On Leonard Susskind's Summa Contra Anthropic Principle

Leonard Susskind is an important string theory theorist who has ventured a little into the realm of non-scientific philosophy. Historically there have been several philosophers who tried to reformulate philosophy as rigorous science (Edmund Husserl wrote a couple of volumes called Logical Investigations to reiterate that point), yet they often fail in the effort to persuade us of the value of the method beyond serving to admonish us to use logical, rational thinking), scientific method though is rigorous in-itself and yields particular rather than general results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind

We understand the nature of science with its value in providing specific answers to specific inquires. The ability to falsify results of a scientific project also provides the probability of a result being true. If it cannot be false than a hypothesis has a hard time being true either. Maybe we discover that same criterion in the ability to have faith in God or even proofs of the existence or non-existence of God, yet as in science we know the results are only probable answers conditional in nature.

We agree with C.S. Pierce (a 19th century American philosopher) that science and logic provide results that work. Pierce invented the philosophy of pragmatism. For example, if one invents a new dance step on a slave plantation to win a contest on the theory that its best, and one does win the contest and ‘take the cake’ given to the winner traditionally, then one’s aesthetic judgment about the quality of the step and of the opinion of the judges is true. A better example might be postulating how to make the chemicals for a match, putting them together and testing them. Implicitly the hypothesis might have been false and the results hence falsifiable.

Dr. Susskind has written a book named The Cosmic Landscape; String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he has taken a step away from the obvious realm of scientific method beyond even the criterion of philosophy as rigorous science. That is o.k. however, for speculative thought sometimes advances the range of knowledge by providing hypothetical and possibly falsifiable models that may be used to construct new theories. C.S. Pierce in inventing pragmatism also created the concept of a trielectical nominative thought process of human consciousness. Of course today we know that there are more than a 100 trillion and consciousness associated with regions of a brain exists as a phenomenal cloud with ideas transcending time in a way with past memories, present thought and awareness and ‘anticipatory text’-like ideas drawn from experience and inference. Susskind’s speculative efforts to venture through a kind of anti-proof of Intelligent Design, or more specifically the anthropic principle, does yield some interesting data as it should.

http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Landscape-String-Illusion-Intelligent/dp/0316155799

The Anthropic principles weak and strong appear as factual in the physical fine tuning of constants in cosmology. One may reasonably postulate a non-theistic explanation for the phenomenon, yet Christian theologians do not at any rate try to prove the existence of God through scientific proofs of Intelligent Design or even the strong or weak Anthropic principles evident as they are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

In fact scientific data acquisition about the Universe and its fundamental nature are changing faster even than theory about its constants and nature. String theory developed in the 1970s, while the acceleration of the Universe was discovered just in 1999. Now, dark energy is thought to comprise 70% of the universe, dark matter 26% and atoms or matter just 4%. While space telescopes have photographed light emissions to within 380,000 years of the creation of the universe from its point of inflation in the first second, the strange fact that humans are able to seem the beginning of the Universe in which they live existentially (trough the time it takes for light to travel to Earth in an expanding Universe) ought to strike people as rather strange. Even if there were a trillion trillion universes created in a multiverse, humanity might have existed at any other such point in space-time such that the first photons issued within the first million years of the universe could never have been captured for observation.

String theory is a marvelous tool for leveraging information about the quantum world. The theories about the quantum world and the Universe itself are moving targets themselves however, and the arguments about speculative constructions of extra universes, pre-universes, membranes, strings and space-time have infinite possibilities for themselves. String theory provides half a million different solutions to correct quantum equations describing the real condition of the quantum universe while the data about the observable universe itself is changing. That makes for uncertainty in the nature of the results, in its falsifiability and in where in space-time to place the data.

As Christians we enjoy the scientific efforts to provide knowledge of a factual kind, yet as philosophers we like to know when speculation is less than rigorously scientific producing pejorative opinion instead of hard data.