The God of Very Large Numbers

My glow in the dark Virgin Mary

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I went to Catholic schools. Mindful of the blow to its credibility caused by 500 years of scientific discovery, the Catholic Church is exceptionally careful about explaining gaps in scientific knowledge as being attributable to the Hand of God. Unlike the Catholic Church of the past, kids of my generation were not preached the Gospel of the God of the Gaps. Sensible advice. In future, the Church will absolutely not position itself in such a way that it would be discredited by any future scientific discoveries. The Catholic Church actually mildly endorses Big Bang Theory as it is in keeping with current scientific beliefs AND consistent with a Creative Event instigated by a Creator Being. Regardless of what many people choose to believe, the Catholic Church is surprisingly moderate and progressive on matters of science and sees science as the honourable task of seeking to understand the beauty of God's Creation.
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Born-again, fundamentalist Christians are a lot less cautious about their attitude to modern science and frequently choose to tackle modern scientific beliefs aggressively and head-on. Science has responded by developing its own fundamentalist belief system, the belief in the God of Very Large Numbers.
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The God of Very Large Numbers is an extremely potent deity indeed. Is evolution a particularly hard idea to swallow, backed as it is by a complete absence of hard, unequivocal evidence? Don’t worry, we have 4,500 million years to play with. Lots could have happened in 4,500 million years. Do some of the explanations of the formation of the Universe and its contents not quite add up? No problemmo, 14,500 million years is yours to fill with imaginative and unverifiable thoughts.
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For most of the history of geology and biology, the fundamental principle that all past events could be explained by reference to events that take place today held sway. This principle, the principle of Uniformitarianism, is intellectually dishonest rubbish and was only invented as a weapon against religious belief. Any events explained away by catastrophic Acts of God in the past could be dismissed as being unscientific because they could not be observed taking place today. Even though Uniformitarianism is fundamentalist scientific crap it was still taught when I was a University student in the 1980s and probably still is.
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Uniformitarianism is demonstrably nonsense because our very existence depends on a series of events that cannot be observed today; the creation of the universe, the formation of our solar system, the beginning of life, even evolution itself. None of these are supported by any hard, contemporary evidence. If anyone does spot the spontaneous creation of a new universe or life springing from inanimate matter please tell me. I'd love to know.
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(PS If any geologists came across this blog and take issue with my claim could they please write and tell me where on Earth limestone or evaporite beds are currently being formed or, failing that, a workable theoretical explanation for their formation. Yes. You've sketched it, You've hit it with your hammer. And No. You haven't the faintest blinking idea where it came from).
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Anyway, there was a program on television last night modestly titled 'What we still don’t know'. Apparently, the humble answer is not very much. We know how the universe formed, where life came from and why we are what we are today.
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There are a couple of flies in the ointment however.
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One of the biggest flies is that literally dozens of scientific constants appear to be fine-tuned to support our existence. This observation is known as The Anthropic Principle. If any of these constants; the force of gravity, the charges that bind atoms, were as little as 1% different we simply couldn’t exist. The traditional explanation from science was that if those constants weren't the way they were we wouldn’t be here to ponder about them. As explanations go this isn’t very useful but scientists embraced it, as the alternative was to acknowledge the existence of a Creator.
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Then someone discovered a new constant, the Cosmological Constant. The cheeky thing about the Cosmological Constant is that if it was different, either way, by as little as 10 to the power of minus 120 we wouldn’t be here. This means that, to all intents and purposes, it is pretty much impossible for the Universe to have been created at random.
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Oops, it was looking like science might have to accept the probability of a Creator after all. However, never fear, the God of Very Large Numbers is here.
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Last night's program explained that our Universe only appears to be fine-tuned for the existence of life because there are zillions of other universes to choose from. If you postulate a Multiverse packed full with an almost infinite number of universes then the existence of one fine-tuned universe isn’t remarkable at all. The very eminent scientists explaining the concept of a Multiverse talked about the concept as if it were a fact, largely because even though as an idea it's completely insane, the alternative is to recognise the probability of a Creator. Scientists would much prefer to make up lunatic crap rather than ever do that.
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Sadly for the cause of atheistic scientists, if they choose to make stuff up, Bill and Ted style, I can play the same game. I can just as validly postulate:

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'In a Multiverse filled with an almost infinite number of universes it is possible that, in another universe, a super intelligent life form has evolved. For purposes only known to that life form it has decided to model our universe and we are just constructs of an enormous computer simulation. This super intelligence is in fact our Creator'

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F***, we're back to the scientific possibility of God again.
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Of course, there's no way of proving my postulation but, of course, there's no way of proving the Multiverse theory, so they're equally valid.
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People have grappled with what is scientific and what is religious thinking for centuries. To date, our best definition of a scientific statement is a statement that is open to disproval by experiment. If I say something that is not open to be proved false then it's not science, it's a statement of faith. I could claim that our entire universe, complete with all our memories, was created 30 seconds ago. This statement might be very well true but, because it cannot be disproved, it is not scientific. On this definition, pretty much everything that constitutes modern, cutting-edge science, hitting documentary TV, popular science books and in-flight magazines is actually religious thinking. That includes Big Bang, The Multiverse, The Origin of Life and Evolution.
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Really.
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Think about the claim that we actually live in a Multiverse composed of a huge number of universes all governed by different physical laws and constants. How could we ever conceive of observing those other universes? We can't. We physically couldn’t be able to. This isn’t science
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it's bollocks.
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