Anthropic Principles by Fr. Dr. Robert Spitzer

um a bit of a breakdown of what will happen so we have father adam hinks who's a professor here at the university of toronto he's also a physicist we're very grateful that he's here he will be introducing brother robert spitzer our esteemed guest and we have jeff willard one of our phd students in physics and he will be moderating the q a now to keep things running as smoothly as possible we ask that you please put your questions in the q and a which you can find at the bottom so on the bottom right hand corner of your screen you'll see a q a there you can punch in your questions even throughout the talk as they emerge and then jeff will take note of them and they will have about 10 or so minutes at the end of the lecture for you to be able to to um to have to hear answers to those burning questions that may arise so again so thank you for being here it's part of our mission you know to be able to help foreign people in in the spiritual life intellectual life so that we can become effective disciples in the public square and give reason for our hope in a way that is fitting for the university setting so in honor of the great saint thomas we begin with a prayer in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit amen god our father you made saint thomas known for his holiness in learning help us to grow in wisdom by his teaching and in holiness by imitating his faith grant this through our lord jesus christ your son who lives and reigns with you and the in the holy spirit god forever and ever amen in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit amen over to father adam good evening my name is father adam hinks i'm a jesuit priest oh hello how's that is that working yes okay we live in the era of zoom and this happens to me uh at least once a day so my name is father adam hinks i'm a jesuit priest like father spitzer and i'm the vice president of the toronto chapter of the society of catholic scientists which is co-sponsoring this event and as father mentioned i'm an assistant professor here um based at st michael's college and in the department of astronomy and astrophysics my own field is cosmology so as you might imagine i'm thrilled and honored to present our distinguished speaker this evening father spitzer is originally from honolulu hawaii he entered the society of jesus the jesuits in 1974 after completing a bachelor of business administration at gonzaga university in washington state and then as a jesuit heated studies and philosophy at st louis university and studies in theology at the gregorian university in rome and at the westin school of theology in cambridge massachusetts he was ordained in 1983 and then went on to do a phd in philosophy at the catholic university of america and he wrote a dissertation called a study of objectively real time so father spitzer has a really extensive cv let me just share some of the highlights that show the background that he brings to our topic this evening he's been a faculty member at georgetown university and at seattle university and he was the president of his alma mater gonzaga university from 1998 2000 currently he's the president of the maja center of reason and faith which produces a wide variety of educational media on the relationship between faith and reason he's also the president of the spitzer center and the napa institute he's written a lot of academic articles as well as 11 books and what i found really remarkable is the wide range of topics that they cover i won't list them all but let me just give you some examples so one of his books is called five pillars of the spiritual life a practical guide to prayer for active people another book is called evidence for god from contemporary physics extending the legacy of monsignor george lemaitre and then another example is the light shines on in the darkness contending with suffering through faith in addition to print he's active in other media he hosts a weekly television program entitled father spitzer's universe that delves into a variety of topics related to quote reason faith suffering virtue and the existence of god he's appeared on a variety of other shows including larry king live the today show he's appeared in series on pbs in the history channel he's produced several television series for ewtn online he wrote the encyclopedia of reason and faith which is hosted by the majes center so in recognition of of all these contributions only some of which i've mentioned he's won several awards including the aquinas medal the catholic leadership institute award and the loyal institute award and he's received honorary doctorates from some u.s universities so please join me in giving a warm welcome to father spitzer as he delivers our lecture this evening thanks so very much adam i really appreciate the warm introduction and also i wanted to thank father peter as well and our whole audience tonight and i'm just going to beg forgiveness a little bit up front um and that maybe my lecture will use a whole lot of new words that those who are not in the physics and cosmology business might well not be very well acquainted with and i just wanted to plead for your um patience and to assure you that my objective here is not to to give you something that where you can master all the details um i don't think that's going to be a possibility really unless you're into physics and cosmology but that you'll get a sense the general contours of a fine-tuning argument um in the contemporary era this would be something where um you know the uh um i think the physicists of the world would probably be split in half and um on one side of the of the uh the venue there would be a lot of people who would be uh very much in favor of the analysis i'm doing and of course the sean carroll and and others on another side of the uh agenda would be uh against it but um it's a plausible argument and um uh so uh uh not only plausible but accepted by many physicists and i think myself i find it quite prominent so let me just go to some resources that might help you out a little bit if you have an inclination toward um physics and cosmology um i just uh i published an article back in 2019 uh and it's called fine-tuning and indications of transcendent intelligence uh this was in the book called theism and atheism opposition in philosophical arguments it's a mcmillan reference article and i'd be glad to send parts of that to you but because of course it's in this mcmillan reference book um i can't send the whole thing to you without violating the copyright but parts of it i can send uh to father peter or to um um well um you know father peter to to go ahead and maybe answer your questions uh there's a second reference that everybody can get in their uh bookstore and that's a book by geraint lewis and luke barnes and it's called a fortunate universe and uh this book uh i think is just excellent especially for people who really have not had a a foray into physics before um it is uh put out by cambridge university press but it's very reasonably priced i think it's like 15 16 whatever it may be uh maybe a little bit more uh it has its technical aspect to it but boy they bend over backwards to put this kind of into a a position into a a form that um uh you know what an educated layperson with maybe a little background physics uh could understand very very well so that's another uh resource i think for the general uh audience who really wants to follow up on this uh that book uh certainly uh it's meant to be kind of almost a debate um weighing both sides of the equations on the fine-tuning argument but at the end of the day it does give a kind of um orientation toward acceptance of the fine-tuning argument as probative and so um just to let you know uh that's pro uh fine-tuning and transcendent intelligence uh there's a third one that i suggest here it's um uh you know uh an article that was uh written by luke barnes on the uh um defending the fine-tuning um uh for intelligence uh argument uh it's a response really to a person named victor stenger uh who uh i will bring up a little bit later uh in the talk so uh those are three references and by the way uh um if you send an an email uh to either father peter or to somebody like spitzer majaccenter.com i can send you these powerpoints and you can go ahead and take a look at it or my assistant can send those powerpoints to you the let's go right away to uh what's uh what's a contemporary argument uh um for uh and you know intelligence transcendent intelligence which of course implies god what's a contemporary argument look like something that you know a luke barnes would would definitely applaud and a variety of other physicists um it basically goes like this there's going to be some discussion about what's called free parameters and i'll define that in a moment because that's what the whole central issue is and the fine tuning specifically of those free parameters for life so that's going to be the first uh area then the second area is what we might call cosmic coincidences uh we're just going to uh just give a few examples of where this fine tuning exists in these free parameters and so you can get a sense of well that truly is uh interesting how can it be explained and that is the question but before we um go into that i need to just touch upon victor stenger's book called the fallacy of fine tuning because uh that book seemed to challenge the whole prospect of the fallacy of fine tuning and all i'm going to do is give you a summary of luke barnes's uh article responding to it but nevertheless it just has to be done because people who've read the book will say what about victor stinger so i'm just dealing with this before we get off the ground then then the real question comes up well how are you going to explain this fine tuning for life in free parameters that are not determined by the laws of physics and so um i'm going to go through a series of possibilities the first one is something in our universe if i can put it that way and that's called a theory of everything as we'll see the theory of everything is very unlikely right now in its state and so that pretty much forces the issue to go to what we'll call a trans-universal cause and that's something outside of our universe so we've got uh five basic options if we go outside of our universe for a an explanation of um what the cause of fine-tuning these remarkable coincidences of fine-tuning and so we'll just uh i'll go through list them for you but i'll explain them as i'm going along so the first uh possibility are what we call uh cyclic cosmologies and um we'll look at two of them so that's like a bouncing universe it expands and contracts and like expands and recontracts and every cycle it goes through all right could you know if you went through an infinite number why conceivably you could go back infinitely in the past nobody really believes that today but uh we'll talk about well is that a good explanation for the fine-tuning for life in our universe a lot of very prestigious people have proposed such a cosmology one of them is roger penrose whose name we'll hear in just a moment um he has a conformal cyclic cosmology and we'll look at that specifically but as you might expect we're going to find that that's an unlikely solution for a variety of reasons and we'll give some brief a look at it the second area is of course the multiverse which i think everybody has heard of and there are two options for that a finite multiverse that gives rise to a finite number of bubble universes i'll explain what a multiverse is in a moment and there's maybe some problems there that we'll talk about and then there's of course the attempt to get around those problems which is the infinite multiverse but then there's some real problems with an infinite multiverse as well now there's a very ingenious guy by the name of tegmark and tegmark is a physicist who tries to get around the problem of finite multiverses and infinite multiverses the problems we'll discuss and he comes up with what he calls a level 4 multiverse and this is going to have some intelligence uh intrinsic to that multiverse it's a very interesting sort of uh theory and it's very creative solution to the problems of the finite infinite multiverse but again we're gonna see that um there's a problem with that too it makes it unlikely and that will bring us to the only solution we really have left right now there might be another solution in the in the future but uh this is the one that seems to be the only one left that can resolve the problem that can solve tegmark's problem the infinite multiverse problem the finite multiverse problem the conformal cyclic homology problem in fact all the cyclic cosmology problems so all these things uh i think can be resolved in a reasonable way by looking at what we might call a transcendent intelligence and what i mean by that is trans physical so it's you know a multiverse it's trans-universal but it's still a physical solution an infinite multiverse is still a physical solution even tegmark's level 4 multiverse has physics in it although he also has a component of idea that namely the equations of physics are stated in its own way and so uh you know um uh what we're left with though if all these things fall apart and a good abductive argument basically tries to lay out well what are what's the problem what are the solutions and which solution is the best and i'm going to make the proposal along with as i said many other physicists um that that i think an intelligent um um a trans physical intelligent cause is the best one that doesn't have any ad mixture of physics in it so in other words it's a pure intelligence and i think there's a reason uh for believing that a pure intelligence can uh operate on a um on a universe like our own um on the physics of our universe even the constants of the physics of our universe that comes from uh quantum theory so that basically is the outline you might think oh my gosh i didn't understand half of what he said i just have patience i know there's going to be a lot of words out there that a lot of people that are not in the physics area are going to have some difficulty with but this is kind of where the contemporary argument uh from fine tuning into intelligent life this is where it's coming from and this article the first one i mentioned uh it has all of the um uh articles uh in it that i'm going to be referring to with the various names you know people like donald page or whatever uh you know that that come out and and so these articles uh you will see uh from these various people um are cited there and um and i think um uh you'll get an idea of well there's a really prohibitive argument out there it's an abductive argument uh maybe we'll find another cause that we i haven't considered in this and and if we do maybe that will replace the need for uh you know a pure transcendent non-physical intelligence uh that's out there that could be determinative of the fine-tuning of our universe okay well that's um that's the overview and it gives you the whole lineup of what a contemporary argument looks like from fine tuning now let's go to free parameters right from the very beginning well what's a parameter to begin with a parameter in physics is something that confines or conforms physical forces to a specific magnitude with a specific value now you go okay well what does that mean well let me let me give you just two examples of of what these free parameters are what the what a parameter is and i think you'll you'll be able to get the the sense of it uh first of all we have these things called constants in our universe and constants are well they're basically numbers but they're numbers that represent some specific ratio a specific minimum a specific maximum they represent some kind of constraining element on the equations of physics okay now a free parameter as we'll notice in just a moment a free parameter could have any value at all it literally at the big bang a free parameter could have been almost any value and that is an interesting thought and the reason we conjecture that is because those free parameters are not required by any law of physics or any combination of the laws of physics that we are currently aware of and so we call them free parameters because they can have just about any value at the big bang now what's a constant again and go back to the idea of a constant a constant i think many of you have heard of the speed of light constant that's a maximum so essentially 186 200 miles per second or 300 000 kilometers per second right this kind of a constant tells you that the kind of the upper velocity um that something can reach in the universe so it's a highest possible velocity and another way of looking at it it's the invariant velocity of light which determines um pretty much a whole bunch of different effects length contraction duration dilation a vial of a variety of other things but that would be a constant why is it constant because it's the same throughout the universe it's the same for all time and does it have real physical effects this you know 186 200 miles per second yes it has very real physical effects it really does have a determinative power over the equations and the laws of physics as they manifest themselves in the physical universe we have four forces in our universe we have the gravitational force we have the electromagnetic force the strong nuclear uh coupling force and we also have the weak force now each of those forces has one or more constants so you probably if you took a physics course even in high school you probably heard about the gravitational force having a gravitational constant so here's um you know a magnitude here's a number of value uh that is is limiting and conforming and constraining the manifestation of gravitational power that's the best way i could put it so there's a gravitational constant and then we have the strong nuclear force which has the strong nuclear force coupling constant so that's another constraint of that strong nuclear force to a particular you know a quantitative parameter parameter and then of course we have things like the electromagnetic force and the electromagnetic force has three constants associated with it the electromagnetic charge the mass of the proton the mass the electron all these things uh you'll see will become important in a moment and of course the weak force has the weak force constant so we've got constants associated with all of our forces well many of you have studied physics you've heard planks constant or you've heard of the cosmological constant or you've heard of hubble's constant we just brought up the speed of light constant remember it remains constant throughout the universe and constant over the course of time now these numbers are very very relevant with respect to life developing on uh you know on our uh within our universe excuse me not just on our planet but within our universe so very significant so here's the the quick and easy uh uh thought to to remember if you kind of reduce uh the argument down if we've really got a true free parameter here in other words if the gravitational constant or the weak force constant or the strong nuclear force coupling constant if that value really um uh is um you know constraining and determining but it can't be caused by any law in our universe it can't be caused by any combination of physical laws in our universe it's free to have any value at the big bang now if that value just happens to be the value which is absolutely necessary for a life form to develop in the universe and it could have any possible value higher or lower than the specific value which will allow a life form to develop boy do you realize what the probability of that would be i mean it would be exceedingly exceedingly improbable that the value needed for life of all the possible values that that constant could have had at the big bang that it should come up right with the exact value needed for life and not just one constant or two constants but in every single constant of our universe including by the way even the initial conditions of our universe there's only specific initial conditions right that we have to have in order for life to develop outside that those specific conditions life's not going to develop so we see then that there is a striking thing which basically engages just about every physicist i know i mean you don't have to be in uh right i guess or right now if the the pew research center is correct about the uh uh american uh um the triple a yes the american uh the society for the advancement of science right um of um um american association for the investment science they did a poll and 51 percent of scientists uh turned up theists uh they believe in either god or a higher spiritual power 41 percent turned up to be agnostics or atheists and eight percent didn't declare so um uh uh probably scared to death to declare for whatever reason just kidding but in any case the the point at hand is that um uh some physicists really do find this very curious but agnostics theists everyone pretty much says okay um yeah these are this is an interesting problem uh no one is kind of tossing it off even victor stenger wrote a whole book about it obviously he thought there was something about it that had to be responded to so for all intents and purposes then let's just say this is a curious thing how in the world if i could put it in one simple phrase how in the world did these constants and initial conditions when they could have had any value higher or lower than what they had how in the world did they get the value specifically needed for a life form to develop in our universe the odds are so exceedingly improbable we need some kind of a an explanation a solution a cause and so let's take a look at some of these cosmic coincidences so we can just you can get an idea of what's really going on out there and uh and then once you we have looked at those cosmic coincidences let's go through all the possible causes that we can think of right now in this kind of abductive argument where we try to see which explanation is going to be the best explanation for this remarkable fine-tuning for life in our universe so let's flip to the cosmic coincidences sheet and um if you can take a look here you can see the first one which is the most vexing of all the cosmic coincidences this is called the low entropy of our universe it's an initial condition of our universe which is completely unexpected what does low entropy mean i know there's this technical but just get a sense of you know what this is about and and then you can read the articles or read the luke barnes uh book and the the lewis during and um i mean the training was in uh luke barnes uh book or whatever you want to do but the point is is what's so uh what's low entropy and what does it do low entropy is what we call high organization of um of of the energy within a physical system and that high organization enables work to be done by and within that physical system so that's a really important thing well entropy is the low entropy is good that means there's lots of of uh usable or free energy available for that physical system to do some work that's a good thing low entropy high entropy is a very um not so good thing a very bad thing because high entropy basically means that the system has got very little free or usable energy left to do some work so to make a long story short that high entropy is a kind of a recipe for no life developing within our universe so roger penrose a very important physicist that i just mentioned a few seconds ago roger penrose at oxford university actually made a calculation uh at the you know at the um uh big bang what are the odds of low entropy occurring by pure chance what are the odds that our uh universe with its specific amount of a number of baryons what what would be the odds of this occurring by pure chance uh for the physicists out there you probably know the equation anyway it's very simple to determine all you need to do is you just take a look at well how many baryons a baryon is like a heavy particle right uh that's out there how many baryons do you have and he says okay let's say there's about 10 to the 80th baryons in the spectrum of visible matter in our universe and he says okay what's the entropy per barium why it's 10 to the 43. so what's the total entropy of our universe why it's 10 to the 123 just adding up the 80 and the 43 and 10 to the 123. but remember now the entropy relates um you know the the the entropy level the total entropy level in the universe you can calculate the odds of the high entropy versus the low entropy by just taking the exponential and so the exponential is the opposite of a logarithm right so it's that the odds of low entropy occurring in our universe or 10 to the 80th baryons is 10 raised to the 10 raised again so a double exponent coming here to the 123 to 1. okay so that's a double exponent so what's what's that number like 10 to the 10 to the 123 to 1. that number is a really big number i mean if you made every zero 10 point type right and you filled up um our universe with zero our solar system with zeros our entire solar system with 10 point type zeros could not hold that number written out it is essentially the same as a monkey typing the entire corpus of shakespeare flawlessly by random tapping of the keys in a single try this is highly improbable obviously i think everybody knows that if you put a you know a whole bunch of paper or you put a computer in there with a typewriter or whatever into a room and the monkey's basically randomly tapping away at keys and you just let them be for a couple of months you come back in after feeding the monkey you see in perfect folio condition mcmahon perfect folio condition hamlin and you think to yourself wow that's highly improbable from a monkey who obviously didn't read shakespeare let alone memorize shakespeare let alone all he could do was randomly tap keys yeah it's virtually impossible and that's what drives physicists a bit crazy including this guy roger penrose over there in oxford and he basically thought oh my gosh you know i mean this is like virtually impossible yet we are living in the virtually impossible universe our entropy has a 10 raised to the 10 raised to the 123 to 1 chance of happening and that entropy is i mean that that the low entropy of our universe is so amazing and remember low entropy is good it's high organization lots of usable free energy right it's so amazing that basically our universe can be kind of a loping long lasting huge right uh uh universe with 10 to the 80th baryons right and so forth and we'll talk about you know what's so unusual about this universe we would expect that our universe would have to be much smaller right i mean the idea of our large universe the 10 to the 80 and that's just that's just the visible matter in our universe right it's it's just a truly amazing uh uh thought and so it's it's a virtual impossibility yet it allowed you and and allowed you know me to develop um uh um in this beautiful universe that's so vast it's so spacious right and we look at it and we go that that is really amazing well what would happen if a high entropy universe evolved so if we went in favor of the odds in other words if we you know what would what would happen if there were a high entropy universe one of those other options basically you would not have very much free or usable energy if you didn't have very much free or usable energy you wouldn't have enough energy to begin with a usable energy to to basically develop a life form let a you know let alone allow a life form to evolve and to allow complexification to occur or the evolutionary process was moving toward higher and higher systems of organization etc from the laws of physics to chemistry to biology right i mean you just couldn't i mean high entropy would prohibit uh the evolutionary complexification and even the very development of a life form like a protozoa a single-celled uh you know even a virus uh uh to to develop uh let alone uh a protozoan okay a single cell organism all right so the the key point at hand here is well that's that's that's amazing our universe has an initial condition that's the same as a monkey typing the entire corpus of shakespeare by random tapping of the keys in a single try and this actually happened in our universe so we say oh that's a universe tuned fine-tuned very highly fine-tuned for life and very exceedingly exceedingly improbable let's take a look at a few things that are constants uh out there and you can kind of gauge and get to see uh you know how this works and by the way if you read my article or luke barnes's book um you know you can get the um uh joint lewis book um you can get uh a lot of other constants but here's just a few examples let's just take the weak force constant uh in its relationship with a gravitational constant basically if you altered the weak force constant by a mere fraction one part in 10 to the 50th that is a very small fraction that's like a decimal point 49 zeros and then a one a teeny little fraction if you vary that by one part and 10 to the 50th the weak force constant higher or lower from the value it just happened to have at the big bang remember weak force constant is a free parameter if it happened to have at the big bang then either the universe would have been continuously exploding terribly exploding right as it's moving in its expansion and will be exploding until this very day parenthetically this is exceedingly bad for life forms because any kind of a molecular complexification that could give rise to a life form would be incinerated continuously from 13.77 billion years ago when the big bang happened up until the present moment that's a no starter that's uh we would say okay yeah that's that's good well what about one um in 10 to the 50th in other words point zero zero right uh uh 40 um um 49 zeros and then a one what happens if we vary it just a little bit lower what would happen then to that weak first cons then the universe would have collapsed basically into a black hole and with a black hole the universe comes together and it gets closely compacted and is the gravitational as the distance decreases the gravitational force increases which causes the distance to decrease again it causes the gravitational force to increase again and just crushes crushes crushes crushes until well the entire mass of the universe is collapsed into well somewhere around uh 10 to the um oh probably 10 to the minus 20 um seven uh 20 second centimeters something like that so the entire uh universe would be collapsed into a very very very small point um and so that that wouldn't uh be a very good thing um and of course once you have that crushing motion nothing no life form is going to develop so we basically um well we avoid the complete cosmological catastrophe by one part and 10 to the 50th and in the weak force constant at the big bang it could have been anything higher it could have been anything lower and just happened to be bango right on with and the window of opportunity is a variant of one part and 10 to the 50th a minute fraction that's what i'm saying you know the odds of this happening by pure chance when all of those other possible values uh could have occurred at the big bang equally possible valleys could have happened the big bang basically monkey typing macbeth i mean that's i guess the best uh you know assess a sense of let's just take another one um in our universe we lie at the the very brink of convective instability right so um we've got the electromagnetic force in its relationship with the gravitational force and boy you you can't mess with this relationship not even a little bit i mean that the mass of the proton the mass of the electron and the electromagnetic charge have to be within one part in 10 to the 39th relative to gravity so that's a decimal point 38 zeros and a one if you had just the slightest variance in one of those uh constants that's the mass of the proton the mass electron or the electromagnetic charge in just one part in 10 to the 39th a decimal point 30 001. if you did that then either every single star if you went in one direction every single star in our universe would be a blue giant the problem with blue giants is that they incinerate things for miles around so they basically are incinerating everything and that's really bad for life forms because if every star in a galaxy is has the effect of incinerating everything around it then of course no life form is going to develop alternatively if you just moved those constants in the other direction then every single star in our universe would be a red dwarf and a red dwarf is such a weak star it gives off so little heat so little light that basically again life forms would be deprived of the heat and light that they need in order to develop so you mean we basically avoided cosmological catastrophe by one part in in 10 to the 39th in the electromagnetic charge the mass of the proton mass of the electron yeah yeah that's what i'm saying uh basically uh again do you know the odds of this occurring by a random pure chance at uh at the big bang uh it's a monkey typing macbeth again again this is really highly exceedingly improbable okay enough said i'll just give you one other example and you'll get the point we have that remember that strong nuclear force coupling constant you might remember that and that constant um uh can it basically controls the the point at which nuclear fusion is going to occur the distance that two protons are from one another where they might fuse and the strength of the force that fuses them now this strong nuclear force coupling constant if you varied it two percent higher you just made it two percent higher from uh the the value it just happened to have at the big bang uh 13.77 billion years ago then there be no hydrogen in our universe if you had no hydrogen in our universe you certainly wouldn't have any suns or stars you certainly wouldn't have any water etc etc so this would be you know a disastrous scenario not to have hydrogen in the universe for any kind of life form developing we need heat we need light and and so forth alternatively if you um made the uh um the uh strongly good first coupling and two percent lower than the the value that it just happened to have at the big bang why then there be no element heavier than hydrogen in the universe no other element the entire periodic table would be hydrogen go ahead try to make a complex molecule with hydrogen alone no oxygen no other heavier element on the periodic table all you've got out there is hydrogen nothing's going to happen you're not going to get a life form well what's the point i'm trying to make again it's the same thing it could have had any value higher than that 2 any value lower than two percent and and yet it just happens to have the exact value that it needs in order for life forms to develop in our universe i think you get the point i'm going to skip the uh carbon uh and uh hydrogen helium uh coincidence um that was uh pointed out by sir fred hoyle because i'm a little behind but i think everybody gets the cosmic coincidences and by the way there's a whole ton of them uh in that article um that i wrote that i pointed out on that first slide so you can get the cosmological constant as coincidence as the gravitational constant has coincidences and so forth so you can see oh even the values of the quarks have cosmological con coincidences okay let's go to then we we need a cause i mean basically we have to have a cause but before i get there i just want to point out um this problem with victor stenger's book the fallacy of fine tuning because it turns off a lot of people um who are not physicists and who might think oh victor stinger just said it was a fallacy and he's a physicist so he must be right um i'm gonna again recommend that article um that i pointed out right at the beginning on the first slide that's the luke barnes uh article on fine tuning for life in the universe and so you want to take that and he really does give a very complex 77-page answer um uh just with each point in the victor stenger uh book and i think um uh it's very much worth reading but what are the three problems with uh victor stenger's argument the first problem that barnes you know points to is pretty simply that there is an equivocation in the central argument of victor sting an equivocation means that you're using the same term in two different ways in your syllogism and your argument right so that's not a good thing you you have to have consistency in the definition of your terms and those of you who go to the university of toronto would know this from your logic course it's not a problem but yes victor stenger did actually slip into the equivocation and it's very real it's a very real equivocation and luke barnes got him in a logical fallacy dead to rights but then what barnes does is he goes on to say let's suppose we accept the conclusion of victor stinger's uh argument and we accept uh the the various conditions and premises that he used to establish that argument what would happen to the rest of physics and what he shows is that victor stenger's conditions and and and premises are in opposition to many very important theories like galilean relativity lagrangian dynamics newtonian mechanics uh general uh and special theories of relativity um and uh and even the standard model of of uh particle physics in our universe so i mean from that point of view it's disastrous because you can't hold these major theories uh in physics along with the stingers contentions uh at the same time they're they're in opposition to each other the third thing actually uh two uh which is you know i think probably luke barnes putting the icing on the cake is to point out about five really blatant uh mistakes uh that that stinger made in his physics and so basically what barnes was trying to do is say okay this is not the easy way out of of the fine-tuning argument the fine-tuning argument at the end of the day is not just the subjective preference of the physicist at the end of the day the fine-tuning argument is based in real objective reality at the big bang what uh barnes is saying is you have a very objectively real ratio in other words you have very objectively real life per uh permitting free parameter a life permitting um uh we'll call it possible values of constants okay so we've got very real possible values of constants that are life permitting you also have very real life prohibiting values of constants that are there in the same universe at the big bang and there's a ratio between them and that ratio is based on the very real laws of physics that allow for those free parameters to be there the very real laws of physics that um that give us the universe that that we accept and the free uh parameters have to be constrained uh to the values of life and if they're not constrained to the values of life we will have a life prohibiting universe and so uh uh what barnes is saying is this is not just the subjective preference this is built into our universe the possibilities that are like prohibiting the possibilities that are like permitting are built in the ratio is objectively real it's based within the laws of physics and the laws of nature as we know them it's a very real problem that comes not from my mind or anybody else's any physicist mind it comes from the universe itself okay let's go to the real question that we need to answer so what could the cause be okay um i'm going to try and go through this very very quickly don't don't get too uh upset if all these things are not clear because it won't be all clear but anyway we've got some real possibilities here and i'm just gonna sort of list them and give you a few little problems uh with these things and then um if you want like i said go to my article uh that's in the theism versus atheism book the macmillan reference book okay the first possible possibility is because there's a theory of everything and i'm just going to say right now the theory of everything has got a couple of we we just can't put one together a theory of everything basically means that there would be some kind of super symmetry that there might be something out there uh that unifies the four forces of our universe and and we didn't know it but in the super symmetry of the unification of our four universal forces remember the gravitational forces uh they're starting to uh force the weak force and and the electromagnetic force uh that there's somehow there might be some additional laws that we are not uh familiar with that could have made the free parameters determined by these higher laws of physics we we have a few candidates for the unification of the four forces of physics uh and we have a lot of super symmetry models but none of them works like the this uh the super string theory model which looked like it might be a good candidate it didn't work it leaves all of the constants and initial conditions as free parameters so that didn't determine the free parameters within uh the super uh within the influence of the super symmetry the same thing with loop quantum gravity it was another way of uh you know unifying the four forces again all of those parameters that um give rise to life they are all free parameters they could have had any value they're not determined by the laws of physics to make a long story short basically we don't have a theory of everything and a theory of everything is pretty unlikely every single model we try to test that that comes up uh you know with the unification of the four forces or some super symmetry just falls short of determining determining um the free parameters of our universe okay let's go then so once we you know a theory of everything's out the window we've got to postulate then a trans-universal cause the supersymmetry is the last universal cause we can really think of in our universe and now we're going to have to postulate something that's kind of beyond our universe that's what trans means beyond the universe we've got to have a trans-universal cause and there there are uh basically four of them and i'll just describe them very very briefly for you the the number one is what we'll call cyclic cosmologies the number two thing uh is what we'll call multiverse the third thing i'm hoping i can have just about five minutes more uh to just go through this very quickly and uh there's an infinite multi vinet multiverse infinite multiverse and then finally uh there is also um uh what we call tegmark's level four multiverse you're not going to understand this but just to get a sense of where the argument is going and why we're kind of forced into the intelligent um cognition some sort of a you know transcendent intelligence you'll just get a sense of why that is let's go with the cyclic cosmologies right away remember cyclic cosmologies are like bouncing universe expand and contract re-expand and recontract and they go through these various cycles the main thing to to notice is sean carroll who by the way is an atheist uh pretty much uh put an end to all of these uh cyclic cosmologies besides roger penrose's uh and the reason is is what he said was look every time you have an expansion and a contraction of of of the universe in one of these cycles you have a tremendous increase in energy remember an in entropy remember an increase in entropy means a decrease in the organization uh that system it's a decrease in the free available uh usable energy to do work in a physical system so you've got these tr and the universe right is it like a physical system so you're going to have a net decrease of of this energy but in the same time your entropy levels are increasing with each cycle so all sean carroll did was he said well go backwards everybody if you go backwards then the previous cycle would have to have much lower entropy remember low entropy is good but low entropy requires fine tuning so he says you're going to have to have lower entropy in the previous cycle and still lower entropy even more fine tuning in the previous previous cycle and even more low entropy let's just say fine-tuning in the previous previous previous cycle etc so finally says you go through enough cycles and you get backward in time far enough and what happens to you well you wind up having almost zero entropy like super low entropy virtually zero entropy which requires infinite fine tuning and sean carroll adds for no apparent reason now of course i'm just going to skip to the conclusion here and just say hey if you actually showed that you actually could go back uh you know to to the point of zero entropy at the beginning of a cycle with infinite fine-tuning you'd already be at god i mean that would infinite fine tuning would require some form of transcendent cause absolutely inexplicable in terms of the physical universe and the alternatives that are permitted within it uh just let's go to number two possibility in cosmic uh um this is a again a cyclic cosmology and it's called conformal cyclic cosmology roger penrose as it's a very intelligent guy he's not a fan of the multiverse and of course uh he has to get around sean carroll's objection uh you know that that basically cyclic cosmologies will always wind up with infinite fine tuning at the end of the day so he says okay how do i get around it well he creates a new cyclic cosmology called conformal cyclic cosmology now the interesting thing about uh this is internally the thing works but he has to have two very controversial conditions which a lot of people like james sinclair and don page don't like and the first one is this he has to require that electrons decay now in you know if you're a physicist you know hey electrons are ground states why i mean this is like not going to happen and so a lot of physicists just simply say no that condition cannot be met uh that that's a poor condition but the second problem with uh penrose's uh conformal sick of cosmology is uh essentially he he's got an internal contradiction what he he has to do is equate time with uh what occurs in a particle so basically then um once particles decay right once particles vanish at a particular point and uh you know particles aren't going to exist when you get to the very very boundary of a cycle right so like at our big being there weren't any particles yet they had to sort of kind of develop so that the point i'm trying to get to is your particles will vanish right remember if time is equated with particles uh and specific particles and you get to the boundary of the cycle going backwards and the particle vanishes then time would have to vanish but in the conformal cyclic cosmology you must proceed backwards through the boundary but if you proceed backwards through the boundary that means that what was previous to that is before and what happened after the boundary is after and that means that there's time without particles an obvious intrinsic contradiction and so uh this is pretty sketchy the penrose conformal cyclic cosmology is not very much accepted by a lot of physicists let's go to the multiverse very quickly because many of you have heard of the multiverse transcendent he said to skip yeah oh i'm so sorry i just wanna just quickly let you know the finite multiverse isn't gonna work and and the reason that it isn't gonna work is because our universe is so so unusual the the odds of our having any kind of a universe like our own accord and this is a roger penrose calculation uh are just almost infinitesimal our large spacious universe you know with attended the 80th baryons etc we we should absolutely by all probability be in a much smaller universe much more constrained much less variety etc so that's not going to work let's skip to the infinite multiverse so somebody says okay skip the finite multiverse let's go to an infinite multiverse the infinite multiverse gets us into all kinds of problems and the measurement problem being one of them but one of them is called boltzmann brains and brief brains those two things are very vexing basically here's what it comes down to a multi-verse an infinite multiverse means that every single one of you out there should be a boltzmann brain you're asking well what's a boltzmann brain that is a basically a brain that fluctuates into existence for a few seconds and completely loaded with all the memories of all the people around you and everybody on the on this uh program with the entire universe that we see out there it's all loaded into your memory and by pure chance this thing fluctuated into existence and then boom it just disappears but while it was around for that few seconds you thought it was real you the odds of you being you the organic material you know composite in this large universe are just about zero the odds are almost you know phenomenally high you should have been a boltzmann brain you are a boltzmann brain that fluctuated into existence of course this is a problem and it's not just the boltzmann brains there's another phenomenon called brief brains don't have time to go through that's a problem so we have to get out of that then we get into tegmark's level four multiverse can't uh talk about that right now but tegmark was very smart he just tried to say okay look i can get out of this multiverse problem by postulating a multiverse that has all the equations of physics in it so it's a multiverse composed of all the basic mathematical possibilities uh that that are out there a kind of a formulated uh set of equations if i can put it that way in the universe well he commits a category error by doing this he basically tried he has to create in a physical universe a real idea like an equation but a physical universe can't be an equation and an equation can't be a physical universe because individuation and abstract ideas are absolutely uh opposites right they're in opposition to one another and so uh essentially he commits a category error of it creates a concrete universal and that's not gonna work so what's left what's left is basically a pure idea it's a pure intelligence and intelligence which doesn't have any physics it's an intelligence which is not conditioned by physical parameters it's an intelligence which is just intelligence and we can use the quantum model uh to think about it but you might say well gosh what's intelligence without a brain some of you may have heard of near-death experiences so i put a little analogy in here for you in those near-death experiences right when somebody gets that state of flat eeg fix and dilated pupils and no gaglet reflex what happens uh to to that uh um that person he says well you know my soul leaves my body but notice that when this soul leaves the body first of all it's not subject to physical laws anymore it can go right through the hospital walls could go up and down you say well is there any medical studies verifying this absolutely really good medical studies in in first class journals like uh the lancet right uh britain's number one medical journal that validate yeah this is going on all the time 81 percent of blind people see for the first time when they're clinically dead which leads to the question okay how could a soul without a physical body right the fiscal body is is basically at the brink of brain death how could that soul see hear understand and if you were blind see for the first time without any physical images in your mind just think of that there is something out there that's not subject to physics that's not material that is thinking thinking thinking and you've got one of them let's just say that these medical studies are true and you know you have one of those souls okay then you can think even without a brain so don't get all flummoxed about identifying intelligence with a brain just think of it this way now what's my the point i'm trying to say is that in quantum mechanics what you see is we have these these things called field conditions and those field conditions they're in wave functions and they can collapse into eigen states and what that means is they can collapse into what looks to be instantiation or have physical effects and in a microscopically physical world and all kinds of things like that but it kind of starts off like a field well just think of ideas as like a thought field and just think of this pure idea this pure thought field as having almost like an unrestricted act of understanding it does really understand all of the equations of physics indeed it generated all the possibilities for all the laws of physics just like tegmark would have in any possible universe that could be possibly conceived that you have an intelligence of this magnitude is that shouldn't that be far far more um improbable than than tegmark saying no it's not far more improbable because and here's the end of the argument at the end of the day ladies and gentlemen at the end of the day that intelligence that can generate those laws of physics and can actually create in its own thought a physical universe which it determines to those laws of physics which it understands its universal ideas that that precursor non-physicalized intelligence this pure idea as it were that does not fall prey to the category error of tegmark it doesn't fall prey to the boltzmann brains of infinite multiverses it doesn't fall prey to the penrose paradox that our universe should not be as it as it is uh spacious and lovely and so forth it does not fall prey to the cyclic cosmology problem and the inflationary cyclic cosmology problems it doesn't look for a theory of everything which doesn't uh you know hit um uh you know um uh uh seem to exist at least as we know the universe and so what's the final conclusion a transcendent intelligence a pure non-physicalized transcendent intelligence seems to be the most rational explanation for those fine-tuning cosmic coincidences that we spoke of and that sounds almost like a transcendent intelligence might be associated with a creator might be associated with god imagine if that was the most reasonable explanation uh like i said go back to drink lewis and luke barnes uh to that book a fortunate universe go back to my article and by the way i reference a huge number of articles that that talk about these things in some detail and so you can get sort of the the backup for it my apologies for going over time i hear the alarm uh but i just wanted to give you a sense yes it is complicated in a sense but in a sense it is really beautiful that there really could be something akin to a pure act of intellection out there in which our universe is just situated among many other thoughts along with all of the laws possible laws of physics thanks so much for your kind attention thanks very much so i'm going to jump right into our questions this is from david when you talk of the transcendent intelligence conceiving the universe are you saying similar to someone like spinoza that the universe is merely within the mind of the intelligence if not can you clarify well uh let's put it this way uh spinoza of course uh did have a uh a plain and a substrate uh but pair say um the notion of intelligence that i'm speaking of would go beyond um the determinative sort of intelligence of spinoza so uh this would be uh if you want uh some examples of this i would uh go to uh bernard lonergan uh he was a jesuit philosopher but he did uh have a very good grasp of physics and that transcendent and um he talks in chapter 19 he has an argument for the existence of god where he talks about the attributes of an unrestricted act of understanding understanding itself the main thing to remember about the intelligence i'm speaking about is that this intelligence has the freedom to conceive according to its own desires it is completely um un uh hampered um to uh the determination of its thoughts um uh if there's no necessary series of thoughts uh it's kind of like a free intellect so that would be the distinction from spinoza thank you very clear okay another question this one's a toughie it's about god of the gaps reasoning uh-huh i'm absolutely not opposed to the idea of a transcendent intelligence but it seems to me that presenting it as the inevitable logical conclusion of current scientific theories is risky scientific theories are built around community consensus but they change all the time and cosmology is one of the most exciting and active areas of research delving into some of the most inscrutable aspects of nature my question is do you not worry that any argument for transcendent intelligence that haines hangs on a specific set of models in this way sets itself up for failure as scientific consensus changes in other words a classic part of the gap's reasoning yeah uh yeah i don't think it's the god in the gaps reasoning for a variety of reasons but the first thing is i never claimed this was a deductive argument at all it's an abducted argument so i am not in any respect trying to say that um you know x follows from y which follows from z et cetera et cetera there's no set of deductions an abductive argument by the way is allowed in physics and occurs all the time and we have you know all kinds of ways of determining uh you know the the various uh probability functions so if you read that article of mine that i have uh i've reduced it to you know um uh you know inequalities and probabilistic functions so none of this is completely determinative at all my um my as i've been trying to say all along and by the way i totally agree with you everything and science can change there's no question about it now some things are more likely to change than others some things are complete surprise and brand new discoveries are made all the time but no question about that um science is an inductive discipline it can change when any new discovery is made and of course the poor scientist is left with the problem of a scientist does not know what he does not know until observational data forces him to discover it that's the problem and so all i've done is an abductive argument i said okay look this is the state of the art today uh you just take a look here's explanation one oh that's got this problem here's explanation to use it and so i basically said this is the best we can come up with now is there a possibility that maybe in the future theory of everything yes is the possibility that maybe uh somebody will show a cyclical yes uh all those things but right now this looks pretty good and it may just remain pretty good and so there's a variety of reasons i discuss why i think it'll remain pretty good but i don't think it's definitive by any stretch of the imagination great question very good the last question and then i'm going to put in a plug for our local society catholic scientists chapter last question why do you think physicists are often resistant to theistic ideas but seem open to other ideas such as multiverses simulations yeah uh just really quickly again i'll just point out um well most scientists uh as i said 51 percent of scientists are theists so they tend to be open uh you know if you if you're a theist or you're a spiritual person this is like i said the pew survey of the american association for the advancement of science if you look at that they're probably quite open to this kind of a solution 41 percent are agnostic and atheist uh atheistic and they it depends on the agnostic to be honest with you whether they're open or whether they're not open now um atheistic uh people uh search for multiverses and so forth because and some and a lot of agnostic search for uh physical solutions because they feel that it is the requirement of their discipline in other words what what they are saying is look my responsibility is to exhaust the realm of physics so to exhaust the realm of in of observable data i will not go to a non-observable phenomenon until i have satisfied myself that i i cannot go any further so i mean i think um 51 as i said of scientists or theists i think the reason that that occurs is because some of them are just religious in principle but some of them actually do think you know we've probably gone the route they they looked at things like the board of lincoln and guth proof or they've looked at uh entropy evidence or they've looked at these fine-tuning explanations that we've talked about today and so forth and so on they just go you know maybe right now the most reasonable thing is uh there is a transcendent intelligence and there's everything in between but i think really um a lot of them want to satisfy themselves that they have been a good scientist that they basically ex exhausted the realm of any observable data based explanation and it you know and uh and right now they're they haven't done it yet so they just think well i can't make that move and a lot of people say yeah we're getting pretty close they're i'm making the move and so um that's i think what the real issue is good well you certainly satisfied us tonight so i just want to put in a plug here for the society of catholic scientists toronto chapter and we are meet we're a group of students and we're also recruiting professors so uh undergraduate graduate and uh postdoc young postdocs science students and we have and we're also recruiting professors and some of our activities include a [Music] textbook group study and uh and we're also planning some panels and other activities and hopefully eventually when things open up a bit we can have some in-person socials so you can find out more information through inquiring with the newman center and my email is on the the torch uh has a has my email there um and you can also uh look uh through social media you can find some links to register and sign up for a group study great and also uh you know the uh the powerpoints if if you want them just uh let somebody know and uh or you can actually probably just get it off the website there that's right thanks very much i'll turn over to father peter lanita will be able to uh to email them out to the registrants so father spitzer thank you so much for being here we would have preferred to have you here physically present but perhaps in the in the future we can have you back in toronto which would be wonderful so you've left us with a lot to think about this night and you've i think you've made physics very attractive especially to those who are a bit afraid of of the whole discipline so thank you very much for that as well and for your witness now we have many different events for the rest of the semester we have our mentorship event which is next for uh thursday on reframing the pandemic and jeff will be leading that we have our vocations fair different congregations and orders in the in the archdiocese of toronto we have uh live testimonies and then virtual virtual um conversations with different members so this is open and it's on february the second beginning at 11 am so please join us for that and his eminence cardinal collins will be celebrating the mass for the feast of the presentation and that we will be live streamed on the cathedral website and then lastly we have our saint tres of the book study on her spirituality of the little way and that begins on february the 22nd and it's open to all members of the community and and others of the archdiocese are interested in learning more about her spirituality again father you said we're living in a virtually impossible universe and uh that is um very true and it is remarkable because our existence is not necessary but it's willed by god so every single one of us ultimately is not a bolts and brain but as a child of god and we're called to enter into fellowship with him through um through our lord jesus christ so uh we're very grateful for that we're grateful for cardinal newman for inspiring the center and for saint thomas as well for his commitment to uh to being able to enter into dialogue with the different faculties that were at his university at the time um we need more saint thomas aquinas on university campuses as well with his holiness as as balthazar used to say and his intelligence so we pray for many uh men and women to be able to to benefit from the this center uh for for the building of god's kingdom here on earth so thank you all for being here uh we have some great articles in this uh the latest issue of the torch and we have father adam hinks talking about the vatican uh observatory and jeffrey and one of our other postdocs gabriel santucci so and there's plenty of different references and things that you're most welcome to look at so why don't we conclude with a prayer in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit amen heavenly father we thank you for this time together we pray that you continue to pour forth your holy spirit upon us help us to know lord that we are your beloved children and we have been been given a great dignity that even though we may see we are very small physically in the context of the universe we are precious in your eyes help us never to forget that and live according to this great dignity may almighty god bless each and every one of you father son holy spirit amen so thank you very much for being here thank you all thank you father and may god bless you and this um this lecture has been recorded and it will be made available by monday on our website see you at our next events bye bye god bless you all

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Length: 80min 4sec (4804 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021