Steven Carr

The fine-tuning argument simpy begs the question of why (to use your analogy) there has to be a black grain of sand available to be created.

What would have happened if it was impossible to create a black grain of sand? Then God would have failed.

To avoid having a God who was as lucky as us, and who might have failed, fine-tuning people have to say that it is a matter of logical necessity that a universe can be created which contains life.


If it is not logically necessary then it was logically contingent, which means that it might have been the case that no black grain can be created, not even by an omnipotent God.

But how can it be a matter of logical necessity that there *must* always be one black grain?

As always, theistic arguments just push the problem one level back, just like the first cause argument begs the question what caused God?

Clutch

I'm so glad to see some people insisting on the crucial point so often glossed in this debate: In order to calculate the probability of there being a stable, life-consistent universe, we need the tools to calculate the number of ways the universe could have been.

But the only calculations I've ever seen have assumed the physical laws of the actual universe -- conjecturing on the consequences of altering some variables while retaining most others. The physical laws and constants of the actual world, however, give us no obvious purchase on the problem of calculating how things would be if the physical laws were different, nor, especially, how many such different fundamental arrangements there are, and what their prior probabilities were.

For instance, given relativistic physics and quantum mechanics, changing the mass of a proton to M would mean the following: [description of boring, short universe]. But what about if the mass of a proton were M, but the universe was governed by bantum bechanics and beneral belativity, or schmantum schmechanics and schmeneral schmelativity? We have the inverse square law for gravitation, but how many possible such laws are there? Could the exponent, say, in that law have taken any real numbers as its value, given that the other laws and constants are contingent as well? How many ways are there for the fundamental laws and constants of the universe to have been?

No answer to this question falls out of the actual laws of the universe; and without an answer to this question, the FT claims appear to be nothing more than fallacious probabilities.

Now, am I just missing something? Sure, maybe. I'm not a physicist, and it's not just the theistic ID-ologues who make such claims. I looked at Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos, and Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers, for instance, and didn't see any clarification of the issue there, either. Maybe these guys are all making this mistake of not seeing the big picture; physicists are not exactly famous for retaining their genius upon leaping into philosophy. Or maybe there is an answer to the concern. But what is it?