A Weak Argument

Perhaps, like me, you have become tired of me attacking Max Andrews' thesis.  If so, good news!  Now I want to attack something Max Andrews wrote in a blogpost.  It's quite a minor element of the post, but it blossoms out quite rapidly:

Let’s look at the weak force coupling constant, g_w = 1.43 x 10^-62.

He hasn't even got into the argument with this statement and it's taken out of context (the specific context isn't actually important) but even so there is so much to talk about.

If you take the time to look up the value of the "weak force coupling constant" you may find that α_w ≈ 10^-7.  The sharp eyed among you might see that we are talking about what appears to be apples and oranges, or g_w and α_w.  Admittedly, at first I thought that Andrews couldn't work out how to display an α and was using g instead (which would be strange).  However, if you dig deeply enough around the net you will find that

α_w = g_w² / 4π

which means that g_w ≈ 1.1 x 10^-3.  That's a big error margin when one is talking about how weak the weak force coupling constant is (10⁵⁹ times bigger than claimed).

(There is a real difference between α_w and g_w.  The former, α_w, is the "weak interaction coupling constant" or " weak nuclear force coupling constant" or "weak force coupling constant" or even "weak fine structure constant" and it represents the strength of the weak force in an interaction.  The latter, g_w, is a less frequently mentioned value.  It is known as the "effective charge of weak interaction" or "weak gauge coupling constant" and is a measure of the strength of the interaction with the weak gauge field (in gauge field theories).)

But wait … there's more.  Andrews might not be entirely wrong about this value (he is though, as we shall discover below).

Like quite a few other constants, the weak force coupling constant is not actually a constant.  It varies with distance, so it can (and should) be expressed as a function of range.  There is undoubtedly a specific range at which g_w = 1.43 x 10^-62 (one not terribly far off the radius of a proton at about 10^-15m).  The question, however, is whether Andrews - who talks about a number of constants in the article - uses the same point of reference.  Note that he refers to the strong coupling constant this way:

g_s = 15

This shares the same relationship with α_s as above, so this corresponds with α_s ≈ 13.7.  Note however, that an actual theoretical physicist, Matt Strassler, has this to say:

But at longer distances, the strong nuclear force gradually becomes (relatively!) stronger. [Again, remember what we mean by “weak” and “strong” here; the force is actually becoming weaker in absolute terms as r increases, but relative to, say, electromagnetic forces at the same distance r, it’s becoming stronger.]

§  α_strong = 0.3 (at r ~ 10^-16 meters)

That’s quite strong indeed! And by the time r reaches 10^-15 meters, the radius of a proton, α_strong is bigger than 1, and becomes impossible to define uniquely.

It's still going to fall with distance, but distance isn't the only measure against which to measure the value of the strong coupling constant.  You also need to consider the energy range, for example on the chart in this article, it can be seen that α_strong peaks at about 0.7 GeV (billions of electron volts) with a value of about 1.2 which equates to a g_s ≈ 3.9.

Andrews' suggested g_s of 15 seems quite unreasonable.  But at least this time he is only out by a factor of about four, rather than a factor of 10⁵⁹.

Which brings us back to Andrews' claim for the value of the weak force coupling constant at 1.43x10^-62.  This is, fortunately enough, a rather specific number so that when I stumbled across it again, at WikiUniversity, it leapt out at me.  But note that this value, while associated with the weak force coupling constant isn't the weak force coupling constant.  It's the Fermi coupling constant, G_F, as expressed in J.m³.  To get the weak force coupling constant, you need to go a step further ("at sufficiently small distances"):

α_w = G_F.M_p².c / ħ³ = 10^-5

This corresponds with a g_w of about 8x10^-12.

Admittedly, the value of α_w is directly proportional to the value of G_F, so Andrews could structure his argument in terms of how the extremely low value of G_F appears to be fine-tuned.  But this isn't the problem usually talked about in physics circles.  They talk about how the measured (effective or renormalised) value of G_F is so much larger than might otherwise be expected (the hierarchy problem).

Interestingly, they suggest that, once normalised, G_F lies very close to G (the gravitational constant).  Personally, this is what I'd expect at least in terms of natural units - furthermore, I'd expect both of them to have a value of precisely 1 (like the gravitational constant, the speed of light, the reduced Planck constant, all the Planck units - mass, length, time, charge, temperature - the Boltzmann constant and the Coulomb constant (which is related to the permittivity constant)).  If this is the case, then their values are not an instance of fine tuning at all, they would be just yet another expected reflection of the nature of the universe.

Even if this isn't the case, Andrews should be a lot more mindful when making bold claims about the values of fundamental constants and try to avoid being out by such huge factors.

Talk to Me about Life

Let's imagine that there is a god.  Let's imagine it’s a specific sort of god -  a male god who has western values and a number of superpowers.  And let's imagine that this god wanted to make intelligent life.  We're not alone in this, by the way, plenty of people imagine this on a pretty much continuous basis.

Now, when these people do all this imagining, they tend to not focus on this particular aspect - the claim that god wanted to create intelligent life.  I am of course talking about the fine-tuning argument in which it is suggested that the universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life.  (Apologists go on and on about this argument, but the rank and file … not so much.)

So, what exactly is going on here?  The implication is that this god didn't have in mind the idea of making a universe so much as it had a specific goal of generating intelligent life and the method chosen just happens to have involved the creation and fine-tuning of a universe to host this intelligent life.

This leads me to ask: did this god need to create and fine-tune a universe to host intelligent life?

The short answer appears to be no.  Firstly, let's look at angels.  Angels are a bit confusing, especially to an outsider who hasn't been told what to think on a weekly basis.  There are indications in Genesis that, before the flood, angels and humans not only interacted, but they interbred … these were, however, fallen (or at least very naughty) angels.  There are mentions of the court of heaven which has a host of angels.  And there are Gabriel and Michael, who appear a few times.

Are angels the natural consequence of a universe which was sparked by god 13.7 billion years ago and left to slowly incubate the human species?  It would appear not, since the "proper abode" for angels is supposed to be heaven, which is where god apparently abides and is therefore another realm (thus being a time-LESS, space-LESS abode).

Given the very early and apparently knowledgeable appearance of Satan (or his representative) in the bible's creation story, a pivotal story that sets the scene for the key act of christianity, one could say the crux, we would have to presume that angels existed prior to or at least separately to humans.  (I'm aware that this doesn't gel with the fine-tuning argument which relies on things being "just right" at the big bang and everything evolving naturally from there with humans as the ultimate product - just overlook that for the moment and stick with me.  I'm also aware that there's some uncertainty as to what the serpent actually was.  The story specifically has a crafty serpent doing the dirty work, but there is an on-going theme of Satan being a snake and/or dragon.  But perhaps it's like the apple - people think that Eve ate an apple, but there's no mention of apples, it's a "fruit of the Tree of Knowledge".  Maybe it was an actual talking snake and it's merely a common misconception that the talking snake was Satan in another guise.  If so, it's unclear why we are being made to suffer because god messed up when creating talking snakes.)

If Satan was the being that tempted Eve, then it would appear that god does have a method for creating intelligence without the need to host that intelligence in a universe … unless god didn't create the angels and the angels appeared from nowhere along with god (or are co-eternal).  I don't think that this works since it seriously detracts from the specialness of god.  It would make all the angels "mini-gods", if not actual gods.  (If the serpent in the creation story was just another animal, then we've got the problem of hosting intelligence [more intelligence than Eve had, it would seem] in the skull of a snake.  It implies that intelligence can be hosted on a much less sophisticated substrate than the human brain, which raises the question … why go to the bother of creating the human when you can host intelligence on a reptile brain?)

Perhaps we can get around this mini-god issue by denying that angels exist.  Well, of course I have no issue with that, but I think it causes some issues for at least the christian theist.  Without the Fall, there is no origin of sin (unless it originates directly in god) and there is no need for the redemption that was provided by the crucifixion of the christ.  And without the serpent form of Satan and its corruption of Eve, there would have been no Fall.  (This is a problem with the fine-tuning argument as it pertains to christianity, because the Genesis story becomes entirely allegorical, there is no Adam and Eve, there is no talking snake and there is no Fall.  Therefore, there is no need for Jesus on a Stick.  And that is why people like William Lane Craig like to compartmentalise their arguments.  You basically have to forget the fine-tuning argument while you are contemplating the resurrection argument.)

And then, let's consider our post-death reward.  Well, I've already pointed out the issue really.  It's post-death.  The natural consequences of being in a universe which is fine-tuned for intelligent life, which includes the eventual deterioration and death of each living thing, will inevitably result in the death of each of us - and by that I mean you.  Yes, you!  You will die.  (I will die too, so please don't misconstrue this as a threat.)

So we die and, despite this - and because he, in the form of his own son, died in a moderately painful way in restitution for the failure of a mythical woman to avoid being corrupted by words of a mythical snake (which may or may not have been a mythical fallen angel) - god will apparently recreate us in some new or reconstituted form so that we can live forever.  Which means that he could have just made us in that form from the start without having to faff around with 13.7 billion years of universal evolution.  He chose not to, apparently, but he could have.

This seems to indicate that the universe itself is somehow important.  It's not just the necessary means to an end, since the end could be achieved by completely different means.

And this brings me to the germ from which this article sprang.  It's to be found in another couple of sentences from Max Andrews:

Without stars we don’t get the full range of heavy and light elements needed for complex molecular life. Without the complex molecular life formed by stars then there’s no life. That’s just a simple fact.

These statements are based on the argument that the weak force coupling constant must be just so or stars won't form and/or burn "properly".  So therefore, god set the weak force coupling constant just perfectly so that everything needed for (intelligent) life would eventually exist in this universe.

But this is pure bullshit.  The theist's argument doesn't stop there.  They go on to claim that this creator god is so fascinated with humans that there is this resurrection thing on offer and this claim works in direct opposition to the claim that the universe needs to be just so for life to exist.  No.  The universe needs to be just so for life (of the sort that we are aware) to exist, if and only if there is no god.

If a god exists, then it can magic up whatever it wants ex nihilo without the need to bugger around with the making of a vastly complicated, apparently totally natural universe like our own.

Just maybe, a creator god would make a vastly complicated, apparently totally natural universe in order to hide from us the fact that there is a creator god.  But if this were the case, then we should do our best to respect its wishes and pretend (or acknowledge) that it doesn't exist.

If there is some other reason for a god to be hiding behind this complexity (while also protesting it does actually exist via a deeply flawed book and a set of deeply flawed institutions devoted to celebrating that book), then I think it is the responsibility of the theist to explain what that reason might be.

Perhaps Max Andrews could devote some time to that rather than misrepresenting modern theoretical physics?

This is Brand New Information

Actually, it's not.

In his debate with Justin Schieber, (see also notes here), Max Andrews makes the claim that a mind is the best way to account for the origin of "brand new information".  In For Your Information, I discussed how for there to be information of the sort of that Andrews talks about in his thesis it is necessary to have someone who cares, for example by presupposing a god-like being external to the universe or multiverse.

Now I want to look at the "brand new information" claim, as separate from the need for a transmitter, channel medium and receiver of such information.

Remember that information in this context is an inverse measure of the probability of what is being considered, or its "surprisingness".  A linked concept is entropy, which is the lack of order and predictability.  Effectively, what creationists are arguing when they claim that the universe has information is that its current condition is surprising - in other words, this is just another way of framing the "fine-tuning" argument.  The notion that the universe has a surprising amount of information is, therefore, tautological.  (There's an endless loop in this: "The result here was more surprising than we had expected, which was a surprise in itself.  This added surprise to the result, making it even more surprising and the realisation that the result could be more surprising than we initially found it to be was another surprise.  Finding that there was one more layer of surprise was also, in itself, yet another surprise.  And this only added to the surprise.  By this point, our eyebrows had lifted so high that our heads were banging on the ceiling.  Which we hadn't expected at all.")

The other way of looking at information is to consider how many questions need to be answered to fully specify what is under consideration.

These perspectives can easily lead to confusion, in much the same way as consideration of entropy can lead to confusion.  When we look at a white kitchen bench, from which all the various implements and so on have been removed, we could say that it is very ordered.  Then we put a neat pile of flour on it.  In a sense this too would be very ordered, because the flour is tightly located in its neat pile.  Say though that we compulsively spread the flour thinly over the benchtop so that it has an even covering of 1mm.  This too seems to be very ordered.

Entropy is a measure of disorder, but more strictly it’s a measure of how many states a system can be in.  And this always increases in a closed system (as expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics).  When we think about it this way, we can see that the pile is low entropy - because when we ask about where a particular bit of flour is, we can always be answered with "in the pile".  There are limited states in which the bit of flour can be found (it's not zero entropy, because there are different positions in the pile for the bit of flour to be found).

Compare this with the situation in which there is no flour on the bench and the bench is completely empty.  The answer to the question "where is this particular bit of flour?" is "what do you mean? what bit of flour? there is no flour!"   This might confuse things a little, but we can easily see that there are no locations in which flour might be, so entropy in this case is zero.

The same applies to space and energy.  Empty space (truly empty space) has zero entropy, presumably nothing (no space) with nothing in it would also have zero entropy.  A system involving space in which energy is clumped very tightly has low, but non-zero entropy and a system involving space in which energy is spread evenly has high entropy - and the more space there is, the more entropy there can be in the system.  (It might be tempting to think of the universe as being driven by the second law of thermodynamics but this law is more descriptive than prescriptive.  It describes the nature of the universe, it doesn't necessarily determine it.)

Entropy and information are conceptually linked.  The more order there is in a system, the less "surprisingness" there is in it.  The more disorder there is, the more "surprisingness" there is and therefore the more entropy in a system, the more information there is associated with that system.

This means that, in its initial state, the universe contained very little information - because it was in a very low entropy state, or rather because it was in a very low entropy state compared to the current entropy state of the universe (there is no upper limit for the entropy of an open or an expanding system) which means there was a much less information in the early universe than there is today.

Now this is a point on which some apologetic fine-tuning enthusiasts appear to want to have their cake and eat it too - such as the people at BioLogos.  Admittedly, it's a subtle point when one argues about the information associated with the initial conditions of the universe, including the "degree of its entropy".  Effectively, they are arguing that there was a surprisingly large amount of information in the initial conditions including the fact that there was amazingly small amount of information (ie, low entropy).  Note that Guth's argument doesn't help them particularly because even though it explains away the low entropy, it does so at the expense of suggesting that the "initial conditions" may not have been initial conditions after all ("the universe need not have a beginning").

Let's get back to the "brand new information" claim.  Well, there's more information all the time, because entropy is (as a whole) increasing all the time, as per the second law of thermodynamics.  Plus the universe is expanding, so that the Berkinstein limit for the universe is increasing, and thus the potential for entropy is also increasing.  Perhaps it could be argued that there was a sudden jump in entropy from zero (when there was nothing, including no space and no time) to non-zero (when the universe was in a hot dense state, prior to the big bang), but this was to what is considered to be an extremely low state of entropy - so this is not particularly surprising given that we've noticed that the universe tends towards increased entropy and it would be natural, if there were to be an increase from nothing, that this increase would be to "very close to nothing".  The sudden appearance of large swathes of entropy would indeed be disturbing, but that's not what the data indicates.

But perhaps this isn't what Andrews and his fellow fine-tuners mean.  I don't think it is.

I think they are thinking of the pre-universe as being a sort of tabula rasa, a clean slate, a blank page, a clear bench and then - shazam - meaningful stuff appears.  Not just an extremely low entropy concentration of energy, but also some sort of predetermined, inbuilt rule book detailing how energy and space-time should interact in order that humans should emerge about thirteen and a half billion years later.  This is akin to not only putting a pile of flour on the bench, but also precoding it miraculously form a very specific form of bread.  Which works perfectly if we consider ourselves to be as important as bread in the analogy and not something more simple, like a meaningless spot of mould in an obscure crack on the bench that would be totally invisible to the non-existent owner of the kitchen.

Consider a different sort of tabula rasa.  A white expanse on which there is one fleck of black.  Say that this expanse could be broken up into a million billion data points and the fleck covers one and only one of these.  That single fleck represents a lot of information, because it's very surprising that only one point on the grid is black - it's one in a million billion.  But can we really say that this information could only originate in a mind?  No, I don't think so.  The wind could have dropped that fleck there.  It could be a tiny bit of ant poo.  While it might take some effort to uniquely identify which spot on the expanse contains that fleck, it's not necessarily of great import.

But again, I don't think that this is what these apologists really mean.

What I think they mean is that if you sat down and decided to not only design a universe, but to design this one, specifically this one, then you would need a lot of information.  Imagine the amount of data required to accurately model the universe in all its detail!  It would be staggeringly huge amounts of information.

But this is exactly the same (in principle, if not in scope) as trying to model the state of the Earth's weather systems.  The reason our weather models fall over after a few days is because inaccuracies creep in.  We don't have enough information to adequately model weather indefinitely (and we never will), the only accurate model of the Earth's weather system is wrapped around the Earth - being the weather.  But we only try to predict the weather into the future, we don't try to design a specific set of weather conditions from first principles.  The fact that there are huge amounts of information associated with the weather at any given moment does not confer importance to that state at that time.

Similarly, you'd have to do some very impressive work if you created a universe from scratch and wanted, as a result, to have some dishevelled, rather grumpy person writing about how you didn't exist some thirteen or so billion years later.  But again, that is presupposing a creator and an intent.  Without the creator and the intent, there is no special information and nothing to get so excited about.

For Your Information

There are arguments for the existence of god that rely on the notion that the only source of ((brand) new) information is a mind.  There are, of course, problems with these arguments, foremost of which is equivocation.  Information means different things to different people and in different contexts.  Pretending that the term means one thing only and gliding from one meaning to another permits all sorts of self-deception on the part of the apologist.

I want to try to explain (and dismiss) one example of this apologetic trickery, but to do that I have to make it quite clear what information is and isn't.

When an apologist, like Max Andrews, provides this equation:

I(m)=-log_x(P(m))

or one like it, it is clear that he is talking about a different sort of information than he is when using a variation of this equation:

P(A|B)=P(B|A).P(A)/P(B)

and he talks about the evidence B in terms of "background information".  (He actually splits the "evidence" into two parts, one that he calls "evidence" (call it E) and the other that he calls "background information" (call that B).  This is something we've come across before.  The effect is, as I have argued, to make P(A|(B&E)=P(A).  In other words, you get nothing from the faffing about with impressive-looking probability equations other than some mild confusion.)

The Shannon entropy equation refers to the information content of m, which could be a message, and is basically a measure of how unlikely m is - which means you need to know what values m may take.

I'll try to make this concept a little more concrete.

Say that a father is away on a business trip and sends a message back to his teenage son: "send socks".  Even before we try to quantify the amount of information in this message, we could be safe in saying that it isn't enough.  How to send them (post, express mail, courier pigeon?) isn't detailed.  When to send them isn't detailed.  Quantity is not detailed.  And the teenager might be quite justified in asking "Which socks?" - unless of course the father only owns one type and colour of sock, all of which are of equal quality (either all with holes in them or none with holes in them).

There's a subtle linkage between how much information is in the message and how much information is required.  For example, this message could contain one single bit of information for the son, a request to transition to the "send state" after having previously been in a "no-send state".  There could have been an existing agreement as to how, when and what to send based on the receipt or non-receipt of this short message.  So the knowledge state of the recipient has an impact on the amount of information being conveyed.

If the father had written "Send one new, unused pair of ankle-high blue socks with yellow stripes, located to the left in the top-drawer of dresser, via express post, immediately" and this course of action had already been agreed, then no more information would have been conveyed than in the message "send socks".

But imagine that everything had been agreed apart from precisely which socks had to be sent.  Imagine further that the father had two types of socks, black sock and brown socks.  Adding the word "brown" to the message adds one bit of information to the message because there is a range of two possible valid messages "send black socks" and "send brown socks".  The more possible valid messages that could be sent, the more information is contained in the message "send brown socks".  We can think of that in this way, the message "send brown socks" also contains the information "don't send black socks".  If the father has a wide range of socks, then the message "send brown socks" also contains the information "don't send black socks", "don't send pink socks", "don't send orange socks", etc, etc.

And it's here that information can be thought about outside the context of sending a message.  Say we were in the father's bedroom standing in front of his dresser with the top drawer open.  We reach in and take out a pair of socks, we identify them as black.  Given that we know that he has only black and brown socks (and that we have assumed, due to the principle of indifference, that he has equal numbers of black and brown socks), then we know that the probability of having selected a pair of black socks was P(Black)=0.5 and so the information associated with that selection was I(Black)=-log₂(p(Black))=1bit.  If there were 20 different types of socks in the drawer, the probability of having selected a pair of black socks would have been P(Black)=0.05 and we'd have I(Black)=-log₂(p(Black))=4.3bits of information.

A standard CD can hold 847MB of data, with 110MB of that being set aside for error correction.  This is close to about 6.8 billion bits which means that the information on a CD is equivalent to uniquely identifying one pair of socks out of 10^2000000000 pairs (847MB is equivalent to about 2GBan).  Or one star out of 10^2000000000 stars (although there are only about 10²¹ stars in the observable universe).  Or one grain of sand out of 10^2000000000 grains of sand (but there are only about 7.5x10¹⁸ grains of sand on Earth, meaning that if every star had two temperate rocky planets as sandy as the Earth (I'm saying that Mars is sandy and ignoring that it's smaller than the Earth, so probably has less sand), then there'd be about 1.5x10⁴⁰ grains of sand in the universe).

(This is probably why Max Tegmark feels confident enough to suggest that the initial data in the universe could have been so simple as to be contained on a single CD-ROM.  Although he immediately suggests that even the CD-ROM might not be necessary - in accordance with his suggestion that the universe (or multiverse) overall may contain hardly any information at all.)

A complicating factor here is the one that probably trips up overly excited apologists such as Max Andrews.  Selecting one specific grain of sand from the universe, using the assumptions above, represents a rather unimpressive 16.558 bytes of data (and I'm overselling it slightly since 256^16.558=7.509955x10³⁹, meaning that I am being cavalier and suggesting that it doesn't matter if I add about 10³⁷ additional grains of sand to universe … about half the number of grains of sand that would exist on as many Earths as there are grains of sand on Earth).  But if we didn't care about the specific grain of sand and just wanted a grain of sand, the information in that grain of sand would be much, much less.  The less specified the selection is, the less information there is in that selection.  There's still some information in the selection of "grain of sand" from the range of things that could be subject to this process, but the game "20 questions" demonstrates just how many different things can be uniquely identified with a sequence of 20 carefully framed "slice questions" - a little over a million.  Double the number of questions and you can uniquely identify 10¹² different items … with precisely 5 bytes of information.

Going back to the sock drawer, if the father just wanted any old pair of socks, then the probability of drawing them from the sock drawer would be Pr(socks)=1.  (Note that I am assuming here that there are socks in the sock drawer, which may not always be the case, but the point at the moment is about the probability of selecting a pair of socks from a set of existent socks, not about the probability of the socks being existent.)  The information in this is precisely zero because log_x(1)=0, irrespective of the value of x.

In other words, the more you don't care about the result, the less information there is in that result.  This, hopefully, makes intuitive sense - think about the difference between the news that Khloe Kardashian has been on a new diet and the news that Prince has died (Purpleness Be Upon Him), both reported in April 2016.  One event led to widespread dismay and spontaneous demonstrations of grief on the streets of Minneapolis and the other one I only noticed because I was momentarily delayed in a supermarket checkout aisle and it was easy 2 see (it) on the cover of a magazine.  Reports of Prince (PBUH) dying contained information.  Reports of Khloe getting marginally less fat is so lacking in information that I lack the care factor necessary to

And this is where the argument of people like Max Andrews becomes circular.

We, as part of the universe, do care about the fact that we exist.  Therefore, for us, this is interesting information.  We are also part of a selection event, in so much as the universe does appear to be fine-tuned, in that were certain constants and laws slightly different then life like ours would not be possible.  We can imagine situations, or alternate universes, in which we would not exist (counterfactuals), and from this glean "information".  For example, if the strong nuclear force were stronger by more than one part in 50 (and all other constants were held at existing values), then diprotons would be stable leading to the failure of stars to form (due to the rapid consumption of all hydrogen in the first minutes after the Big Bang).  So we can posit a universe in which the strong nuclear force was stronger by one part in 20, or twice as strong, or four times as strong, or seven times as strong.  And we could keep going, infinitely, providing different multiples and then claim that just this one single fact contains infinite information.

(A problem here, of course, is that we don't know that all of these values are valid, let alone equally valid.  And there was a caveat, "all other constants were held at existing values".  There are solutions in which the strong nuclear force may be higher and other constants being at different values still allows for unstable diprotons.  The bottom line is that we don't really know how unlikely it is that the strong nuclear force lies in the convenient range that it does, and "we don't know" is equivalent to "no information".)

But when it comes to the existence of the universe, it doesn't really matter how interested the constituent elements are in it.  It's a question of how interested the universe is and, unless that is a mind, it's not a huge leap to suggest that the universe isn't interested at all.  In which case, there is no information in the universe as a whole.

What appears to be a novel argument on the part of Max Andrews is that because there is so much information in the universe, and minds are the only originators of "brand new information" (this part is a standard creationist claim, usually centred on genetic speciation), then there must have been an antecedent mind to have initiated the universe (or multiverse).  But this is circular, the universe as a whole only has information if the universe itself is a mind or there is a mind external to the universe that cares about what is inside it.  (The universe (or multiverse) would also have to be contingent, meaning only the universe/multiverse could have been different.  There's no information in a necessary thing being as it necessarily must be.)

So, unless he is suggesting that the universe itself is a mind, Andrews is presupposing that there must be a god of some sort, that therefore the universe contains a huge amount of information (presumably due to extreme contingency of it) and therefore that there must be a god as the source of that huge amount of information.

This is completely circular and therefore totally useless as an argument for what he so desperately wants to argue.  It's amazing that this got accepted as a thesis, but I guess that when both of your supervisors are dedicated god-botherers then so long as your answer is "god did it", you can get away with any old nonsense.

A Snide Comment

Remember I wrote that Max Andrews is a philosopher who started out with a Bachelor of Science in Religion from the Liberty University in Virginia (in The Four Mechanisms of the Ignopolypse)?  Unfortunately, I can't resist making a snide comment (or rather another snide comment).

In his thesis, he talks about a mechanism associated with the generation of life permitting universes that cannot be explained, namely the "conversion of the energy of the inflation field to the normal mass/energy we find in our universe", which he chalks up to "Einstein’s E=mc² + the coupling of the inflation field and the matter fields".  He then launches into a potted history of relativity.

Strangely, he uses an article from the Indian Academy of Sciences' journal Resonance that seems to have been commissioned to celebrate the anniversary of Einstein's golden year of 1905, rather than a text book on relativity.  But this article doesn't seem to be the source of Andrews' problems.

Towards the end of this history, Andrews writes:

The square of the speed of light is called the constant of proportionality. It does the job of converting from the unit in which mass is expressed to the unit in which energy is expressed.¹⁵⁵ With this, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was born.

You what?

"Constant of proportionality" is a general term, the gravitational constant G is a constant of proportionality, Planck's constant h is a constant of proportionally, Coulomb's law constant k is a constant of proportionality and, yes, if you are interested in E and m, then c² is a constant of proportionality.  What it isn't is the constant of proportionality.

I refer in other articles to mass-energy (as in "concentration of mass-energy" and "concentrations of mass-energy") because mass and energy are sort of the same thing, and their units are mediated by the relationship between time and space (which is what the speed of light c represents).  But it's a little inaccurate to suggest that the speed of light squared somehow has the duty of converting mass to energy (or the inverse square of the speed of light has the duty of converting energy into mass).  The energy is there in the mass all the time, any conversion of "mass to energy" such as seen in the nuclear reactions in a power station or nuclear explosion is not really a conversion but a release of energy which was previously bound in one form so that it may be expressed in other forms (kinetic and thermal energy plus some radiation).

Perhaps I am being finicky here, but it seems to me that the issue that Andrews is alluding to is that we may not understand the mechanism by which energy from the inflaton field (not "inflation field") could end up being expressed as mass - what might cause this energy to be bound up as mass.  One thing that seems pretty clear is that not all energy ends up as "normal mass/energy" and in fact the indications are that the majority of it ends up as dark matter, dark energy and maybe even (as quite recently suggested) dark radiation.  ("The standard model of cosmology indicates that the total mass–energy of the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy." - wikipedia article on Dark Matter)

And then we get to my snide comment.  Andrews' finishes the sequence with the words "With this, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was born."  Um, excuse me, but that is plain wrong.  The E=mc² relationship might well fall out of Special Relativity (see On Time), but the "birth" of Special Relativity was very much in evidence in a different paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, and not in the article Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content? which was written almost three months later.  And the phrasing E=mc² didn't appear until 46 years later.

These sorts of errors are perhaps what one would expect when one's Bachelor of Science is taken in Religion.

Ah, it feels good to get that out of my system.

Unbelievable! It's Max Andrews!

In his Unbelievable discussion, Max Andrews stated that he has noted in himself, when shaping apologetic arguments, the tendency to beg the question of god.  You may recall that begging the question is, at base, a fallacy of circular reasoning, even though the circularity might be subtle.  It appears that he and I might have some alignment here in that I have noticed, on the part of apologists, the exact same tendency.  That said, while I agree that many arguments for god presume god, or something attributed to god, I would not, however, have necessarily included fine-tuning based arguments in the list.

These are the apologetic arguments that, off the top of my head, include some element of begging the question:

Moral Argument

Ontological Argument

Argument from First Cause

Argument from Resurrection

Argument from Revelation

Argument via Inference to Best Explanation

A good example of the sort of apologetic question begging involved appears in this video by Dave S at theglobalatheism, which concludes that the ontological argument proves no more than that if god exists, then god exists (which is the law of identity: if X, then X, or X=X).

Another video by Dave S, on the argument from resurrection, also hints at begging the question, pointing out that to get a high-ish likelihood that god exists (Pr≈0.5) you need to assume that claims that god raised people from the dead were true.  Think about this for a moment.  If you assume, up front, that claims that your god raised people from the dead are true, this necessitates the assumption that your god actually exists.  You should find this a little odd, because it would mean that, rather than adding support to the notion that the apologist's god exists, the resurrection argument reduces the likelihood of that god's existence.  This seems odd to me.

Anyway, what about the fine-tuning argument.  Does this include an element of begging the question?

Perhaps there is.  The fine-tuning argument first suggests that the universe is fine-tuned (arguing the reality of fine-tuning is a speciality of Andrews' partner in the discussion, Luke Barnes).  But that's insufficient to show god.  To show god, the apologist has to go one step further and argue that nothing else explains fine-tuning other than their god.

This is where a question can be comprehensively begged, on two levels.

Firstly, there is the definition of "god".  As indicated above, it can be argued that the ontological argument can fail based on the fact that it tries to define a god into existence.  The fine-tuning argument fails on the same grounds, because of begging the question.  The apologist pressing this argument is effectively trying to define their god into existence via the claim that their god can do anything that is necessary to prove that existence.  Their god can make a universe that looks like ours and seems incredibly unlikely, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if it ever starts to look like the universe is incredibly likely, the same apologist will argue that their god can make an incredibly likely universe as well.  Or an eternally inflating multiverse.  Or a quantum multiverse.  Therefore, their argument collapses into "if our universe were created by the sort of being that can make universes of the sort that we live in, then our universe was created by the sort of being that can make universes of the sort that we live in, let's call it god".

Secondly, there is the sheer unlikeliness of our universe versus typicality.  In this argument, there is no assumption of a god followed by a conclusion of a god, it's more an assumption of atypicality followed by a conclusion of atypicality which feeds into a "this is so surprising, therefore god" argument.  Ignoring for a moment the fact that multiverse theory arises totally independently of counter-apologetics, if we were to posit a multiverse to solve the unlikeliness of our universe, the counter-counter-apologists then rush in to say that, if there were many different kinds of universes in this multiverse, then our type of universe would be atypical - and, therefore, we have an obligation to explain why we are in this atypical universe.

This atypicality is often expressed in terms of a Boltzmann multiverse, the sort that fails on the basis of Boltzmann brains.  In a Boltzmann multiverse, each universe is a fluctuation of order in a vast, enduring region of comprehensive disorder.  In such a regime, small regions of order would be far more likely than regions like our observable universe and we would indeed be unusual.  However, all this does is put a kibosh on a Boltzmann multiverse.  But no-one is seriously positing a Boltzmann multiverse (I will do so semi-seriously in a later article though).

Nevertheless, when people regurgitate WLC's argument against the multiverse (including people like Barnes) they assume a Boltzmann multiverse and conclude that a multiverse is impossible.  Thus they are arguing that an impossible form of multiverse is impossible, which is trivially true.

The other element of the argument is based on the assumption that we must be typical.  This seems similar to the argument that leads to (counter-apologetically derived) multiverses, but there is a subtle but important difference between very highly unlikely and very highly atypical.  When you bring the multiverse to bear on the problem, the likelihood of a very highly unlikely universe existing increases, towards 100% as N (the number of universes) approaches infinity.  At the same time, as N approaches infinity, the number of atypical universes increases, the number of distinct chances of being atypical increases.

Think of it in terms of jellybeans with the probabilities being indicative, rather than rigorous.  If one in every 100 jellybeans was atypical, then with a sample of 100 jellybeans, you would expect on average that one would be atypical and there would be only chance to be atypical.  If there were 10,000 jellybeans, then we'd expect there to be 100 chances to be atypical.  Agreed, there would still be a lot more typical jellybeans than atypical ones, but the increased number of atypical jellybeans would increase commensurate with sample size.  If we introduced a filter that only permits a certain shape of atypical jellybean to pass through, and used a very large, approaching infinite sample size, then so long as the shape is possible, then we should not be surprised to see one.

This is the situation that we find ourselves in.  We are in a universe which, although atypical, must be the way it is for us to find ourselves in it - because it's precisely the sort of universe in which we could develop as persistent intelligent life (rather than Boltzmann brains).

In other words, our atypicality is very much the point, rather than being a failure of the multiverse to explain our fortuitous existence.

---

Curiously enough, Dave S includes, as further reading for the resurrection video, which was posted a year ago, both my Sweet Probability and Max Andrews' dissertation on Bayes Theorem and the resurrection.  Some nice recognition there for both of us, even though I at least hadn't noticed it.

The Four Mechanisms of the Ignopalypse

Max Andrews is a philosopher who started out with a Bachelor of Science in Religion (that's actually a real thing!) from the Liberty University in Virginia, which claims to the be the largest Christian university.  He went on to get a Masters of Arts in Philosophy, also from Liberty University for which, of course, he wrote a thesis.  The contents of his thesis have reappear in various guises, for example as articles on his blog and embedded in his (two?) public debates.  (As noted in The King of Spades and the Strong Anthropic Principle, Max Andrews has changed his position a little in recent times, so even he may no longer concur with what I refer to below.) 

I've been reading through his thesis and have come across (once again) his "four mechanisms" (here's a shorter document which refers to them - you could even listen to his lecture which mentions the mechanisms, if the link had worked).  What Andrews argues is that there are four mechanisms that are necessary for an inflationary multiverse to produce a life-generating universe:

A mechanism that supplies the energy needed form bubble universes

A mechanism that forms bubbles

A mechanism that converts energy of the inflation field (by which he seems to mean inflaton field) to "normal mass/energy" (by which he means not Dark Mass and not Dark Energy)

A mechanism that leads to variation in the fundamental constants between universes

Oh boy.

This is not an original Andrews argument.  It's an argument that was raised by Robin Collins in The Teleological Argument, an essay that appeared in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology which was edited by our old friend William Lane Craig (and J.P. Moreland).  This is a go-to book for wannabe apologists and quite possibly ought to be one for wannabe anti-apologists, since it collects together the best of the current defences of theism - on the grounds that we should always try to interact with the best form of any argument we might want to argue against.  Unfortunately, the book costs in the order of $200, so I'm just going to work from Collins' own preliminary version of his essay.

Robin Collins quotes the Shaw Prize winning cosmologist, John A. Peacock, when he formulates the four mechanisms, although it does seem that he's only using Peacock's words with respect to the inflaton field related to the first mechanism, specifically the following words: "the vacuum acts as a reservoir of unlimited energy, which can supply as much as is required to inflate a given region to any required size at constant energy density".  In Collins' view, the inflaton field has to "conspire" with Einstein's equations in order to form and populate bubble universes.  There's no indication that he has cosmological support for this notion.

Andrews, however, quotes Collins and another couple of chaps, Axel de la Maccora and Boris E. Meierovich.  To the former he attributes the following notion:

If inflation is not complete or efficient then the remaining energy density within the bubble must be fine-tuned to give the correct value distribution.

And to the latter:

Attempts to circumvent fine-tuning concerning the inflation field have focused primarily on describing what occurs posterior to the moment of bubble inflation.

With respect to de la Maccora's attribution, it is true that Maccora said something very similar in the referenced paper, but look at the context taken from the abstract (my emphasis):

If the inflaton decay is not complete or sufficient then the remaining energy density of the inflaton after reheating must be fine tuned to give the correct amount of Dark Matter. An essential feature here, is that Dark Matter-Inflaton particle is produced at low energies without fine tuning or new parameters.

de la Maccora immediately follows the referenced sentence with a clear indication that fine-tuning is not required, a conclusion that can be comprehended if one reads the actual text of the paper.  For example:

However in our scheme the regeneration of φ takes place naturally without fine tuning and, once the field φ becomes nonrelativistic, when its mass m_o > T, φ will decouple since n_φ is exponentially suppressed.

and

The aim of this section is to show how a single scalar field φ can account for inflation at early times and as Dark Matter at a late time, without any fine tuning of the parameters.

In other words, this is cherry picking of an astounding quality.

As for Boris Meierovich, I have tried to find a sentence or a paragraph from which the notion attributed to him could be extracted, with no success.  Perhaps someone with more time or sharper eyes can find it, but I note that even if this were to happen, this is just another example of cherry picking.  Meierovich's paper also speaks against fine-tuning:

The parametric freedom of the theory allows to forget the troubles of fine tuning. In the most interesting cases the analytical solutions of the Einstein’s equations are found.

and

The equations (31,49) with the boundary conditions (50) are easily integrated numerically. The regular solutions are free from fine tuning. Moreover, the existing parametric freedom results in a great variety of possible configurations.

Absolutely staggering.

But there's more …

Let's go back to Collins' four mechanisms (via Andrews).  The first mechanism needed to supply the energy to form the bubble universes, according to Andrews, is the fine-tuning of the "inflation" field.  Someone more sceptical than I might suspect at this juncture that Andrews is deliberately equivocating over the term "inflation field".  No educated person really doubts that inflation is an excellent solution to a number of problems with standard cosmology (although there are other solutions put forward by respected cosmologist that don't rely on inflation).  What we don't really understand at this point in time is what the mechanism behind inflation would be.  But there are speculative theories.  The inflaton is associated with one of those.  To put this theory into perspective, if you google "inflaton" and look really carefully, you'll see that there are only about 530 mentions of inflaton on the internet (none of which are Andrews, because he consistently misrepresents it as an "inflation field" and many are repeats so that unique mentions probably amount to no more than 160 - at least one of which was due to a typo).

Collins and Andrews really should be more forthcoming about how speculative the theories that they are hanging their arguments on are.

So, if current theories about inflationary multiverses are correct and if the inflaton theory is correct and the two qualified people quoted by Andrews in support of his argument are wrong about the substance of their papers (but not that which was cherry picked from those papers), then maybe we would be in a position to suggest that multiverses are fine-tuned.  But even then, the claim that this is indicative of a volitional agent's design is no more than a brash appeal to ignorance - "we can't think of any other reason for this, therefore goddunnit".

The King of Spades and the Strong Anthropic Principle

I was introduced to the works and thoughts of Max Andrews by Skydive Phil.  In this, and at least one other article, I'll be addressing some issues that I have with Max' published take on the multiverse and fine-tuning.  Note that unlike some others that we won't mention, Max is upfront about being theist (and Christian) but, as is the case with Jeff Zweerink, his support of fine-tuning as an argument for god has faded of recent times.

It should be noted that what I address below was written quite some time in the past and does not necessarily represent Andrews' current position.  Therefore, I am not arguing against Andrews per se, but rather against a position that he no longer appears to hold (at least not in entirety).  Keep in mind that it's quite likely that there are apologists out there who would be more than happy to call upon the 2013 version of Max Andrews in support of their argument for god, while totally ignoring the fact that the 2016 version of the same person no longer agrees with everything that the 2013 version had to say.

For an insight into Andrews' most recent position (at time of writing), listen to his appearance with Luke Barnes (yes, that Luke Barnes) on Justin Brierley's Unbelievable show.

---

Max writes at his blog, in the article Do Multiverse Scenarios Solve the Problem of Fine-Tuning?:

The role probability serves in this argument does not favor the non-fine-tuning hypothesis (either chance, necessity, or a combination of the sort) in multiverse scenarios.  If the objector to a fine-tuner argues that the odds of having a finely tuned universe, which harbors life, increases given the vast number of universes there is bound to be one with the values we have.  This is an abuse of probability and commits the gambler’s fallacy.  This claim assumes a general disjunction rule of probability.  For example, this rule of probability suggests that the probability of drawing a king from a deck of cards increases when each card drawn is not replaced.  If the deck has all the cards it is supposed to have the probability of eventually drawing a king is 1.  The multiverse is like the restricted or general conjunction rule of probability. By simply increasing the number of possibilities, one does not increase the probability of selection.  For example, say you randomly draw a card from the deck and you want the king of spades.  The odds of you drawing a king of spades are 1/52.  Say you draw the three of hearts.  When you replace the card and draw another card from random the odds of you getting the king of spades is not increased by the first selection.

What Max writes about cards is true, but it misses the point.  A multiverse is more like multiple decks of cards.  With each deck there is a 1/52 chance of drawing the king of spades from the top - assuming that they have all been randomised by thorough shuffling such that there is an equal likelihood of any particular card being on top.  This is equivalent to using the one deck of cards, selecting a card at random, replacing it, and then selecting a card at random again - so long as we use a probability measure such that each of the 52 cards has an equal likelihood of being selected (this comment is intended to pacify mathematicians, just in case they are reading).

But while each random draw from a single deck and each draw from the top of a randomised deck has a 1/52 chance of resulting in a king of spades, across all the draws, the chance of one of them resulting in a king of spades is higher.  By the time you have drawn 1066 cards, using either method, there is one about a 1 in a billion chance that you have not drawn a king of spades (by the way, I am not implying that William the Bastard [aka William the Conqueror] was a dastardly king of spades, the 1066 figure is just a happy coincidence).  Draw 10000 cards and that becomes about 2 in 10⁸⁴.

In other words, as the number of universes in the multiverse increases, the likelihood of any unlikely event happening in at least one of them also increases.  If there is an infinite number of universes, then anything that is at the very least possible must happen.

Interestingly, this lends credence to a formulation of the Strong Anthropic Principle that I don’t normally favour.  The argument goes a little like this (per Carter):

(at least one) universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage

We know that life is possible (if you doubt this check your pulse, if you don't have one, try looking out your window and you'll probably see either a tree or some grass and possibly both).  If there is an infinite number of universes then we know that life must therefore be instantiated in at least one of them.  And it would appear that we are in one of them.  Therefore, life becomes less miraculous, it's just something that we'd expect.  (This is the case even if there is a finite but very large number of universes.  Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin calculate that there are in the order of ten to the power of ten to power of ten to the power of 7 (10^{10^7)}) universes.  While this might not make very very very very very unlikely (yet possible) things certain, the odds of possible things that are merely very very unlikely happening are pretty high.

This seems a little circular, which is why I don’t give it too much credence, but it does seem to speak rather strongly against many probability-based (ie appeal to ignorance) arguments for the existence of god.

If there is an infinite or extremely high number of universes …