Faith & Science Icon Faith & Science
Intelligent Design Icon Intelligent Design
News Media Icon News Media
Physics, Earth & Space Icon Physics, Earth & Space

An Open Letter to Dr. Hossenfelder’s Mother

p1628a1nowords.jpg

Writing at Forbes, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder neatly dismisses media hype about a “multiverse” (“Sorry, ‘Flash’ Fans — There’s No Evidence For A Multiverse Yet“). Her own mom, she explains, was perplexed by media headlines about the “multiverse” and asked her about it — “I read the [Large Hadron Collider] people have shown we live in a multiverse!”

You can read the windup for yourself. Dr. Hossenfelder concludes:

In a nutshell, the argument is that since theoretical physicists can’t explain the mass of the Higgs, any parameter can take on any possible value and we live in a multiverse.

It’s an interesting argument but it’s logically inconsistent. It relies on an expectation about what we mean by a “random number” or its probability distribution, respectively. There are infinitely many such distributions. The requirement that the numbers in the standard model should obey a certain distribution is merely a hypothesis that turned out to be incompatible with observation. That, really, is all we can conclude from the data: physicists had a hypothesis for what is “natural.” It turned out to be wrong.

This doesn’t mean there is no multiverse. There might or might not be one. It just means the LHC results don’t tell us anything about it.

I spent an hour explaining theoretical high energy physics to my mom and assured her the LHC hasn’t shown we live in a multiverse. She now understands how the Higgs gets its mass, but she doesn’t understand why newspapers write multiverse headlines. I can’t help her with that.

I can.

Dear Dr. Hossenfelder’s mom,

You have asked why so many “newspapers write multiverse headlines,” as if the multiverse were established science rather than pure “conjecture” — a “conjectured endless collection of universes” — as your daughter correctly says. It’s not only newspapers. The media-bombarded layperson is easily forgiven for thinking the conjecture has been demonstrated as true.

Why do “newspapers write multiverse headlines”? The reason is that the multiverse is not just science fiction but a requirement of the materialist thinking that the mainstream media take for granted. Our universe with its physics and chemistry is ultra-, ultra-, ultra-fine tuned for biological beings like ourselves. Your daughter alludes to this “fine-tuning” in her article, but it goes much further than she indicates. See the work of biologist Michael Denton in his book Nature’s Destiny, also accessibly presented in a series of short documentaries at the website Privileged Species. You’ll find additional resources on the theme here.

The obvious understanding of this fine-tuning, like all the careful tuning we do in our daily lives (of radios, musical instruments, paragraphs, etc.), is that it is deliberate, aimed intelligently at a particular end goal. But under materialism, the obvious cannot be correct. That would imply design by an intelligent agent, which is not allowed. Hence the multiverse, which allows near-infinite opportunities for rolls of the dice, producing the illusion of tuning without the reality. This is much the same as how evolution is said to produce the illusion of design without the reality.

Extraterrestrial intelligence is another requirement of materialism. If life arose by chance on Earth, then generating life (including intelligent life) from nonlife should be pretty easy and so it must have occurred elsewhere as well. A great number of places in the cosmos, in fact.

The media headlines follow effortlessly. Thus we read today about how, no doubt frustrated by the lack of radio communication from conjectured alien civilizations, a small number of scientists advocate turning to optical clues (“Is it time to rethink the way we search for intelligent alien life?“). The media can be counted on to hype such guesswork into a near certainty (“We probably just heard a message from aliens, scientists say“). The irony is that the search for ETs is heavily indebted to design thinking, but that’s a subject for another time.

Intelligent design can easily live with a multiverse, with ETs, or both. But the denial of a design behind terrestrial biology must have both. This explains many, many media headlines.

The insistence on material causes alone in explaining life isn’t necessarily a function of atheism, as it might seem at first glance. Some religious believers deny objective scientific evidence for ID even, strangely, as they fulsomely affirm a designer or creator. With these religiously committed evolutionists, the motivation may in many cases involve personal status and prestige, the dread of being associated with the down-market demographic of “creationists” and “creationism,” which atheist propaganda falsely but successfully equates with intelligent design. This, as near as I can figure it, is a psychological phenomenon rather than a scientific or theological one, driven by a very human craving for respect. Respect is the reward, promised though not necessarily delivered, for compliance with groupthink.

The media that generate the headlines you wonder about are under the sway of the same system of reward and punishment: reward (social, career, self-esteem) for persuading the public with materialism, punishment (in a word, shame) for raising doubts about it.

As long as that system reigns, you’ll keep seeing the headlines.

I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

David Klinghoffer

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI).

I’m on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

Share

Tags

Newsscience