Saturday, March 9, 2013

"Cosmic Lottery" Examined

Thoughts on an article against the teleological argument.


Criticisms of Dr. Wai hung-Wong’s article the “Cosmic Lottery.”

  1. Dr, Wong is arbitrary or at best begs the question on how the universe is life permitting rather than not.
  2. Dr. Wong assumes with the analogies of a lottery and pulling of straws that the universe by chance could have taken on different states of affairs. The difficulty is that this assumption means chance could have produced either a world with or without laws that would allow life to exist. But it sounds very similar to the pop theory. Such a view things cannot be explained, so people say that things just pop into being by nothing. Or worse, the anthropic principle is by luck or coincidence. Why not just say the universe magically came to be life permitting. Dr. Wong seems to be saying that if the universe randomly is life permitting out of all the possible universes, it does not require an explanation, since it has peculiar features as other possible universes. He ultimately is saying it is the drop of the dice. Such a view seems just as arbitrary to say it was by magic we have a life permitting universe. Both answers seem to beg the question on giving an explanation on how the universe came to be life permitting with laws (e.g. the laws of gravity) that preserve life.    

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