Tag Archives: Size

News

Answering some silly objections to the fine-tuning argument

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Review: In case you need a refresher on the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments, as presented by a professor of particle physics at Stanford University, then click this link and watch the lecture.

If you already know about the standard arguments for theism from cosmology, then take a look at this post on Uncommon Descent.

Summary:

In my previous post, I highlighted three common atheistic objections to to the cosmological fine-tuning argument. In that post, I made no attempt to answer these objections. My aim was simply to show that the objections were weak and inconclusive.

Let’s go back to the original three objections:

1. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does it have to be so BIG, and why is it nearly everywhere hostile to life? Why are there so many stars, and why are so few orbited by life-bearing planets? (Let’s call this the size problem.)

2. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does it have to be so OLD, and why was it devoid of life throughout most of its history? For instance, why did life on Earth only appear after 70% of the cosmos’s 13.7-billion-year history had already elapsed? And Why did human beings (genus Homo) only appear after 99.98% of the cosmos’s 13.7-billion-year history had already elapsed? (Let’s call this the age problem.)

3. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does Nature have to be so CRUEL? Why did so many animals have to die – and why did so many species of animals have to go extinct (99% is the commonly quoted figure), in order to generate the world as we see it today? What a waste! And what about predation, parasitism, and animals that engage in practices such as serial murder and infant cannibalism? (Let’s call this the death and suffering problem.)

In today’s post, I’m going to try to provide some positive answers to the first two questions: the size problem and the age problem.

Here’s an excerpt for the size argument:

(a) The main reason why the universe is as big as it currently is that in the first place, the universe had to contain sufficient matter to form galaxies and stars, without which life would not have appeared; and in the second place, the density of matter in the cosmos is incredibly fine-tuned, due to the fine-tuning of gravity. To appreciate this point, let’s go back to the earliest time in the history of the cosmos that we can meaningfully talk about: the Planck time, when the universe was 10^-43 seconds old. If the density of matter at the Planck time had differed from the critical density by as little as one part in 10^60, the universe would have either exploded so rapidly that galaxies wouldn’t have formed, or collapsed so quickly that life would never have appeared. In practical terms: if our universe, which contains 10^80 protons and neutrons, had even one more grain of sand in it – or one grain less – we wouldn’t be here.

If you mess with the size of the universe, you screw up the mass density fine-tuning. We need that to have a universe that expands at the right speed in order to form galaxies, stars and planets. You need planets to have a place to form life – a place with liquid water at the surface.

And an excerpt for the age argument:

(a) One reason why we need an old universe is that billions of years were required for Population I stars (such as our sun) to evolve. These stars are more likely to harbor planets such as our Earth, because they contain lots of “metals” (astronomer-speak for elements heavier than helium), produced by the supernovae of the previous generation of Population II stars. According to currently accepted models of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, this whole process was absolutely vital, because the Big Bang doesn’t make enough “metals”, including those necessary for life: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and so on.

Basically, you need heavy elements to make stars that burn slow and steady, as well as to make PEOPLE! And heavy elements have to be built up slowly through several iterations of the stellar lifecycle, including the right kinds of stellar death: supernovae.

Read the rest! These arguments come up all the time in debates with village atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. It’s a smokescreen they put up, but you’ve got to be able to answer it using the scientific evidence we have today.

By the way, the first post in that series got over 1200 views and over 100 comments. It’s worth reading as well.

UPDATE: Lenny from Come Reason has an article answering similar questions here.

Videos

Michele Bachmann explains why government should not meddle in the free market

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Video was found by the Maritime Sentry, a conservative policy-oriented blog.

We’ve seeing a lot of my two favorite Congresswomen lately. Did you miss the previous posts?

If we had elected these two as POTUS and VPOTUS, we would not be spending trillions of dollars on single-payer health care.

Commentary

Are Obama’s policies weakening America’s security, liberty and prosperity?

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In this American Spectator piece entitled “Obama the Destroyer“, Quin Hillyer recounts the many deeds that Obama performed in order to weaken America.

Hilyer writes:

If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely “change America,” and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.

He then lists some of the specific areas that Obama has weakened:

  • contract law (which is part of the foundation of capitalism and free enterprise)
  • strict interpretation of the Constitution
  • counter-terrorism (released interrogation techniques)
  • responsible spending and size of government
  • energy production
  • missile defense
  • military preparedness and research
  • border security
  • transparency and free/open debate on legislation
  • freedom of choice in health care
  • the integrity of the voting/census system
  • diplomacy and foreign policy

I could name at least a half-dozen more areas not on that list, such as the Western Experience’s post about Obama’s decision to weaken our nuclear capabilities. In fact, Jason has a whole article on the Obama’s naive, weak foreign policy.

But foreign policy is one thing, what about the cost of the trillions in spending? Writing in the Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer explains that there are only two ways out of the massive deficits that Obama has run up: Higher taxes, which destroys economic growth and ships jobs overseas, and hyperinflation, which impoverishes the poorest among us by making them pay more for everything.

He lists all the mistakes that the ACORN lawyer has made, and concludes:

We are also certain to see the portion of our pay that we actually get to take home decline significantly. The debt that Obama is running up will have to be repaid. Already, there are grumblings in the market about the future of the dollar, with the Chinese not the only one of our creditors worrying that we will inflate our way out of our obligations. Run the presses, make dollars cheaper, and use the debased currency to repay debts.

…But inflation is not the only possibility. Instead, politicians, remembering the fate of Jimmy Carter when he allowed inflation to climb towards 20 percent, will try to restore fiscal sanity by raising taxes. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who supported the president’s stimulus package, puts the needed tax increase at $1.1 trillion over the next decade; the International Monetary Fund puts the figure at $1.9 trillion, a sum the magnitude of which is better understood when written as $1,900,000,000,000.

And don’t forget the looming problem of entitlements. You remember. Social Security and Medicare? Costs ballooning out of control? Matthew Continetti writes about it in the Weekly Standard:

The trustees conclude that a combination of lavish benefits, an aging population, and a moribund economy has brought the United States’s social insurance system close to bankruptcy. Medicare is already running a deficit, and the trustees say that it will be totally out of money by 2017. Social Security will be in the red as soon as 2016. That’s a problem not only for Social Security. It’s a problem for the federal budget.

…Meanwhile, bizarrely and perversely, Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill say that the only way to fix America’s spending problem–we are not making this up–is to spend more money. More on energy. Health care. Education. The three pillars of the president’s “new foundation.” Don’t worry about the cost, Obama says. The rich guy at the other table will pick up the bill.

What sort of person would spend trillions of dollars in a recession with a looming entitlement crisis? Oh, I know. An unqualified spendthrift who can’t even keep his own financial house in order.

Gateway Pundit reminds us that the Democrats understand that their cap and trade bill with hurt the poorest people the most. And they don’t care! Most of them are probably like Al Gore, who owns assets that will benefit from the unnecessary government regulations.

Gateway Pundit writes at the American Issues Project:

The potential cost of the democrat’s cap and trade policy is enormous. It will likely cost $700 to $1,400 dollars per family per year. The Department of Energy estimated that a similar bill, S. 2191, the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal, will increase the cost of coal for power generation by between 161 percent and 413 percent. Human Events reported that the DOE estimated GDP losses (see chart) over the 21-year period they forecast, at between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion. There are estimates that the bill could increase unemployment by 2.7 percent or about 4 million jobs.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag was on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos in March. During his interview Orszag admitted that Obama’s proposed cap and trade energy legislation will increase energy costs for everyone. The Heritage Foundation reported that cumulative GDP losses for 2010 to 2029 approach $7 trillion. Single-year losses exceed $600 billion in 2029, more than $5,000 per household. Job losses are expected to exceed 800,000 in some years, and exceed at least 500,000 from 2015 through 2026. In Missouri and the Midwest where energy is “cheap” the democrat’s legislation would cause electricity rates to double. Even the far left Huffington Post admits that the approach taken by the Waxman-Markey bill does not alleviate the problem whereby household consumers will pay higher energy costs.

The article continues here.

Remember when Obama said this in 2008?

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Businesses would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that cost onto consumers.”

What? You voted for Obama and the MSM didn’t tell you that he said that? I’m shocked.