What's the Difference?

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents, but his explanation also just pushes the problem back a step or two, as we'll see:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God - aliens which seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace, but it leaves unanswered the question how this advanced technological civilization came to be. Are these superintelligent, superpowerful designers self-existent creatures like the Judeo-Christian God? If so what's the difference between these beings and God?

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

So why the puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet positing unobservable aliens is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent, superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing but who still requires an explanation for its existence, and a necessarily existing God who does the same?

It seems that a scientist can offer any explanation for the existence of the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. It seems, too, that scientists have great difficulty escaping the need for a cosmic designer, but they steadfastly refuse to allow that the designer is the God of theism. We might well ask what lies behind their obduracy.