99Percent

I see the problem of fine tuning no different than the problem of existence:

Why do you exist?

If you look at all the factors involved that were necessary for your existence you would indeed wonder if there was a "being" involved in your creation. e.g.:

1. Think about the circumstances that were needed for your two parents to have met- To have befriended each other- To have fallen in love- To have married- and the specific combination of DNA to have arosen at the moment of conception...

2. Now multipy these factors to each generation of parents above (granparents, great-grandparents, etc).

3. You would arrive at such an absurdly low probability that you would have to think that there must have been a creator involved.

This problem is more easily resolved by the just accepting existence as it is. Existence just is, or else you would be wondering about the alternate existence or the non-existence nontheless.

The problem of existence can be applied to just about anything that is real: why is that can of coke in this place, and not on this other place? (because if the can was in this other place I would be asking why it isn't in the original place). Why is my son a male and not a female (because if he were a female, I would be asking why is my daughter a female and not a male.), Etc.

The fine tuning argument can be discarded likewise. If any of the fine tuning variables were to be changed we would not exist to be able to ask this very question. So the argument is ultimately null.

[ January 04, 2002: Message edited by: 99Percent ]</p>

NialScorva

Yes, yes. I'm very familiar with the arguments against fine-tuning. I've made quite a few of them myself, and still don't accept it. That's not the point here. All that is required to be an evidentiary argument is
1) One should follow the evidence.
2) All of one's evidence should support the proposition in question.

No skepticism, no "no unnecessary hypothetical entities", no best-fit clause, just a simple statement of what uses evidence and what doesn't. If one assumes that god exists, then fine tuning is a perfectly valid evidentiary argument. Without that assumption, fine tuning is a perfectly acceptible evidentiary argument relying on a hypothetical god. This is not fine tuning as proof of god. This is fine tuning as an explanation of why nature is the way that it is. All standard arguments against fine tuning that I've seen, and all that have been presented here, require you to bring in a judgement criteria for selecting a most valid proposition out of a set of valid evidential propositions.

This is not a discussion about whether fine tuning proves anything or is more or less likely than another explanation, it's a discussion of whether fine tuning is evidential.

[ January 05, 2002: Message edited by: NialScorva ]</p>

jpbrooks

I'm beginning to believe that you guys are right about the "Fine Tuning Argument" and all such "proofs", (including TAG), for the existence of God. They all commit fallacies in their attempts to establish God's existence. Some of these "proofs" may (or may not) still be useful to Theists when used as formal refutations of readily apparent inconsistent interpretations of God, but their value seems limited to such "negative" argumentation.
Thus, I am being driven to the conclusion that Theism, as it is known in the West and Middle East, could not have arisen by "construction", i.e., by stringing together "bits" and "pieces" of rational argumentation on the basis of some other "worldview", at all. Perhaps Theism, as we know it in the West and Middle East, had some other non-rational and thus underived origin.

BTW, I'm still puzzled about why SingleDad had to leave. Overlooking the tone of his exchange with bd-from-kg in this thread, I found the discussion quite informative.

[ January 05, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Vorkosigan

The way I see it, Fine Tuning (FT) as a debate/philosophical position would not exist without the built-in cognitive bias we have toward considering ourselves the center of all things. FT is merely one overt expression of that subjective feeling. Proof of that is that this feeling, and some form of the FT argument, has persisted throughout history, in many different cultures, regardless of the level of knowledge about the world -- in other words, regardless of the evidence. FT as an assertion/argument exists independently of any evidence, and cannot be thought of as evidential.

Michael

[ January 05, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

bd-from-kg

NialScorva:

1. Evidentialism and Evidentiary arguments

The course notes you linked to were pretty interesting. But evidentialism, as you define it, has serious problems. Lots of hypotheses “fit the evidence”, yet would be considered unreasonable to the point of insanity by practically everyone.

One such type is the unfalsifiable hypothesis, such as the “Invisible Pink Unicorn” so popular on these boards. A more realistic one is the paranoid delusion that there is a vast conspiracy bent on concealing something, or fooling one into believing something, or on driving one insane. Whenever someone points out that there is no evidence of such a conspiracy, this is taken as evidence of just how vast (and clever) it is.

Another class of hypotheses that fit the evidence are theories that the end of the world is imminent. All such hypotheses fit all possible evidence until the postulated time comes. They’re falsifiable (if they specify a date), but not today. A similar (though less popular) type of hypothesis would be that the natural laws currently operating will continue to be valid up to a specified time, after which a different set of laws will come into play. Again, this hypothesis is consistent with all known facts, but anyone who believed it (without evidence) would rightly be considered insane.

More generally, if one ignores the principle of induction and Occam’s Razor, all kinds of hypotheses are “justified” at any given time. For example, I might be firmly convinced that a given coin is unbiased. After flipping it 10,000 times and getting heads 90% of the time a reasonable person might conclude that the coin is biased after all, but the hypothesis that this result is “just a fluke” is perfectly consistent with the evidence.

Indeed, very few people would say that an evidentiary argument is valid so long as the evidence presented is merely consistent with the hypothesis. Something more is needed. Roughly speaking, the evidence should point to the hypothesis; in some sense, it should make it appear more plausible than any alternative. But this is very difficult, if not impossible, to make precise. SingleDad’s attempt to do so doesn’t work; it is unreasonable to require that a hypothesis imply the supporting facts (in the sense of making it either certain or more likely than not that they are true) and vice-versa (in either sense). And Bayesian analysis doesn’t work in general because it is often impossible to assign nonarbitrary probabilities to the terms on the right, or even to say what such probabilities would mean. (This, of course, leaves open the question of what does constitute an “evidentiary argument”.)

2. The “fine tuning” argument

So while, as you say, fine tuning is “a proposition that can fit the evidence”, that doesn’t make the fine tuning argument an evidentiary argument. It only shows that the fine tuning hypothesis is not demonstrably false. But the proponents of the fine tuning argument claim far more than that; they claim that it makes the hypothesis that God does not exist implausible. That’s the whole point of the argument.

You say later that “Fine Tuning is an evidential argument contingent upon the unproven fact of a tuner's existence.” And later, “if one assumes that god exists, then fine tuning is a perfectly valid evidentiary argument.” This doesn’t make sense.

Of course, it’s possible that you are using the term “fine-tuning argument” to refer to something quite different from the argument that generally goes by that name. If so, your comments are out of place. The FTA was mentioned for the first time in this thread in the last paragraph of Mr. Carrier’s post, which said:

Clearly this statement refers to an argument for the existence of God, and which therefore cannot be predicated on an assumption that God exists. If you want to comment on the implicit claim that the FTA is an evidentiary argument, it would be best to talk about the same FTA that this passage is talking about. In fact, if I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that the FTA referred to in this passage is not an evidentiary argument (although the argument that you are calling the FTA is). This would of course tend to support SD’s position that many [not all] supposedly "evidentiary" arguments for theism really aren’t, and to reject the reviewer’s position.