OneAndOneIs2

I mentioned a while ago that I was reading "The God Delusion"

I can't say I've been hugely impressed with it. Obviously, not being religious, I'm not really the target audience. And I already agree with the fundamental points of the book: That "God" is not a useful answer to any question; and that there is no evidence of an intelligent designer to be found in evolutionary evidence on Earth.

But on thinking over the whole matter, on a purely scientific basis, I've come to the conclusion that the odds are in favour of our universe having been created by an intelligence.

Not quite the point the book was aiming for, I know :o)

The logic runs like this:

Clarke's Third Law states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Magic is, generally, just a way of saying "I don't know" - how does a stage magician saw a woman in half and put her back together again? Magic!

(Actually, I do know the answer to that one, but anyway...)

By extension, any inhabitant of a sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from a magician.

And by further extension, any sufficiently powerful magician is indistinguishable from a god.

So any really, really advanced civilization would be a race of godlike beings. What stops us being able to create personal worlds, travel to other galaxies, turn water into wine, etc? Only the fact that we don't know how. Any godlike ability will eventually be reproducable by science.

So, my chain of logic was, essentially: Any universe which is so structured that life-capable planets can come into being in, will eventually form life-capable planets (LCPs)

Because of the size of a universe, even if LCPs are very uncommon, there will still be billions of them.

If there are billions of LCPs, then life will arise within the universe. Even if life is a very rare thing to evolve, there are billions of worlds and billions of years in which it can happen. Some proportion of worlds will become life-bearing.

Some proportion of those life-bearing worlds will give rise to intelligence.

Some proportion of intelligent species will survive famine, pestilence, wars, natural disasters and so on, and go on to become a godlike race as mentioned above.

So far, though, we've got a deity as a product of a natural universe, not as a creator of one.

However.

Many current theories for the universe call for it to not be the only universe in existence.

There are many universes with different physical laws in them, so the theory goes.

So here's where things get interesting: If universes come into being naturally and without intervention, and any natural event can be duplicated by sufficiently advanced technology, then sooner or later, one or more of our godlike races, that evolved through natural selection and purely non-interventional scientific process, will discover how to manufacture universes to order.

Here we must diverge to an "As above, so below" chain of reasoning. Take a look at our society right now, and look at how many "artificial universes" we make ourselves.

Books create imaginary worlds. Science creates self-contained biospheres. Computer simulations are the most common: Sim City today, Sim Universe tomorrow!

Intelligences like to create. And they like to create sophisticated things. Some day, if we last that long, we'll learn how to create universes. And we'll create LOTS of them, just like we create lots of artificial worlds right now.

But since there's not much to get out of a universe that just sits there, we'll selectively create universes that can create life.

So what this means is: Any universe that is capable of producing life will, inescapably, lead to the creation of a plethora of new, life-creating universes.

And all of THOSE universes will lead to lots more life-filled universes. And so on, and so on.

No call for a supernatural deity at any point: Life evolves purely by natural selection and chance at all stages. But still, considering the vast number of intelligently-created universes that even a single naturally-occurring universe would result in, intelligently-crated universes would hugely outnumber natural ones.

And so, statistically, our universe is most likely one of those created by one of those super-advanced intelligences from some other universe.

Not supernatural, maybe not even worthy of being called "God". But an intelligent creator nonetheless.

Of course, such a creator wouldn't care in the slightest about being believed in or worshipped, any more that we want computer-generated characters to pray to us. And he wouldn't intervene to make evolution "work right" because an intelligent creator would be intelligent enough not to need to intervene - a clock that needs to be constantly adjusted by its manufacturer is a lousy, in fact downright defective, clock; A 'god' that needs to keep fiddling with a universe after it was created is not worthy of the name "supreme being"

You can draw a lot of other conclusions if you decide that you're living in a universe that did in fact have an intelligent creator, but none of them can ever have any evidence to back them up. So it's only really useful as a thought experiment. But I thought it was interesting...