Jamie_L

Fine tuning seems completely unconvincing to me, yet I am still struggling to put clear words to why.

It really has nothing to do with lottery fallacies, but rather just a feeling that the existence of parameters that are "just right" for life doesn't see to me to need an explanation as to "why".

I think of my life as an analogy: if any little thing along the way had changed, my life might be totally different. I might be rich, or dead, or married to someone different, or "living in a shot-gun shack" if I had arrived to some high-school party five minutes later than I actually did.

Does that mean my life has been fine tuned?

I just don't get it.

Jamie

Synaesthesia

I think FT eqivocates gods-who-want-to-create-life with processes-likely-to-produce-life. There is no way of evaluating the size of the g-w-w-t-c-l subset within p-l-t-p-l or their relative a proiri likelyhood.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Jamie,
I think one must look at actual examples of fine tuning to get a sense of their weight and ramifications. It's not as if fine tuning accounts for such arbitrary facts like: you are a car salesman as opposed to a computer salesman, or that you married a redhead as opposed to a blonde.

The question of fine tuning can be summed 'Why is there ANY novelty at all?'

Here is just one example of fine tuning...
“Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.”
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History Of Time

I think it's important to notice that this is not talking about whether flowers are merely pink or orange. This isn't even talking about some arbitrary novelty one might notice in the universe. This is illustrating how rare it is that there is *any* novelty in the universe at all.

This is saying that there are 3 possibilities for the universes expansion:1-collapse 2-endless expanse, 3-equilibrium. The odds of universal expansion 'just happening to be' in equilibrium are unfathomably infinitesimal compared to the odds of it collapsing or eternally expanding.

In addition it's not as if 'equilibrium' is some completely arbitrary novelty someone pulled out of a hat...there are 3 and only 3 possibilities for universal expansion: equilibrium is one of them...and it's the only one where any novelty at all can occur.


And this is just one example of fine tuning, there are many others.


Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Dr S

But none of this is "tuning" in the least. Fine or otherwise.
You are looking at the past and saying "things could have been different." Sure they could of but they weren't. This doesn't show tuning, it shows the past as a single set of events.
If the past had been different we would be in a different present saying, "wow, imagine if mankind had come down from the trees." But it wasn't so we don't.

Koyaanisqatsi

And the odds of anybody winning the lottery are really small and the odds of me being hit by an Albino Armenian driving a purple and red 1965 Buick at 10:00 am on February 29th outside of a Stuckey's on Route 66 are incredibly small and the odds of my being able to pick up a red grain of sand in the Sahara desert while blindfolded are astronomically small and...

The point?

What happens to any of these irrelevant observations if I did, in fact, win the lottery or got hit by an Albino Armenian or picked up the red grain of sand?

None of these scenarios are impossible, just highly unlikely from a human perspective. That means absolutely nothing.

I think of all the arguments attempted, this one has to remain supreme as the worst one, since it relies entirely upon the stupidity of the person listening to it.

[HICK VOICE]The odds that nature exists naturally are really, really, small, therefore a magical fairy god king must have blinked it all into existence, hyuck![/HICK VOICE]

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Dr. S,



SOMMS

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Koy,
So...

If you flipped a coin 50 times and it came up heads each time you would still think it was a fair coin BECAUSE this scenario is not 'impossible, just highly unlikely from a human perspective.'

If a supposed 'random' sample of a population composed of 50% blacks and 50% whites has 80 white people in it and only 4 blacks you would still think this was random BECAUSE this scenario is not 'impossible, just highly unlikely from a human perspective.'

If your playing cards with someone who plays 3 royal flushes in a row you would not think this person is cheating BECAUSE this scenario is not 'impossible, just highly unlikely from a human perspective.'


Etc, etc, etc.




Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Dr S

I'll try again.
I'm walking on the beach and bend over to pick up a single grain of sand.
The odds that I will pick a particular grain are a gazillion to one.

Now I've picked it up.

The odds that I picked up that one grain are now "one." Not one in a gazillion, only one. They are "one" because that is what happened. There can be no odds on an event that has already happened. That is why you can't lay a bet on yesterdays horse race.

There is no fine tuning, there are no odds on past events.

Thomas Metcalf

Still awaiting your response to my criticism of the fine tuning argument. (And your responses to my objections to the other arguments you produced, and your response to the studies I posted that demonstrate that atheists are generally smarter than theists.)

I'll post the fine tuning points I made here:

"The lottery analogy fails because we know that there are people in a position to tamper with the lottery. A better analogy would be if we ran a computerized random number generator (from 1-1000) and produced the sequence 354 99 122 2 98. The probability of this sequence is one in 1,000,000,000,000,000. Do we assume that a magical elf exists who likes the sequence '354 99 122 2 98'? Or that someone was tampering with the machine? According to you, one can statistically show that we can have no confidence that this sequence was produced at random. Do you care to support that statement, or have I misread you?"

Have at it.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

The probability of any event that occured in the past is 1. This does not mean however that this event was random. It also does not mean that one cannot statistically infer that it was not random.

Case in point...the example I gave to Koy.
A supposed 'random' sample of a population composed of 50% blacks and 50% whites has 80 white people in it and only 4 blacks in it. You can statistically infer that this was not random...no matter if it happened yesterday or 1000 years ago.

Concerning your analogy:
If you searched far and wide for the *one* piece of black sand on the beach, found it and gave it to somebody...they should not think it special...they should think you merely reached down and randomly picked any grain of sand.

Is that right?

SOMMS