The edge of the observable universe is 46-47 billion light years away.

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

Are you purposely ignoring bunny?

I don't think it was a miscalculation. In the chapter I linked he basically explains that there are 60 orders of magnitude from the smallest size we can know anything about to the largest size we can know anything about. The things in this world of our everyday experience, from ants to mountains, lie at the center of that scale.

I don't think he made a conscious decesion to frame it in terms of orders of magnitude just so it would fit nicely in the center. Using orders of magnitude is the common way of looking at things which have a broad range of values.

No, I was getting to him.....did you watch that youtube clip I posted about eclipses? I'm curious to see hear what you thought.

Right, but the actual numbers you stated put the middle at about 10^-2.5 cm, very different than your 1 to 2 meters statement earlier.

I'll try to watch the video when I get a chance.

I don't necessarily think it was conscious. It's nonetheless arbitrary (and in the above there's a further 'rounding' of -33 to -30 and +28 to 30). After all there are no ants and definitely no mountains 10^-2.5 cm - even approximately.

Quite apart from the fact that a numerical coincidence wouldn't provide any argument for design anyway (unless there is some reason a designer would prefer to have intelligent beings around about the middle of an arbitrarily chosen logarithmic scale) I just don't think there is any 'coincidence' to explain. If we had 8 fingers instead of 10 (or used a base 16 numer system or something) the calculations would similarly need to be massaged in order to be striking.

EDIT: Wikianswers says the average height of a mountain is 4000 metres (or 4x10^5 cm) an ant is what 10^0 cm? If our range of 'human scale' is 5 exponents, it's not that surprising for a randomly chosen 5-exponent range to be near the middle of a 60 exponent range. This is quite apart from all the physical laws which place upper bounds and lower bounds on where intelligence could be. Plus I have no idea why ant and mountain are seen as the extreme of 'human scale' - perhaps it should be a 10 exponent range?

It's just not that surprising a finding.

I'm too lazy to check, but wouldn't the result be the same regardless of which logarithmic scale is used? Just different total orders of magnitude, but I think the middle would fall in the same place.

I lived just north of LA and remember the riots. Not a lot happened in my neck of the woods but about a year later I was smack in the middle of riot at Six Flags...that was something else.

I agree with you that humanities place in the universe isn't strong evidence for against the existence of God. However I see quite often in this forum, atheists will use our cosmological place to make an argument that there is no God. Do you think it an error on their part?

That was my feeling too but I wasn't going to against Bunny on it as his expertise deals more with numbers than mine.

They keep saying "almost exactly 400 times" without any mention of the real values. If you actually look at the ranges of distance and size ratios, it's completely unimpressive. The average distances don't even work out to be all that close.

When you get a chance can you watch the guy's lecture and read the chapter. What we are discussing is a major theme to his book and I just don't see it likely for him to screw it up.

I was referring to Alex filippenko's remark about how unlikely an occurence it probably is in our galaxy, and that we may be the only intelligent species in the galaxy who get to observe a total eclipse. The other university professor said basically the same thing but he took it as far out as the entire universe.

16:28 - 17:02

Very polite of you, but you are both right. I was being a moron.

The arbitrariness is purely around what constitutes 'the middle' (5 vs 10 orders of magnitude) and also why we are averaging the exponents as opposed to the absolute numbers?

Fair enough - I won't watch a video, but I'll have a look at the chapter sometime.

I don't think it's an argument against God, per se. Plenty of conceptions of God are consistent with the vastness of the universe.

But it is an argument against certain conceptions of a personal God who created humans in Her image, and who has a specific concern for our welfare and offering us salvation.

By the way, I don't pretend to be a math expert, but even I know that over 60 orders of magnitude, even small rounding errors can get you any result you want. (For instance, if we estimate the size of an atom and we are off by 1.5 percent, that's going to translate into vast distances at the other end of the scale.) So this sounds quite phony even in terms of its premise (let alone its importance, which the "penis" point goes to).

No they dont (or at least i dont). They use the vastness of space to say the version of Yahweh who created this all for us is false. Which also might be an error. But i do find it odd that a God would create this all for us.

Ok I read it (I'm not one for watching videos, I'm afraid). It was interesting I guess, but I got irritated by his introduction of "Midgard" as the term for what he deems the middle scale. (I blame Fritjof Capra, personally).

I maintain it is an arbitrary result. Leaving aside my aberrant nonsense about base ten arithmetic:

1. Why should we look at exponents and 'average' those? The midpoint of 10^-33 and 10^28 is approximately 0.5*10^28. He's chosen exponentiation entirely arbitrarily - the midpoint of those has no natural significance.

2. As I mentioned above, it requires a certain wooliness in the figures anyhow. Obviously, it's fine to say a human is 10^2 cm (within an order of magnitude) - but to declare ants (10^0 cm) and mountains (10^5 cm) some kind of 'human experience limit' is purely arbitrary. FWIW, this wouldn't have been my choice - nothing in the experiences and interactions which have informed my common sense is mountain sized. I could barely stretch it to be Football Field size (say 10^4 cm) but even that is generous in my view. The things I can grasp easily using my intuitive knowledge are pretty much things between 10^0 and 10^3 cm). Someone else may use a broader scale - perhaps we should include microbes, since they cause disease and that has a direct influence on us, also we should include the Earth since it's such a significant factor in our existence - that gives a human range of 10^-3 to 10^7 or something?... All of that is obviously not worth arguing about - the point being that such a declaration of 'human scale' is a completely arbitrary thing.

3. Following on from this is the arbitrary rounding - as we've seen, a difference in orders of magnitude is huge. Yet he 'rounds' the difference between 10^-33 and 10^28 to be 60. He also 'shifts' the midpoint of those exponents (10^-2.5) a few points upward in order to declare that the midpoint is within the 'Midgard' range. Finally, as others have observed - 10^28 is a number based on our limited ability to observe the universe. Perhaps the universe is bigger - most would guess so, I suspect and I've even seen speculative estimates of how large the actual universe is (including the unobservable parts apparently). Why not use these estimates? I'm guessing he would have - if doing so would have put humans in the midpoint and the observable universe had us too close to the big end of things.

All in all, it's not a particularly inspiring coincidence, in my opinion. As he points out intelligent species pretty much have to be within a narrow scale anyhow - given his broad definition of 'human scale' to be several orders of magnitude, the actual midpoint could have been anywhere from 10^-5 to 10^7 or so and he'd be able to construct some kind of argument as to us being in a privileged position.

My questions to you (going back to your opening query of happenstance or design?) are these:

If you are to take this as evidence for design can you explain why? Given all the wooliness and the fact that very small and very big things can't be intelligent - it seems not terribly surprising at all that we would be near the middle, even if the middle was randomly generated in some way. What is it about a designer which would lead you to suggest intelligent beings should find themselves 'in the middle' of an exponential scale from smallest thing to largest thing? Why is the exponential scale the relevant thing to average rather than the actual magnitude of the extreme scales? What is it that makes the design scenario more likely than "happenstance"?

lol how did this OP warrant a serious reply?

Grunching

Stu, you realise that even if this be true, it simply puts us in the middle of an arbitrary (ie. base 10) number system right? And it would not put us in the middle of any other arbitrary number system (like base 7). In other words, 0 is in the "middle" of 10^10 and 10^-10 but not 7^10 and 7^-10 (I put middle in quotes because it is not in the middle distance wise if we were using meters, nor in a base 7 number system - it would be in the middle of 7^10 and 7^-10 were we using a base 7 number system, ie. sliding decimal places - I think).

So the size of the moon and the fact that we can have total eclipses is God jumping up and down and waving and saying "Im here!! Im here!!!" ??

When you desperately seek out evidence for the conclusion you've already decided on and attached your desperate emotions to, and the evidence you're looking for is very hard or impossible to come across, you start lowering your standards to make sure you find something - namely, exactly what you wanted to find from the beginning. If you don't lower your standards, AKA you remain objective about the topic, well, you end up an atheist like most of this forum.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Neither the number system nor the measurement used matters. See bunny's similar mistake.

You are correct as far as orders of magnitude go (I began by stating that this was not true but at the end of my statement I said it was true, so my previous post is contradictory). What I mean is that we can only be considered to be in the middle in terms of orders of magnitude. 10 (I mistakenly wrote 0 before) can be considered the 'middle' of 10^3 (1000) and 10^-3 (.1) but not of 7^3 (343) and 7^-3 (.0029). In that case, 7 would be considered the middle because we are using a base 7 system. That to which I object is claiming that we are in the middle in terms of orders of magnitude, regardless of the number system used, seems as arbitrary as claiming that there is nothing special because if we change our number system (or measurement system) significantly we would not be on the first order of magnitude.