Cosmology

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oliversen

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William Dembski was speaking at the Univ. of Toronto when one biologist at the lecture said, "I [Dembski] must take seriously that the world is two minutes old so long as I [Dembski] accept Intelligent Design." I have an idea of what he meant by "the two minute world," but I am wondering if anyone actually knows.
 
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doubletruncation

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I would assume he means that an intelligent designer could have created the universe two minutes ago with exactly the set of initial conditions and laws (including all our memories, the apparent age of things etc) to produce the universe as we see it now. This might be an acceptable solution to the problem if you could somehow know the current conditions of everything in the universe and all the laws of nature (because then, to the extent that the universe is deterministic, you could predict everything you wanted to). But, given that many aspects of the current conditions can be understood to come about from an even simpler set of initial conditions (i.e. baryon mass density, radiation density, cosmological constant etc. just after the big bang) it would seem that understanding the history of the universe in this way is better since in practice I think it has more predictive power than using a 2 minute universe model, or a few thousand year old universe model for that matter (fewer initial conditions to determine, so you're more likely to find them and then you can guess that you've got them right and try to predict what the current set of conditions are that you don't know yet). <br /><br />The other point is that even if the 2 minute-old universe is right, you would never know it so long as you could understand the present set of conditions as the result of an apparent history of events that extends beyond 2 minutes into the past. This second point, I think, is ultimately why creationism (and intelligent design) is not a science - it's not refutable, your theory just boils down to the set of initial conditions and laws which the creator laid down with the creator/intelligent designer aspect adding no additional testable predictions. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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doubletruncation

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there is a pretty famous Bertrand Russell quote to this effect:<br /><br />"There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago."<br /><br />this was in reference to the idea that the universe could just as easily have been created 5 minutes ago as a few thousand years ago. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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derekmcd

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If Neo is "The One"... he can find out. If Jet Li is, truly "The One"... well, that's a whole nuther story. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <div> </div><br /><div><span style="color:#0000ff" class="Apple-style-span">"If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing." - Homer Simpson</span></div> </div>
 
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oliversen

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Yes, doubletruncation I think your answer is what he was talking about, since it fits the context of the rest of what the book talked about. <br /><br />Falsifiability is a different subject. ID has access to the same science, but the interpretation is different. That is another subject though. Thanks for your comments as it really does clear up the 2 minute world remark.
 
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