On the Fine Tuning Argument for the existence of God

[drumdude]

Over at an unnamed blog, a bunch of facts and figures are being thrown around:

the diameter of our galaxy is between 80,000 and 100,000 light-years.

Our sun likes[sic] between two spiral arms, some 27,000 light-years, or approximately two-thirds of the way, out from the Milky Way’s center

the solar system is just above (or below, depending upon one’s orientation) the center of the 6,000-light-year-thick central plane.

The edges of most galaxies are metal-poor; our positioning within the galaxy places us in a metal-rich area.

This may seem impressive. Until you learn of the very simple and effective rebuttal to this very old, very tired line of reasoning.

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”

This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.

How do creationists respond to this? With the following faulty reasoning:

Consider more closely the puddle’s reasoning. Let’s name our puddle Doug. He has noticed a precise match between two things: 1) his shape and 2) the shape of the hole in which he lives. Doug is amazed! What Doug doesn’t know is that, given A) the fluidity of water, B) the solidity of the hole, and C) the constant downward force of gravity, he will always take the same shape as his hole. If the hole had been different, his shape would adjust to match it. Any hole will do for a puddle.

This is precisely where the analogy fails: any universe will not do for life. Life is not a fluid. It will not adjust to any old universe. There could have been a completely dead universe: perhaps one that lasts for 1 second before re-collapsing or is so sparse that no two particles ever interact in the entire history of the universe.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the student to explain how this is an egregious example of begging the question.

[Physics Guy]

It may be that our planet or our solar system or our galaxy is somehow especially suitable for intelligent life to emerge, and that if conditions aren't so perfect elsewhere then intelligent life may be rare. It may just be, however, that different conditions elsewhere lead to lots of different kinds of intelligent life, which we can't anticipate well because there are too many variables. And even if intelligent life does require finely tuned conditions, there are so many planets and galaxies that one could expect the right conditions to turn up somewhere among them just by chance, at least once.

Wherever that happened, we would be calling it "Here". So the fact that we find ourselves in suitable conditions for intelligent life should not be counted as some kind of fluke. And if conditions for intelligent life are so rare that most galaxies harbor no thinking beings, then that would strike me as evidence against any kind of purposeful creator, because it would seem awfully wasteful.

It's conceivable that it also takes fine tuning of the very laws of Nature in order for conditions suitable for intelligent life to occur at all anywhere in the universe. This is a hard argument to tighten up, though, because it's too hard to know whether different natural laws wouldn't just have led to different kinds of intelligent life that were just as alive and intelligent. And it's also hard to be sure there aren't some kind of meta-laws that make those apparently finely-tuned laws more inevitable than we currently think.

What does seem to require fine tuning is to produce the exact world we have, with all of us down to our fingerprints. But the whole point of that observation is that slightly different fine tuning would seemingly have been just as good, so the choice to have things just as they are, rather than otherwise, would seem to have been arbitrary rather than urgently necessary. The line of argument for God from initial conditions is quite different from the Fine Tuning Argument.

I don't think much of the Fine Tuning Argument. I don't even like it theologically. It makes God out to have been the kind of amateur creator who has to keep justifying awkward plot twists with ad-hoc explanations instead of the kind of gifted storyteller who makes everything seem natural even when it's surprising.

[Rivendale]

It may be that our planet or our solar system or our galaxy is somehow especially suitable for intelligent life to emerge, and that if conditions aren't so perfect elsewhere then intelligent life may be rare. It may just be, however, that different conditions elsewhere lead to lots of different kinds of intelligent life, which we can't anticipate well because there are too many variables. And even if intelligent life does require finely tuned conditions, there are so many planets and galaxies that one could expect the right conditions to turn up somewhere among them just by chance, at least once.

Wherever that happened, we would be calling it "Here". So the fact that we find ourselves in suitable conditions for intelligent life should not be counted as some kind of fluke. And if conditions for intelligent life are so rare that most galaxies harbor no thinking beings, then that would strike me as evidence against any kind of purposeful creator, because it would seem awfully wasteful.

It's conceivable that it also takes fine tuning of the very laws of Nature in order for conditions suitable for intelligent life to occur at all anywhere in the universe. This is a hard argument to tighten up, though, because it's too hard to know whether different natural laws wouldn't just have led to different kinds of intelligent life that were just as alive and intelligent. And it's also hard to be sure there aren't some kind of meta-laws that make those apparently finely-tuned laws more inevitable than we currently think.

What does seem to require fine tuning is to produce the exact world we have, with all of us down to our fingerprints. But the whole point of that observation is that slightly different fine tuning would seemingly have been just as good, so the choice to have things just as they are, rather than otherwise, would seem to have been arbitrary rather than urgently necessary. The line of argument for God from initial conditions is quite different from the Fine Tuning Argument.

I don't think much of the Fine Tuning Argument. I don't even like it theologically. It makes God out to have been the kind of amateur creator who has to keep justifying awkward plot twists with ad-hoc explanations instead of the kind of gifted storyteller who makes everything seem natural even when it's surprising.

If the universe is the way it is because of initial conditions I wonder if there are fundamental brute facts that can never change. Or is it that initial conditions may spring forth fundamentally different physics due to the type of particles created?

[Physics Guy]

The structure of natural law as we have always known it so far has three tiers, sort of analogous to constitutional law, statute law, and precedent from court rulings, in human law.

At the bottom there is one fundamental equation, like F = ma (in its day) or the Schrödinger equation (which is far more general than the simple case of a single particle which is usually presented). This bottom-level equation is kind of like a grammatical rule, rather than a statement. F = ma, for instance, doesn't tell you anything at all until you fill in some kind of law for the force. The Schrödinger equation says little more than that probability will always total to one, until you specify exactly what the Hamiltonian operator is.

Then there are the laws that specify what things actually exist and what forces act among them. Currently we have the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, which states a specific (rather large and complicated) Hamiltonian operator for the universe, modulo lots of ways of re-writing it into equivalent forms. In particular the Standard Model Hamiltonian contains a couple of dozen quantum field operators, which create and destroy the elementary particles that we know. The Standard Model stipulates three fundamental forces and three different families of matter particles (counting the Higgs). It also specifies as natural constants the masses of the particles and how much they have of various kinds of charge. And then as an afterthought we have gravity.

Finally there are initial conditions, which as far as the theory is concerned could have been absolutely anything, and simply happen to have been whatever they were, that led to how things are now.

We've collected a lot of light emitted billions of years ago from stars billions of years away, and the sets of frequencies emitted by those ancient, distant stars look just like the patterns we see emitted and absorbed by hydrogen and helium and other elements in our labs here on Earth, except for the whole intricate pattern being uniformly shifted to lower frequency, because of Doppler shifts and the continuous expansion of space. This is a huge amount of data that really strongly indicates that the same laws we see in our labs also applied a long, long time ago in all those far, far distant galaxies. As far as the entire visible universe is concerned, the constitutional and statute laws seem to be fixed and universal, with differences between here and there, and now and then, determined entirely by initial conditions.

We know we can't see all of the universe, though. Most of it has expanded too far and too fast for light from it ever to reach us. So conceivably some of those basic laws can actually vary, presumably under some deeper set of meta-laws that we don't yet know, and we are simply in a big blob of space where one phase of laws apply, while other versions rule elsewhere, kind of how the oceans are full of water while the mountains are bare. Or conceivably there are many universes within some larger multiverse, and individual universes can have all different laws.

On the one hand we have no scrap of evidence, so far, for anything like that. And presumably if it were true that the laws we now know are only one of the many possibilities that apply in other places and times, there would still be some deeper set of laws that really were universal, that we just haven't found yet. Our basic guess, that is, is that the triple structure of natural law must always apply, though the dividing lines between the different levels might vary.

Maybe the Standard Model is just due to our local initial conditions. It contains a bunch of magic numbers, some of which are tantalisingly close to simple fractions (the fine structure constant is close to 1/137) while others are bizarrely tiny (all the elementary particle masses, in units of the Planck mass). It's kind of weird to think that God just picked all those weird numbers off the top of her head for no reason, but no theory we now have says anything at all about why any of those numbers should be anything in particular. (No theory that works, anyway. All the so-called Grand Unified Theories are attempts to put a backstory behind some of the magic numbers.) If the process of determining some of those numbers were pushed back into the initial conditions, instead of having to be part of the set-up of the laws themselves ... well, I guess we'd count that as explaining the magic numbers a little better, somehow, at least, even though they'd still ultimately be arbitrary. Sigh.

Or maybe some of what we now think are arbitrary initial conditions actually had to be that way because of some law we don't know. The boundaries between fundamental grammar, basic content, and initial conditions may well all shift up or down in the future, if we learn enough more.

[Rivendale]

The structure of natural law as we have always known it so far has three tiers, sort of analogous to constitutional law, statute law, and precedent from court rulings, in human law.

At the bottom there is one fundamental equation, like F = ma (in its day) or the Schrödinger equation (which is far more general than the simple case of a single particle which is usually presented). This bottom-level equation is kind of like a grammatical rule, rather than a statement. F = ma, for instance, doesn't tell you anything at all until you fill in some kind of law for the force. The Schrödinger equation says little more than that probability will always total to one, until you specify exactly what the Hamiltonian operator is.

Then there are the laws that specify what things actually exist and what forces act among them. Currently we have the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, which states a specific (rather large and complicated) Hamiltonian operator for the universe, modulo lots of ways of re-writing it into equivalent forms. In particular the Standard Model Hamiltonian contains a couple of dozen quantum field operators, which create and destroy the elementary particles that we know. The Standard Model stipulates three fundamental forces and three different families of matter particles (counting the Higgs). It also specifies as natural constants the masses of the particles and how much they have of various kinds of charge. And then as an afterthought we have gravity.

Finally there are initial conditions, which as far as the theory is concerned could have been absolutely anything, and simply happen to have been whatever they were, that led to how things are now.

We've collected a lot of light emitted billions of years ago from stars billions of years away, and the sets of frequencies emitted by those ancient, distant stars look just like the patterns we see emitted and absorbed by hydrogen and helium and other elements in our labs here on Earth, except for the whole intricate pattern being uniformly shifted to lower frequency, because of Doppler shifts and the continuous expansion of space. This is a huge amount of data that really strongly indicates that the same laws we see in our labs also applied a long, long time ago in all those far, far distant galaxies. As far as the entire visible universe is concerned, the constitutional and statute laws seem to be fixed and universal, with differences between here and there, and now and then, determined entirely by initial conditions.

We know we can't see all of the universe, though. Most of it has expanded too far and too fast for light from it ever to reach us. So conceivably some of those basic laws can actually vary, presumably under some deeper set of meta-laws that we don't yet know, and we are simply in a big blob of space where one phase of laws apply, while other versions rule elsewhere, kind of how the oceans are full of water while the mountains are bare. Or conceivably there are many universes within some larger multiverse, and individual universes can have all different laws.

On the one hand we have no scrap of evidence, so far, for anything like that. And presumably if it were true that the laws we now know are only one of the many possibilities that apply in other places and times, there would still be some deeper set of laws that really were universal, that we just haven't found yet. Our basic guess, that is, is that the triple structure of natural law must always apply, though the dividing lines between the different levels might vary.

Maybe the Standard Model is just due to our local initial conditions. It contains a bunch of magic numbers, some of which are tantalisingly close to simple fractions (the fine structure constant is close to 1/137) while others are bizarrely tiny (all the elementary particle masses, in units of the Planck mass). It's kind of weird to think that God just picked all those weird numbers off the top of her head for no reason, but no theory we now have says anything at all about why any of those numbers should be anything in particular. (No theory that works, anyway. All the so-called Grand Unified Theories are attempts to put a backstory behind some of the magic numbers.) If the process of determining some of those numbers were pushed back into the initial conditions, instead of having to be part of the set-up of the laws themselves ... well, I guess we'd count that as explaining the magic numbers a little better, somehow, at least, even though they'd still ultimately be arbitrary. Sigh.

Or maybe some of what we now think are arbitrary initial conditions actually had to be that way because of some law we don't know. The boundaries between fundamental grammar, basic content, and initial conditions may well all shift up or down in the future, if we learn enough more.

The Hamiltonian and the Schrödinger equations are indeed descriptive not prescriptive. I often think of a parallel involving the laws of logic. Why are logical laws considered absolute? Or are they? What prescribes the law of identity? Similarly it seems we take these logical axioms and use them to describe reality as best we can, however this tells us nothing about why. I guess it is nothing more than ---is vs ought paradox. Or arguments for morality. Fascinating how all of this ties together. Do have some insight into the kind of evidence we might find to help narrow the possible scenarios for pre-expansion of the universe? For me at this current time it seems this is a question similar to "what is north of the North Pole?" Maybe humans will have to come to terms with the fact some things can't be known.

[Physics Guy]

In the vanilla Big Bang scenario, "before the Big Bang" is indeed very much like "north of the North Pole". The Big Bang is not exactly the same kind of geometrical singularity as a North Pole but it is a geometrical singularity, so the analogy is more than just a metaphor. It's like describing a cube as a 3D square.

In general I'm optimistic about what future science may discover but I'm a lot less optimistic about really finding out for sure about anything earlier than a certain point. Everything we now know tells us that even once things had settled down enough that our current theories ought to have been reasonably accurate, conditions were still so extreme that we'll likely never be able to reproduce them in a lab.

The hope would be to find a simple theory with no adjustable knobs on it, which made a lot of definite predictions about things that we actually can observe, and they were all uncannily accurate. Then you could maybe take seriously whatever it said about the Big Bang—or whatever it said happened instead. So far no-one has found anything like that. People keep looking, but I'm a little pessimistic about this endeavour as well. It's so easy to dream up something that sounds potentially plausible, but so hard to find something that will actually work, that it's a noisy field without much of a signal.

[hauslern]

I asked Dan about your response and it seems he must have read it. His response "I'm aware of his response. He's one of the few people over at your board of choice whose comments occasionally have value to me; I've made a note of his points, and will certainly address them at some point (probably in a more formal publication than here). Serious fine-tuning advocates have already taken the kinds of things that he mentions into account.

When he comments on the Church and its teachings, though, he routinely thinks himself more knowledgeable about our position than he actually is. But I respect his thoughts on science."
Who are the serious fine-tuning advocates?

[drumdude]

Who are the serious fine-tuning advocates?

Isn't it funny how Dan never actually points to these "serious people" doing apologetic work?

If he told you who they were, we would be able to easily show that they aren't making any different arguments than Joe Christian on his intelligent design blog.

Certainly the arguments aren't going to be made by Daniel, he's not qualified at all on the subject. He simply copies and pastes from the chain emails and links that his underlings regularly send him.

[Physics Guy]

If Peterson can point to a stronger case for fine tuning, that might be interesting. I’m afraid I think it’s more likely that his sources do not actually resolve the problems I’ve mentioned, but merely dance around them with enough technical-sounding patter to impress lay people.

Some people find an argument more impressive when exactly the same logical steps are described in fancier words. The effect works with math, too, for some people. It’s common for an idea that sounds fine in lay terms to be destroyed by the devil in the technical details, but rare for something that sounds dubious in plain words to be transformed into a compelling case by technicalities. If somebody claims something like that, they’re probably snowing you, having snowed themselves first.

[doubtingthomas]

If Peterson can point to a stronger case for fine tuning, that might be interesting. I’m afraid I think it’s more likely that his sources do not actually resolve the problems I’ve mentioned, but merely dance around them with enough technical-sounding patter to impress lay people.

Some people find an argument more impressive when exactly the same logical steps are described in fancier words. The effect works with math, too, for some people. It’s common for an idea that sounds fine in lay terms to be destroyed by the devil in the technical details, but rare for something that sounds dubious in plain words to be transformed into a compelling case by technicalities. If somebody claims something like that, they’re probably snowing you, having snowed themselves first.

I don't understand why the Mormon apologists believe in the Fine Tuning argument. It shouldn't make any goddamn sense to them.