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with an infinite number of worlds, everything is possible

This point is by Bill Dembski: it's possible that Rubenstein knows nothing about piano yet hits keys randomly right before perfect music plays. His point is to show that if an infininte number of universes get rid of the anthropic principle, it gets rid of a whole lot of other stuff besides (including, I would add, science).
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Unknown said…
Polkinghorne (sp?) says that even with infinite multiverses, representing different variations of the laws of physics, there would still be some law beneath them that would have to be "just right" for the whole thing to *be* at all.

I suppose if the infinite variations truly represented every logical possibility, then there would be no true underlying physical laws. (As far as I'm aware, though, this isn't what multiverse proposers say.) In that case, there truly would be no "laws" to speak of! Is that what you mean by - there would be no science?
11:27 AM
Leo White said…
I kinda agree with Polkinghorne in the following way: to be able to say why two universes are not the same, you have to say that they are not the same X, where X is something applicable to both. Taking my point of departure from how we talk and know, I would presumptuously infer that following applies to any two universes: that each difference they have is a difference in X, where X is something generic to the two.

Uh, thinking about what I just said, I am not so sure that the word "bloviation" doesn't apply, but in any case, it's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Regarding infinite variations, I like what Dembski says. He is having fun with logical possibilities, which include a lot of things that, if taken seriously, would seem absurd to us. His real point seems to me to be that if an infinite variety of universes includes these logical possibilities, then how do you know that you don't live in one of them right now? And to the degree that you are unable to give an answer to that question, science no longer seems to look that much like knowledge and more like wishful thinking, i.e., science looks rather unscientific.
9:21 PM
Leo White said…
Looking at this argument again, it seems to me that Dembski may be engaging in an appeal to ignorance: "How do you know it isn't so--that hitting the keys and the sounding of music merely coincide rather than being causally related?" But he seems to commit that fallacy only if you take his argument more seriously than he probably intended (then again, if there is an infinite number of universes, we may be in the one where he is arguing in a straightforward manner).

In any case, the claim that there is an infinite variety of universes isn't the same as the claim that every logically possible universe exists. If the latter is the case, then the former is too; but not vice versa.
8:39 AM
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