The fine-tuning argument for God's existence

Aside from being pure speculative conjecture, the multiverse theory raises more questions than it cares to answer. For example, how did the mechanism behind the multiverse come to be? Who designed it to pump out an endless number of universes? It requires laws and fine-tuning in itself.

10^60 is a huge number. To paint an analogy: grab 20 six-sided dice. Roll them every day, day & night nonstop for the rest of your life. You're highly likely to never roll all 6's.

And yet, the odds of getting a constant like G to within a life permitting range is 45 magnitudes lower, i.e 10^45. And we're supposed to think it's random? That's insane.

God does not need to (and lies outside the physical real of the universe). timtofly explained it pretty well above.

I can understand your logic. But I don't see that the mystical explanation of "It was God wot done it" helps in any way.

That would be like an engineer building a bridge, people coming out to look at it and saying "Behold! A miracle!"
 
And yet, the odds of getting a constant like G to within a life permitting range is 45 magnitudes lower, i.e 10^45. And we're supposed to think it's random? That's insane.

but the odds that we have this universe are 100%,
 
Again, your failure to conceive of random chance does not in any way disprove the theory that the universe was created by random chance.

However, even if we accept the idea that the universe was fine-tuned by some distant, higher power, you are making a vast logical leap to suddenly equate that power with God. That is justified absolutely nowhere in this long list of quadrillion-to-one chances you've posting as proof for your case.

How is 1 in 10^60 a quadrillion-to-one chance? I don't think you appreciate how ludicrously high this number is, it throws any argument of chance out of the window. Only an insane person would attribute that chance to luck.

On the other hand, attributing this anomaly to God is a far more conceivable and rational.

If not God, then who fined tuned the constants? You really have two option: 1) either they were fined tuned by themselves - randomly or 2) deliberately & knowingly - by who?
 
This might be the wrong thread, Unicorny. As you can see, this is the fifth in a series of Q&A where questions are asked of theologians. There's an index in the front. It's not so good for proselytizing, in that, this is not the place.

In this case "theologian" is not someone who purports to know the nature of gods, but is willing to discuss the histories and various philosophies. So, we can discuss Kalam, but we'd not like to argue Kalam.

A non-denominational thread arguing about God might be fun, though! :)
 
This might be the wrong thread, Unicorny. As you can see, this is the fifth in a series of Q&A where questions are asked of theologians. There's an index in the front. It's not so good for proselytizing, in that, this is not the place.

In this case "theologian" is not someone who purports to know the nature of gods, but is willing to discuss the histories and various philosophies. So, we can discuss Kalam, but we'd not like to argue Kalam.

A non-denominational thread arguing about God might be fun, though! :)

Maybe the last pages could be split from the thread?

El_Machinae is right of course.... yet, please I have to make one small remark:
Do we know why the universe is as "fine-tuned" as it is? I am not well versed in physics, but I am guessing the answer is no. And if we don't know why, how does it make sense to speak of the odds of it happening?

No. This is one of the big questions in physics right now. We do not even know whether the universe is fine-tuned and to what degree. Supersymmetry, for example, is a hypothesis that required much less fine-tuning than the Standard Model. With the experimental evidence we have right now, it is not looking good for it, but we cannot discard it just yet.

Some day, there might be a theory that explains the fine-tuning as a result of some symmetry. Or it might be that such a theory does not exist and the universe is fine-tuned. We just do not know (yet?)

What are the odds of the Earth being exactly suited for the life that happened to evolve on it? (This is a hypothetical question, not meant to be answered by a Theologian)

That is another question, to which the only reasonable answer is: We do not know. Even putting aside the unknowns about the fine-tuning of the universe, there is not enough data about the formation of stellar system to give a reasonable answer to how probable it is in our universe. The probability of a system like the solar system arising can range from being a freak accident to very common. With planetary searches improving, we might get more data on that in near future.
 
Yeah but warpus I think that the survival-bias you are alluding to isn't really transferable to what was being discussed.
In the case of the universe it is different because we do not know if there are any more universes. We do know that there are tons of planets and suns allowing for a huge sample.
So if it was correct to say that it was extremely unlikely for our universe to make life possible, than this would be a better case for some 'design' than that our planet happened to provide life after the universe allowed it in the first place.

But since we can not know such odds regarding the universe (because we do not know enough about it), it is a moot point.
 
To get back to my example - at one point we didn't know that there were other Earth-like things in the universe. We thus (wrongly) assumed that the Earth must have been created for us - with the exact conditions we need to live. I mean, what an amazing coincidence that we're on a planet that satisfies all of the exact things we need for life, right?

Turns out we had that backwards.
 
Yeah, it might have been a plausible assumption, I'm not really sure.

What I take away from it is that we should learn from our past mistakes - in this case not making assumptions about "design" when we just don't have enough data.
 
How is 1 in 10^60 a quadrillion-to-one chance?

Do you happen to know the exact name for 10^60? I don't, so I threw out a very large number (which is larger still if you don't use short scale notation).

On the other hand, attributing this anomaly to God is a far more conceivable and rational.

It's a lot more conceivable, yes, but that's not how one does science. X is more likely than Y, so rather than prove X, let's just go with it because it feels better?

If not God, then who fined tuned the constants? You really have two option: 1) either they were fined tuned by themselves - randomly or 2) deliberately & knowingly - by who?
If we accept your argument that such numbers prove that a higher power created the universe, then we are left with nothing but wishful thinking as to who it was, as no amount of powers of ten will indicate who it was. I'm perfectly happy to believe it was God, but then, as I said, I don't need all that pseudo-maths to convince me of God's existence.
 
I don't see an actual question to me in all this fine-tuning stuff, but let me try to say something about it before addressing the other questions that have been asked.

The fine-tuning argument seems to me to be the only vaguely reasonable version of the teleological argument going.

It is indeed true that if the various physical constants had differed by even the teeniest tiniest amount, life wouldn't have been possible. This has been remarked on by many extremely respectable physicists as the video that Unicorny posted states. It is a feature of the universe worthy of consideration.

And personally I don't think that the "anthropic principle" response to this is a very good one. It is true that if the universe didn't have these features, we wouldn't be here to comment on it. However, that doesn't make the fact that it has these features unworthy of comment. Swinburne and others have constructed nice analogies to point this out. Suppose Dr Evil creates a bomb that will destroy the world and sets it off. For some reason, the bomb does not go off, and the world continues to exist. In such a situation we'd be entitled to ask "Why did the bomb not go off?" It wouldn't be a sufficient answer to say "The bomb couldn't have gone off, because if it had, we wouldn't be here to ask why." Similarly, yes, if gravity had been very slightly different we wouldn't be here to comment on the convenient nature of gravity; but that doesn't mean that the convenience of gravity isn't remarkable or in need of explanation.

However, there are some serious problems with the fine-tuning argument beyond this, and Unicorny's video doesn't get to grips with them. For one thing, the argument assumes that the physical constants in the universe could have been different. Gravity could, for example, have been a teeny bit stronger or weaker, and so could all the other constants. Given this assumption, the fact that they're set to their actual values requires explanation. But what justification is there to make such an assumption? Why shouldn't it be the case that in fact these are the only possible values? How do we know that a universe with different values is even theoretically possible? The video purports to address this issue by stating that the claim that these values are necessary is unverifiable, untested, and pure speculation. But one could just as easily say the same thing of the claim that these values are not necessary. We don't know how to make universes - we don't know what actually causes gravity and the rest; scientifically speaking they are just observed regularities. So how do we know that they could have been different? We simply don't, and for the fine-tuning argument to work there needs to be a good reason for supposing this.

Another problem is of course the multiverse hypothesis. The claim is that perhaps there's a vast number of actual universes, maybe an infinite number, each corresponding to one possible universe. If this is so then obviously the one that has the correct physical constants for life will contain life. I think it's worth recognising that the multiverse hypothesis, if it were true, would entirely undermine the fine-tuning argument. It wouldn't prove the non-existence of God but it would certainly wreck the argument that the nature of physical constants in our universe requires explanation; if the multiverse hypothesis is true then it simply doesn't require explanation, because among all the universes there must have been one like this (in fact, infinitely many). Unicorny's video points out, in response to this, that we have no reason to suppose that the multiverse hypothesis is true, and it's pure speculation. But this isn't quite accurate. For one thing, some physicists have posited it as an explanation for apparently uncaused quantum phenomena in our universe, suggesting that there may be communication between different universes which causes these phenomena. This doesn't seem to me a very good reason for believing something so unlikely-sounding, but it is at least a reason. Much more importantly, though, surely there is indeed good evidence for the multiverse hypothesis: namely, precisely the fine-tuning phenomena that proponents of this argument point to in the first place. We're told that the chances of a universe having these properties is gazillions of gazillions to one, and this demands an explanation. Well, the multiverse hypothesis is an explanation. It's not clear to me why God is a better explanation.

Moreover, if God is given as an explanation for the life-permitting physical constants, one can make just the same retort to this as the proponent of the argument does to the multiverse. We have no reason to suppose that God exists either, and it's pure speculation to suppose that he does. The theist will say that we do have good reason, namely all this fine-tuning stuff. But for some reason the theist thinks you're not allowed to say that about the multiverse. So again, what makes God a better explanation for fine-tuning than the multiverse? How is one any less speculative or lacking in evidence than the other?

Unicorny said above that there's a 50% chance of God existing, but didn't give any justification for this figure. Perhaps for any claim one might say it has a default truthfulness probability of 50%, before one has investigated it in any way whatsoever, although I'm not sure even this is true - after all, there are surely more false propositions than there are true ones, so statistically speaking any given claim is probably false. But even if we ignore this, that doesn't mean that all claims have a probability of 50% or any other default figure after you've determined their meaning and started thinking about them! And in fact there are good reasons to think that God as traditionally conceived is very improbable, which I won't go into now because they're not so on-topic.

Still, there's an even more fundamental reason why the fine-tuning argument doesn't work, in my opinion, and this is that it assumes that there's something intrinsically interesting and explanation-requiring about the fact that the universe permits life. Yes, if gravity had been very slightly different there would be no life. Well, so what? We care about that because it affects us, but why suppose that there's some kind of objective significance to it? There's an infinite amount of possible universes that differ from this one, and perhaps to our eyes most of them seem uninteresting, but that's just because we're interested in ourselves and what makes us possible. Suppose that gravity had been different and the universe had consisted of an undifferentiated soup of particles drifting about. Why would that be worse? What's so special about our universe compared to that one?

The defender of the argument might say something like: our universe is intrinsically better, being more interesting, containing intelligent beings, and so on. But then you're just assuming that these things are more intrinsically valuable than the contents of the various alternative universes. And if you think that then you're basically assuming some kind of objective scale of values in which things like variety, intelligence, and morality are more important than other things. But what grounds that assumption?

Imagine a raffle in which every person on the planet is entered. There is one winning ticket. Hurley draws that ticket. He reasons:

(1) My chance of winning the raffle, if it's fair, is only one in seven billion.
(2) If the raffle is fair, then, I would almost certainly not win the raffle.
(3) But I have won the raffle.
(4) Therefore, the raffle is almost certainly not fair.

The argument is clearly fallacious (you cannot infer from "if X, then probably not Y" and "Y" to "probably not X"). Under the terms of the raffle, someone has to win it. The fact that Hurley wins it is extremely interesting if you happen to be Hurley, but of little interest to anyone else, who can see that it had to be someone, and it just happened to be him.

Similarly, the fact that the universe has physical constants that allow for our existence is of great interest to us, who wouldn't be here if it didn't. But it doesn't follow from this that there's a particular reason why it has these constants rather than different ones. Assuming there was going to be a universe in the first place, it had to have some physical constants, and it happened to have the ones we like. That's great for us but this fact alone does not show that it wasn't random. Unicorny's video claims otherwise - that the vastly improbable nature of its being these values is effectively an impossibility. But any set of values would be equally improbable. If we suppose that they're set purely by chance, then no matter what they had turned out to be, it would have been incredibly improbable that that particular set of values would be actual. But that's just because there are so many possible ones, not because there's anything special about our set.
 
Let me also quickly address some of the specific points made here.

So it is a huge deal (maybe not to you for whatever nonsensical reasons), but most if not all physicists and cosmologilists are pondering such questions, such as Stephen Hawkings.

Ignorance is bliss.

It puzzles me that proponents of this argument cite Hawking. The video you posted quotes not only him but also Martin Rees and David Deutsch as Big Names in cosmology and physics who have pointed out the remarkable way in which the universe is set up for life to happen. And yet not one of these three people believes in God. Why are we supposed to kowtow to their Big Brains on the subject of the nature of physical constants but not on the subject of its cause? Doesn't the fact that the very people who know the most about these physical constants reject the supposition that God is the best explanation for them suggest that there's something wrong with this argument?

Let's assume that our universe popped into existence with a perfectly fine-tuned set of cosmic constants to permit life. You have two options here:

1) Either that the universe was designed & fine-tuned knowingly
2) It happened randomly out of a sample of billions if not an infinite number of universes out there.

#2 is problematic. Not only can you not prove the existence of other universes - rendering such a notion as non-scientific - and therefore, as mere fiction - but also this multiverse model will be in vain if it turns out that the mechanism that generates the multiverse in the first place must also be fine-tuned, for then one has only kicked the problem upstairs.

It is worth pointing out that you're confusing two alternatives to God here. One possibility is that our universe is the only actual universe and it just happens to have the right physical constants for life. The other is that our universe is one of an infinite number of actual universes, and it is the one (or one of the many) with the right physical constants for life. Your objections to the second of these don't apply to the first.

Moreover, your objections aren't correct anyway. You don't have to prove the existence of the other universes in order to refute the fine-tuning argument, any more than you have to prove the existence of God in order to refute the multiverse theory. Provided the multiverse theory is possible, that shows that God is not the only explanation for the physical constants we have. That alone undermines the argument. Moreover, one might have reason to think that the multiverse theory is more plausible or probable than the existence of God. In that case the argument is undermined even further.

And, indeed, that does seem to be the case. The most popular candidate for the multiverse fictitious theory is the inflationary multiverse, as it appears to require fine-tuning. For example, M-theory, the theory which supposedly governs the multiverse, works only if there are exactly eleven dimensions—but it does nothing to explain why precisely that number of dimensions should exist. There will never be an answer.

So when someone brings out the multiverse thing, just ask them: isn’t the multiverse itself describable by specific physical laws? Don’t those laws themselves include constants and boundary conditions which must be fine-tuned in order for the multiverse to exist in the first place? Rinse & repeat forever.

I don't think this argument works either. You're relying on the characterisation of multiverse theory given in the video you posted, which portrays it as positing a sort of silly "machine" which pumps out universes. Now only might indeed say that such a "machine" must be governed by laws of some kind, and these laws require an explanation. But this is a very weak argument, because the laws in question no longer have the feature of being "fine-tuned" to support life. If this machine is pumping out vast numbers of universes, only one of which can support life, it no longer looks quite so biocentric as when we were talking about just one universe. The interesting feature about it is not that it follows laws that specifically permit life, but that it follows laws at all.

Now Richard Swinburne has argued that the fact that the universe has laws at all requires explanation, and God is the best such explanation - never mind the fact that the laws it actually has are well suited to life. And he has extended this argument to apply to the supposed multiverse as well. But this is a quite different argument from the one you're putting forward - and in my opinion it's even weaker.

More importantly, the multiverse hypothesis needn't include any such "universe machine" and all the rest of it. At it's simplest it's simply the supposition that every possible universe is actual. There doesn't have to be some set of laws governing all universes. There aren't any "constants and boundary conditions" that need to be "fine-tuned" in order for all possible universes to exist; all you need is the supposition that all possibilities are actual. And you can call that a constant if you like, but it's not one that shows any signs of being fine-tuned to support life.

Remember, the whole point of the fine-tuning argument was that the particular physical laws we have are such that even the slightest change would have resulted in life's being impossible. Thus, they look like they're designed with life in mind. But once we start talking about laws that govern all possible universes, on the hypothesis that they're all actual, we're no longer talking about laws that look designed for life. They're far more general. The claim that "the laws of the multiverse machine are fine-tuned for life" is far, far less convincing than "the laws of our universe are fine-tuned for life".

If you're going to insist that said constants existed for "some reason - randomly or otherwise" then you must either prove that a near infinite set of universes exists, out of which, our universe happens to be the lucky one OR just blindly believe that it just happened randomly which is no better than believing that a perfect entity designed it as such.

Proponents of these kinds of arguments love to use the word "blind" and its cognates. I'm not sure why! To believe that something happened randomly is not necessarily to believe "blindly". One might examine the evidence carefully and conclude that random chance is the best explanation. That's not a "blind" belief.

Still, it's interesting that you claim that such a belief is "no better" than belief in God. That's quite a weak assertion. Maybe it's no worse. Maybe belief in God is "no better" than belief in chance. Do you have a reason to show otherwise?

Aside from being pure speculative conjecture, the multiverse theory raises more questions than it cares to answer. For example, how did the mechanism behind the multiverse come to be? Who designed it to pump out an endless number of universes? It requires laws and fine-tuning in itself.

As I've said, you don't need a "mechanism" to posit a multiverse. But even if you did, obviously the questions you ask could be applied to God too. How did he come to be, and who designed him to design universes? Now you did recognise this problem earlier:

The problem of course is that one is then immediately forced to ask, "From where did God come from?" - to which the answer is He is both uncreated and eternal.

And that's a pretty weak answer. Why can't we say that the universe is "both uncreated and eternal"?

God has to be uncreated otherwise there would be no creation in the first place, i.e. there would be no universe, nothing.

That just assumes the conclusion. If the only way the universe could exist is by being created by God, then certainly God has to exist if the universe does. But the whole point at issue is whether that's the only way the universe could exist. If the universe is uncaused then we don't need to posit God at all.

Because if something had created God, then that something would have to be created by something else, invoking an infinite endless cycle (infinite regression) of past-creation and therefore, depriving the universe and everything else from existence as the opportunity wouldn't be there in the first place.

Even if we accept this argument (which I think is invalid anyway), all it tells us is that there must be a first cause. But that doesn't have to be God. Certainly if you think that God exists, then by definition nothing can have caused him, but again, whether or not God exists is the question.

10^60 is a huge number. To paint an analogy: grab 20 six-sided dice. Roll them every day, day & night nonstop for the rest of your life. You're highly likely to never roll all 6's.

And yet, the odds of getting a constant like G to within a life permitting range is 45 magnitudes lower, i.e 10^45. And we're supposed to think it's random? That's insane.

It's not insane, because your analogy is flawed. Suppose, as the fine-tuning argument proponents assume, that all of the conceivable physical constants the universe could have had are indeed equally probable. So there are 10^45 possible values that G could have had, of which the actual value is no more probable than the rest. (And this is a pretty big assumption in itself, as I've said.) Well, if there's going to be a universe at all, one of these values would have to be actual (even if it were 0). So any universe would have had a value of G that had a probability of only 10^45, no matter what that value actually was. So the fact that its actual value has this probability is exactly what you'd expect. This isn't a dice roll, and it isn't a lottery, it's a raffle. Someone has to win a raffle. Even if there are 10^45 tickets, one of them will win. The fact that my ticket is the winning one is absolutely amazing news for me but it is not objectively remarkable because it's no more unlikely than any of the others winning.

To put it another way, you say that it's "insane" to suppose that the actual value of G came about through pure chance. Well then, what would you have expected it to be if it had been pure chance? Which value do you think would be more probable? There's no answer to that, because for all we know, any given value will be just as improbable as any other. That means that your assertion that it's insane to believe it's pure chance boils down to a refusal to believe that it could possibly be pure chance at all, no matter what value had been actual. And that's just a refusal to accept pure chance as an explanation at all, which isn't rational.

[EDIT] I have split the thread now.[/EDIT]
 
I don't think there are any convincing intellectual arguments for God's existence.

Maybe there are some non-intellectual reasons for it, though.
 
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