[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker C: Hello, I'm Andrew McDermott. Today I'm sharing with you some bonus content from our short video series Signs Uprising. Some well known scientists have been preaching a materialistic worldview rather than presenting the public with all the evidence. The objective scientific evidence does not prove our universe is blind and purposeless. It doesn't prove humans are simply meat machines. And it doesn't prove that evolutionary mechanisms can completely account for the diversity of life on Earth. Science Uprising was created to help people think for themselves and make an informed decision about these important issues. Each episode also comes with some great accompanying interview material so you can dive deeper. On this episode of Idea the Future, distinguished physicist and cosmologist Frank Tipler discusses the Big Bang, fine tuning and more. First, you've probably heard talk of the singularity, but what is it and how does it figure into the fine tuning debate?
[00:01:14] Speaker A: The standard Big Bang theory, the old fashioned big Bang theory says the universe began in a singularity 14 billion years ago.
Now what is the singularity? The singularity, in a short one sentence description, is a supernatural being that created the universe out of nothing. Let me expand on that.
Supernatural literally means outside of nature. Nature is something that's in space and time. Everything in this office, you and me, are in space and time. The singularity is outside of space and outside of time. It's an intrinsically infinite body, infinite entity which is not subject to any laws of physics. Rather, the singularity creates space time. It determines exactly what the universe will be like, that the space time will be the entity on which reality is played. And also it creates the laws and the initial conditions which govern things in the universe. Outside of the universe, which is created by the singularity and the singularity itself, there is nothing. No space, no time, no matter, no nothing.
[00:02:36] Speaker C: The fine tuning of our universe is real and it's a problem that some try to explain away. So what is the fine tuning problem and are the laws of physics fine tuned for life?
[00:02:47] Speaker A: The fine tuning problem is that as far as we can tell, just looking at the laws of physics itself, they could have any value whatsoever that for example, we normally define the strength of the electrostatic attraction by what we call the fine structure constant.
And it is observed to be 1/137 roughly. But the laws of physics do not tell us what it could be. It could have any value which is positive. It could have any value, in other words, between zero and infinity. Why is it this particular value of roughly 1 over 137. If it were substantially different, life could not exist.
According to the standard model of particle physics, which is the laws of physics that govern everything in reality, in space and time, except for gravity. These constants, in the standard model, there are roughly 30. Such constants could have virtually any value between 0 and plus infinity. They have specific values which we measure, but according to the fundamental law of physics, they could have any value whatsoever. Why do they have these particular values that they are observed to have? Now, what you find if you deviate from. If you imagine what the universe would be like if any of these constants are changed significantly, then it becomes impossible for life ever to exist in that universe.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: Some try to dilute the fine tuning problem by proposing multiple universes, each with its own naturally occurring set of laws and constants. Is there evidence to support any universe with different laws than ours?
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Let us imagine a universe generator in which the generator generates other universes with different values of the cosmological constant, with different values of the fine structure constant, and so forth. Then we can imagine. Well, of course, if all of these universes exist, there will be a universe in which the particular values of the constants have the value in which we see. And indeed, only those universes which have the values in that range would give lies to people who ask, why are the laws what they are? Now, people who imagine that they have a universe generator like that are actually assuming themselves to be God himself. They are assuming that they can dictate what is out there in reality, that they can dictate that these other universes actually exist.
But the laws of physics as we have tested them in the laboratory, assertion there are only these laws of physics with these particular constants. You do not have, unless you're God, the freedom to create these other universes. The universe is as it is. And we determine what the universe, all of reality now is by doing experiments. There are no experiments indicating that there are other laws out there that generate other universes. You can imagine such things, but you're just doing that imagining. If you claim that they really exist, you are claiming that you yourself personally are God. You are not being an atheist, you are believing in God. You're believing that you're God. You, sir, are crazy.
[00:06:47] Speaker C: Is there evidence that the singularity exists?
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Our equations say the singularity exists and controls this universe.
The singularity gives rise to everything in this universe and controls what happens in this universe. We are allowed a range of free will. We are allowed a range of free will by the singularity the singularity really does control the. The evolution of the universe. It controls the universe which it gave rise to.
And the reason the constants are as they are is because the singularity controlled it to be this way.
Now you can understand the singularity in realizing it, that it is a rational structure analogous to. To the rationality which we have. The universe has a rationality to it. Laws of logic work in this universe because the singularity wanted it that way.
[00:08:01] Speaker C: If the evidence is clear, why isn't the singularity widely accepted?
[00:08:06] Speaker A: The Big Bang theory of cosmology was a term used by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle as a term of derision. He did not like the theory that the universe came into existence. All that exists is what the universe means in this context.
All that exists came into existence at a singularity about 14 billion years ago. He says, it's crazy to think that there could be an entity out there which is not subject to any conceivable laws of physics, but rather give rise to the laws of physics. Rather, it must be the case that the universe has always existed. The equations, however, are very clear that the universe began in a singularity. Now, the only way to avoid that is to invent new equations which eliminate the singularity.
And in the original Big Bang theory, the singularity certainly existed. The singularity also, the Big Bang theory, in its original form, predicted the existence of background radiation, which was generated in the beginning of time by the singularity, and it predicted its temperature. People looked for it, and lo and behold, there it was.
Now, this was a defeat for people like Fred Hoyle, but who wanted the universe to existed forever, because his theory had no way of naturally putting in a background radiation. He could artificially do that, but it was not an innate structure of the theory itself, as it was in the Big Bang theory. So for many years, people said, well, I guess we're gonna have to get rid of. We're just gonna have to accept the existence of the singularity, to accept the existence of a supernatural being that created the universe out of nothing.
Now, unfortunately, many people did not like this because they were convinced that the universe had to exist forever. It is not possible for the universe to have only existed for a finite time. But the equations were very clear. The universe to explain what we have seen must have existed for only a finite time.
What the atheist physicists then decided to do. Well, we will invent new laws of physics whose entire purpose is eliminating the singularity. They did so, and what they have now proposed is a universe that in reality is the same as the old steady state universe. There are many we'll call it baby universes out there, of which we are one baby universe.
In other words, the part we can see, what we call the universe, is not really the universe, but just a tiny part of it, an infinitesimal fraction of it, really our universe. Everything that we can see, this huge sphere 14 billion light years plus a cross, originated in little quantum mechanical fluctuation, where you had a very dense state, but not infinitely dense, which is what the singularity is in space time. Space time, according to their theory, goes back infinitely far, but there is no experiment showing this to be the case, and they have to modify the laws of physics in order to force this to be the case. There is no experimental evidence for it. It is entirely motivated by a religious principle, namely that a singularity, an entity which is supernatural and created the universe out of nothing, cannot possibly exist. This is the only motivation for creating such a theory.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: That was Frank Tipler, professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He's co author of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, a book about the significance of intelligent life in the universe. The interview you just heard complements episode four of the Science Uprising series. To see more, go to scienceuprising.com where you'll find fast paced, highly produced videos addressing everything from the shortcomings of materialist philosophy to the true limits of their winning evolutionary processes. That'
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[email protected] or through your favorite podcasts app. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com.
[00:13:30] Speaker C: SA.
