Reply #90: The evidence is so strong

[Stunster]

that leading scientists like Rees, Linde and Susskind have been rushing to posit an infinity of unobservable parallel universes (aka the Multiverse) in order to avoid the design inference.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/susskind03/susskind_index.html
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge116.html
http://www.stnews.org/guide_confirm_0105.html

The irony of positing an infinity of unobservables in order to avoid positing one infinite unobservable has not been lost on theists, I might add.

But the multiverse idea, by which the apparently fine-tuned features of this universe are to be explained by a kind of cosmic natural selection mechanism actually doesn't help overcome the basic problem affecting any alleged global explanatoriness of natural selection as a scientifically inferred mechanism.

For natural selection to work at all, it must work upon some domain.
To identify any domain whatsoever in the first place, science must find order of some kind pertaining to that domain. For example, one multiverse theorist is Smolin. But he has to construct
mathematically a physical theory in order to infer the existence of the domain upon which his natural selection mechanism is supposed to work. But if the domain in question was devoid of order altogether, Smolin couldn't mathematically construct a coherent physical theory referring to it or identifying it.

Because science always needs to discover some intelligible order as a feature of what it is investigating in order even to identify anything at all as being a physical reality, every domain upon which natural selection is proposed to operate must already be ordered in some way.

Hence, natural selection cannot be the sole explanation of order in nature, unless one posits an infinite unobservable (such as an infinite brane, as in the Randall-Sundrum model), or an infinity of unobservables----which kinda defeats the purpose of relying on natural selection in the first place, which was to explain phenomena without positing anything infinite and/or unobservable (such as God is supposed to be).

I.e. Some order, at some level of scientific analysis, must be primitive. It can't all be generated by natural selection. Or else, one must posit an infinity of some kind, which by definition must be scientifically unobservable by finite scientists.