Your reasoning will no doubt be seen again and again when we are conversing with atheists. As you say,
BTW, one of the things I find quite annoying with multi-verse physical cosmology theory is the presumption that the physical laws and constants of this universe would apply to prior ones. That is a statement of faith not reason.
Thank you also for that beautiful link to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey!
Well I would say that any property is the result of entities acting in accordance with their nature and in accordance with natural laws. The fact that science can’t explain, yet, some phenomenon does not give us permission to invoke a supernatural explanation. What is solved by doing that? It doesn’t explain anything. God by definition is unknowable and incomprehensible. That conception is an attack on reason itself. Far from clarifying anything it puts an end to any rational inquiry.
When looking for the “why” of anything you have to start someplace right? You can’t have an infinite regress of causes, that’s the first cause argument. As soon as you allow for a something that just is and needs no explanation there is no rational reason to exclude nature from that list of things that just are and always have been. So by invoking a supernatural cause you are saying “I know the universe exists with certain natural laws but I don’t like that answer so I am going to jump to some unknowable, undefinable, incomprehensible being instead as an explanation. Something that is unknowable and unexplainable can’t be an explanation for anything.
As for M theory, scientists are proposing it because the big bang theory is limited by the fact that relativity as a theory is incomplete and that is why scientists are looking for a unified theory or quantum theory of gravity. But here is the difference between a theory and a supernatural being as an explanation: Once science has a theory it does not stop there. In fact a theory is only the beginning of the inquiry. It has to be tested and verified and that process never stops. 300 years from now we will still be verifying the theory of relativity or whatever new theory encompasses it and goes further. When you say “God did it” that is the end of any further investigation.
I totally reject the dichotomy between matter and spirit (consciousness). I reject materialism. We know that both matter and spirit exist together in nature, that man is an integration of the two and there is no reason to separate them. All the evidence points to consciousness being a result of biology, of our brains, but even if we never understand where it comes from, an inquiry into the origins of anything can not go outside of existence (nature) to look because there is by definition nothing there.
Without anisotropy we could not exist; without isotropy we cannot survive.And yes, it certainly should cause people to recognize "Divine Providence" - i.e. that God is the Creator.
QUESTION: how can one explain (mathematically or otherwise) that both isotropy and anisotropy coexist in our universe -- without invoking an external "Cause"?I don't see how they can explain it away. It would be interesting to watch and I'm pinging a few from a thread about atheism to solicit their response to the challenge, if they have a response.
I do not identify as an atheist, but regardless, I don't understand the value of this argument. It seems as though you've chosen a phenomenon that you don't think science will ever be able to explain and said, "See? That means God must have done it." But what do you do if science does explain it? What if there turns out to be a perfectly reasonable, all-nature explanation for the existence of both isotropy and anisotropy? What does that do to your confidence in Divine Providence? Why make God dependent on what we understand and don't understand about how His universe works?