So, many atheists would claim that the fine-tuning argument is one of the best arguments for god.
This argument, in what is considered its strongest form, is that the constants of the universe, for example, the gravitational constant, have a range that supports life, and this range is basically 0 in comparison to the size of the real number line, so it would seem that these numbers were fine-tuned by a god who specifically wanted a universe with life.
I have thought of a sort of comeback to this argument, and it centers around the question of why god would want to make life. A god that is all-powerful could have wanted to make anything, yet it chose to make life, and specifically human life.
If you claim that this is due to God’s properties of being all good, well then, why does God have this property at all? I can more easily see how someone might think god himself would be necessary, but I see no reason why being all good would be a necessary property.
And even still, why make specifically humans? The design of humans seems very arbitrary if it were to be made by a god, so why would he make us the very specific way he did? It seems like the only answer to these questions is that it’s just the way it is, and in that case I can respond the same way for why the universe has the constants it does.
What do you mean? I wouldn’t say it presupposes that life was a goal. It just says that if the constants could have been anything, without a mind that specifically wanted life, having life would be very unlikely.
Whenever I think of the existence of God my mind always goes back to the concept of a simulation, like matrix the movie.
It’s kind of a dumb parallel but my reasoning is that if life really is a simulation then maybe all that we know was ‘told’ by someone above us, not a god per se but just someone that has more power than a human, like the periodic table, maybe in this simulation (or plane, layer, etc..) the values are like this because someone made them to be like that, and in the world above they are completely different.
I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, in short the point that I’m making is that we don’t know enough about how the universe works, Aristoteles thought that the universe revolved around the earth, we know now that that’s false, but in his perspective there was real evidence to justify that fact, until of course more information came to light, which made the information already know corrected.
I haven’t read a lot about astronomy but I heard somewhere that we know that dark matter is like half of the universe and still we don’t know anything about it.
I think rationalising god is futile (at least with the information of the modern world). Maybe in the future we will be able to but for now we just have faith to guide us.
The argument is just something like, “This degree of exact coincidence is implausible without a guiding intelligence.”
You are asking questions like, “Why is God good?,” “Why would God make humans in the specific way he did?,” etc. I don’t see that these questions have much to do with the fine-tuning argument. Indeed, the fine-tuning argument takes no stance on whether God is good, or whether he had to make us in the way he did, etc.
Isn’t the usual atheist response something like this: the fine-tuning argument assumes that life is the target and that the universe was somehow arranged to hit it. But life is not independent of the universe’s conditions. Life evolved within the environment that exists, and species are continually shaped by those conditions. Note also that the vast majority of species that have ever existed are extinct because they could not adapt to environmental change. Bloody wasteful approach by a God if design perfection is the goal, right?
So the point is the fine-tuning argument gets the relationship backwards. Life is not an independent target that the universe happens to fit; it’s a product of the conditions that exist. So we should expect ourselves to be in a universe compatible with our existence, rather than treating this as a remarkable coincidence.
As arguments go, the fine-tuning argument never really convinced me as an atheist. A better argument is C. S. Lewis’, who raised the question of how it is that a purely material universe could give rise to human reason and to our apparent ability to grasp truth about reality. This connects to the broader issue of the intelligibility of nature: why a mindless physical world should be structured in a way that is so consistently accessible to minds.
Why should God comply with human concepts and logic? It seems a bit ridiculous to me, it’s like telling God "God, if you want to exist, you must comply with our human concept of existence, our human logic, our human ideas, otherwise, I am sorry, you are not allowed to exist.
Who says there’s fine tuning? Cosmic natural selection vis-a-vis multiverse theory, supported by data; fine-tuned for rocks and gas; the vacuum energy \ne 0, making this the worst possible universe for life (?), the entropy of the early universe is orders of magnitude less than it needs to be for life; anthropic principle; contraduction (oh look how perfectly the penis fits the condom ); why does an omnipotent god need to fine-tune anything?; there could be exotic life that thrive under different conditions in different universes; heat death of the universe; 99.9\% of all species that existed have gone extinct; Evolution is survival of the fittest and death of the weakest;
It must be said that the cosmological constant doesn’t seem to have been picked randomly from a bag (the worst prediction in the history of physics - off by a factor of 10^{120}), but it would be better for life if the value = 0 (?)
The answer that seens to be emerging is that we live in a multiverse. There are several scientific theories which allow the existence of various types of multiverse. But lets assume that the Universe is for all practical purposes infinitely large and slightly different conditions apply within it in different localities. In some parts of the Multiverse, the condititions are statistically likely to be right for life. In these localities conscious beings exist who wonder why it is that the initial conditions are so precisely suited to them. As you are interested in religion this seems close to the Universe described by Giordano Bruno
The point is that you cannot get anything like life if you tweak some of the constants or something like the entropy of the early universe. If it is physically impossible for any atom other than hydrogen to form, for planets and stars to form, etc., it would be seemingly impossible for anything remotely like life to form. The argument isn’t about the type of life we happen to find in the cosmos, but there being anything to experience anything at all.
So, I think a premise in the type of response you are offering would have to say that the difference between life/complex systems and any physical system at all is not a material difference.
Another way to frame it is in terms of frequency, but this only works with multiple universes, which have their own plausibility problems.
The popularity of the multiverse theory is largely that it answers the Fine Tuning Problem.
But if you’re willing to accept that everything possible happens, even timelines where the Red Sea splits when Moses touched it with his staff, Christ came back to life through a just-so quantum flux, and all shall experience quantum immortality, but only if these are the product of a mechanistic principle, then the preference for mechanistic principles starts to look more like a deeply rooted aesthetic prererence than anything else.
Like all such arguments it simply passes the buck and refuses to obey its own logic.
If it’s impossible for a universe like this to exist without a “guiding intelligence” then surely it’s impossible for this “guiding intelligence” to exist without its own “guiding intelligence”.
There are many strong counter-arguments to the fine-tuning argument; I’ll list a few below. I think the OP’s questions / arguments though are not actually about fine-tuning at all. Asking why God wanted life, why he wanted humans specifically etc…these are questions people could have asked centuries ago before anyone thought to invoke fine tuning.
Anyway, some of the counter-arguments off the top of my head:
We don’t know if the constants really have arbitrary values; many former constants have been found to be derived from simpler physical properties
There could be a multiverse, hence all values of the constants exist
The universe doesn’t look very fine-tuned, given that the vast majority of its volume is extremely hostile to life.
We don’t know if other constants’ values could also produce some kind of life, particularly if the constants are coupled
…and others. The last time I did this exercise, I think I listed 7 or 8 counter arguments, but I feel the above 4 are the main ones, so I’ll stop here
Not really. The conditions of the universe may have been similar to that of Earth, in that the conditions here are perfect for evolving matter to advanced matter (life). That in some infinite existence of many universal bubbles, all with random set of physical constants, one of them ends up in the perfect conditions for the kind of stable evolution of matter which our universe found itself in.
So the fine-tuning argument is just dismissing that more plausible possibility.
Fine-tuning argument isn’t really saying that humans were the deliberate end point of the fine-tuning. The fine-tuning argument is more related to a scientist who sets up lab conditions in the hopes of growing some organic matter towards some point, but that the exact conditions they turn out to be are too chaotic for there to be any theory on exact outcomes.
In essence, a fine-tuning God would have set the initial conditions and then in some areas of the petri dish that is our universe, some life began to grow and be shaped and formed by the chaos of that specific petri dish.
Basically, it’s the problem that’s plagued theology for a long time. With each new frontier of knowledge about the universe, the goal posts are constantly shifting further and further to conclude that there is a God.
So then, where does it end? For each new era of knowledge we reach, believers and theologians reshape and rephrase their definitions of what God is to always be right outside the reach of the current understanding in science and physics. Tomorrow we might present new evidence which moves the horizon of knowledge further, and the believers and theologians will rush to invent new ways of keeping God just beyond the reach of our understanding.
This behavior itself should raise flags for anyone accepting reasonings and arguments in favor of God.
I think the main idea behind the objection is that “guiding intelligence” doesn’t yield a better explanation than a brute fact, unless everything that it is supposed to explain is front-loaded into it, for without such front-loading we would be left without any specific guidance for a life-supporting universe. But if the explanandum has to be front-loaded into the explanans, then the explanans is no better than the brute fact that we sought to explain away – worse indeed, since we would then have more to explain than what we started with, not less.
I’m not sure if I’m following your argument. Suppose we have two theses: guiding intelligence or brute fact. The explanandum is the phenomenon of fine-tuning, and given such an explanandum, the explanans of a guiding intelligence fits better than a brute fact. Similarly, you could say that the watch that Paley finds is just a brute fact, but that’s an intrinsically implausible thesis.
Apparently you are raising a different argument than the one which favors a brute fact as an explanans. You seem to be saying something like, “The watch we found is complex; it requires an explanation because of its complexity; a complex artifact can only come from an equally or more complex artificer; therefore there is a more-complex artificer that needs explaining.” You can make that argument and furnish your premises, but I don’t see how the conclusion entails the thesis that the “watch” was just a brute fact in the first place.
The fine-tuning argument does exercise atheists and scientists in an interesting way, but the response that is generally favored is a multiverse theory, not a brute-fact theory. As has been pointed out, the multiverse theory is largely motivated by this exact issue.
Can someone explain how the multiverse theory explains away any apparent fine-tuning in the shape of things in our universe? If someone believes the shape of things in our universe is one accidental exercise of many possibilities, why do there need to be multiple other universes that exercise all of the other possibilities, and further, how does the exercise of all the possibilities allow for the shape of things to be accidental in the individual, “parallel” universes?
It all just seems like a Marvel movie serving as a scientific theory. And it doesn’t explain functioning systems to me, it just changes the subject. Maybe the watch was left in the forest by time traveling monkeys who were still trying to accidentally type out a Shakespearean sonnet, but had already accidentally built a watch for no reason because they didn’t care what time it was because of the Time Machine (so they just left the watch)? Why doesn’t that work as well as multiverse theory?
The thesis that there is or was some kind of guiding intelligence does not explain anything on its own. For all we know, the intelligence could have guided towards anything whatsoever, or it could have sat on its thumbs and done nothing. In order for guiding intelligence to explain X you need to posit that said intelligence guided specifically towards X. That makes for a worse than worthless explanation, if you excuse the alliteration. It simply reiterates what we wanted to explain and then adds more stuff on top that we didn’t ask for.
Paley’s watch is not a fit metaphor here (nor was it for Paley), because there we have a rich source of background knowledge to draw upon. Not so in the case of the origin of the universe. Here we don’t have any background knowledge; without sneaking in any theological or anthropocentric baggage, any intelligence that we posit would have to be entirely sui generis.
@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus, @Leontiskos, @FireOlogist: There are a lot of misconceptions about cosmological “multiverses” and cosmological fine-tuning. Suffice to say that the narrative that the multiverse was posited by atheistic cosmologists in order to block the fine-tuning argument for God is entirely false. I suggest keeping to the topic as stated in the OP, which I take to be largely an epistemological argument.
Correct, the various multiverse theories develop out of theoretical models. So there is Everett’s interpretation of quantum mechanics (which only gets you a fix for FTP with particular cosmologies), and then from cosmic inflation, or black hole cosmology, etc. However, these became popular, in part, because they answer fine tuning issues.
For instance, Tegmark is explicit in his book that this is what he takes to be the decisive evidence in favor of the multiverse. Rees reasons this way too. It’s a fairly common argument. It’s not so much to “block God” as to explain an otherwise seemingly staggeringly unlikely set of coincidences.
Black hole cosmology would even seem to have a mechanism that might explain why universes tend towards those that could support life.
); why does an omnipotent god need to fine-tune anything?; there could be exotic life that thrive under different conditions in different universes; heat death of the universe;