17 Jun 2012

Clarifying the Fine-Tuning Argument for a Designed Universe

Religious 74 Comments

Two weeks ago we had quite a healthy discussion of the “fine-tuning” argument for a designed universe. In today’s follow-up post, I want to try to clarify some of the issues of framing. Some of you were bringing up standard arguments or analogies whenever these types of debates occur, but I think a lot of you were using them inappropriately.

First of all, many of you immediately jumped to, “Well you still need to prove there’s a God.” Right, of course. The fine-tuning argument by itself just claims that there is a designer or designers. For all we know, we could be living in The Matrix, or maybe this is the real deal (HT2 Daniel Kuehn).

Incidentally, this is why I think it’s so funny when people automatically say that the “intelligent design” movement, or the fine-tuning argument, are by their nature “unscientific.” Suppose we really did live in The Matrix. Surely our scientists would be involved in discovering this truth about our empirical observations. If Morpheus tried to tell them to revise their cosmological explanations, they wouldn’t dismiss his claims as being outside the bounds of science per se.

Second, let’s work through a different analogy just to clarify the issues of probabilities and framing. Suppose a guy has trained his dog to go in his garage and fetch a bottle of beer. The guy has 1,000 bottles in his garage, and the dog goes and grabs one. The guy throws it back and keeps watching his sporting event on the television.

The crazy thing is, it turns out that the beer distributor has to recall the batch of beer bottles, because somehow poison found its way into the last shipment leaving the plant. Scientists go and test the remaining 999 bottles in the guy’s garage, and they are all poisoned. It turns out that the 1 bottle, of the whole 1,000 in the garage, that wasn’t poisoned, was the one the dog grabbed.

This seems like a pretty interesting coincidence. The scientists try to come up with theories to explain how the dog could have known. E.g. maybe he smelled the poison, or maybe the poison masked some smell that the dog liked in the normal beer, etc. But try as they might, the scientists can’t come up with any reproducible explanation for what happened.

Now: Would it be satisfactory to just say, “Well, it was a freak thing. The guy just got lucky.” ?

I think if this is the whole scenario, most people would say, “No, that’s not a very good theory. We don’t have to cite a miracle, but we can’t simply say, ‘Hey the guy lived, so it must be he got lucky.’ Prima facie, if there were only a 1/1000 chance of that happening, then it is unlikely that ‘sheer luck’ is the explanation. There must be something else we don’t know about.” (If you don’t see that, change it 1 out of 1 million or 1 billion beer bottles. At some point, surely you see that “dumb luck” is a terrible theory.)

But wait a second. Suppose I give you more information. It turns out that there are 1,000 guys who each bought 1,000 bottles of beer from the tainted batch. They all sent their respective dogs out, and 999 of those guys died. The one guy we first learned about, is the only one whose dog grabbed a safe beer. Scientists go out and determine that for each of these guys, 999 of the bottles of beer in their garages were tainted, while 1 was safe. (This result itself isn’t due to randomness. There is a specific reason that the beer plant specifically sent out batches that had 1 safe and 999 tainted bottles. I am not going to bother inventing a story for this specific part of my analogy.)

Now in this new scenario, I think everybody would agree that it’s perfectly fine to explain the one guy living, by reference to “dumb luck.” There’s no reason to keep searching for the hidden explanation of how his dog somehow “knew” what the safe beer was, because 999 of the other dogs didn’t know. Given that we had 1,000 guys in this situation, we would expect 1 of them to survive just through dumb luck.

I hope we can all agree on the above handling of the two scenarios. I’m sure in the comments people will tweak my story in order to get across what they want to stress, regarding the fine-tuning argument. Sure, that’s fine. But I claim that some of you weren’t obeying the above, obvious precepts when dealing with the argument. In particular, some of you didn’t seem to realize just how crucial the many-worlds theory is, if you want to cite the anthropomorphic anthropic principle for explaining fine-tuning.

74 Responses to “Clarifying the Fine-Tuning Argument for a Designed Universe”

  1. Daniel Kuehn says:

    Beer lasts a while, but I think 1,000 bottles would go bad before you got to the last one. I think it’s only a few months.

    • Dan says:

      These are Irish guys in the story.

  2. Philippe Bélanger says:

    Here is what I take to be the defining argument against fine-tuning. The claim is that life could not have arisen out of random acts of nature, so the universe had to be “fine-tuned”.  The problem is, conscious beings can only exist in a “fine-tuned” universe, because, by definition, life cannot emerge in an unfined-tuned universe. So either a living conscious being perceives and wonders at a fine-tuned universe, or a lifeless unfined-tuned universe exists, but unperceived. In other words, fine-tuners are always saying that it’s amazing how the world is fine-tuned, not realizing that if it were not fine-tuned, we simply wouldn’t be there to see it (it’s impossible to find a counterfactual by definition).

    • Philippe Bélanger says:

      A parallel would be someone being amazed at the coincidence that his two parents met and had him as a child, not realizing that any conscious human being inevitably has two parents who met and had sex, making the counterfactual (someone who doesn’t have parents), again, impossible.

    • Blackadder says:

      Here is what I take to be the defining argument against fine-tuning.

      I take it you are just now joining this discussion.

      To see what’s wrong with your argument, consider a parallel case. Two guys are talking about the Cold War. The first one says “It’s really amazing that the human race survived the Cold War, given how close we came at several points to all-out nuclear war.” The other guy responds: “Don’t be silly. If we had all been annihilated, then we wouldn’t be here having this conversation. So there can’t be anything amazing about the fact that there was no WWIII.”

      If you can see why the second guy’s response is flawed, you should be able to see the problem with this response to the fine tuning argument.

      • Philippe Bélanger says:

        The difference between that particular case and my examples is that we can estimate the probability of WWIII occurring based on previous historical outcomes (the propensity of major powers going to war, the reluctance or lack thereof of using newly available deadly weapons, ect.), so we can be “justified” in comparing our estimate of the probability with the actual outcome and being suprised. But in my two examples, the subject is not surprised at an outcome by estimating its probability, he is simply surprised at something which is a precondition to him observing it; he really is, implicitly, surprised at his own existence, an outcome for which the probability is inevitably equal to 1.

  3. joshua says:

    Incidentally, this is why I think it’s so funny when people automatically say that the “intelligent design” movement, or the fine-tuning argument, are by their nature “unscientific.”

    Agreed. If “intelligent design” is only “creationism in disguise,” then Ridley Scott must be a creationist.

  4. Matt_R.L. says:

    Okay, I’ll bite.

    If I might first summarize your argument: (1) there’s nothing impressive about something improbable taking place given a large enough set of experiments; (2) there seems to be only one ‘universe experiment’, and yet something very improbable — life coming to be — did take place; therefore (3) EITHER there are multiple universes (multiple runs of the experiment) such that it’s less impressive that one of them happened to stumble upon the conditions for life, OR it is exceedingly unlikely that this happened merely by chance.

    Is that a fair characterization of your argument?

    Here’s where I think you err: I view it as sort of a rhetorical trick to suggest that the operative ‘experiment’ or ‘trial’ is that of the universe. I think, rather, that there are millions and billions of experiments — within the universe. Viewed through this lens, we find that an exceedingly rare event happened in one case (life on Earth in the Solar System in the Milky Way in the Local Cluster, etc.), but, as far as we can tell, did not happen in manifold other cases. To put it another way, the odds are heavily against a planet supporting carbon-based life as exists on Earth coming to be — and, in as much a we’re able to determine so far, the success ratio has borne this out.

    Now if you want to come back and say, “but Matt, you’re missing the point — the universe IS also an experiment, and if the gravitational constant had been different or the rate of expansion had been dramatically slower or […] then life would have had ZERO chance at ever coming into existence.”

    My reply to this would be that it assumes what it ought be trying to prove, namely, that other ‘universes’ are even conceivable. The interesting thing about this argument is that, as I see it, you are, argumentatively at least, the one who needs a multiverse, for only with a multiverse does it even make sense to talk about (well, what if gravity was more potent or light less fast or […]).

    In conclusion, we know that there is a universe. We know that, within this universe, life-sustaining planets are, at best, exceedingly rare — just as you would expect them to be. It doesn’t impress me one iota that in a universe vast beyond vast (and with a near-15 billion year time horizon), some few out of trillions of ‘experimental quadrants’ house planets that can give rise to life. This is exactly your billion dogs running for the beers, one getting the non-poisonous, and the other 999,999,999 grabbing the poisonous ones scenario.

  5. Scott H. says:

    We don’t need a multi-verse. We have no idea of the probability of a life friendly universe versus a universe where life is not possible.

    Here is one for you. What is the probability of a designed universe where the designer hides from the intelligent life it has created — and the designer is not trying to trick us into thinking it does not exist. I would say it would say that probability would be exceedingly low.

    • Gene Callahan says:

      “What is the probability of a designed universe where the designer hides from the intelligent life it has created — and the designer is not trying to trick us into thinking it does not exist. I would say it would say that probability would be exceedingly low.”

      Right. Thankfully we do not live in a universe where the designer hides from us, hey?

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        So the author of Hebrews was just pulling our leg with the whole “evidence for things unseen” thing, huh?

        • Gene Callahan says:

          We do NOT need faith to know God exists; that is a conclusion of philosophy, from Plato to Aquinas. So that is clearly not what that passage is speaking of.

      • Egoist says:

        Thankfully we do not live in a universe where the designer hides from us, hey?

        Hallucinations don’t count as evidence of intelligent designers revealing themselves.

        • Blackadder says:

          Hallucinations don’t count as evidence of intelligent designers revealing themselves.

          What would count as evidence, in your view?

      • Tel says:

        ” Thankfully we do not live in a universe where the designer hides from us, hey?”

        Therefore religion has no need for faith, and should abandon any faith-based conclusions.

        • Gene Callahan says:

          Yes, Tel, and because my wife is visible to me, there is no need for me to have faith in her, either, right?

          • Tel says:

            An odd kind of marriage if you take the existence of your wife as an article of faith, but each to his or her own, I try not to be judgemental about other people’s relationships.

            Perhaps you mean that you have faith in her behaviour… so would you be concerned about the behaviour that is visible to you, or the behaviour that is not visible?

      • MamMoTh says:

        True. I don’t come here very often, but I am not hiding. It’s just that there are other blogs in the universe, including one a its centre.

  6. joeftansey says:

    I see you have abandoned the conditional probability argument. It is highly relevant. It means that no matter what, observing a universe necessitates it existence.

    Your analogy fails because if the dog retrieved the wrong bottle, we’d still observe an outcome. In the case of universal-tuning, we do not.

    A better analogy is what if there was a million sided dice. It is face up on “1”. You’re inclined to posit that the dice could have landed on any one of its million sides but luckily/miraculously wound up on “1”. An annoying statistician reminds you that you’re assuming the dice rolls according to a uniform distribution. You have not tested your hypothesis, and given that the dice has turned up “1”, it makes more sense to guess a dirac function.

    The mistake is to deliberately ignore the only sampled outcome, “1”, and model the probability distribution as if it were completely random.

    • Tel says:

      Since only one side of the die is observable, we don’t even know how many sides it has.

  7. konst says:

    So again… this is the problem. The scientists who invented this stupid “fine-tuning” theory did a great disservice to people.

    There is no fine tuning involved.

    The universe is an amazing place. Not necessary to bring fine tuning into it.

    P.S. Yes I understand your story and the analogy you are trying to make. My point is that it and the anthropic principle has nothing to do with the universe.

    • konst says:

      Also those “many-world” theories and some of the other ones are not science either. They are mathematical theories. The only science in them is when and if experiments are devised to test those hypothesis.

      Until then those theories are as much a religion to those scientists as spiritual religions are. The scientists who “believe” those theories, e.g. many-worlds, string theory, believe them on “faith” cause they have the idea that mathematics describes physical reality. It usually does but still they pursue them cause of faith in that their mathematics must describe something that exists in reality.

  8. Peter says:

    Unfortunately for “Intelligent Design” proponents, their only argument which has any kind of evidential basis is, that of the “fine tuning” and directionality of the overall life process which is increasingly apparent in such fields as geology, biology and chemistry, just does not hold water.

    Simply because, as is readily observed on close examination of history there really are no “designers” at all, even at the human level.

    The fatal flaw in their their inference that these persistent and pervasive patterns imply “design” contains derives from the naturally anthropocentric world-view that we inherit both genetically and from our culture.

    It is the very concept of “designers” which lies at the heart of this. . We intuitively assume that individuals of our race “design” things. But only in a very trivial everyday sense is this seemingly obvious notion really valid.

    For itt can be argued, with strong evidential support, that we do not invent or create artifacts of systems but that , rather, these are more properly viewed as having evolved within the collective imagination of our species.

    To quickly put this counter-intuitive view into focus, would you not agree that the following statement has a sound basis?

    We would have geometry without Euclid, calculus without Newton or Liebnitz, the camera without Johann Zahn, the cathode ray tube without JJ Thomson, relativity (and quantum mechanics) without Einstein, the digital computer without Turin, the steam engine without Stephenson, radio without Marconi, the Internet without Vinton Cerf.

    The list can. of course be extended indefinitely.

    It may be seen that fine tuning (an effect which extends well beyond the values of the physical constants) does not require the assumption of any kind of “designer”, merely the full appreciation of the observable fact that selection is a function of dynamically changing prevailing conditions which are themselves subject to evolutionary processes such that they are sufficiently often “just right”. This seemingly an intrinsic property of nature’s machinery.

    This very broad evolutionary model (extending beyond biology) is expanded upon (very informally) in “The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?” which is a free download in e-book formats from the “Unusual Perspectives” website.Unfortunately for “Intelligent Design” proponents, their only argument which has an evidential basis rather than the hearsay of mythologies, that of the “fine tuning” and directionality of the overall life process. which is increasingly apparent in such fields as geology, biology and chemistry, just does not hold water. Simply because, as is readily observed on close examination of history there really are no “designers” at all, even at the human level.
    Their inference that these persistent and pervasive patterns imply “design” contains a fatal flaw which results from the naturally anthropocentric world-view that we inherit both genetically and from our culture. Namely the concept of “designers”. We intuitively assume that individuals of our race “design” things. But only in a very trivial everyday sense is this seemingly obvious notion valid.

    It can be argued, with strong evidential support, that we do not, invent or create artifacts of systems but that , rather, these are more properly viewed as having evolved within the collective imagination of our species.

    To quickly put this counter-intuitive view into focus, would you not agree that the following statement has a sound basis?

    We would have geometry without Euclid, calculus without Newton or Liebnitz, the camera without Johann Zahn, the cathode ray tube without JJ Thomson, relativity (and quantum mechanics) without Einstein, the digital computer without Turin, the Internet without Vinton Cerf.

    The list can. of course be extended indefinitely.

    It may be seen that fine tuning (an effect which extends well beyond the values of the physical constants) does not require the assumption of any kind of “designer”, merely the full appreciation of the observable fact that selection is a function of dynamically changing prevailing conditions which are themselves subject to evolutionary processes such that they are sufficiently often “just right”. This seemingly an intrinsic property of nature’s machinery.

    This very broad evolutionary model (extending beyond biology) is expanded upon (very informally) in “The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?” which is a free download in e-book formats from the “Unusual Perspectives” website.

  9. Peter Surda says:

    Dear Prof. Murphy,

    analogies only bring you so far. Proper arguments require a high level of abstraction and are extremely difficult to craft. On the abstract level, the fine tuning argument contradicts the concept of conditional probability, as it confuses a-priori and a-posteriori probability. Once again, this does not disprove god or anything like that, it merely means the argument is invalid.

    Also, introducing a designer does not really fix the alleged problem of probability. It just shifts it one step further. Isn’t it highly unlikely that such a designer comes to exist on its own? In your example, is a magical dog more probable than a lucky dog?

    Also, as I argued previously, the concept of causality has no meaning outside of the scope of the universe, so strictly speaking we cannot even perform this one step shift, and we are even left without a methodology to address the issue. Without the concept of causality, we cannot really conclude anything.

    • Gene Callahan says:

      “Isn’t it highly unlikely that such a designer comes to exist on its own?”

      No, in fact, it is necessary. “I am that I am” and all.

  10. Daniel Kuehn says:

    I think in the last post we converged on the importance of frequency or opportunity and that’s important to highlight here again. But as far as a proof of God, this doesn’t really help the case.

    Once again – if you’re going to marvel at the alleged serendipity of a fine tuned universe, and demand a designer to explain it, you can’t think be satisfied with a designer who himself is omniscient and omnipotent enough to make that universe (much less stand outside of it).

    In other words, if getting one beer out of a thousand amazes you shouldn’t a prescient, deliberative dog with miraculous powers amaze you even more? The fine tuning argument, even if it got past the frequency hurdle (which I don’t think it does) is hardly a proof of God.

    Three more points that can’t be neglected:

    1. We really only understand life as it exists in a finely tuned universe so we don’t have all that much insight into life in a non-finely-tuned universe. There may be forms of life wholly unlike ours, and our form of life may be marvelous and inconceivable to them. If this is the case you don’t even need to invoke frequency.

    2. We don’t know the probability distribution of universes. It may not be uniform. Our possibilities may be highly concentrated around the right parameters for a fine tuned universe. You can only say its unlikely by assuming the draw is on a uniform distribution. Can you say that for sure?

    3. I’m always amazed that members of the Christian faith even buy these “proofs of God”. If you could work out the existence of God rationally why would Christ invoke faith so much?

    • Blackadder says:

      Daniel,

      Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you say in a prior thread that you thought the chance of their being a God was around one in ten?

      The chances of their being a finely tuned universe are a lot lower than that.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        Assuming (1.) one shot at it, (2.) that other constants can’t produce other types of life, (3.) that we’re really drawing from a uniform distribution of constants, and probably a few other conditionals.

        I’m also not necessarily thinking about a creator God that stands outside of space and time. Just because I think it’s very possible there is a God doesn’t mean I’m necessarily assuming the truth of specific parochial mythologies.

        I would also not argue for this God on the basis of fine tuning or presume that anything is “proven” by assuming an even more complicated answer to the question.

        • Blackadder says:

          Daniel,

          Your points 1-3 are well taken, but they don’t go to the claim that appealing to God to explain fine tuning doesn’t work because the existence of God would “amaze you even more.”

          • Daniel Kuehn says:

            If there’s a God, I doubt he exists outside of space and time. I’d put that sort of creator-of-everything God at a much lower probability. I’d expect he’s something inherent to an uncreated universe.

            • konst says:

              The God of the bible, the Christian God exists outside of space and time. He is existence itself beyond the understanding of all created beings.

    • Vojtech says:

      Ad 2: As I tried to say last time, we actually know, that the distribution can’t be uniform. You can only have uniform distributions, if you have a finite number of possibilities. Otherwise the total probability would not sum up to 1 (but to infinity). Clearly there are infinitely many possible values for basic constants of the universe.

      • Lucas M Engelhardt says:

        This is just incorrect.

        As proof I offer the standard uniform distribution – all the real numbers from 0 to 1 (an infinite number of choices) have an equal probability. To see what I’m talking about, check Wikipedia’s article about continuous uniform distributions.

        • Vojtech says:

          Yes, I messed it up. Still, you can’t have (continuous) uniform distribution for an interval -Inf..+Inf (which is the case for possible values of basic constants of the universe) and (discrete) distribution for infinite number of possibilities.

    • Gene Callahan says:

      “If you could work out the existence of God rationally why would Christ invoke faith so much?”

      Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. If I have rational reasons for believing in the existence of my wife, why would she ask me to have faith in her?

      • Ash says:

        Gene, as great as your wife may be, her mere existence does not imply–nor is it asserted to mean–infallibility, omnipotence, and omniscience.

        That is to say, (what I take to be) Daniel’s argument is that if the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, merciful, etc., God can be rationally proven to exist, why must we still have faith that God is omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, merciful, etc.?

        If I can rationally prove that all gammas are deltas, then I no longer need faith to affirm that all gammas are deltas.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        Ummm… those uses of the word “faith” are a wee bit different Gene. Granted, there’s an expectation of that sort of faith too – trust and fidelity – but with the Christian faith there’s an additional expectation of faith as a foundation for the knowledge of God and for the acceptance of Christ as savior. There are repeated references to Christ’s frustration that people would deny him even given evidence and that his followers ought to have faith in the truth of what he claims to be (NOT simply faith as you’re using it here).

        Not to mention the fact that it’s not merely existence that we’re asked to have faith in. We’re expected to have faith in the extraordinary properties of God, in the creative work of God, in the salvific work of God, and in the ultimate judgement of God. That’s asking far more than the sort of faith your wife is asking.

  11. Egoist says:

    Incidentally, this is why I think it’s so funny when people automatically say that the “intelligent design” movement, or the fine-tuning argument, are by their nature “unscientific.” Suppose we really did live in The Matrix. Surely our scientists would be involved in discovering this truth about our empirical observations. If Morpheus tried to tell them to revise their cosmological explanations, they wouldn’t dismiss his claims as being outside the bounds of science per se.

    The intelligent design crowd aren’t proposing that the intelligent designer is a natural entity, such as a machine or computer. They are specifically say the intelligent designer is a SUPER-natural, “unscientific” entity.

    You can’t say it is “scientific” for you to propose an intelligent designer supernatural God on the basis that some atheists are claiming that it is scientific to propose a natural intelligent designer Matrix computer. It’s an equivocation of the term “intelligent designer.” They mean it in a natural, “scientific” way, you mean it in a super-natural, “unscientific” way.

    Regarding the beer fetching dog: I don’t know why you feel obligated to throw out “unlikely” events with low probability. Low probability events are events that occur. Nassim Taleb would be very upset to hear if someone took an event with 1/1000 probability (or 1/1,000,000 probability) and acted, thought, and went ahead as if the probability is “effectively zero, so let’s ignore it.” That’s precisely the thinking that got the mortgage backed security industry in trouble. They “effectively ignored” the low probability, tail end risk.

    If an event has a 1/1000 probability of occurring, then it is an event that can indeed occur, and its occurrence should not be met with “Something is wrong here, because only events with 1.00 probability typically occur.”

    Are you suggesting there is more to winning the lottery, which occasionally have odds lower than 1 in 100 million, than “sheer luck”? Why can’t you come to accept that low probability events are by definition events that do occur, and therefore if they occur, we don’t feel obligated to find out something that we missed?

    Of course this gets into the whole determinism / indeterminism debate, on whether or not lottery pickings are indeed “luck”, rather than being the result of a precise, albeit outrageously complex, chain of cause and effect that includes such things as air turbulence inside the ball jumbler, but I don’t think that’s what you were talking about.

    • konst says:

      Nassim Taleb would be very upset to hear if someone took an event with 1/1000 probability (or 1/1,000,000 probability) and acted, thought, and went ahead as if the probability is “effectively zero, so let’s ignore it.” That’s precisely the thinking that got the mortgage backed security industry in trouble. They “effectively ignored” the low probability, tail end risk.

      No they believed an illusion created by actions of the Fed and Congress rather than a “low probability” event. In other words, their whole premise was wrong. That is, unless they know it wasn’t real but didn’t care anyway as long as they could get away with it before the collapse.

      • Egoist says:

        I didn’t say they “believed in a low probability event.”

        I said they effectively ignored the low probability event.

        Yes, they believed in the illusion created by the Fed and Congress, and that is exactly what made them effectively ignore the low probability event of the national mortgage market collapsing.

        • konst says:

          Sorry. Haven’t had my coffee yet. I meant that the saying that there is a “low probability” event of the housing market downturn in many areas of the country(ies) would mean that the housing boom was quite sustainable. i.e. since the event had low probability.

          It may be better to think of it as the Fed and Congress creating what would better be called an artificial reality. i.e. a reality believed and accepted most people and economists. The real world would be the real probabilities and events without the Fed fueled bubble.

          • Egoist says:

            I meant that the saying that there is a “low probability” event of the housing market downturn in many areas of the country(ies) would mean that the housing boom was quite sustainable. i.e. since the event had low probability.

            Wouldn’t an event with low probability eventually occur, in which case it isn’t “sustainable” as we typically understand the term?

            • konst says:

              The problem is you’re attaching probabilities to the artificial reality created by the Fed and Congress, e.g. that the housing market always goes up.

              The so-called “low probability” event of a housing bust wasn’t really a low probability event.

              In the Fed’s reality it’s a low probability event but in the real world it’s a 100% expected event.

              • Egoist says:

                The problem is you’re attaching probabilities to the artificial reality created by the Fed and Congress, e.g. that the housing market always goes up.

                You’re? As in me, or the “Kingly” you’re? I wasn’t suffering from that illusion. I have been reading Mises.org for many years.

                At any rate, statesmen weren’t the only ones promoting the notion that home prices never fall at the national level. It was borne out of a misguided empirical inference from the fact that home prices have not actually fallen at the national level since WW2 (before 2008 that is).

                In the Fed’s reality it’s a low probability event but in the real world it’s a 100% expected event

                At some point, yes. In the temporal sense, that’s what low probability means.

  12. Ken B says:

    Beer always helps with Bob’s religious posts.

    Let me try to summarize some of the arguments above from the loyal opposition.
    Here are some of the elements of the dog story where the analogy breaks down.

    1. You don’t know the beer is poisoned. (That is you don’t know the universe is fine tuned.)
    2. You don’t know how many garages there are. (Multiverse, many-worlds, or the ‘constants’ vary over time or space in our universe, or the universe cycles being slightly different each time.)
    3. You don’t know if the adroitness of the dog can be explained. Maybe it needs to be.

    Here’s part of the analogy you left out. We learnt about this miracle dog by sending out a spam email to everyone. We only got one response. We have no clue how many got our email, or drank beer.

  13. Egoist says:

    Saw this making the rounds today.

    • konst says:

      There are very old manuscripts that agree with the King James bible and other translations which those translations didn’t have access to. Like in some monasteries near Mount Sinai.

      Those old manuscripts are copies not translations since most or almost all of the New Testament was written in Greek.

      • Egoist says:

        What you said is consistent with that picture I linked to.

        Yes, “very old”….but not original. The oldest surviving scrolls were written hundreds of years after the last apostle died. Imagine some patriotic historian who believes in statism and writes the account of Bush’s adventures in the middle east, hundreds of years after it took place, and the historian has no presentable, verifiable citations. I think “we should be skeptical” would be an understatement.

        Yes, there are “agreements”….but there are many disagreements.

        Not saying the picture is accurate, but your response isn’t exactly a rebuttal against it.

        • konst says:

          The picture doesn’t present history. The bible (both old and new testaments) was compiled hundreds of years after the Apostles but there were written texts and individual books of the bible for hundreds of years before the actual books to be included in the bible was decided.

          Another thing you’re forgetting or may not be aware of is that Christians believe the bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and as such was preserved from the errors of heresy so devote scribes and monks would take great care to see that it was transcribed accurately.

          • Egoist says:

            The picture doesn’t present history. The bible (both old and new testaments) was compiled hundreds of years after the Apostles but there were written texts and individual books of the bible for hundreds of years before the actual books to be included in the bible was decided.

            But those “hundreds of years before the actual books to be included in the bible” THEMSELVES are based on scrolls that are no older than hundreds of years AFTER the original documents.

            Another thing you’re forgetting or may not be aware of is that Christians believe the bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and as such was preserved from the errors of heresy so devote scribes and monks would take great care to see that it was transcribed accurately.

            Ah yes, the old tried tested and true “holy spirit” get out of jail card.

            • konst says:

              But those “hundreds of years before the actual books to be included in the bible” THEMSELVES are based on scrolls that are no older than hundreds of years AFTER the original documents.

              For the new testament not really a long time. Maybe a few decades.

              For both the old and new testaments books tell me:
              When you copy a manuscript by scribes (by hand) how many hundreds of years will make a difference before you lose confidence in the copy?

              There would only be minor differences in transcription in a thousand years.

              • Egoist says:

                For the new testament not really a long time. Maybe a few decades.

                Other than the single gospel of John, it is a really long time. We’re talking one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred years later.

                When you copy a manuscript by scribes (by hand) how many hundreds of years will make a difference before you lose confidence in the copy?

                I think it has more to do with the lack of any copies prior to hundreds of years after.

    • Blackadder says:

      Egoist,

      As a Catholic I’m not inclined to defend the King James Bible, so I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

      Every year, several New Testament manuscripts handwritten in the original Greek format are discovered. The latest substantial find was in 2008, when 47 new manuscripts were discovered in Albania; at least 17 of them unknown to Western scholars. When comparing one manuscript to another, with the exception of the smallest fragments, no two copies agree completely throughout. There has been an estimate of between 400,000 variations among all these manuscripts (from the 2nd to 15th century) which is more than there are words in the New Testament. This is less significant than may appear since it is a comparison across linguistic boundaries. More important estimates focus on comparing texts within languages. Those variations are considerably fewer. The vast majority of these are accidental errors made by scribes, and are easily identified as such: an omitted word, a duplicate line, a misspelling, a rearrangement of words.

      Also, your link is mistaken in claiming that the earliest surviving manuscripts are from a couple hundred years after the apostles died. The earliest surviving manuscripts are from the early second century, which would have been decades after the death of the last apostle, not centuries.

      • Ken B says:

        We have small fragments from 2nd century. We have nothing like a full set of NT books from that early The oldest large chunks are 4th century. The best early manuscripts are Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both 4th C I think.

        And the bible as THE BIBLE, ie the canonical lsit did not exist until about 400 AD.

        The KJV is the best example of a work that gains in translation but if you care about the content rather than the style, it’s a poor choice.

        Need I add, these early manuscripts the believers here point to as authorities do NOT have Bob’s favorite, the lynch-pin of his apologetics, the woman taken in adultery http://incorrections.blog.com/?p=7

        • konst says:

          There’s a big difference between “We have nothing like a full set of NT books” and “they didn’t”.

          Beside which books were included in the NT was decides much later so you’re forgetting about the individual books at the time.

          • Egoist says:

            There’s a big difference between “We have nothing like a full set of NT books” and “they didn’t”.

            There is a big difference in making claims based on what information you have, and what information you believe others had many years ago.

      • Egoist says:

        As a Catholic I’m not inclined to defend the King James Bible, so I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

        This really isn’t convincing. For one thing, saying that there are “considerably fewer” variations within the same language, doesn’t mean there are absolutely few variations. There could still be a ton of variations, just not 10 tons. For another thing, even if the vast majority of the variations within a language are accidental, that still doesn’t mean there are absolutely few variations.

        Remember, we’r talking about a population of 400,000 variations. Even explaining 350,000 of them as accidental mistakes, and/or mistranslations, leaves enough to make the bible suspect in terms of its accuracy.

        Also, your link is mistaken in claiming that the earliest surviving manuscripts are from a couple hundred years after the apostles died. The earliest surviving manuscripts are from the early second century, which would have been decades after the death of the last apostle, not centuries.

        This is a better criticism.

        The earliest known new testament manuscript is from 125 AD, from St. John, and it says:

        “the Jews, “For us it is not permitted to kill anyone,” so that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spoke signifying what kind of death he was going to die. Entered therefore again into the Praetorium Pilate and summoned Jesus and said to him, “Thou art king of the Jews?”

        and on the reverse:

        “a King I am. For this I have been born and (for this) I have come into the world so that I would testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears of me my voice.” Said to him Pilate, “What is truth?” and this having said, again he went out unto the Jews and said to them, “I find not one fault in him.”

        Pretty interesting. But no divinity there.

        ——

        The bulk of “old” new testament manuscripts, the ones used as source material for the KJV and the “divinated” Jesus, date from the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th centuries AD.

        I think Jesus the man became Jesus the holy God’s son many, many years later, when it was perhaps clearer he could be “used” more effectively if he were divinated, rather than just some mortal who claimed to be King of the Jews.

        • Gene Callahan says:

          “I think Jesus the man became Jesus the holy God’s son many, many years later, when it was perhaps clearer he could be “used” more effectively if he were divinated…”

          Those diabolical early Christians, scheming how to “use” the figure of Jesus to spread their religion so that they could be martyred more quickly.

          • Daniel Kuehn says:

            It’s always interesting… particularly since September 11th… that people still treat martyrdom for religious claims that are trumped up from the original as so irrational. Maybe it’s irrational (I might argue that), but it’s certainly not as implausible as you’re implying.

          • Ken B says:

            As usual Gene really does not know much about very early christianity. The first christians seem not to have thought Jesus was divine. The notion just isn’t in the first writings we have. That idea set in later. And many of those somewhat later christians thought he was divine but NOT the god of the Jews.

            And some of course thought he wasn’t human.

  14. Ken B says:

    The KJV was based on a defective text, the Textus Recptus. Much better editions exist based on more recently found manuscripts. Even the Church of England replaced the KJV over a century ago. (Alas some are so misguided they think the contents matter.)

    The KJV is about 80% William Tyndale’s one man translation. A genius of the English language.

  15. Alexandra K. says:

    Sorry Dr. Murphy but I am not impressed by your reasoning. I can’t see why scenario 1 is different from scenario 2.
    Only in the case of deliberately adjusted rules, when “the beer plant specifically sent out batches that had 1 safe and 999 tainted bottles.” ( or, a much better and realistic example is any lottery. Where must be a winner ticket, yes? Surely, nobody would say a winning is a miracle or a winner is a God-appointed champion ( except the winner himself he-he.))
    In all other cases first and second scenarios are the same. Let’s turn your “poisoned beer” example upside down, i.e. we have 999 bottles of good beer ( if Americans can understand what “good beer” means of course) and 1 bottle of poisoned beer ( some brave and risky germ dived into). If the dog chooses this bad bottle and its master gets a wart on his nose as a result… yes,.. “it’s statistically impossible so it’s unscientific!” What the hell?! The fact that many people and even many scientists ( mostly ones who are mesmerised by statistics*) think so does mean nothing.
    I’d offer you a much better example, namely your own ( and my) existence.
    We know that an average man produces about 20 – 200 million of these little creatures during every ejaculation. All of them but one miss the target. Plus, how many times our parents did it? OMG! But it isn’t the end of the story. What about our grandparents, great-grandparents, our all ancestors in N-generation? What about probability of your of my existence? It is ZERO! But we are, alive and kicking! So according to your Fine-Tuning theory God prefers us to an infinite amount of our would-be brothers and sisters? Why? Are we the best? You know, it sounds quite arrogant for me.
    Hey Dr. Murphy, I don’t say I don’t approve of God’s choice about your existence ( not speaking of mine 🙂 ), I definitely prefer you to your possible Marxist or Keynesian brothers. But anyway it looks strange, what do you think?

    * “ Lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Good said. I’d like to add that statistics is a tool of lazy minds, who are not able to find causalities so they are satisfied with correlations.

  16. Ash says:

    Why did you have to even invent this analogy? Why didn’t you just refer to an earthquake or tsunami, where hundreds or even thousands of people die, but one baby is found alive among the rubble days later?

    • Ken B says:

      Or all the male children in Jerusalem except one are slaughtered?

      • MamMoTh says:

        No one would ever believe that.

  17. Paul says:

    Bob,

    I have a couple of comments regarding the fine tuning argument as a whole as well as the dog analogy.

    If the belief is that God exists and created the universe then I think that it is safe to assume that He created it with a purpose. I am assuming omnipotence, omniscience, and logic as being inherent properties of God. It is possible to deduce God’s overall purpose based on the assumption that there had to have been a purpose else He would not have created the universe in the first place. Where our knowledge stops, though, is in the specifics of God’s plan. We don’t know why little Jane had to die of cancer at the age of eight, nor do we know why the dog grabbed the one beer out of 1,000 that was unpoisoned. What we can say is that these events that are allowed to happen would make much more sense if we were God, and we could see the big picture.

    To tune the universe implies that it was created, and then it was fixed, in a way, to accomodate human life. Doesn’t this undermine the basic properties of God? Isn’t this saying that His creation did not suit His purpose, and therefore He had to change it?

    When it comes to the dog analogy, would it undermine God’s purpose if the dog had picked up a poisoned beer? I say there is no way for us to know this.

    I guess, if the fine tuning argument is directed at purpose rather than “tuning” then I don’t think that it can be used to explain much given the fact that we cannot understand the specifics of God’s plan.

    • konst says:

      To tune the universe implies that it was created, and then it was fixed, in a way, to accomodate human life. Doesn’t this undermine the basic properties of God? Isn’t this saying that His creation did not suit His purpose, and therefore He had to change it?

      Not necessarily. It could only mean that the range of the tuning is there not that it was changed afterwards to “fix it”.

      But I don’t believe the fine tuning argument anyway cause it’s a consequence of some physicists misinterpreting the theory.

  18. Sam Geoghegan says:

    Intermission:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNDG7ErY-k4&feature=related

    I was quite impressed with Chompsy’s impartiality here.

  19. Jorge says:

    Top 10 things that don’t make sense to me about theism:

    1] Theists are inconsistent when they believe that the complexity of the universe implies a designer, but the complexity of God doesn’t.
    2] Theists speak of God as existing prior to existence, as if that’s not an incomprehensible concept that cannot be postulated at all.
    3] Theists compare the inference of God from the universe to the inference of an intelligent human from a book, as if the concepts “God” and “Human” stand on equal scientific footings.
    4] Theists arbitrarily assume that the universe’s hospitality to humans is not a flaw in God’s design. The trash container in my kitchen perfectly sustains bacterial growth, but that doesn’t mean I’m fond of bacteria.
    5] If theists believe God is omnipotent and never errs, it makes no sense to believe he created a complicated environment designed to support a fragile organism when it was his own choice to make that organism so fragile to begin with.
    6] Theists illogically attribute absolute benevolence to God as if he wasn’t the one who set up all the conditions that made evil possible.
    7] The bible is just awful.
    8, 9, 10] I ran out of ideas. Suggestions?

    • Xon says:

      1. What is this “complexity” of God you speak of? The general idea amongst western theists is that God is simple (one essence without parts).

      2. Theists speak of God as existing prior to the existence of any *created* thing, not prior to “existence” in general (whatever that would mean). Not that hard to understand as a basic logical categorization, really.

      God–uncreated being, eternal (non-temporal)
      everything else–created being, temporal

      “Prior” is a bit misleading when talking about such things as God existing “before” the creation, since before the creation there was no temporality at all (only the self-existing eternal simple God). But the sense of priority here is usually said to be logical, not temporal.

      3. there is no “equal scientific footing.” It’s just an argument by analogy, which philosophers and serious thinkers do all the time even when there are differences between the two things being compared. The point is that certain kinds of organization imply an intelligent mind, and the human mind is the intelligent mind we know best. But if there is a creator of all things that is also intelligent, then inferring an analogy between the divine intelligence and the created human intelligence for certain intellectual purposes is perfectly reasonable.

      4. This is a separate issue, though. You can’t try to persuade a theist that God’s design sucks unless you first grant that there is a God whose design we can judge. But if you do that, then you’re a theist, your top ten list not withstanding.

      5. Why doesn’t that make sense? Are you saying God needs to be efficient in his designs? Why? Infinite beings have no need to be concerned with efficiency. Presumably some design purpose is fulfilled by making humans fragile that has nothing to do with God'[s ability to make them less fragile if He so chose.

      6. Ethics is, like, complicated. 🙂 There is usually lots of variety within any broader school of thought about the nature of good and evil, the way that determinism effects responsibility, etc. There is no one “theist” answer to these things, and so you can’t possibly criticize all theists at once on this point.

      7. Some question-begging in this one, I fear. When the Bible is read with a serious eye to letting it harmonize with itself and with an understanding of its grammatical-historical context in which it was written, it ain’t so bad (I say this as one who does not believe it to be an inerrant source of revelation). In any event, though, what of theists who don’t believe in the Bible (Muslims, deists, etc.)? What about those who take the Bible to be only a human-influenced repository of certain basic moral and spiritual principles (as mainline liberal Protestants and many liberalish Catholics do)?

      8-10. Sadly I am little help to you here. 😉

      • Jorge says:

        1. So the entity that’s powerful enough to create the complex universe is assumed to be simple, an “essence without parts”. And theists know this about God how exactly?? I suppose that when science is not a part of your postulates you can just tailor the story however you please.

        2. Again, theists postulate an intelligent creator of the universe, and then assume this creator is eternal. How do they know he’s eternal? Well, they just assumed it. On what basis? It just makes a nice story.

        3. You said “if there is a creator of all things that is also intelligent…” then the analogy is reasonable. So the analogy both presupposes the creator of all things and is used to infer him too. That’s quite an analogy.

        4. I don’t have to be a theist to criticize elements in the theistic story. If you’re a theist, how are you sure human’s are not a flaw in the design? Well, you just assume it, like everything else.

        5. So God is all benevolence yet creates a world full of misery and suffering. Why? Because “some design purpose is fulfilled”. Or not. How would you know ether way? You dont. You just assume whatever makes a nice story for you.

        6. It’s not complicated. There is evil. God created everything. Therefore, God created evil. Yet God is benevolent. How does that make sense?

        7. The bible “ain’t so bad”?? There’s passages directly condoning slavery! If you’re omnipotent, why not use some of that power to write a bit more clearly and maybe keep the slavery passages out of your divine word?

    • Ken B says:

      7) And the bible is not even the worst of them.

  20. Ken B says:

    Making a new universe might be easy. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/25/big-bang-didnt-need-god-to-start-universe-researchers-say/#ixzz1yrhUNa5g

    I like this bit:
    “So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe,” Shostak added. “I don’t know how that affects your theological leanings, but it is something to consider.”

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