Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Tercel · 03-06-2003, 02:24 AM

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Originally posted by Silent Dave
That's an excellent statement of FTA, and I can see its appeal to professional apologists.

Thank you.

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It would have absolutely no effect on me, however, since the a priori probability I assign to B is zero.

Why? Zero probability implies some sort of logically certain argument against God. I'm not sure I understand what that would be. If you think the argument from suffering suceeds then that still leaves a transcendent, deistic, or non-omnibenevolent type God. A complete and utter commitment to materialism would be the other obvious possibility, but I'd be suprised to see an argument for that which remotely neared the level of a logical certain proof.

Theli · 03-06-2003, 03:10 AM

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If you think the argument from suffering suceeds then that still leaves a transcendent, deistic, or non-omnibenevolent type God.

But, would you still call that the christian god?
Depending on how strict the definition is, at one point the only logical possibilities are not sufficient to call what we have left "god". And another word would be more advicable to use, to not confuse whatever god we have left with the omnibenevolent christian god. I'm looking at you, Pantheists.

Just a thought.

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Design. The designer then works out how to implement the design decisions. The designer searches amongst "all possible implementations" for an implementation that would meet the design requirements. In the FTA's case this would mean searching the possible worlds for one capable of sustaining life.

I think we should also keep in mind that the concept of "life" given a designer would not exist before the forming of the design. Unless you equate god's life with the life we are used to, wich is to simplify the term.

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if we walk into a room and find a deck of cards ordered ascendingly, we instantly assume that they were deliberately sorted by an intelligent agent rather than shuffled into that order randomly

This is not a good analogy to the design argument, as you here refer to us as external agents watching the cards from a distance. Where in FTA we should be one of the cards, and thus find familiarity even in chaos. There is alot of chaos in the world around us, we have simply screened it out.

Vorkosigan · 03-06-2003, 05:23 AM

The question of design hinges on asking which of the following is more likely:
1) That random chance was responsible and caused this result.
2) That design was responsible and caused this result.

But Tercel, this is a strawman. You left out the actual answer:

3) That non-random selectionistic and other processes led to the universe as we now know it.

The "random chance" redundancy is making a claim no advocate of naturalistic origins makes.

Vorkosigan

Clutch · 03-06-2003, 06:16 AM

Tercel's first step:

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Considerations are made about what is trying to be acheived.

Right: Without an assignment of preferences and intentions to the supposed god, the whole FT bag of ferrets never even gets started.

So, are there a priori ways of assigning preferences to the god(s) claimed to be responsible for the universe? Few people appear to think so; and those that do end up sounding like anthropomorphic idiots. Eg, Swinburne runs through this kind of reasoning -- if you were omnipotent, then it stands to reason you'd value worship, and <...blah-dee-blah...> and that you'd make them vertically symmetrical bipeds... and so forth. It's dismal and depressing stuff.

But without this cotton-candy theology, all the FT argument can do is assign preferences to its imagined god on the basis of how the universe actually looks.

This ends up having nothing to do with our universe, evidentially speaking. For any universe U, the properties of U would stand in the same evidential relation to the hypothesis: A god with preferences for a U-universe created this universe.

Wiploc · 03-06-2003, 06:32 AM

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Originally posted by Clutch
But without this cotton-candy theology, all the FT argument can do is assign preferences to its imagined god on the basis of how the universe actually looks.[/i]

Example proving the Mississippi river was designed:

"All these raindrops fell spread out over thousands of miles. What are the odds that they would spontaniously gather themselves together in one place and that the place would be right here? The odds against that are astronomical! No, somebody must have wanted a river right here --- that's the only reasonable explanation."
crc

Wiploc · 03-06-2003, 07:22 AM

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Originally posted by Tercel
The question of design hinges on asking which of the following is more likely:
1) That random chance was responsible and caused this result.
2) That design was responsible and caused this result.

They can be evalutated against each other by asking the following questions:
-What a priori probabilities do we assign to the possibilities of random chance creating a universe (A) vs an intelligent agent doing so(B)?
-Given that random chance was creating a universe what is the probability of F occuring (C)?
-Given that an intelligent agent was creating a universe what is the probability of F occuring (D)?

Given that we observe F, we can then compare the two values of A * C and B * D: If A*C is greater than B*D then random chance is the likely cause and if B*D is greater then design is the likely cause.

This doesn't work unless you start with an implicit belief in the likelihood of god.

Yesterday I made 1000 universes. I made a certain number of them without gods, and put gods in any remaining universes. Now, since I made the gods, I can say with certainty that the odds of a god making life in her universe are 90%. And since I made the universes, I also know that the odds of an ungodded universe developing life are just 1%.

Then I selected a universe at random. It had life. What are the odds that this universe had a god?

A. Pseudo-mathematical FTA answer: Something like 90 to 1? In any case, it is clear that it is enormously more likely that there is a god than that there isn't.

B. True answer: 0%. I didn't put gods in any of the universes. Therefore, there is no chance that a god made the life.

What we learn from this exercise: The FTA depends on an unstated assumption that it is likely that god exists. Since it is also the goal of the FTA to prove it likely that god exists, the FTA is a circular argument.
crc

Thomas Metcalf · 03-06-2003, 12:55 PM

Originally posted by Clutch :

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But without this cotton-candy theology, all the FT argument can do is assign preferences to its imagined god on the basis of how the universe actually looks.

This ends up having nothing to do with our universe, evidentially speaking. For any universe U, the properties of U would stand in the same evidential relation to the hypothesis: A god with preferences for a U-universe created this universe. [Emphasis original.]

This is a very important point. We figure out what kind of being designed the universe by what the universe looks like. I can't see any other way. And I have a hard time finding a principled reason to think a god would prefer any universe U over a different universe U'.

Thomas Metcalf · 03-06-2003, 01:14 PM

Originally posted by Tercel :

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In the FTA, I have said above that the group of possible world that allow life and the group that don't are of equal interest to an "unknown purposes" being - ie probability 0.5 each. Yet the FTA asserts that the number of possible worlds which don't support life is significantly greater than the number that do. Hence the probability distribution for random chance is significantly lower and we see that the worlds that do support life would be of disproportionate interest to an intelligent designer. Hence the observation of a life-supporting universe provides confirmation of the design hypothesis.

I'm still not seeing sufficient reason to think an intelligent being would prefer a life-permitting set to some other set of constants. There are probably sets of constants that are far more orderly than this one. The number of possible worlds that don't have the set of constants x is significantly greater than the number that do. Further, and I think this is a very important point, we're not even required to say this designer is particularly intelligent; all that has to be the case is that it has some arbitrary preference about how things are going to turn out.

We might have a problem with circularity here. I might hypothesize that a non-intelligent, mechanistic entity finetuned the universe to result in F*. Your reply would be that the chance of such a being existing is very low, because why would such a being just happen to exist? And then the chance of a being that prefers life would be higher, because intelligent beings seem to prefer life. But wait -- we don't know that this being is intelligent yet. Maybe I'm not seeing your argument clearly enough.

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I don't see your point. F consists of a small number of facts about the world all summed up in the one singular design decision that the world be able to sustain life hence the chance that a god would want F is reasonable. There are an almost infinite number of arbitrary and unrelated facts in F* (you are talking about a bizillion design decisions made exactly one way instead of just one) which makes the probability of a God* who wants exactly F* to obtain is vanishingly small.

Suppose God* thinks a certain set of constants is aesthetically pleasing, and this is just an interesting fact about God*, the same way "life permission" is pleasing to God. God* makes every decision with respect to whether the universe he ends up with will fit the pattern he has in mind. We're wide open here with respect to what sort of being is designing the universe; perhaps some facts have in common "lead to permission of life," but other facts have in common "lead to result of set of constants x." And while God* has the additional facts "cares about x, y, and z...", God has the facts "cares about x, but not y, or z..." You could even say God*'s preferences are very specific, namely, that he cares about influencing all the constants that don't have anything to do with physical life.

the_cave · 03-06-2003, 02:11 PM

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Originally posted by Thomas Metcalf
God* is kind of defined that way. So God* makes a better explanation than God.

No, God* is a God who cares about all the details, including the detail that we exist. So we are an equally important detail, right? Even if we're outnumbered.

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My position is that the purpose of the universe is obviously for {F*} to be true, not {F}. (Because {F*} are less likely than {F}.) So anything that contributes to that fact (say, life being possible) is maybe just as important, but the point of the universe is to guarantee the truth of {F*}.

Hey, fine--as long as we're included!

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I don't think the second disjunct follows. God didn't finetune the universe for those consequences themselves, just for physical life. So they're not as important; they're kind of irrelevant. And further, there seem to be plenty of facts that don't have anything to do with whether {F} are true. God* explains these further facts, whereas God only explains {F} and the ones that are necessary for {F}.

Hm--are we sure the FTA's point is that the universe was created for us? That might be how it's usually portrayed, but it now seems to me it's actually designed

to merely prove that there is some purpose to the universe, not whether the purpose is us or the pencils lying on my desk.

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Good analogy, but I think you have to say that if I didn't know anything about humans or houses, I'd be just as justified in supposing you cared about sawdust as I did in supposing you cared about right angles and planes. And in addition, I'd also reason that you cared about the pattern of knotholes in the wood you used, because that improbable result is better explained with the supposition that you do indeed care about them.

I don't know about "better"--equivalently explained, perhaps I'd grant. I still think it's valid to reason that the purpose could stop somewhere, and everything that follows from it is irrelevant, so to speak. But it's true that it might be an unproved assumption that we're the purpose.

the_cave · 03-06-2003, 02:24 PM

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Originally posted by tronvillain
At this point, someone usually drags out Bayes' Theorem. I will simply point out that the prior probability of God (as usually defined in the fine tuning argument for the existence of God) must be vanishingly small. After all, in the absence of any evidence there are a virtually infinite number of hypotheses, and "God" occupies only a fraction of them. Now, it is true that the "God" hypothesis will be confirmed by fine tuning, but it is far from the only hypothesis which is confirmed. There are so many alternatives that the confimation is marginal at best. Besides, the whole argument depends on the possibility of prior probability, and it is not clear that there was any such thing.

What other hypotheses? It seems to me that they're all versions of "so somehow or other something incredibly unlikely just happened". But this hypothesis is disconfirmed by our observations that unlikely things rarely happen. If you mean what I think you mean by "the possibility of prior probability", you have a good point, but theists aren't the only ones to use the language of prior probabilities.

03-06-2003, 05:23 AM	#23
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	Re: Re: A New (or improved) Criticism of the Finetuning Argument? The question of design hinges on asking which of the following is more likely: 1) That random chance was responsible and caused this result. 2) That design was responsible and caused this result. But Tercel, this is a strawman. You left out the actual answer: 3) That non-random selectionistic and other processes led to the universe as we now know it. The "random chance" redundancy is making a claim no advocate of naturalistic origins makes. Vorkosigan

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