jim guinee wrote:
Apologists for the ID argument will no doubt cite (among others)
Polkinghorne,
theoretical physicist and colleague of Stephen Hawking, who writes:
"In the early expansion of the universe, there has to been a close
balance between the expansive energy (driving things apart) and the
force of gravity (pulling things together). If expansion dominated
then matter would fly apart too rapidly for condensation into
galaxies and stars to take place.(The possibility of our existence)
requires a balance between the effects of expansion and contraction
which at a very early epoch in the universe's history (The Planck
time) has to differ from equality by not more than 1 in 1060. The
numerate (mathematical) will marvel at such a degree of accuracy...
What a crock. Since we have absolutely no idea how many times universes
have come into being before radomly happening upon this
particularstructure, we have no idea whether this outcome is to have
been expected at least once over the long haul or not. We couldn't help
but find ourselves in a universe more or less like this one, because
nothing much like us would have come into existence in a universe like
the others contemplated in the "problem."
What is particularly amusing is that Charles Sanders Peirce contemplated
a cosmic conundrum vaguely similar to this one more than a century and
explained it away using an argument analogous to natural selection. As I
recall, the idea went something like: What are the odds that bodies
would have gravitation precisely enough to result in a universe like the
one we find about us? Peirce's answer: All the bodies that were not
gravitational at the start of the universe (if there were any) have long
since flown apart well out of the range of our telescopes (i.e., were
selected out), and the only ones we can now see (and induce our physical
laws from) are those that had enough graviational force to cohere into
the cosmic structure we now see.
Regards,
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
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