G.K. Chesterton, observes in his book Orthodoxy, that "The materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of a madman. Both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable." Nor, he says elsewhere, do either of them ever seem to have doubts.
I was reminded of this comparison while watching episode 4 of the Discovery Institute's series titled Science Uprising. Early on in this episode there's tape of Bill Nye - whom generations of middle school students came to know as the "Science Guy" - declaring with all the fervor and certainty of a madman that he's just "a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.”
Well, what Mr. Nye claims about himself may be true of Mr. Nye, I'm not in a position to disagree with him, but it's very likely not true of humanity in general.
As the brief video below points out, the universe has all the appearance of having been intentionally designed to permit life-forms like us to inhabit it. In fact, the only way to avoid this conclusion, other than to not think about it at all, is to invoke the existence of a multiverse, for which there's no empirical evidence and only scanty theoretical evidence.
The multiverse hypothesis is indeed unanswerable. There's no way to test it, and, given its extravagance (an infinity of universes!), it's scientifically intolerable and thus not fit to be entertained by serious scientists. Metaphysicians, perhaps, but not scientists.
I suspect that Chesterton might opine that invoking the existence of entities (an infinity of universes) for which there's no empirical evidence merely to escape an otherwise uncomfortable conclusion (a single Creator-Mind) - the empirical evidence for which is presented to our senses no matter the part of the universe to which we apply our microscopes and telescopes - is itself a form of madness, or at least neurosis.
Anyway, here's episode 4 of Science Uprising:
Very smart people are like very fast cars. If they start out heading in the wrong direction they just get further down the wrong road more quickly than others would.
