Re: Meaning of "fine-tuning"

From: george murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Tue Oct 24 2000 - 14:29:23 EDT

  • Next message: george murphy: "Re: Meaning of "fine-tuning""

    Moorad Alexanian wrote:

    > No scientist can prove that the sun will definitely rise tomorrow. Our laws
    > describe more the regularity of the past than future actions. All
    > scientific laws are generalizations of historical (past) propositions. The
    > ability to make predications with the aid of our mathematical laws is a
    > mystery, which can only be solved if we know the unknowable, how God
    > interacts with nature?

            It is an amazing and mysterious fact that we can predict quantitative
    aspects of the future, & even qualitatively new phenomena, with a considerable
    degree of success with mathematical laws: "The discrepancy between a movement
    of atoms in an astronomer's cortex, and his understanding that there must be a
    still unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the
    Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling" (C.S.
    Lewis, _Miracles_). But it is a fact, & one which does not depend upon any
    knowledge of how God interacts with the world. Certainly Steven Weinberg made
    no appeal to divine action in developing electroweak unification which
    predicted, among other things, a neutral partner to the charged W bosons.
            Of course our predictions sometimes fail. Our laws are only
    approximations to the full mathematical pattern of the universe, & we sometimes
    need to improve them. But that doesn't change the fact that they're already
    pretty good.

    > The sovereignty of God cannot be lost by any
    > pattern that man observes in nature. Thanks for your penetrating comments.

        God's sovereignty includes God's ability to limit divine action to what is
    in accord with the pattern
    God has built into the universe.

    Shalom,

    George



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