Comment by lisper
2 years ago
No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of irrational numbers. And there is no evidence of high Kolmogorov complexity in the creation of the universe. To the contrary, all of the evidence points to extraordinarily low Kolmogorov complexity at the foundations of our reality, things that can be described in just a few pages -- maybe even just a few lines -- of math. So to posit an intelligence as the explanation is every bit as unjustified as positing that the Tooth fairy is responsible for the coin under your pillow.
If we live in a simulation, there is a simulation creator.
Serious physicists agree that the simulation hypothesis is a possibility, so you are the unscientific one saying that believing there might be a creator is believing in the Tooth fairy.
Of course the simulation hypothesis is a possibility. So is the tooth fairy. And both of those hypotheses have the same amount of supporting data. (Actually, the tooth fairy has more because people really do get money when they leave teeth under their pillows.)
> at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method
All the information you have comes from your five senses. Isn't some kind of faith necessary to believe that the scientific method would lead to an accurate understanding of reality?
That depends on what you mean by "an accurate understanding of reality." One can observe empirically that the scientific method converges towards something which enables you to predict the outcomes of experiments more and more accurately is it converges. Whether you want to call that "an accurate understanding of reality" is a terminological quibble, but it seems like an apt label to me.
Note that I'm not arguing against the scientific method, but I'm arguing against your claim that it alone can deliver an accurate understanding of reality outside of what we can experiment and observe. This is your parent response:
" You are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence"
You can look at the CMB and take that as evidence of the big bang, but you are relying on faith when you make either of these statements:
- The singularity that resulted in the big bang was created from nothing, time didn't exist before.
- The big bang was created by God
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