The God Delusion (part 1).

I know, I know: the book's some three years old. Today, I picked up my copy of The God Delusion and started on a new chapter. I've had my copy for around two years but I've never really given it a fair shot - after all, I thought that I'd read the ultimate in anti-theism polemics: Why I am Not a Christian (by Bertrand Russell).

I started reading it a few weeks back and then left it, focusing on something else which I can't quite remember. Today, by chance, I started reading chapter 4: Why There Almost Certainly is no God. What can I say? I'm finishing the chapter as I write this and I'm full of excitement and my mind is brimming with the ideas I've been consuming.

It starts as a rebuttal of Fred Hoyle's posit that the origin of life is as unlikely as a Boeing 747 being assembled out of scrapyard junk randomly during a hurricane. Dawkins repeatedly rebuts this idea by showing that if something is reduced to being irreducibly complex, then that means that the likelihood of its being made by any deity is even more unlikely - thus we get into an infinite regress of the 'what made God' sort. By stating that something is too complex to have arisen via natural selection, one immediately undermines one's argument - how could something as complex as a deity have arisen by chance? Surely, it was also designed. But then what designed the designer of the designer? Ergo, we have an infinite regress that isn't helpful but rather creates infinite confusion.

The main point given early in the chapter is that evolution isn't determined by chance - it is guided by natural selection. The only chancey thing that's ever occured is the origin of life. Dawkins states that we are here not because of God (or a god, or gods, or a flying spaghetti monster) but because of the 'anthropic principle'. What is it? Well, simply stated it is the fact that out of all the billions and billions of planets that exist in our universe, many (billions, in fact) are likely to be well-suited to life. If one per cent in a billion billion planets bears life, that still means that there exist a billion life-bearing planets in our universe.

The anthropic principle has two qualities: the human side and the cosmological side. The human side has been stated in the previous paragraph. The cosmological side of the anthropic principle coin is very much similar. I'm sure you've heard of it - multiverse theory. This theory posits that there could be an infinite number of parallel universes (an alternative theory is that they could be linked in series). In this theory, each universe has a different set of conditions - some combinations of which lend themselves to life; others of which are hostile to life or, in fact, can never bear life - or even certain mixtures of atoms.

It could be that all universes bear the same six 'univeral constants' that support life (the ones present in our universe); it could be that there are many possible combinations. Either way, we know that we live in one of said universes because we are here.

One theorist - Lee Smolin - presents an altogether more tangible idea 0f the multiverse (although it still is quite peculiar to our everyday senses). In his mind, the multiverse isn't a 'foamy' structure like that of Martin Rees's - universes exist inside black holes (so the multiverse is a honeycomb structure that, in theory, 'evolves'). In this theory, successful universes are universes which bear black holes. Universes that bear clouds of dust form stars, stars form black holes, and black holes create new 'universes inside the universes in which they're present'. Each new 'daughter' universe born of a black hole contains 'mutations' which alters slightly its properties. It's a fascinating idea.

http://www.2think.org/lifeofthecosmos.shtml