it's coincidence or design, it will look the same, and so there is no criterion for making the distinction.

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As above, so below

It is possible, of course, that the universe could be put together in such a way that it was impossible for things to happen with natural processes.

That isn't the way our universe works, though.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

OK another angle then: if we find a pre-BBT mechanism (singularities/other leading to "spawned" Universes, "big crunch", parallel/inverse Universe), would this not indicate a cyclical / self propagating nature of reality as we experience it? Whereas if there is no explanation, the Universe just "happened" and is tending towards some point of stasis in the future, would this not indicate a huge "Leap of faith" perhaps towards a creation event? Or, does Time come to the rescue by extending towards infinity when you look into the begining and end of things?

I have a big problem with infinity; but then I have a tiny mind.

What did you expect, an unscientific answer?

Also another unanswerable question, since we have no means to examine what happened before the big bang or at time zero, even in principle. You should accept that there are questions that science cannot answer - forming conclusions in these situations based on personal bias isn't science.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, DrWho, I wasn't looking for someone to prove empirically that there is / isn't a God or some other Creative Force, I'm not that ambitious! Is it so dangerous to offer an opinion on the balance of probabilites, for the benefit of the less luminary amongst us?

I'm aware of the difficulty in proving theories in various scenarios: it's incredible we can infer as much as we do. Isn't it that case that Physics is very much concerned these days with the stuff we CAN'T see or interact with, a kind of leapfrog over human perception?

My questions were a bit clumsy, granted.

Anyone who's seen one a certain style of action painting and has also seen a sidewalk under an area where pigeons like to congregate?

I think the only reason why I'd be able to tell the difference between a photograph of one or the other that I've seen clearly-identified examples of both so I can compare and contrast.

I've only seen one universe, and it doesn't come with a label.

--

On another note, arguments like the popular argument from fine-tuning are painfully specious. We don't know where these constants come from. For all we know the way they're set up now is just how universes naturally tend to turn out, and the truth is that it's much harder to get a sterile universe and those are the ones that require design. Here on Earth it certainly takes a lot of effort to produce environments that aren't hospitable to life, and it takes a heck of a lot of effort on the part of intelligent creatures to produce an autoclave.

But how can you work out the probabilities? There simply is no way.

Yes, it is.

Not unless you're a string theorist! If you can't observe it, measure it or interact with it, what can be said about it? Nothing.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

DrWho I think you should have a word with all those misguided souls working on Dark Matter, Black Holes, WIMPS, (Strings!) and the like then!

There are certainly more eminent folk than you or I who are putting arguments forward to push the boundaries - MOND being one as you mentioned.

So.. are you saying YOU can't answer my bad question, or that the bad question can't be answered?

Do you think the Universe is cyclical/self propagating in nature, or a fixed event?

I'm not asking you to prove it, I doubt with all respect you are Einstein's second coming! And if you were, I wouldn't understand your proof!

How are those things (except string theory) at all equivalent to your OP question?? There is excellent observational evidence for dark matter and dark energy and even better evidence for black holes. Science can certainly address those issues.

Both.

I don't know and neither does anyone else. We only have evidence for a singular event that happened some 13.7 Gya.

I don't need to be Einstein's second coming to know that some things cannot be answered.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

I believe your original point was along the lines of: if you can't see it or interact with it, it's not worth discussing? Don't the areas I suggested fall into this category? Dark matter is theorized through circumstantial evidence at best is it not? It fits the observations because it's been designed to fit. That's not to say the theory is wrong.

I take your point that you find my badly worded question unanswerable, I'd be interested in others' viewpoints though.

And as much of science, including the Dark Matter theory you seem comfortable with, is deduced rather than directly observed, I would posit that the big "origin" questions are NOT ones which cannot be answered, that's too final isn't it? You couldn't have answered many things in the past which we now can. I guess my point is that I believe our generation could be in a position to answer some of these questions.

Well, maybe not my questions!

Dark matter was theorized because observations indicated that it had to be present to account for what we do see. If what we saw made sense without dark matter, we wouldn't be talking about dark matter. MOND theories have tried to remove dark matter from the scene but have failed to account for other well understood physics. I have already mentioned that dark matter concentrations have produced gravitational lensing effects which pretty much confirms its existence, even though we don't yet know what it actually is.

There's a difference between things that we don't yet have an answer to and those things that can never be known in principle. The initial conditions of the BB fall into the latter category.

How would you go about answering the question about the BB's design or otherwise? Why do you believe that we can find an answer to that, through what means?

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

I don't know what sort of evidence could even be cited as "proof" of a creator. I'd imagine something that broke basic laws of nature (conservation of energy most likely) would have to be broken (ie. a massive object appearing from nothing right where everyone can see it and study the event only coming to the conclusion that matter was formed from nothing in an instant).

Even then, you might have difficulty. Science is a reflection of what happens in the universe, and would most likely be amended to accommodate whatever miraculous exhibit was thrown our way (as it has done in the past) rather than throw up its arms in defeat and say that there's no way to ever know how that happened and conclude that God is the only explanation. Anyway, wouldn't you agree that a mere lack of explanation will never be "the proof" that God exists? Scientists who have any confidence at all would much sooner say that "the answer is out there" than say "the answer is nowhere" about a physical, observable event.

So, getting at last to the point, no, I don't see a hand of creation. That's not to say there isn't one! Such a thing is unprovable. But I don't see one, and that's what you asked.

I think your question touches on what is probably the deepest mystery in all of science, if not the deepest mystery in intelligence. That mystery is, why does this work so well? You can say that intelligence provides survival benefits and under certain conditions can grow to allow the use of tools and even the invention of language and civilization. That doesn't explain quantum mechanics or general relativity, theories that under ideal conditions can be accurate to ten decimal places.

This in turn leads into another of the deepest and longstanding debates of science, which is between rationalism and empricism. Rationalism says the universe really is ruled by fairly understandable mathematical laws, and we are gradually figuring out closer and closer approximations to those laws, and our progress is slowed more by our limitations in perception than our limitations in intellect. Empiricism says that the only way we know anything about the world is by observing it, and our efforts to make sense of it are useful to us, but are never a substitute for actually interacting with the reality. Rationalism has an answer to why this works, but empiricism handles the problem that theories are falsifiable but not provable.

Into this mix enters the question, "is there some design to all this?" That question requires a careful definition of "design", which is currently lacking. I could easily define the term such that my answer is yes, or I could define it so my answer is no. But my real point is, I don't think we get to know the answer to questions like that, we have to find whatever answers work for us, and that can even be different in different contexts. We need to wear many hats.

I'm not really arguing whether or not Dark Matter is the best fit for current observations; my point is that it cannot be directly observed/interacted with, yet you still seem to support it, which I think is a contradiction to your eariler post.
How can you be sure that we can never know about the conditions of the BB? Maybe not with currently accepted mathematical models and physical understanding. I get your point.
If I knew the answer to that one DrW I wouldn't be posting on here! However we have much to discover about sub-atomic particles, dark-whatevers or their replacements, black holes and the like. We know a lot more about this subject matter than we did 100 years ago, isn't it arrogant to believe we have peaked?!

This, I think, is a question worth addressing if we are to have much hope of finding extraterrestrial life.

A "good" scientist will abide science. That is, they will stray away from letting opinion govern a decision. Unless, of course, that opinion is their hypothesis to be tested. In which case, that opinion/hypothesis will be tested. Regardless of the whether the results are "positive" or "negative", it becomes part of a new or pre-existing theory.

That being said, there is a scientific basis for detection of design (as mentioned above), but there is no scientific basis for presuming design.



M74

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I pray to no one.

You cannot see a magnetic field from a bar magnet either, yet we can see its effect on iron filings.

Because there is no signal that can ever reach us from that point in time, especially as time itself didn't exist.

It isn't a matter of peaking, it's a matter of not being able to get information about a system, ever. I can understand how it might be difficult to accept that there are some things which science simply cannot answer, ever.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

This question cannot be answered one way or the other, probably never will be.

The only thing i can say is that currently it is a matter of opinion.

welcome to baut LunarJim

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ooops..... wrong forum!!!

More than 20 posts and no one has brought up the Anthropic Principle?

The universe is what it is and we're just lucky to be around to
a) observe it
b) understand some of what we observe.

The universe needs no purpose.

Does a hexagon show evidence of design?

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SpeedFreek

Sure. It indicates the object's structure follows a generally hexagonal design. . .

Well, I'm on no keen edge of science, but I'd say no. As far as we can see, it looks like only natural processes. We're still in the 'dark' about many of them (dark matter, dark energy, to name a couple), but there's no reason to think there will not be some natural explanation, once we find it. Even the origination of life has the beginning of a plausible explanation in Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order, or more accessible to the lay reader: At Home in the Universe.

Of course, we can only 'see' so far back. As Sagan said...

Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened -- the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

You dare to question reality. Its a good question and an interesting subject. Wrought with risks. Any minute some folk might take offence and we get locked down. Its happened before and for very good reasons... but we are having a discussion and I feel the want to contribute.
Instead of asking if I can detect any signs of design ? No I do not but,. That might require a faith which I do not have. Might it be better to ask if there is any realistic alternative ? For if you go with the must have been built cos it just must be... then the onus is on you to persuade me and us that some omni powerful entity created. That's the problem I see. There is no real alternate idea. This Universe at a predetermined moment begun. There was no before and its ongoing for what might seem an eternity. So for me the question evaporates into the endless fog and can never be answered at all.

The only real scientific question is whether or not there is a true bio-oriented cosmological structure principle in effect?

And the answer is that it "appears" to be so:

http://knol.google.com/k/richard-rya...cb34nnchgkl5/3

No, I must disagree.. The number of planets found that have life forms in abundance numbers just one. We have at this time not a single example of such any place other than this one.
We have had numerous discussion regarding all aspects of probability. The fact remains that but one has been confirmed as yet. So to say the Universe is bio-oriented is not confirmed as yet.

The honest answer to this question, in the context of this section of this forum, which is strictly mainstream, there is no evidence of design in the way the universe behaves. Period.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart