On the Fine Tuning Argument for the existence of God

[Physics Guy]

Nature seems to have a handful of magic numbers baked into its basic laws. The way our current theory is constructed, the values of those numbers seem like afterthoughts. You can go through long calculations to predict tons of different things, while leaving all those parameters just as unknown algebraic symbols, until the very last line when you spit out a final number. So it's tempting to think that maybe God thought the same way when designing the universe. Maybe God settled on quantum field theory early in the creative process, then narrowed down the set of gauge symmetries after a bit of workshopping among the angels, and only dialled in the fine structure constant and the lepton masses just before stepping up to the mike with that opening line about light.

If you imagine it all happening kind of like that, then you're tempted to point to the specifically dialled-in values of natural constants as fingerprints of God on the canvas of creation. If they could have been anything and God had to just choose them, then presumably they were chosen for the results they would produce. So you get fine-tuning arguments of the form, "If the fine structure constant had been different by just X, process Y wouldn't have worked, so God must have carefully tuned the FSC to enable Y."

As I've said, my own feeling is that the argument from initial conditions is a stronger argument for a similar conclusion, so I think the fine tuning argument about the fundamental constants should be ignored by religious apologists. And even religious scientists are always going to hold out the hope that the fundamental constants are not arbitrary numbers but mathematical constants like pi, that have to have exactly those values for mathematical reasons. I think that's the kind of universe that would be made by a real God. Fine-tuned parameters are like the final plot twist where the heroine saves the day because, oh yeah, she just happens to have a socket wrench in her purse. When a pro writes the script, she's been a mechanic all along. Never mess with mechanics.

[Physics Guy]

I think that it's possible, for example, that two or more of the currently-known constants are/may be related, and could be combined. We found something similar with the so-called fundamental particles, and fundamental forces. I remember (not really ) when electricity and magnetism were thought to be totally separate phenomena, and when there were only electrons, protons, and neutrons.

Sure, ideally all of them will turn out to be related exactly by some deep underlying principle. Conversely that's about the only hope we have for "proving" ultimate theories empirically, to find that they predict the natural constants precisely.

The two examples of electricity and magnetism, and fundamental particles, are good because they illustrate two different kinds of progress that we can make. Electricity and magnetism did seem like totally separate things, tantalisingly similar in some ways while bizarrely different in others, until about 1831, when Faraday discovered induction. Fridge magnets stick to iron, staticky balloons stick to walls, and that seems kind of similar; magnets always seem to have north and south poles, though, while static charge is just overall positive or negative. Gradually people figured out that electricity and magnetism talk to each other a lot, until finally Einstein recognised that they were simply two distinct facets of a single four-dimensional phenomenon. So they were unified by fitting them both into one larger whole. A big consequence of that fitting was to make the differences between electricity and magnetism clearly necessary and inevitable, rather than arbitrary.

Popular science taught for decades that everything was made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but actually there was never much time when that was the real scientific understanding, because the positron and the neutron were both discovered in 1932. Lots more particles kept being discovered in the following decades, until eventually people pieced together the jigsaw puzzle enough to recognize that most of the various -ons were molecule-like bound states of a smaller number of more fundamental particles. So the zoo of particles was reduced by eliminating most of them as basic ingredients and concluding instead that they were composites.

I'm not sure but I think it might still not be completely ruled out that the Higgs boson is really a composite of quarks, rather than a fundamental particle. And in principle any or all of the particles that we currently think are fundamental could be composites of currently unrecognised particles, bound together by currently unrecognised forces. Likewise the forces we now think are fundamental could in fact be residual forces left over when the real forces are mostly balanced, like tidal effects from gravity.

The real fundamental forces and particles would then be fewer in number, making up the larger number of forces and particles we currently see by combining in multiple ways. One result would then be that many of the parameters that we now think of as fundamental constants of nature could in fact be derived mathematically from the smaller number of parameters possessed by the fewer fundamental things.

So, whether we unify things into larger entities, or reduce them to smaller ones, we could expect to pare down the number of mysterious magic numbers in the world. As Einstein might have put it, this would leave God with fewer choices to make.