Yes, the 'miracle' of life, along with the majesty of our universe begs for some explanation. Yet on the scale of human time and intelligence, one wonders if that is actually possible.
We always tend to posit a 'god' to explain what we do not yet understand. And yet eventually much of the supernatural becomes natural.
Given we have yet to master rational behavior in our current, very limited existence, how important can knowing the mind of god, if we cannot master our own? Would it make us smarter and a more successful species? Or would it make us even more prone to see ourselves as a god in waiting, as so many Americans see themselves as a Wealthy person in waiting?
Science and philosophy have enlightened mankind for thousands of years, yet we continue to skirt the edge of the abyss for ego, obsessive greed and the lust for power and self-indulgence. Maybe, hidden somewhere within the basic principles on which the Universe was created, there is a constant balancing the creative force of life against it's propensity for destruction. And maybe someday scientist will declare that this universe had 'almost' everything needed to sustain life indefinitely.
You wrote: "The point is that an infinite number of non-life-bearing multiverses are possible. None would explain (or make unsurprising) the fine-tuning of our universe. Thus, Rees (and any other multiverse theorist) needs a new constant, a meta-constant that specifies the internal diversity of any proposed multiverse. Call this constant D. Given that D can take an infinity of different values most of which (by Rees’s admission) would be inconsistent with a multiverse containing a universe fine-tuned for life, it seems that the value of D for Rees’s proposed multiverse must, like the values of his six numbers, be finely tuned for life, and to a very high degree."
This problem is easy to avoid: simply posit the maximal multiverse (the maxiverse), which contains all possible (i.e., logically non-contradictory) universes. No meta-constant (hyperparameter) required. Problem solved.
The maxiverse is the logical conclusion of a very simple idea that has been floating around in Western philosophy for millenia. Arthur Lovejoy, in his classic work in the history of ideas The Great Chain of Being, dubbed it the Principle of Plenitude (PoP). This principle can be expressed in just five words:
Everything that can exist, does exist.
Lovejoy found hints of this principle in Plato's Timaeus and a rejection of it in Aristotle's Metaphysics ("it is not necessary that everything that is possible should exist in actuality").
We can count David Lewis (modal realism) and Max Tegmark (the level IV multiverse) as modern proponents.
The PoP is easily accommodates atheism, but theists have also been drawn to it. Why would an omnipotent deity create one measly universe when it could just as easily create them all?
I find the PoP very hard to reject. No metaphysical barrier prevented our universe from existing, so why would there be any metaphysical barrier preventing the birth of sibling universes? Our universe is not that special (it's certainly not, as Leibniz absurdly claimed, the best of all possible worlds).
I think there is a bias towards thinking of coming into existence as very difficult and requiring a lot of work, making it unreasonable to expect fecundity as regards universes. I believe this bias to be an unconscious representation of the difficulty of human birth (we call it labor for a good reason). On the other hand, the Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola) can effortlessly lay up to 300 million eggs at a time. An intelligent Ocean Sunfish would likely find the PoP very plausible.
Stephen Mitchell's limpid translation of the Tao Te Ching takes liberties here and there, some of which hint at the multiverse:
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.
The Principle of Plenitude is a far simpler Theory of Everything than classical theism.
Well, first of all, the “great mother” seems to me to be a stand in for God or a supreme being. Second, why should everything possible exist rather than simply nothing possible exists? It seems to me that on your hypothesis, theism would still be needed to explain why everything possible exists when it’s possible that nothing possible exists. Again, I contend that theism answers questions that atheism cannot answer.
The words "Great Mother" are purely metaphorical; Taoists do not regard the Tao as a person or as an intelligent Creator.
The question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswerable. If you say the answer is X , I can always ask "Why does exist. Why not nothing?" This is true when X is God, so theism is not an answer. Theism fails to answer any questions that atheism cannot answer.
The Ultimate Explanation of Everything (UEE) cannot require an explanation of its own, for then it would be at best only the penultimate explanation of everything. A UEE must simply be accepted as a brute fact. I claim that the PoP is the simplest UEE, far simpler than any form of theism.
For the ultimate, you accept an infinity of objects, while, theists accept one non-composite being as the ultimate. I take my stand on the claim that the The position is more reasonable.
If the One were the source of the Many, then the Many were already present in the One as potential things and the One is no longer non-composite.
Additionally, theists generally suppose that God is a person. The idea of a non-composite person is completely absurd. Persons have intellect, volition, and desires. All of these mental faculties require structure, i.e., parts.
The Principle of Plenitude is conceptually far simpler than classical theism, which has to offload the structure of our universe onto the decisions of a being that is supposed to be no more complicated than a photon.
How could a photon-like entity decide that the fine structure constant would be approximately 1/137 or that it would incarnate as a particular sapient at a specific time on a specific inhabited planet? How did a photon-like entity design the Y chromosome it had to create de novo for Jesus?
Classical theism is both ridiculous and incompatible with what 99% of theists actually believe.
I deny your opening statement. If the many are separate beings that resulted from a free choice then they are not already contained within the One. Regarding your other comment, Intellect, volition , and desire are not parts of God since they are not detachable from God and by parts we mean detachable parts. For instance, a person’s hopes are not detachable parts of the person’s mind because the idea of a hope being detached from a person’s mind and placed on a laboratory slide to be looked at under a microscope separate from the mind thinking it is conceptually absurd. Incoherent. Same for volition, desire, and so forth. So. There is nothing inconsistent in supposing that the One is a person. This is, of course, a central idea of Christian Platonism.
Attributes (intellect, volition, hope, etc.) require structure, i.e. parts, but there not need be a detachable part that instantiates any given attribute.
The beauty of the Mona Lisa depends absolutely on the physical arrangements of dabs of paint. We can destroy or otherwise alters its beauty by altering these dabs. It’s true that we can’t detach its beauty and study it in isolation. So what?
Suppose I hope to marry the woman I love. That hope is encoded in various synapses in my brain. If she crushes that hope by rejecting my proposal my hope will disappear as various synapses are rewired. A future neurosurgeon might be able to extinguish that hope and that hope alone by performing very precise microsurgery.
We already know how brain damage can a diminish or erase various mental attributes by altering the neurological structures that make these possible
You wrote: “If the many are separate beings that resulted from a free choice then they are not already contained within the One.”
Nope. In this case the One contains the potential to make a multitude of free choices and so must be composite. Making choices requires structure, i.e., parts. There must be parts that consider and assess various options, parts that make the choices, and parts that implement the choices.
In any case the idea of a metaphysically free choice is a illusion. As human beings we have evolved some ability to figure out the causal chains that produce our decisions. This ability is limited because it would not be cost-effective for us to remember lengthy causal explanations of all our actions (i.e., we have to avoid analysis paralysis). So any attempt to figure out why we did this or that always bottoms out in choices whose causes are unknown (due to our cognitive limitations). We only think of them as free because we can’t see how they were determined. Spinoza saw this clearly about 350 years ago:
"Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." — Spinoza, Ethics
Well, we are at a an impasse. That what you call my data comes from astrophysics. You rejected as groundless without any evidence. And admitting that you haven’t read the literature. I claim that I’m on stronger ground here. And I’ll leave it at that
Now, to carry the analogy further, suppose my favorite station is a very obscure one, KRAB. Suppose further that I had been telling the sales person at the store, how much I like KRAB. They called me the “crab nut” because I talked about KRAB radio all the time. Suppose further that I had told the store that I was saving up money to buy a transistor radio, and I would be in next week to buy one. Now I come in next week and find that the radio has been improbably tuned to KRAB— out of dozens of stations it could’ve been set to. In that case, given the facts at hand, it seems to me that the best explanation is that the store owner or someone personally tuned it to KRAB, as a nice gesture. These thoughts support an inference to a personal designer., that is, an intelligent one. Call this neo Platonism if you wish!
Before Newton developed his physics, nobody had a clue as to why the Moon always has the same face turned toward the Earth. I expect that many people in that era said: "It cannot have happened by sheer chance that the Moon would always turn the same face toward the Earth; so God must have arranged it so."
I take it that this reasoning would not cut much ice with you. The inference from (P1) "This cannot have happened by sheer chance" and (P2) "Nobody has an acceptable explanation of this through natural causes" to the conclusion (C) "God did it" may be natural to a lot of people, but it is not rationally compelling at all. The rationally warranted conclusion is simply that we don't know what the cause is.
The analogy with your "fine tuning" argument should be apparent. Your presentation of that argument in pp. 99–100 of your textbook has five premises and a conclusion, but it seems to me to commit the same non sequitur. The only significant difference that I see between the two arguments is that, in the case of the "fine tuning" argument, there is reason to believe that science will never advance beyond the physical constants to discover a natural cause of their values, because fundamental physics has been largely "stuck" for several decades. Or perhaps the relevant point is that all that science can ever do is reduce phenomena to certain laws and constants, so that even if we could reduce all physical constants to one constant, we could not advance beyond that constant. So you would say that we have to attribute that constant to intelligent design. It seems to me an extraordinary length to which to go to avoid a confession of ignorance.
One observation about the summary presentation of your argument: Your first premise, according to which "the universal constants of physics are fine-tuned," seems to me to beg the question. We do not know that the constants are "tuned" at all, finely or otherwise (this is why I always put the phrase "fine tuning" in quotation marks to refer to the argument in question). We do not know whether it is possible for them to have other values. To describe them as "fine-tuned" assumes that they have an infinite range of possible values. You equate human ignorance with ontic possibility. That seems to me, at bottom, a rather silly assumption, though I'm not sure how to dispute it.
I’m just going with the astrophysicists who say that the constants can have any value of an infinity of values. They all say that. You admit you’re not familiar with the physics. You’re just repeating the same objection over and over again. So I don’t think you see it at all, and I think you need to read the literature on the fundamental constants. Until then I think we’ll have to just agree to disagree. We’re not getting anywhere on this.
Thank you for your reply. First of all, since the “fine tuning” is the data to be explained, we must interpret “fine-tuning” simply as meaning that the arrangement is such that if even one constant were to have been ever so slightly different life in any form would not be possible. That’s all it means. It does not by itself imply intelligent design or else the argument would be circular.
Second, here’s why intelligent design is the best explanation of the fine tuning data. Simply put, the fine-tuning is far far more probable on theism than on atheism. On atheism, the fine-tuning arrangement is almost infinitely improbable. The probability is very very close to zero. For out of all possible universes and multi verses nearly all are sterile.
But the universe’s finely tuned arrangement is expected on theism. That in a nutshell is why theism is the best explanation.
Now, someone might reply that the words “finally tuned” imply an intelligent designer. I disagree. When I was a kid, KJR was the radio station to listen to for the best rock ‘n’ roll. Now someone might buy a transistor radio at the local store and open it, turn it on, and say, “It is tuned to KJR! “. Those words do not imply that it was tuned by a person or an intelligent being. I think they leave it open as to what set the radio dial on that station.
"the fine-tuning is far far more probable on theism than on atheism"
This seems to me patently false. We know nothing, absolutely nothing about the causes of the values of the physical constants. The idea that they could have different values may, for all that we know, be mere vacuous fantasy. So to attribute a probability to their having the values that they have is an equally vacuous fantasy. Once again, it seems to me that your argument rests on inflating human ignorance into a pretended metaphysical insight.
If the claim is patently false then why is it asserted by virtually all the renowned astrophysicist who talk about the issue including Rees? For the astrophysics community agrees that an infinite number of combinations of constants is possible, yielding, an infinite number of possible universes and that an astronomically small subset would harbor life.
If they think that then I think that they are committing the same error. "Possible" in this context, if used responsibly, can mean no more than "consistent with what we know." That shows that (surprise!) there is a great deal that we don't know. It does not warrant a conclusion about determinants of the values of the constants. Go back to my original example. In 1700 [correction: 1600], say, I don't think anyone knew anything or even had a plausible hypothesis to explain the Moon's consistently turning the same face to the Earth. The only hypothesis under which this phenomenon was probable was the hypothesis that God ordered things so. Now, we have better explanations. The only essential difference is that at present we are very likely at the limit of our knowledge of the physical constants, and nobody will ever have a plausible hypothesis as to why they have the values that they have. The theistic hypothesis makes their having those values probable. But in this case, as in the case of the Moon, the alternative is not "It just happened by a cosmic accident" but "We don't know."
Sorry, but astrophysicists have mathematical models that show , for instance, that if the gravitational constant were to have been different by one digit in the (say) 50th decimal place then life in any form would not have been possible. They have hundreds of models like that.That is what it’s all based on.
You seem to be just repeating the point that the best available cosmological theories have no determinants for the physical constants. Therefore, it is consistent with what we know, or at least with our best theory, that the constants should have different values. I don't see how it follows that different values are "possible" in any sense other than that we know nothing about what determines them. Seems to me exactly parallel to my example of the Moon.
String Theory proposes multiple inflationary events that could have created a multitude of universes, each with slightly different values for the constants of nature and physical laws. So, there are billions of parallel universes out there, most of them with no life at all. Well, this could be true, but it is an unverifiable theory as we cannot leave this Universe. And so, if this is an unverifiable theory, then it can only be taken on faith (who's doing metaphysics now?).
By the way, this multiverse theory is so complex in its construct that it does not pass Ockham’s Razor. Additionally, this theory has more fine-tuning specificity then it’s trying to explain. Many physicists no longer subscribe to String Theory as it does not have verifiable components in the “real world”.
Which of these two is simpler, that there is a near infinite number of universes where the laws of nature are slightly different in each, with this one we live in being the perfect one for intelligent life, or that God, being the perfect scientist and mathematician, though of all possibilities and decided to create a single universe that was good for intelligent life? Currently, the initial mass measurement of the Higgs Boson does not lean towards a multiverse universe.
A priori... the conundrum of conundrums.
Yes, the 'miracle' of life, along with the majesty of our universe begs for some explanation. Yet on the scale of human time and intelligence, one wonders if that is actually possible.
We always tend to posit a 'god' to explain what we do not yet understand. And yet eventually much of the supernatural becomes natural.
Given we have yet to master rational behavior in our current, very limited existence, how important can knowing the mind of god, if we cannot master our own? Would it make us smarter and a more successful species? Or would it make us even more prone to see ourselves as a god in waiting, as so many Americans see themselves as a Wealthy person in waiting?
Science and philosophy have enlightened mankind for thousands of years, yet we continue to skirt the edge of the abyss for ego, obsessive greed and the lust for power and self-indulgence. Maybe, hidden somewhere within the basic principles on which the Universe was created, there is a constant balancing the creative force of life against it's propensity for destruction. And maybe someday scientist will declare that this universe had 'almost' everything needed to sustain life indefinitely.
You wrote: "The point is that an infinite number of non-life-bearing multiverses are possible. None would explain (or make unsurprising) the fine-tuning of our universe. Thus, Rees (and any other multiverse theorist) needs a new constant, a meta-constant that specifies the internal diversity of any proposed multiverse. Call this constant D. Given that D can take an infinity of different values most of which (by Rees’s admission) would be inconsistent with a multiverse containing a universe fine-tuned for life, it seems that the value of D for Rees’s proposed multiverse must, like the values of his six numbers, be finely tuned for life, and to a very high degree."
This problem is easy to avoid: simply posit the maximal multiverse (the maxiverse), which contains all possible (i.e., logically non-contradictory) universes. No meta-constant (hyperparameter) required. Problem solved.
The maxiverse is the logical conclusion of a very simple idea that has been floating around in Western philosophy for millenia. Arthur Lovejoy, in his classic work in the history of ideas The Great Chain of Being, dubbed it the Principle of Plenitude (PoP). This principle can be expressed in just five words:
Everything that can exist, does exist.
Lovejoy found hints of this principle in Plato's Timaeus and a rejection of it in Aristotle's Metaphysics ("it is not necessary that everything that is possible should exist in actuality").
We can count David Lewis (modal realism) and Max Tegmark (the level IV multiverse) as modern proponents.
The PoP is easily accommodates atheism, but theists have also been drawn to it. Why would an omnipotent deity create one measly universe when it could just as easily create them all?
I find the PoP very hard to reject. No metaphysical barrier prevented our universe from existing, so why would there be any metaphysical barrier preventing the birth of sibling universes? Our universe is not that special (it's certainly not, as Leibniz absurdly claimed, the best of all possible worlds).
I think there is a bias towards thinking of coming into existence as very difficult and requiring a lot of work, making it unreasonable to expect fecundity as regards universes. I believe this bias to be an unconscious representation of the difficulty of human birth (we call it labor for a good reason). On the other hand, the Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola) can effortlessly lay up to 300 million eggs at a time. An intelligent Ocean Sunfish would likely find the PoP very plausible.
Stephen Mitchell's limpid translation of the Tao Te Ching takes liberties here and there, some of which hint at the multiverse:
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.
The Principle of Plenitude is a far simpler Theory of Everything than classical theism.
Well, first of all, the “great mother” seems to me to be a stand in for God or a supreme being. Second, why should everything possible exist rather than simply nothing possible exists? It seems to me that on your hypothesis, theism would still be needed to explain why everything possible exists when it’s possible that nothing possible exists. Again, I contend that theism answers questions that atheism cannot answer.
The words "Great Mother" are purely metaphorical; Taoists do not regard the Tao as a person or as an intelligent Creator.
The question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswerable. If you say the answer is X , I can always ask "Why does exist. Why not nothing?" This is true when X is God, so theism is not an answer. Theism fails to answer any questions that atheism cannot answer.
The Ultimate Explanation of Everything (UEE) cannot require an explanation of its own, for then it would be at best only the penultimate explanation of everything. A UEE must simply be accepted as a brute fact. I claim that the PoP is the simplest UEE, far simpler than any form of theism.
For the ultimate, you accept an infinity of objects, while, theists accept one non-composite being as the ultimate. I take my stand on the claim that the The position is more reasonable.
If the One were the source of the Many, then the Many were already present in the One as potential things and the One is no longer non-composite.
Additionally, theists generally suppose that God is a person. The idea of a non-composite person is completely absurd. Persons have intellect, volition, and desires. All of these mental faculties require structure, i.e., parts.
The Principle of Plenitude is conceptually far simpler than classical theism, which has to offload the structure of our universe onto the decisions of a being that is supposed to be no more complicated than a photon.
How could a photon-like entity decide that the fine structure constant would be approximately 1/137 or that it would incarnate as a particular sapient at a specific time on a specific inhabited planet? How did a photon-like entity design the Y chromosome it had to create de novo for Jesus?
Classical theism is both ridiculous and incompatible with what 99% of theists actually believe.
I deny your opening statement. If the many are separate beings that resulted from a free choice then they are not already contained within the One. Regarding your other comment, Intellect, volition , and desire are not parts of God since they are not detachable from God and by parts we mean detachable parts. For instance, a person’s hopes are not detachable parts of the person’s mind because the idea of a hope being detached from a person’s mind and placed on a laboratory slide to be looked at under a microscope separate from the mind thinking it is conceptually absurd. Incoherent. Same for volition, desire, and so forth. So. There is nothing inconsistent in supposing that the One is a person. This is, of course, a central idea of Christian Platonism.
You wrote: “by parts we mean detachable parts.”
Attributes (intellect, volition, hope, etc.) require structure, i.e. parts, but there not need be a detachable part that instantiates any given attribute.
The beauty of the Mona Lisa depends absolutely on the physical arrangements of dabs of paint. We can destroy or otherwise alters its beauty by altering these dabs. It’s true that we can’t detach its beauty and study it in isolation. So what?
Suppose I hope to marry the woman I love. That hope is encoded in various synapses in my brain. If she crushes that hope by rejecting my proposal my hope will disappear as various synapses are rewired. A future neurosurgeon might be able to extinguish that hope and that hope alone by performing very precise microsurgery.
We already know how brain damage can a diminish or erase various mental attributes by altering the neurological structures that make these possible
You wrote: “If the many are separate beings that resulted from a free choice then they are not already contained within the One.”
Nope. In this case the One contains the potential to make a multitude of free choices and so must be composite. Making choices requires structure, i.e., parts. There must be parts that consider and assess various options, parts that make the choices, and parts that implement the choices.
In any case the idea of a metaphysically free choice is a illusion. As human beings we have evolved some ability to figure out the causal chains that produce our decisions. This ability is limited because it would not be cost-effective for us to remember lengthy causal explanations of all our actions (i.e., we have to avoid analysis paralysis). So any attempt to figure out why we did this or that always bottoms out in choices whose causes are unknown (due to our cognitive limitations). We only think of them as free because we can’t see how they were determined. Spinoza saw this clearly about 350 years ago:
"Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." — Spinoza, Ethics
Well, we are at a an impasse. That what you call my data comes from astrophysics. You rejected as groundless without any evidence. And admitting that you haven’t read the literature. I claim that I’m on stronger ground here. And I’ll leave it at that
Now, to carry the analogy further, suppose my favorite station is a very obscure one, KRAB. Suppose further that I had been telling the sales person at the store, how much I like KRAB. They called me the “crab nut” because I talked about KRAB radio all the time. Suppose further that I had told the store that I was saving up money to buy a transistor radio, and I would be in next week to buy one. Now I come in next week and find that the radio has been improbably tuned to KRAB— out of dozens of stations it could’ve been set to. In that case, given the facts at hand, it seems to me that the best explanation is that the store owner or someone personally tuned it to KRAB, as a nice gesture. These thoughts support an inference to a personal designer., that is, an intelligent one. Call this neo Platonism if you wish!
Before Newton developed his physics, nobody had a clue as to why the Moon always has the same face turned toward the Earth. I expect that many people in that era said: "It cannot have happened by sheer chance that the Moon would always turn the same face toward the Earth; so God must have arranged it so."
I take it that this reasoning would not cut much ice with you. The inference from (P1) "This cannot have happened by sheer chance" and (P2) "Nobody has an acceptable explanation of this through natural causes" to the conclusion (C) "God did it" may be natural to a lot of people, but it is not rationally compelling at all. The rationally warranted conclusion is simply that we don't know what the cause is.
The analogy with your "fine tuning" argument should be apparent. Your presentation of that argument in pp. 99–100 of your textbook has five premises and a conclusion, but it seems to me to commit the same non sequitur. The only significant difference that I see between the two arguments is that, in the case of the "fine tuning" argument, there is reason to believe that science will never advance beyond the physical constants to discover a natural cause of their values, because fundamental physics has been largely "stuck" for several decades. Or perhaps the relevant point is that all that science can ever do is reduce phenomena to certain laws and constants, so that even if we could reduce all physical constants to one constant, we could not advance beyond that constant. So you would say that we have to attribute that constant to intelligent design. It seems to me an extraordinary length to which to go to avoid a confession of ignorance.
One observation about the summary presentation of your argument: Your first premise, according to which "the universal constants of physics are fine-tuned," seems to me to beg the question. We do not know that the constants are "tuned" at all, finely or otherwise (this is why I always put the phrase "fine tuning" in quotation marks to refer to the argument in question). We do not know whether it is possible for them to have other values. To describe them as "fine-tuned" assumes that they have an infinite range of possible values. You equate human ignorance with ontic possibility. That seems to me, at bottom, a rather silly assumption, though I'm not sure how to dispute it.
I’m just going with the astrophysicists who say that the constants can have any value of an infinity of values. They all say that. You admit you’re not familiar with the physics. You’re just repeating the same objection over and over again. So I don’t think you see it at all, and I think you need to read the literature on the fundamental constants. Until then I think we’ll have to just agree to disagree. We’re not getting anywhere on this.
Thank you for your reply. First of all, since the “fine tuning” is the data to be explained, we must interpret “fine-tuning” simply as meaning that the arrangement is such that if even one constant were to have been ever so slightly different life in any form would not be possible. That’s all it means. It does not by itself imply intelligent design or else the argument would be circular.
Second, here’s why intelligent design is the best explanation of the fine tuning data. Simply put, the fine-tuning is far far more probable on theism than on atheism. On atheism, the fine-tuning arrangement is almost infinitely improbable. The probability is very very close to zero. For out of all possible universes and multi verses nearly all are sterile.
But the universe’s finely tuned arrangement is expected on theism. That in a nutshell is why theism is the best explanation.
Now, someone might reply that the words “finally tuned” imply an intelligent designer. I disagree. When I was a kid, KJR was the radio station to listen to for the best rock ‘n’ roll. Now someone might buy a transistor radio at the local store and open it, turn it on, and say, “It is tuned to KJR! “. Those words do not imply that it was tuned by a person or an intelligent being. I think they leave it open as to what set the radio dial on that station.
Thank you.
Thanks for replying.
"the fine-tuning is far far more probable on theism than on atheism"
This seems to me patently false. We know nothing, absolutely nothing about the causes of the values of the physical constants. The idea that they could have different values may, for all that we know, be mere vacuous fantasy. So to attribute a probability to their having the values that they have is an equally vacuous fantasy. Once again, it seems to me that your argument rests on inflating human ignorance into a pretended metaphysical insight.
If the claim is patently false then why is it asserted by virtually all the renowned astrophysicist who talk about the issue including Rees? For the astrophysics community agrees that an infinite number of combinations of constants is possible, yielding, an infinite number of possible universes and that an astronomically small subset would harbor life.
If they think that then I think that they are committing the same error. "Possible" in this context, if used responsibly, can mean no more than "consistent with what we know." That shows that (surprise!) there is a great deal that we don't know. It does not warrant a conclusion about determinants of the values of the constants. Go back to my original example. In 1700 [correction: 1600], say, I don't think anyone knew anything or even had a plausible hypothesis to explain the Moon's consistently turning the same face to the Earth. The only hypothesis under which this phenomenon was probable was the hypothesis that God ordered things so. Now, we have better explanations. The only essential difference is that at present we are very likely at the limit of our knowledge of the physical constants, and nobody will ever have a plausible hypothesis as to why they have the values that they have. The theistic hypothesis makes their having those values probable. But in this case, as in the case of the Moon, the alternative is not "It just happened by a cosmic accident" but "We don't know."
Sorry, but astrophysicists have mathematical models that show , for instance, that if the gravitational constant were to have been different by one digit in the (say) 50th decimal place then life in any form would not have been possible. They have hundreds of models like that.That is what it’s all based on.
You seem to be just repeating the point that the best available cosmological theories have no determinants for the physical constants. Therefore, it is consistent with what we know, or at least with our best theory, that the constants should have different values. I don't see how it follows that different values are "possible" in any sense other than that we know nothing about what determines them. Seems to me exactly parallel to my example of the Moon.
String Theory proposes multiple inflationary events that could have created a multitude of universes, each with slightly different values for the constants of nature and physical laws. So, there are billions of parallel universes out there, most of them with no life at all. Well, this could be true, but it is an unverifiable theory as we cannot leave this Universe. And so, if this is an unverifiable theory, then it can only be taken on faith (who's doing metaphysics now?).
By the way, this multiverse theory is so complex in its construct that it does not pass Ockham’s Razor. Additionally, this theory has more fine-tuning specificity then it’s trying to explain. Many physicists no longer subscribe to String Theory as it does not have verifiable components in the “real world”.
Which of these two is simpler, that there is a near infinite number of universes where the laws of nature are slightly different in each, with this one we live in being the perfect one for intelligent life, or that God, being the perfect scientist and mathematician, though of all possibilities and decided to create a single universe that was good for intelligent life? Currently, the initial mass measurement of the Higgs Boson does not lean towards a multiverse universe.
Exactly. Very well put.
Thank you for this very interesting reply! I would be interested to see some of your research.