House of cards ... from the article:
Rather, he suggests that if there exists some process by which parent universes spawn new universes with small, random changes in their physical parameters, and if the characteristics of a universe determine how many progeny it produces, then fine-tuned universes like ours can arise by cosmological natural selection.
In particular, if new universes are produced by black-hole bounces, then universes in which stars (and thus black holes) can form are 'fitter' than others. After a period of time, you would expect the universes produced by this process to have a set of cosmological parameters that maximizes the number of black holes that can form.
There is always a beginning. Hawking, Steinhardt and other cosmologist/physicists recognize the theological significance and try much more rigorously than Smolin to defeat the fact of a beginning, evidently also in order to deny God.
By comparison, Smolin's speculation is much ado about nothing.
Also, Smolin is trying to employ Darwin’s “random mutations plus natural selection” to avoid the plentitude argument, i.e. that anything that can happen has. But because we know there was a beginning, there cannot be an infinity of opportunity. The author evidently realizes this because he pleads "But if there were enough universes, a tiny fraction..."
A-G, the idea that all can be explained by the measurable is purely and simply blind faith of the most irrational kind.
Even if there weren't a beginning--that there were a beginning is just a guess since some three-year old asked gramps where he came from--that would not imply that an earth, our earth, necessarily has to exist. In an infinity all possible things will happen--that hypothesis is a violation of stochastic principles.
Works either way, don't it. :^)
And do most people that believe in a god.
So, did God have a beginning? If you say "no" then why do you think the universe had to have one?
I can't resist this subject. Everyone has an opinion. Observations don't yet rule out one answer or the other, but seem to suggest our favorite conclusion -- whatever that may be. So we keep on looking. The topic doesn't grow old. Not to me anyway.
Not if the cosmology allows closed timelike loops or is infinite in time (e.g. a de Sitter universe). Moreover, a beginning--particularly a beginning to time itself--does not imply a cause.
God cannot be proven or disproven by logic. He lives in your heart or He does not.
You might view it that way, but I thing the science behind this argues, not against God, but against an interpretation of God.
So, it could be wrong...but at least it's science."
Uh-huh. Scient if ic.