the_cave

Splicing my replies together. Boy, too much time on my hands tonight...but I thought I'd reply while my ideas were fresh.

Sure I have--many times. And seen it done many times. So I'm surprised when I see a (straight) royal flush, but not baffled. It's not baffling when it happens once every few thousand hands (or however many). There's only one universe, though, so...

Perhaps you can imagine if I had dealt the only hand of cards ever to be dealt throughout space and time, and everyone got a royal flush in a different suit. I myself would be quite baffled, and would suspect that someone had stacked the deck. That's the (supposed) import of the FTA.

(However, it's time to make a disclaimer: the FTA is mostly of academic interest to me. I really don't have a lot riding on it. Nevertheless, I do find life surprising, at least as surprising as a royal flush! So the issues, at least, interest me.)

Asimov assumes there's a lot going on in the universe--and he's right. But I could argue (ok, I will, for the argument's sake...) that this is because our universe is such an interesting place--because of the unlikely arrangement of physical values which it posesses. For example, I could imagine a universe with physical constants that produced nothing but random collisions of particles over and over again. A totally uninteresting place, where nothing interesting ever happened.

(Now I think maybe at this point you could claim that universes like ours, with some disorder and some amazing order, are in fact the most common types of universes that could be imagined, but I'll let you make that argument yourself if you want, 'cause I don't believe it...yet.)

Sorry, but I do.



Hey, nobody's arguing (ok, well I am not arguing!) that the history of homo sapiens sapiens would have turned out the way it did if you re-ran it...but there'd still be people involved. Just like there'd still be a river, though it's course could be different. cFTA (sounds like a regional transportation authority of some sort...) just argues that the existence of us in general is unusual. I would argue it's more unusual than the existence of rivers.



Arbitrarily? The cFTA definitely, I will admit, relies on the impression that the confluence of physical constants necssary for the existence of intelligent life is truly impressive. I myself am impressed by it. I guess if someone is not, the cFTA will not be persuasive.

Mm, this is the crux of the issue, IMO, and a reason why I have always distrusted the cFTA. But again, cosmologists seem willing to play the cFTA game according to the theologians' rules, so why shouldn't I? In fact, I read an article in the New York Review of Books some years back, wherein Steven Weinberg (the physicist) argued that actually the chances that all the relevant physical constants were within a range that produced life weren't all that small after all--I don't remember the value he argued it to, though it was still unlikely (but not bafflingly unlikely). Was he right? Who knows (I believe he also explained in that article, quite seriously, why he was among, I believe it was, the 50,000 happiest people on Earth. I still chuckle out loud--not in a complimentary way--when I think back on it...) Anyway, if Steven Weinberg is willing to take the argument seriously, so am I. But then, we could both be wrong, after all...

(I told you I didn't have a lot riding on it.)

Wiploc

Every hand of cards is as unlikely as every other hand. The thing that makes you think a straight flush is less likely than other hands is that you value it more highly.

What the FTA does is look at what we were dealt, decide to value it highly, and then decide that that it's really surprising that what we value is what we were dealt. That's like firing an arrow blind and then painting a bullseye around where-ever it hits.



It doesn't take much. Pour out a glass of water. How dumbfoundingly unlikely was it that the molecules would leave the glass in that order!



A creationist would value that result, notice that things at least hypothetically could have been different, and decide that it proves there must be a god of uninteresting randomness.
crc

the_cave

Ok, then, well...[holding head in hand] I'm sorry, then I do not understand what you are saying. I thought the unlikely event was the existence of intelligent life in some universe, with or without an intelligent designer. So, in your original example, what had the 1% chance of happening, and what now has the 0% chance? Or are you just saying that .01 * 0 = 0?

Well, like I said, I mistrust the cFTA for the very reason that I'm not sure we're talking about anything when we're talking about probabilities.

But oh, now I see what you're saying! Yet I disagree--you don't need a likely god. You just need some probability of a god. That's all. I've never thought cFTA proved anything, besides a likelihood of a god existing. I always thought the only point was to prove that the likelihood of U(I)=a Universe with Intelligence, given C(~I)=an unIntelligent Cause, was less than the likelihood of U(I) given C(I)=an Intelligent Cause (I actually dislike cooking up logical symbols to make philosophic arguments, but they seem popular, so I figured hey, why not. If I remembered how to use the operator "|" properly, I'd use it, and cook up a formula using Bayes' Theorem like someone suggested above, but I don't remember how to use it correctly. Maybe someone can do it for me before I look it up this weekend.)

Anyway, if U(I) given C(I) is more likely than U(I) given C(~I), it's more reasonable to assume C(I)--though of course it's not impossible that C(~I). But darn it, I think your point applies here, too--because if C(I) is too unlikely, it will end up being more likely that C(~I), regardless.

So maybe all the cFTA does is prove that if you can somehow prove that U(I) given C(I) is more likely than U(I) given C(~I), it is indeed reasonable to assume that God exists. But good luck proving the first part of that conditional! I think you may have won this point, wiploc.

Theli

Say what?
So, probability is a property of matter?
Then how can probability exist in mathematics?

HRG

Why only in the context of matter, pray tell ? Probability theory is a formal mathematical theory, and thus not dependent of any specific matter.
This is no obstacle against assigning a Bayesian probability to his existence.

Regards,
HRG.

Thomas Metcalf

Tercel :

Think about the really strange designer, God*, who loves the current set of facts about the universe and won't settle for anything else. As I take it, you'd say the chance of God* just happening to prefer the current set of facts about the universe is very low, while the chance of God preferring to create life is about 0.5. But then again, God* is a much better explanation than God, if the chance of God and God* existing is equal. In fact, I'd say the more specific you get (the more facts you conjoin into F*), the less likely it is that a designer would just happen to prefer F* (the less likely it is that God* exists), but the more likely it is that the universe was designed to produce F* because there's much greater explanatory power.

If that's true, then FTA is in trouble. It seems we can slide up and down the explanatory scale at will and always end up with the same results. As strangeness of the designer goes up, explanatory power goes up. As strangeness of the designer goes down (preferring to influence the outcome of fewer and fewer facts about the universe), explanatory power goes down. This is a hard point for me to express, so let me try to put it another way.

Suppose there are five facts about the universe, and each had a 0.1 probability of obtaining. The chance of the conjunctive fact obtaining was 0.00001. This is highly improbable. Now suppose there is a being who prefers to influence the outcome of one fact, F1. Call the being S1. To posit S1 doesn't do much to explain the obtainment of F1, because there was a 0.1 chance of F1 obtaining anyway. But S1 seems fairly likely to exist; a designer seems to have a fairly good chance of preferring the influence the outcome of F1, because that's just one fact. Now suppose S5 is the being that prefers to influence the outcome of all five facts. S5 has quite a bit of explanatory power, but the chance S5 would prefer to influence the outcome of all five facts seems to be very low. But S5 explains very well a much less probable outcome. It's not clear to me why we should prefer one level of specificity to another; while the designers become less plausible as they care about more and more facts, they become more and more necessary for an explanation of the conjunction of these facts.

I don't think we're entitled to say that. N is much larger than L, so just as easily, a case can be made that any designer is much more likely to choose ~L, because it's more likely to prefer a member of N, all else equal. Maybe life won't obtain, but "set of facts x" will obtain, and I still don't see why a designer would more likely want life than want any particular set of facts for the set's aesthetic value. An intelligent designer must choose between any set of constants N1 and the failure of that set to obtain (~N1) -- so is that probability 0.5?

It seems to me that when we're estimating background probability, we don't want to be estimating the chance an intelligent designer would want some outcome -- we want to estimate the chance that an intelligent designer would want some outcome conjoined with the chance that the designer is intelligent. In terms of our experience, most things that have effects on the outcomes of other processes are unintelligent.

Well. I hope I've been clear in what I'm trying to express but I have a feeling there are points at which I could have been clearer. Let me try to summarize with a different take on the problem. When we're inferring what sort of being designed the universe, how do we know when we've gone too far and attributed some preference to it that we're not entitled to attribute? How do we know to stop at monotheism without additionally claiming God prefers that humans live on continents instead of on islands? Or why go so far as physical-life monotheism when the background probability of a god who just prefers the possibility of life in general, rather than physical life, is higher?

tronvillain

the_cave:
What I mean by "the possibility of prior probability", I mean that without the assumption that the universe is something that came into existence, there is no need for an explanation of it coming into existence. Without a "before the universe" there can be none of the prior probabilities of fine tuning.

Anyway, there are countless alternative hypotheses to "God." For example, perhaps there are certain biases inherent in the nature of reality towards certain physical constants - the number of hypotheses of this nature are essentially infinite, though a huge number of them will be disconfirmed by the evidence, a huge number will also be confirmed to greater or lesser degrees. None of these are accurately described as "so somehow or other something incredibly unlikely just happened" or at least, not any more than "God" is. Beyond that we have the endless variations on parallel words, sucessive worlds, and successive parallel worlds. Beyond that we have the virtually limitless number of alternative intelligent creators (you can theoretically include these in the "God" hypothesis, but most theists would probably be a little upset about that), and unintelligent creators.

The fine tuning argument for theism amounts to "I see something which appears staggeringly improbable given what appear to be the number of alternatives. I will explain this (make the probabilityi of the evidence given the hypothesis closer to one) by proposing the existence of something staggeringly improbable." This is not a good explanation. There is no good explanation given the information we have to work with, and it is entirely possible that no explanation exists.

Dr. Retard

Tercel wrote:
Kenny wrote:
Both seem to be making the same point, and I don't buy it. Here are two propositions:

(1) An intelligent being capable of creating universes might be interested in producing a universe in which other intelligent beings arise.
(2) An intelligent being capable of creating universes might be interested in producing a universe in which other physical/embodied intelligent beings arise.

I'm not sure if (1) is true, but I 'get' its intuitive appeal. But the FTA needs (2), and I see no reason to accept (2). After all, such an immaterial mind could presumably create other immaterial minds in any old universe. I think (part of) the appeal of the argument lies in a covert slide from (1) to (2).

TerryTryon

The FTA (as do all teleological arguments) rests on the intuitive notion that since humans must use work and intelligence in order to adapt their surroundings closer to their desires, that the beneficial aspects of their environment that are granted without human effort must have been arrived at by a similar process. In other words, the the FTA is an unsupported, intuitive analolgy that anthropomorphizes nature.

The first hurdle for FTA advocates is to show that that the order in the universe beneficial to the species does indeed have a teleological basis. To share a metaphor from this thread, the FTA advocate must show that there is indeed a intrinsic difference between sawdust and framing members. In the metaphor, the sawdust is discarded while the framing members remain integral to the structure of the house. The FTA advocate must offer similar examples, in order to establish that his/her grounding principle is more than intuition posing as brute fact. To show that an certain constant is both beneficial to human life and is inconceivably improbable merely begs the question. There are a multitude of constants irrelevant to human happiness that have similar improbabilities.

For this reason, I maintain that the FTA is an unverifiable hypothesis. I see no grounds and no conceivable grounds for accepting its foundational assumption. There is no reason to grant the need for an intelligent designer until it is shown that the ID has actually left a distinguishing mark on his creation.

Or am I just blowing smoke?

theophilus

I'm sorry. I always assume I'm dealing with naturalist/materialsits here.
Are you suggesting that there are immaterial entities? How do you explain this?

Your assignemnt of probability to the existence of God is a projection of materialism onto what is an immaterial being. It's like trying to assign a color to the number 6.