[EDIT] Oops, I accidentally used moderator-fu to move this post down the thread a couple of places, and I can't move it back. It should still make sense.[/EDIT]
Apologies for not being able to reply to everything that you've wrote - I have a limited amount of time at my disposal, but this point caught my attention.
I agree that the multiverse theory is not a complete explanation - but rather a poor one - as it raises more questions than it cares to answer for. For example: what physics or laws are involved in the mechanism of reproduction of universes? How did such a mechanism come into being in the first place? Would it not have to be meticulous fine-tuned itself to function as desired?
You end up having more questions than answers with the multiverse hypothesis, which is unprovable, undetectable, and unobservable, and therefore, unscientific.
The hypothesis of God on the other hand holds no such problems, as God is the answer is to everything. From our purpose in life, death, the universe, and everything else that science cannot and fails to answer.
The concept of God as described by theologians commonly includes the attributes of omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. God is the creator and sustainer of the universe. He is finite, eternal, uncreated, and the cause of everything, being uncaused.
But these are just assertions. Your argument from fine-tuning is supposed to show that there's an intelligent designer. It doesn't even purport to tell us anything about that designer. Now if you come along and state that this designer is omnipotent, necessary, morally perfect, and all the rest - well, that's very nice, but how on earth do you know that? Because he's really, really good at designing universes? All that the fine-tuning argument tells you - if it tells you anything, which it doesn't - is that there's an intelligence behind the universe. These properties of classical theism are just made-up things that you're adding to that idea of the intelligent designer. And if you're allowed to just make up properties of the designer, why can't someone else just make up properties of the multiverse, or even just the observable universe? Why can't I say that the universe itself exists by necessity, as many people have thought? Why can't I say that it exists eternally, as most ancient Greek philosophers believed? Why can't I say that it was caused by a previous universe, and will give rise to a new one, in a never-ending cycle, as the Stoics believed? You say that such assertions are "unscientific", but attributing a bunch of arbitrary properties to God to make him into a more convenient explanation is not exactly a scientific endeavour.
Precision and odds go hand-in-hand. I'll give you an example: what are the odds of you guessing a 9 decimal number to it's least significant digit on the first try?
1/999,999,999
What are the odds of the cosmological constant being in its 10^-122 range, knowing that had it been an order higher or a lower, the universe wouldn't permit the existence of life itself? 1/10^122 ~= 0. The precision being so highly remarkable also means that the odds are almost nonexistent.
It is
really frustrating seeing you
still not understand this objection. I thought I'd explained it pretty well in my last post, most of which you've ignored. I really think you need to go back and look at it more carefully. Others have repeated this objection over and again. I will throw my hat in again one more time, although I can't really do better than PhroX's excellent post above. He puts it exactly correctly.
Here is my attempt. Please realise that we understand the point that if these constants had been very slightly different life would have been impossible. The objection is that you don't know what the probability is of the different possible constants. You are assuming that all of the
conceivable possible values of the constants are
equally probable. On that assumption, yes, the actual values are staggeringly improbable. But
it's just an assumption. You don't know what the relative probabilities are.
The shortest man ever officially measured was 5,464 mm tall, and the tallest was 2,720 mm tall. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that these are the limits of possible human height, and we also assume that everyone is some exact number of millimetres tall, it would follow that there are 2,744 possible heights. It would seem to follow that I had a 1 in 2,744 chance of being 1,778 millimetres tall, as I actually am. But of course this wouldn't follow, because 1,778 mm is an extremely common height (it's 5'10), whereas the heights at the extremes of that range are exceptionally uncommon. My chance of being 1,778 was far higher than my chance of being 5,500 or 2,600.
So the fact that there's a large number of possibilities for a certain value does not, in itself, give you enough information to know what the
probability of each of those values is, because they might be
unequally probable. This is what my example of the student essays in my previous post was meant to indicate.
Similarly, we can all agree that if gravity had been a squillionth part different, the universe would be made of marshmallow, or whatever it is. But that doesn't tell you that the probability of getting a non-marshmallow universe was one in a squillion, because you don't know how probable the various alternatives were. Maybe the actual value of gravity is far, far more probable than even a value one squillionth part different. Maybe the actual gravity is the only possible one, and all others are actually impossible. The mere fact that you can imagine alternative ones doesn't necessarily mean they are possible. (I can imagine that 96875680797+87545964 is a prime number; it doesn't mean that it is; but if it isn't, then it's a necessary fact that it isn't; therefore, the mere fact that something is imaginable doesn't show that it's logically possible.)
Another example of you making this error:
In fact, the relevant initial conditions had to be fine tuned to a precision of one part in 10 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least for our universe to sustain life.
We'll grant this for the sake of argument.
Meaning, the odds are in the order of 1 over 10 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes.
No, that it
not what it means. This is an absolutely invalid inference.
There are 316 million people in the United States. Does that mean that any given individual in the USA has a 1/360 million chance of being president ten years from now? Obviously not, because some people are far more likely than others to become president (depending on personal interests, ambition, ability, wealth, connections, etc.). In fact there are only relatively few people in the US - less than a hundred, maybe? Surely far less than a thousand - who have any non-negligible chance of being president ten years from now; some of those people's chances are relatively high (especially, it seems, if they happen to be closely related to recent past presidents); and most other people's chances are negligible. The probabilities are not evenly shared out.
So, again, the mere fact that there are X possible ways a situation can turn out does not in itself mean that the probability of any given one of those ways is 1/X.
I like Thomas Aquinas five arguments for God's existence by the way. Have a read:
1) The unmoved mover argument asserts that, from our experience of motion in the universe (motion being the transition from potentiality to actuality) we can see that there must have been an initial mover. Aquinas argued that whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another thing, so there must be an unmoved mover.
I can't believe you're seriously pulling these out at this stage, but why not? When one argument fails there's a host of other, weaker ones to fall back on.
Aquinas' First Way relies on Aristotelian physics, which is false. It's not the case that a thing in motion must be moved by something else; Newton's first law of motion states otherwise. Even if it were Aquinas' premise were correct, all his argument would prove is that every chain of motion has a starting point. E.g. if there's a train moving along the tracks, there must be a locomotive that's pulling the carriages. This does not prove God's existence. Aquinas illegitimately assumes that all such motion chains form a single whole, such that there is a
single first mover; he also illegitimately assumes that that first mover is God. There's no reason why it should be.
(Note, BTW, that "first mover" in Aquinas refers to causal priority, not temporal. He's not saying there
was a first mover that set things into motion and then stopped. He's saying that the universe requires a sort of motor to impart power into it constantly, like an engine, because if no such motor existed, all motion would stop. On his view, God takes the role of this engine. I don't see any reason to accept Aquinas' premises here.)
2) Aquinas' argument from first cause started with the premise that it is impossible for a being to cause itself (because it would have to exist before it caused itself) and that it is impossible for there to be an infinite chain of causes, which would result in infinite regress. Therefore, there must be a first cause, itself uncaused.
Aquinas' rationale for the impossibility of an infinite chain is invalid. It revolves around an equivocation on the term "remove". We can discuss this in detail if you really want to. Suffice to say for now, even if you accept this argument (and there's no reason why you should), it still doesn't prove God's existence. All it proves is that, in the chain of causation which we perceive in the universe around us, there was a first one. I don't think that this is a very dramatic conclusion. It tells us nothing about the nature of that first event.
3) The argument from necessary being asserts that all beings are contingent, meaning that it is possible for them not to exist. Aquinas argued that if everything can possibly not exist, there must have been a time when nothing existed; as things exist now, there must exist a being with necessary existence, regarded as God.
This is a weak version of the argument from necessity, unsurprisingly so since Aquinas didn't have the concept of modal possibility/necessity that would later be developed by Scotus and those working after him. This means that he doesn't realise that something could have only contingent existence and yet there never be a time when it didn't exist; contingent existence means that there's a possible world in which it doesn't exist (not that there's an actual period of time when it doesn't exist). Leibniz's version of the argument, which does incorporate this understanding, is much stronger. It still fails to convince, though, because it assumes the truth of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, i.e. that everything that's true must have a reason for its being so and not otherwise. But this principle is just an assumption. Kant pointed out its obvious flaw: we may see that everything in our experience has an adequate explanation or reason for being so and not otherwise, but we cannot legitimately assume that things outside even our possible experience follow this rule.
4) Aquinas argued from degree, considering the occurrence of degrees of goodness. He believed that things which are called good, must be called good in relation to a standard of gooda maximum. There must be a maximum goodness that which causes all goodness.
It's unsurprising that this argument is little discussed today, given how weak it is. It assumes a Neoplatonic outlook in which terms get their meanings, and objects get their properties, by reference to a perfect exemplar. Since we're not Neoplatonists - at any rate, I'm not - I don't see why we should accept this assumption. You might as well say that things that are called blue must be so-called in relation to a standard of perfect, maximum blueness.
5) The teleological argument asserts the view that things without intelligence are ordered towards a purpose. Aquinas argued that unintelligent objects cannot be ordered unless they are done so by an intelligent being, which means that there must be an intelligent being to move objects to their ends: God.
This was probably the most reasonable argument of the five, until Hume came along; and then Darwin came along and mopped up whatever bits Hume had overlooked. Aquinas was wrong to think that intelligence is the only agency that can bring about order; we now know that natural selection can do so as well.
Logical, coherent, and they all make sense.
But they don't actually prove God's existence. The first three don't even purport to do so. They only purport to prove the existence of some entity "which," as Aquinas himself puts it, "we call God". But even if there does exist an unmoved mover, a first cause, or a necessary being, Aquinas hasn't even shown that there must be one of each of these, that they must be identical with each other, or that they must have any of the properties that he elsewhere ascribes to God. And all of the arguments have serious weaknesses that cast heavy doubt over even their purported conclusions.
Physicist Paul Davies calculated that in order for planets to exist, the relevant initial conditions had to be fine tuned to a precision of one part in 10 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least. For electromagnetism, he estimated a change of only one part in 10 to the power of 40 would have spelled disaster for stars, like our sun, thereby precluding the existence of planets.
Just to add to this, if you can find an explanation from Paul Davies about the relative
probability of these different scenarios, we'll be getting somewhere.
Precision is not the same thing as
probability.
I can't help also mentioning that I once accidentally spilled a big cup of coffee very nearly right over Paul Davies. If I'd known people were going to use his calculations in this way I might have aimed it a bit more carefully at him!
