The ever-growing knowledge of the complexity of the Universe and Life is leading many thinkers to the conclusion that such systems cannot appear at random but have an Intelligence behind them. They fit too much together and are fine tune to result in the possibility of stars, planets, life and finally, humans. The list of the fine-tuned aspects (physical constants, arrangement of planets, chemical properties, proteins, etc.) continues to become larger and larger.
The opponents of Intelligent Design have come to alternative explanations of the fine-tuning of the Universe. One of them is the concept of a Multiverse, which consists of an immense number of universes. If so many exist, it is possible that by chance we are placed in one in which all the physical laws and constants happen to fit such that we can exist. (I will write about the Multiverse theory in another post.)
The huge improbability of a purely naturalistic explanation draws a particular observation from the dedicated materialistic or atheistic thinkers.
“It is a matter of imagination! You, theists, lack the power or the will to imagine how all these could have come together through purely naturalistic ways.”
Such an observation is followed by phrases like “It is possible that…,” or “We can easily imagine that…,” or “We do not know yet, but one day Science may discover that…”
Imagination now runs wild. Darwin claimed that life MAY have started in a small warm pond. There is no scientific evidence, but WE CAN IMAGINE it. It is an established fact that accidental mutations are in most cases detrimental to a species, but we can GUESS that given millions of years, something may have miraculously happened to perfect the organisms.
“The sleep or reason produces monsters” is the title of a painting of the Spanish painter Goya. We can replace that with “Too much imagination produces monsters.”
Now I come to my main subject, Boltzmann Brains, named for the German physicist B.
The idea is the following: weird things may happen in the Universe. In the billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars, there are super-large clouds of gas made of hydrogen, helium, and possible other heavier elements. These clouds may extend to hundreds of light years, in an unimaginable immensity. Strange things may happen in these clouds.
Perhaps somewhere there is some shape which looks like a Tesla car, another like an perfect elephant and another which looks like Emperor Napoleon. In fact, we can go much further. One such strange object may be a brain. We are not only talking of outside appearance, but also of complete functionality (the scale does not matter). It is possible that this brain is endowed with a complete memory of childhood. It may have feelings and profound thoughts. It may see people and cities and mountains. Ultimately all these are just illusions created by absolutely random processes, which became possible by the immensity of the space clouds and the number of galaxies. We call these strange objects Boltzmann Brains.
You may be yourself nothing else but a Boltzmann Brain. Furthermore, it seems that it is more probably that you are a Boltzmann Brain than the human being which you think you are, living on planet Earth, having parents and brothers and sisters and children and a community in which you live. After all, the reality which you perceive is more complex than the Boltzmann Brain you are. Imagination and the illusion of reality is cheaper and easier to exists than the reality itself.
If you are really a Boltzmann Brain, your reality may by chance start to behave in a strange way. The sun may suddenly disappear and in stead of it you will see a rabbit running across the sky. In the next moment you will figure up how to give a simple demonstration of Fermat’s theorem. The possibilities are endless.
Science as an instrument to discover the Truth dissolves. There is no physics, no chemistry, and no biology. There is no Truth, there is no ultimate reality and there is no reality at all. It is all an illusion created by the random and strange and coincidental fluctuation of various fields and particles inside a galaxy gas cloud.
I do not know about you, but I do not believe I am a Boltzmann Brain. I believe I live on a real Planet Earth, I have a real family and I live in a nice American city. Most important, I believe I am a human being created in the image of God.