Thursday, May 22, 2008

All things are possible through the scientist who postulates very large numbers?

Vox Day, a Christian libertarian opinion columnist and author of The Irrational Atheist has this to say recently (January 28, 2008) about Richard Dawkins's embrace of multiverse theory (a delusion bigger than God?):
Dawkins visits the wreckage of his train of thought, pours lighter fluid over it and sets it on fire by bringing up the multiverse concept, an utterly non-scientific theory invented solely to get around the problem of the anthropic principle. ... Those indisposed to accept the anthropic principle attempt to get around the massive improbability problem it presents by imagining that there are billions and billions of universes, for all things are possible through the scientist who postulates very large numbers. Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer. But not only is multiverse theory every bit as unfalsifiable and untestable as the God Hypothesis, it is demonstrably more improbable. If we accept Dawkins's naked assertion that a universal designer is more complex than the one known universe, a designer is probably less complex than any two universes and infinitely less complex than an infinity of them. ...
Of course, one way of simplifying a problem is to make it so complex as to be beyond any possible solution. That's not satisfactory, but it does have a certain grandness about it.