Something Actually Worth Reading from Skeptic Magazine
Amazing. I never thought I would find anything worth reading in Skeptic Magazine, but Robert Lawrence Kuhn has actually pulled together a fairly intelligent article entitled Why This Universe? Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations (pdf document). In the article, Kuhn notes: Since the 1970s, theists have invoked this fine-tuning argument as empirical evidence for a creator by asserting that there are only two explanations: God or chance. However to pose such a stark and simplistic choice is to construct a false and misleading dichotomy. Since the Anthropic Principle leads to multiple universes, a “multiverse,” other possible explanations are made manifest. I have documented such explanations—a constellation of what I’ll call “ultimate reality generators” in a kind of typology of cosmological conjecture. I’m sure there are more, or some could be subdivided, but generally the taxonomy can be structured with four overarching categories: One Universe Models, Multiple Universe Models, ...