On the Fine Tuning Argument for the existence of God

[dastardly stem]

PG, are you familiar with Luke Barnes?

https://www.closertotruth.com/contribut ... es/profile

His book A Fortunate universe, I believe it’s called, is an attempt to address the types of problems with the fine tuning argument you mention. I’d definitely be interested in your take.

[Physics Guy]

I had never heard of Luke Barnes before. This stuff isn't my field, though I did once use to be closer to it.

I didn't look at any of those videos in the link because I really don't like watching videos. I can read so much faster than I can listen or watch that videos are usually really tedious. Some well-made how-to videos are good but interviews are unbearable.

I did find one of Barnes's papers about fine tuning and skimmed through it. He spent quite a bit of time critiquing work by this other guy Stenger. Stenger seems to have made some wildly overblown claims in the reverse direction from fine tuning, arguing that the laws of nature that we see are obviously inevitable. That's silly, and Stenger's arguments seem to be exactly the kind of technical-sounding snow job that I warned about on the other side, in favour of fine tuning. Barnes seems to do an effective job of exposing Stenger's fallacies; he takes longer to do it than I would like, but maybe it's the right length for his audience.

Religious apologists are by no means the only people who resort to snow jobs and sophistry. Anybody who wants to be sure of something will be tempted to advance bogus arguments.

I didn't carefully go through Barnes's whole paper. It does look sensible and responsible as far as it goes. The problem with fine tuning arguments isn't that they're all technically incompetent, but just that the whole topic is too full of unknowns for any really solid conclusions to be possible. You can try to make the best guesses you can based on what we now know, and I think it's a legitimate scientific project to try to do that. It's nice to lay out how it looks from our current knowledge. In the end, though, all you can really conclude is a big, "Hmmm." What I don't like about fine tuning arguments is when they try to make it all seem more solid than that.

We don't know anything about why the various natural constants are what they are, so we can't say anything about whether they are arbitrary decisions that have to have been made very carefully or whether they are as inevitable as the digits of pi. We don't know anything about what radically different kinds of universe from ours might also have been very interesting and full of phenomena comparable to intelligent life even if radically different. So for me the bottom line is just a big grain of salt.

(This is why I'm much more impressed by the issue of initial conditions than I am by fine tuning. All of science since Newton tells us that initial conditions are arbitrary choices. That's the whole basic structure of natural law as we know it. It's not at all clear that the constants of nature are like initial conditions, however. In current theory, they aren't; perhaps in reality they could be; we don't know.)

Maybe Barnes actually realises this fully—I couldn't tell from my quick skimming of this one paper. Even if he does it will still be perfectly reasonable for him to go on laying out the conclusions we can try to draw from what we know, and rebutting people like Stenger who make specious claims in the opposite direction. If he really thinks that there is a powerful fine tuning case to be made, something that goes well beyond "Hmmm", then I would say that he is too biased by the need for someone in his line of work to rely on assumptions in order to get some results. Just because something is the best guess we can make doesn't mean it's a good guess.

[Rivendale]

I had never heard of Luke Barnes before. This stuff isn't my field, though I did once use to be closer to it.

I didn't look at any of those videos in the link because I really don't like watching videos. I can read so much faster than I can listen or watch that videos are usually really tedious. Some well-made how-to videos are good but interviews are unbearable.

I did find one of Barnes's papers about fine tuning and skimmed through it. He spent quite a bit of time critiquing work by this other guy Stenger. Stenger seems to have made some wildly overblown claims in the reverse direction from fine tuning, arguing that the laws of nature that we see are obviously inevitable. That's silly, and Stenger's arguments seem to be exactly the kind of technical-sounding snow job that I warned about on the other side, in favour of fine tuning. Barnes seems to do an effective job of exposing Stenger's fallacies; he takes longer to do it than I would like, but maybe it's the right length for his audience.

Religious apologists are by no means the only people who resort to snow jobs and sophistry. Anybody who wants to be sure of something will be tempted to advance bogus arguments.

I didn't carefully go through Barnes's whole paper. It does look sensible and responsible as far as it goes. The problem with fine tuning arguments isn't that they're all technically incompetent, but just that the whole topic is too full of unknowns for any really solid conclusions to be possible. You can try to make the best guesses you can based on what we now know, and I think it's a legitimate scientific project to try to do that. It's nice to lay out how it looks from our current knowledge. In the end, though, all you can really conclude is a big, "Hmmm." What I don't like about fine tuning arguments is when they try to make it all seem more solid than that.

We don't know anything about why the various natural constants are what they are, so we can't say anything about whether they are arbitrary decisions that have to have been made very carefully or whether they are as inevitable as the digits of pi. We don't know anything about what radically different kinds of universe from ours might also have been very interesting and full of phenomena comparable to intelligent life even if radically different. So for me the bottom line is just a big grain of salt.

(This is why I'm much more impressed by the issue of initial conditions than I am by fine tuning. All of science since Newton tells us that initial conditions are arbitrary choices. That's the whole basic structure of natural law as we know it. It's not at all clear that the constants of nature are like initial conditions, however. In current theory, they aren't; perhaps in reality they could be; we don't know.)

Maybe Barnes actually realises this fully—I couldn't tell from my quick skimming of this one paper. Even if he does it will still be perfectly reasonable for him to go on laying out the conclusions we can try to draw from what we know, and rebutting people like Stenger who make specious claims in the opposite direction. If he really thinks that there is a powerful fine tuning case to be made, something that goes well beyond "Hmmm", then I would say that he is too biased by the need for someone in his line of work to rely on assumptions in order to get some results. Just because something is the best guess we can make doesn't mean it's a good guess.

I have read some of Victor Stenger books and agree. It appears to make any substantial leap in cosmology we need a breakthrough that we can't currently see. Much like how quantum mechanics could not have been foreseen by Newton or his future contemporary scientists. Perhaps something that takes the weirdness and counterintuitive nature of the predictions of quantum mechanics. Maybe something like Jeremy England's origin of life hypothesis back in 2014. If interested check out https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-su ... -20170726/ .

[Physics Guy]

England's ideas may perhaps turn out to be revolutionary for biology, but his whole point seems to be that life does not need any new physics. He's not proposing to revise quantum mechanics or anything like that. What he's doing looks interesting, all right, but it's not shocking. He seems to be supporting, with simulations, things that I think most physicists have assumed for many years.

[Gadianton]

There is only empirical evidence for God, whether it's fine-tuning or anything else, if God decided to allow the evidence to exist. Brigham Young (and lots of Christians I think) believed that Satan hid the dinosaur bones in the earth to trick us. But he did that under God's watch. God could make it look like life is an accident that happens all the time. He could have created life on Mars with a fake fossil record that originates in totally different ways than life on earth. He could have been straight with us, covered his tracks, or thrown us off the scent in whatever way he imagines for his higher purpose.

[drumdude]

DCP recently referenced a piece from a Christian, ruminating on why people would go to hell. It’s not because they’re bad people, it’s not because they’re unpersuaded of gods existence. It’s not because there’s no good evidence to believe in God.

Rather, everyone in hell will be there because they can’t stand to be in the presence of God. It’s a nice way of undercutting the criticism of any argument for the existence of God. “You are made such that you cannot and will not believe.”

It can’t be the case that Mormonism fails on objective rational grounds. It has to be your personal individual moral failing to believe.

I am hopeful, that someday Daniel’s heart will be softened and he will accept atheism as a valid rational position and stop attacking the Madeleine Murray Ohare straw man.

[Gadianton]

The line I thought was the worst from this Davis guy, who is apparently a complete moron:

Moreover, the evidence that we have from this life is that some people will go on denying God forever

Right -- and over at the .win board, they say that normies will deny that Trump won the 2020 election forever.

DCP should just substitute, "the evidence that we have from this life is that some people will go on denying Joseph Smith restored the gospel forever" -- people like Stephen Davis.

A while back, Henry Eyring spoke at a funeral I went to, and he explained that missionary work in the next life is just as hard as it is in this life.

What a bunch of losers. A retired professor of Islam, the number three guy of the world's richest church, and a distinguished professor of philosophy at Claremont all come up with the same observation that drives the most functionally broken of the QAnon cultists. And they call it scholarship.

[Rivendale]

The line I thought was the worst from this Davis guy, who is apparently a complete moron:

Moreover, the evidence that we have from this life is that some people will go on denying God forever

Right -- and over at the .win board, they say that normies will deny that Trump won the 2020 election forever.

DCP should just substitute, "the evidence that we have from this life is that some people will go on denying Joseph Smith restored the gospel forever" -- people like Stephen Davis.

A while back, Henry Eyring spoke at a funeral I went to, and he explained that missionary work in the next life is just as hard as it is in this life.

What a bunch of losers. A retired professor of Islam, the number three guy of the world's richest church, and a distinguished professor of philosophy at Claremont all come up with the same observation that drives the most functionally broken of the QAnon cultists. And they call it scholarship.

How does Eyring know that?

[Gadianton]

How does Eyring know that?

nonspecific reference to interaction with messengers on the other side.

[dastardly stem]

We don't know anything about why the various natural constants are what they are, so we can't say anything about whether they are arbitrary decisions that have to have been made very carefully or whether they are as inevitable as the digits of pi. We don't know anything about what radically different kinds of universe from ours might also have been very interesting and full of phenomena comparable to intelligent life even if radically different. So for me the bottom line is just a big grain of salt.

Same here. It feels fairly obvious we'd have no way to know whether there is some intentional fine tuning that took place.