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Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant?

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Neon Genesis:
I was listening to a debate between Hugh Ross and Lewis Wolpert over whether or not cosmology proves the existence of God.  In one part of the debate, Hugh Ross started quoting all these atheists and agnostics that supposedly agree with him that the universe points to an intelligent designer.  At one point, he quotes some paper from a group of unnamed physicists called "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant."  Hugh Ross claims that at one part of the article, the unnamed physicists admit that there was so much low entropy at the beginning of the universe that the only way a universe could be formed from this low entropy was if an external agent existed outside of space and time. 

Hugh Ross almost immediately then jumps to the conclusion that this external agent must be the god of the bible and the scientists only rejected the idea of a cosmological constant because they didn't like that it proved the existence of God.  I mean, an external agent that exists outside space and time that scientists don't like?  Obviously it must clearly prove Jesus created the universe.   ::) I tried Googling this paper but all I can find out about it coincidentally happens to come from an article Hugh Ross himself wrote from his own website.  Clearly this is too coincidental and must prove God created the Reasons To Believe website?  Hugh Ross also cherry picked a verse from Isaiah where it talks about God stretching out the heavens as proof that the bible predicted the expanding universe long before science did and this proves Jesus created the universe but wouldn't the idea of the expanding universe contradict Genesis chapter 1 which claims God finished his creation on the sixth day?

Chew:

--- Quote from: Neon Genesis on Aug 14, 2012, 11:21:05 AM ---Hugh Ross also cherry picked a verse from Isaiah where it talks about God stretching out the heavens as proof that the bible predicted the expanding universe long before science did and this proves Jesus created the universe but wouldn't the idea of the expanding universe contradict Genesis chapter 1 which claims God finished his creation on the sixth day?

--- End quote ---

"stretched out the heavens"? Past tense? It doesn't say "I stretch the heavens". According to that verse the universe is static.

Entropy is time dependent. If an agent existed outside time then it couldn't influence the entropy of the early universe.

Trinoc:
This paper?

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0208013

Lukas:

--- Quote from: Neon Genesis on Aug 14, 2012, 11:21:05 AM ---I was listening to a debate between Hugh Ross and Lewis Wolpert over whether or not cosmology proves the existence of God.  In one part of the debate, Hugh Ross started quoting all these atheists and agnostics that supposedly agree with him that the universe points to an intelligent designer.  At one point, he quotes some paper from a group of unnamed physicists called "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant."  Hugh Ross claims that at one part of the article, the unnamed physicists admit that there was so much low entropy at the beginning of the universe that the only way a universe could be formed from this low entropy was if an external agent existed outside of space and time. 

--- End quote ---
They mention the "external agent" possibility, but certainly not as the only solution to the paradoxes they discover. Here are some direct quotes from the paper (which is certainly written by real well-respected physicists):

Introduction

--- Quote ---The question then is whether the origin of the universe can be a naturally occurring fluctuation, or must it be due to an external agent which starts the system out in a specific low entropy state? We will discuss this in greater detail in Section 6.

--- End quote ---

Section 6:

--- Quote ---We are forced to conclude that in a recurrent world like de Sitter space our universe would be extraordinarily unlikely.

What then are the alternatives? We may reject the interpretation of de Sitter space based on complementarity. For example, an evolution of the causal patch based on standard Hamiltonian quantum mechanics may be wrong. What would replace it is a complete mystery.

Another possibility is an unknown agent intervened in the evolution, and for reasons of its own restarted the universe in the state of low entropy characterizing inflation. However, even this does not rid the theory of the pesky recurrences.

[...]

We wish to emphasize that the above conclusions appear to be the inevitable consequence of the following assumptions:

• There is a fundamental cosmological constant.
• We can apply the ideas of holography and complementarity to de Sitter space.
• The time evolution operator is unitary, so that phase space area is conserved.

Perhaps the only reasonable conclusion is that we do not live in a world with a true cosmological constant.

--- End quote ---

In other words, even the external agent theory does not resolve the paradoxes completely, and the conclusion is that currently they have no clue how to resolve these. Leave it to creationists to twist this into a proof of God...

Anders:
The interpretations point to an 'external agent'. How you make the leap from this to an 'intelligent designer' is... interesting.

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