Toby Wardman

(copy of my reply posted to Broken Ladder and Emerigo elsewhere)

These two objections are all closely related. I’ll post an amalgamated reply.

Broken Ladder and Enemigo both raise the same very good question. Essentially what you’re saying is: why should we mark out ‘life-permitting’ as a characteristic that needs explaining when others don’t? Various philosophers have tried to answer this question – not entirely satisfactorily, in my view. It’s hard to answer without collapsing into either circularity (“There’s a God, so this is the kind of thing he’d do, so this is evidence for his existence”) or dodgy premises (“Complexity always needs explaining, and life is complex, so this is evidence for God”).

Broken Ladder, I think, touched on the real non-question-begging answer. To use BL's example, if we find a brick hut in the rainforest, we infer intelligent design because we already know of something (namely, a process of human design and construction) that generates things like brick huts. Or, to use one of my favourites, if you’re travelling on a train and you pass by a hillside where rows of white stones spell out the words BRITISH RAIL WELCOMES YOU TO WALES, you infer intelligent design because you already know of something (again, human design) that generates language. There’s a very large number of possible configurations of white stones on hillsides, but only a small subset – those which form meaningful words – would suggest human design.

The principle is that a particular configuration of things is evidence for intelligent design in that it increases the probability of an intelligent designer existing. So if the prior probability of a capital-D Designer is good (as theists would claim), then the fact that the universe is life-permitting increases this probability, probably making it reasonable to accept God’s existence. But if the prior probability of a Designer is low or zero (as atheists would claim), then the fact that the universe is life-permitting doesn’t give it much of a boost, and we should still on balance prefer the conclusion that there is no Designer.

There’s a forthcoming paper, ‘Is the universe significant?’, referenced in my article. This paper is a broader development of the above points, complete with the obligatory urn and lottery analogies and a discussion of various objections.

In summary, the fine-tuning argument is probabilistic, not decisive. The strength of the Designer hypothesis, once the fine-tuning argument has been taken into account, depends on:

(a) the prior probability of the Designer hypothesis – if zero or very low beforehand, it will still be zero or very low afterwards;

(b) the estimated number of possible configurations that will generate life-permitting universes – the more common they are, the less support is given to the Designer hypothesis; and

(c) the total number of possible configurations – the fewer there are, the less support is given to the Designer hypothesis.

In my view, (b) and (c) aren’t a problem for the theist. That is, for reasons developed above in my replies to Andrew, I think there are very few possible configurations that could possibly generate intelligent life. And, for reasons given under the heading “Maybe things had to turn out this way” in my original article, I reject the claim that there might have been hardly any possible configurations to ‘choose’ from.

Only (a) remains as an avenue of attack for the fine-tuning argument, and it’s urged by Broken Ladder above: the case for the Designer depends on how much independent reason we have to think that a Designer (God) exists, so, if the atheists are right and we have little or no independent reason to believe in God, the fine-tuning argument is no help at all.

By the way, there’s a response at http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=56659 which is along the same lines as Andrew’s objection at the top of this thread. I refer the author to that debate.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to feed back about my article. It’s a pleasant break from the world of academic philosophy, where the first response you hear to your work is in some obscure journal six months down the line.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Toby Wardman :

In your original article, you write:

I have argued that while the crude "maybe things had to turn out this way" objection is unsuccessful, there is a more potent related objection. Suppose the atheologian were to claim that it is a metaphysically necessary and therefore explanation-less fact that this "law" biased the universe in favor of life. Certainly, this would be a strange claim, but it doesn't seem any less likely than the God claim, and therefore, it provides a viable alternative hypothesis.

The theist is likely to say that the atheist's alternative isn't viable at all, because there's no reason to think this sort of law could be explanation-less. But the proper counter-response is that if God can be explanation-less, so can this law. We have no reason to rate the probability of God any higher or lower than the probability of this law. This turns out to be essentially your conclusion at the end of the article.

Another way to present an objection similar to the one that points out that any outcome is equiprobable is to note that the chance of the universe providing evidence for life is only the chance that life is significant to its designer. This is highly likely for an intelligent being, but highly unlikely for a non-intelligent being, and there seem to be more non-intelligent entities than intelligent entities in the world.

Steven Carr

I assume you are Dr. Hinna?

(Sorry I haven't linked to your article yet, I haven't got access to update of the page)

You wrote to me that the possibility that there can be a universe which allows life is a brute fact - unexplainable.

This surely allows atheists to say that it is just an unexplainable, brute fact that the universe is life-permitting.

The probability that I win the lotttery increases the probabibility that I really do have a guardian angel looking after my interests. He, or she, though is then cut down by Occam's Razor.

But if the Universe is really fine-tuned to produce ME, (and I think it highly significant that it does, or else why would I be here), then I might look more closely into this guardian angel business.

Unless we have the curious paradox that God created a universe to design life, but did not care in the least about which life-forms were produced (The fact that he has allowed whole branches of Homo (eg Neanderthals) to go extinct might back that up.

As a general point about fine-tuning, it is determinism on a literally cosmic scale to think that fine-tuning the conditions of the Big Bang will automatically produce Homo sapiens billions of years down the line. Is the Universe really so mechanical?

Or do fine-tuning proponents think God has been doing a bit of prodding every now and then eg wiping out the dinosaurs, ending Ice Ages etc?

Toby Wardman

I'm delighted to say that I can be brief here.

To Thomas: I would agree with you sooner than you think. It's true that the conclusion I reach at the end of my article is that if God can be explanationless, then why not the universe (which saves us from bringing God into the equation at all)? But in fact, I agree that metaphysical necessity doesn't need any further explanation, any more than the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' needs an answer.

To Steven: Sorry mate, but I'm not Dr Hinna. I'm Toby Wardman, the author of the current feature article on the Secular Web. (I think I was in touch with you a few months ago very briefly about your website.) But for what it's worth, we agree, because when you replied to my last post, you wrote:

which is a very neat way of summarising exactly my points in the post from which you quoted.

Toby Wardman

Reading back over this thread, I think there have been a few slips here and there. I know the discussion has moved on, but it might be helpful if I clarified some points in my original article. After all, I'd hate for anyone to be left thinking:



OK. First, my argument is not that the fine-tuning argument works. It's just that the objections I consider in the article are far weaker than usually considered.

The main complaint I want to call attention to in this thread is summarised here by fishbulb:

This is where we have to be careful. The term "actually possible" is a bit unhelpful, but from context I think it's clear that fishbulb means something like "contingently" or "physically" possible, as contrasted with "logically possible", meaning simply "consistent". (It's physically impossible, but logically possible, that a man should fall 1000 feet onto concrete and survive. It's logically impossible that a man should fall 1000 feet onto concrete and both survive and not survive.)

Fishbulb's objection, then, is that I'm assuming that every logical possibility is in the reference class for our probability estimates, whereas actually I should only take physical possibilities. His point is valid, but my reply is this: when we're talking about the birth of the universe - and by universe I mean 'everything that exists', including all physical constraints - all logical possibilities are in fact physical possibilities. So it's right to use logical possibilities as the reference class. This is simply because, if we want to constrain the reference class by eliminating logical possibilities as physically or contingently impossible, we have to provide a reason - a constraint, or as someone called it elsewhere in this forum, a 'meta-constraint'.

This, phrased slightly more precisely, is the point of the section "Maybe things had to turn out this way" in my original article. If we say that the domain of physical possibility is narrower than the domain of logical possibility, then we are introducing some kind of contingent physical constraint which itself needs explaining if anything does.

To see the point, imagine the debate between theist and atheist:

ATHEIST: The universe's fine-tuning for life doesn't need explaining because it just had to turn out that way.

THEIST: Oh yeah? Why's that then?

ATHEIST: Because (perchance) there was some prior reason why the universe was almost guaranteed to be life-permitting - no need for intelligent Design.

THEIST: You're claiming that there was a physical constraint which forced the universe to be life-permitting, or biased it that way? Surely the existence of that contingent constraint itself points to God's handiwork? After all, my original fine-tuning claim was simply that God (or rather, a Designer) biased the universe in favour of life. Maybe he did that by arranging things such that, out of all the logically consistent scenarios, only those which were life-generating were physically possible.

That reply will always be open to the theist as long as the atheist relies on the argument that for some reason the universe was very likely to turn out life-permitting. At best, this claim can only push the need for explanation one step further back.

Incidentally, I have never before been likened to Michael Behe - the idea sends a chill down my spine!

Finally, then, here are what I think are some good arguments against fine-tuning:

1. If the prior probability of God's existence is low, the fine-tuning argument is of little use. (See my previous post.)

2. The universe may be life-permitting, but it's far from the most life-permitting it could possibly be - in fact, it's mostly empty. We could propose an "inordinate love of empty space" after the apocryphal "inordinate love of beetles". (See Steven Carr's earlier posts in this thread.)

3. Even if the universe does appear to be fine-tuned, to posit a Designer only pushes the question one stage further back: why is there a Designer? And to reply 'he is self-causing' or 'he needs no explanation' contradicts the initial premise that unlikely and significant events need explanations. In other words, if something is going to be without a cause, why not the universe? (See the end of my article.)

4. Perhaps there is a logical, not physical, 'meta-constraint' on the way things could have turned out; in which case, maybe the reference class of all possible universes is much smaller than I find it hard to imagine what logical constraint there could be, but I must be careful not to make the Philosopher's Mistake.

5. Even if we grant a Designer, the existence of a Designer is a far cry from the existence of the (mono-)theistic God.

By the way, I'd reject the many-universes hypothesis for different reasons, but to get into that would take us far beyond the scope of either the article or this thread. (Interestingly, though, considering the many-universes possibility highlights problem number 2 above.)

Normal

I fail to see how this argument is effective. There may be life in each solar system, and on top of that, life would be impossible were it not for a universe with "mostly empty space".

Toby Wardman

I see what you mean, and this isn't my area, but basically my point number 2 is a rehashed version of the old argument that God would create the best possible universe (where 'possible' means 'logically possible'). A premise of the fine-tuning argument is that God wants to create intelligent life. Yet there isn't as much intelligent life as it seems there could conceivably be. (Sure, there may be intelligent life in each solar system, though this throws up difficult questions about why we haven't met them yet; but even if there is, it seems odd to claim that there is as much intelligent life as there can possibly be. Or does God for some reason just want to create a limited amount?)

As for lots of empty space - yes, having lots of empty space may well be physically necessary for intelligent life given the way the universe works. But I don't see that it's logically necessary. And it's logical necessity that we're interested in, since God isn't bound by merely physical restrictions - he can do anything that's logically consistent.

So I take your points, but off the top of my head, I think my objection stands.