03 Jun 2012

The Fine-Tuning Argument for an Intelligent Designer of the Universe

Religious 292 Comments

Daniel Kuehn is nonplussed by the so-called fine-tuning argument:

I never quite understood why people get so excited about alleged “fine tuning”. The multiverse idea seems quite plausible to me, but I think even that overcomplicates it.

If certain conditions are required for us to exist and observe reality, and if we do exist and observe reality, then you really only have two options:

1. We exist and observe and the universe does not meet these conditions, or
2. We exist and observe and the universe does meet these conditions.

The conditional probability of 1 is zero, so the conditional probability of 2 is one. Far from being something to marvel at – an apparently “fine tuned universe” seems like a logical necessity to me.

UPDATE: And we should be careful to not take the fine tuning argument too far either. It’s often framed as “there can’t be life without certain physical constants”, so a God presiding over life would be very interested in these constants. But my understanding is that its not just an issue of life; matter itself would not exist without these constants. So there’s nothing especially pro-flourishing-life about the fine tuning issue. Its even baser than “for living things to exist and observe we need x, y, and z” – it’s that “for stuff in general to be stuff we need x, y, and z”. Again – this is less an issue of awe and wonder and more an issue of logical necessity.

OK I don’t think the above works at all. There may be great rebuttals to a theist (like me) who points to the allegedly finely-tuned universe as an independent argument for the existence of God, but I don’t think Daniel’s reaction is a member of that set. I can make my modest point with a simple analogy.

Before I do that, however, let’s be clear on what the fine-tuning argument is. I turn to my trusty research assistant, Wikipedia:

In 1961, the physicist Robert H. Dicke claimed that certain forces in physics, such as gravity and electromagnetism, must be perfectly fine-tuned for life to exist anywhere in the Universe.[4][5] Fred Hoyle also argued for a fine-tuned Universe in his 1984 book Intelligent Universe. He compares “the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a star system full of blind men solving Rubik’s Cube simultaneously”.[6]

John Gribbin and Martin Rees wrote a detailed history and defence of the fine-tuning argument in their book Cosmic Coincidences (1989). According to Gribbin and Rees, carbon-based life was not haphazardly arrived at, but the deliberate end of a Universe “tailor-made for man.”

The premise of the fine-tuned Universe assertion is that a small change in several of the dimensionlessfundamental physical constants would make the Universe radically different. As Stephen Hawking has noted, “The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”[8]

If, for example, the strong nuclear force were 2% stronger than it is (i.e., if the coupling constant representing its strength were 2% larger), while the other constants were left unchanged, diprotons would be stable and hydrogen would fuse into them instead of deuterium and helium.[9] This would drastically alter the physics of stars, and presumably preclude the existence of life similar to what we observe on Earth.

I purposely left in all the hyperlinks. I assume most of you have heard of Stephen Hawking, but in case those other names are unfamiliar, go ahead and click on them. These aren’t theologians and they aren’t mere “science beat” journalists, they are actual scientists, with PhDs in technical fields and some of whom with fairly impressive academic positions. Maybe they’re all nuts, but this isn’t some obscure theory dreamed up by an archbishop.

Now, there is healthy debate within the ranks of cosmologists, astrophysicists, etc. on whether “fine-tuning” is a big deal or not. Click the Wikipedia link to read more on this. But if you want to grapple with it, the way to do it is, say, argue that for all we know, all sorts of non-carbon-based life would emerge in a universe that couldn’t support solar mechanics the way ours can. Or you could argue that actually, there’s a lot more leeway in how far the charge on an electron could go, either way, and still support life as we know it.

But what doesn’t work, I claim, is to give Daniel’s response, and merely point out that hey, if the universe couldn’t support life, then we wouldn’t be alive to fuss about it in the first place. Here’s my analogy on that score:

Suppose Daniel and I stow away on a new ship owned by J.P. Morgan. We quickly strike up friendships with the other vagabonds on the giant vessel, and at one point Daniel is so happy he stands on the bow and yells, “I’m king of the world!”

Unfortunately we end up hitting an iceberg, and Daniel and I soon find ourselves floating in freezing water, hanging on to a piece of wood. As the numbness moves up our legs, I admit that maybe Bill Anderson should cut Krugman some slack. Daniel, for his part, admits that Krugman is a jerk. We close our eyes as the icy sea consumes us…

Yet we’re not dead. We are amazed to come to our senses in an underwater cave of sorts, only about 20 square feet in floor space and about 8 feet high. We can see fish swimming around on the outside, yet there is an impermeable barrier keeping the water from filling the cave. After a few hours pacing around the cave, I suddenly exclaim, “Daniel, I just realized, how come we haven’t suffocated?! Our breathing should have turned all the oxygen in here into CO2 by now, right?”

We examine the rocky wall and realize there are tiny holes, through which (we conclude) the atmosphere inside our small room is constantly being exchanged.

As the days pass, we discover new things about this strange place. Driven by hunger, we eventually try eating the slime mold on the cave walls, only to find that it is delicious, and apparently can sustain human life. with no ill side effects. When thirsty, we simply put our tongues up to the invisible barrier, which lets the ocean water through but filters out the salt. I don’t want to share any indecent details, but the cave’s special properties also allowed us to dispose of our waste products in a sanitary way. We also notice that one of the rats from the ship managed to find its way into the cave with us, and it too feasts on the slime mold and drinks from the barrier.

Since we’ve solved business cycle theory by Day 7, eventually Daniel and I begin discussing the finer things. I declare, “Some intelligent being must have designed this cave. It is clearly intended to support human life. This doesn’t look like something people could have done, so maybe you’re right, Daniel. Maybe aliens do exist!”

Daniel scoffs. “Are you saying that just because we’re alive? Look, if we hadn’t sunk into a cave with these properties, we would have drowned. So stop being so awed every day about ‘oh wow this cave is so cool,’ you’re really getting on my nerves with that broken record. Look, using your exact same reasoning, I could walk around talking about aliens who apparently love rodents, since they designed a cave for that rat over there.”

How many people side with Daniel in this hypothetical argument? Would I be wrong to be flabbergasted by this cave?

292 Responses to “The Fine-Tuning Argument for an Intelligent Designer of the Universe”

  1. Anonymous says:

    It’s a rather bad analogy since life apparently didn’t come from the cave. I think you’re working under the assumption that life and the cave had the same designer thus requiring a designer in the first place.

    I’d be totally awed though.

  2. Matt_R.L. says:

    First of all, good post Bob. As Peterman was wont to say in Seinfeld, “that is one ripping yarn!”

    Pleasantries now out of the way, let me bring up just one of several objections that could be raised in response to your point.

    You claim, in essence, that the Universe is shockingly well-suited to human life. The merest of tweaks in some of natures constants would have precluded the Universe from forming as it did, and so rendered man’s coming to be impossible.

    How, then, do you come to grips with the fact that, during the short history of mankind, there was a period during which humanity almost died out? Scientists estimate we had been reduced to a mere pittance of humans left in a stretch of Africa before we managed to pull through and expand elsewhere. Seems like a rather close thing — especially in light of the millions and millions of species which have gone extinct — for the Universe’s choice creature.

    But let’s say your response to that is, “well, I don’t see what the problem is; humans DID survive!” Okay, sure. What say you, then, about the fact that we’re statistically bound to be hit by a cataclysmically large asteroid at some point in the not-too-distant future? Or about the fact that, at some point, the sun is going to do what all stars do and become giant-sized, and then either collapse into an ultra-dense neutron or, considerably worse for us, go supernova and collapse into a black hole. Or about the fact that the Milky Way is on an irrevocable collision course with the Andromeda galaxy (which doesn’t mean Earth will smash into some other planet or star, but which will almost invariably have substantial gravitational implications)? Or, most damning I think, about the possibility of the heat death of the Universe?

    I’m merely an occasional consumer of popular science, so if there are scientific nits to pick in the above I take full responsibility for them, but I do not think they diminish my broader point: that while there is some extent to which the Universe has hitherto been hospitable to human life, given the vast stretches of time that we must consider, things don’t appear quite so swell in the long run. Surely that has implications for the argument you put forward.

    • joshua says:

      Good points, but I don’t think they’re too hard to counter. If you believe one of the traditional interpretations of Christian eschatology, then there’s a good chance we’ll be on to the “new heaven and new earth” long before the sun burns out or we collide with Andromeda. And if you don’t, well, hey, maybe Man will be a multi-planetary or even multi-galaxial creature by then…

  3. Joel says:

    I side with you, Bob.

    From philosopher Mitch Stokes’ recent book, _A Shot of Faith (to the Head)_:

    ***

    Philosopher Peter van Inwagen calls the invocation of the anthropic principle “one of the most annoyingly obtuse arguments in the history of philosophy.” He considers an analogy:

    Suppose you are in a situation in which you must draw a straw from a bundle of 1,048,576 straws of different lengths, and suppose it has been decreed that if you don’t draw the shortest straw in the bundle you will be instantly and painlessly killed: you will be killed so fast you won’t have time to realize you didn’t draw the shortest straw. Reluctantly—but you have no alternative—you draw a straw and are astonished to find yourself alive and holding the shortest straw. What should you conclude?

    You should probably conclude, according to van Inwagen, that someone has set up the situation so that you would be guaranteed to choose the shortest straw. And if I asked you to explain why you happened to pick the shortest straw, you wouldn’t (I hope) reply, “Because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.” If you did, my considered response would be, “Well, duh.”

    ***

    • Egoist says:

      This analogy is flawed because in the anthropic principle argument, the “unlucky” outcome would never have us being here in the first place.

      In the straw picking analogy however, humans are presumed to exist from the start, so OF COURSE it would be silly to then consider “If I hadn’t picked the shortest straw, I wouldn’t be here” as justification for why he picked the shortest straw. He’s already there before he picked any straw!

      Then there is the non sequitur that one “should” conclude that someone has set it up so that you would be guaranteed to pick the shortest straw. I mean really, is that what winners of lotteries, where the odds can get even lower than one in 1, 048,576, “should” conclude as well? That someone in the lottery commission “designed” that particular winner of winning?

      What is so wrong about concluding that it WAS really just hitting a low probability outcome by chance?

      If the straw picking analogy is to make any sense, it has to go a layer deeper. It would be like 1,048,576 people each picking a straw, and they are all zapped one by one as they pick the wrong straws, then when it gets to you, you pick a straw and survive, and you conclude “I picked the shortest straw because if I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t be here.”

      Not so “duh” now is it?

      • Joel says:

        EGOIST: This analogy is flawed because in the anthropic principle argument, the “unlucky” outcome would never have us being here in the first place.

        JOEL: When an analogy is not identical to the thing against which it is compared, that is not a tell-tale sign of a flawed analogy. In fact, an analogy is similar to the thing against which it is compared – and not identical – by definition.

        EGOIST: In the straw picking analogy however, humans are presumed to exist from the start, so OF COURSE it would be silly to then consider “If I hadn’t picked the shortest straw, I wouldn’t be here” as justification for why he picked the shortest straw. He’s already there before he picked any straw!

        JOEL: There’s always the chance that the critic’s thinking is flawed, not the analogy. Just throwing that out there. I think you’re failing to interpret the analogy at its point of similarity with the anthropic principle. You’re missing the significance of the analogy.

        Here’s why:

        In the context of the claim that the anthropic principle is an obtuse argument, the straw analogy also represents a similarly reasoned obtuse argument because the statement, “If I hadn’t picked the shortest straw, I wouldn’t be here,” IS NOT AN EXPLANATION OF WHY THE PERSON CHOSE THE SHORTEST STRAW. Interesting because in a similarly obtuse fashion, the anthropic principle does not explain WHY the universe appears fine-tuned. It merely restates what we already know, to wit, the universe is fine-tuned.

        EGOIST: Then there is the non sequitur that one “should” conclude that someone has set it up so that you would be guaranteed to pick the shortest straw.

        JOEL: It’s not a non sequitur because van Inwagen says “should probably,” not “probably.” Misrepresentation on your part.

        Futhermore, you’re continuing to miss the point of the analogy. If the person assumes s/he picked the shortest straw as a function of chance and probability, IT’S STILL OBTUSE TO “EXPLAIN” THE SITUTATION BY SAYING, “If I hadn’t picked the shortest straw, I wouldn’t be here.”

        It’s fascinating to watch as you focus on the wrong parts of this analogy in an attempt to dismantle it.

        EGOIST: What is so wrong about concluding that it WAS really just hitting a low probability outcome by chance?

        JOEL: Nothing is wrong about that conclusion other than that you’re missing the significance of the analogy!

        Duh!

        • Egoist says:

          I’d rather speak for myself, thanks.

          When an analogy is not identical to the thing against which it is compared, that is not a tell-tale sign of a flawed analogy. In fact, an analogy is similar to the thing against which it is compared – and not identical – by definition.

          I am not saying it has to be “identical.” It just has to have certain identical concepts in both. That’s how propositions become analogies, rather than just independent and separate propositions. Analogies are in fact constrained to the proposition the analogy refers.

          I submit that your short straw analogy is flawed, not because it isn’t identical, but because it is different from the referent in key concepts, such as whether or not humans are here or not. That is vital to the anthropic principle. It would be absurd to use an analogy that isn’t even consistent with this.

          There’s always the chance that the critic’s thinking is flawed, not the analogy. Just throwing that out there. I think you’re failing to interpret the analogy at its point of similarity with the anthropic principle. You’re missing the significance of the analogy.

          I reject the claimed significance of the analogy. Your analogy doesn’t have the key similarities to make the analogy sensible.

          In the context of the claim that the anthropic principle is an obtuse argument, the straw analogy also represents a similarly reasoned obtuse argument because the statement, “If I hadn’t picked the shortest straw, I wouldn’t be here,” IS NOT AN EXPLANATION OF WHY THE PERSON CHOSE THE SHORTEST STRAW.

          THAT’S MY POINT. Contrary to the anthropic principle, which IS in fact “a” theory that attempts to explain why the universe is the way it is, by considering the fact of our existence, your short straw analogy FAILS to even explain that, because humans MUST be presupposed as already existing before they can be said to have even picked a straw! That isn’t the case with the anthropic principle. Humans are NOT presumed to exist in the very utilization of the principle. In the anthropic principle model, humans can be presumed not to exist, and this presumption applies to all the universes that have constants which make human life impossible.

          Interesting because in a similarly obtuse fashion, the anthropic principle does not explain WHY the universe appears fine-tuned. It merely restates what we already know, to wit, the universe is fine-tuned.

          You clearly don’t understand the anthropic principle. That seems to be the problem here. You have a false conception of it, and you’re arguing against that false conception. No wonder your analogy doesn’t make any sense. It is an analogy for something else other than the anthropic principle.

          To let you in on the secret, the AP does in fact explain why the universe appears fine tuned. You don’t have to agree with it, you don’t have to say it’s right, but it IS in fact an explanation. it’s why more than cosmologist have adopted it. It’s not exactly popular today, but it once was, and throughout, the AP has remained an explanation.

          It’s not a non sequitur because van Inwagen says “should probably,” not “probably.” Misrepresentation on your part.

          I didn’t say can Inwagen said “probably.” I said van Inwagen said “should”. Total misrepresentation on your part.

          He said one “should” conclude that someone deliberately planned the shortest straw being picked. I reject that “should”, because there is nothing that stands in the way of me concluding that it WAS indeed luck, probability, chance, etc. I don’t care how small you believe the probability really is, the fact that it is non-zero is all the probability I need to make it a possibility, such that anyone who says I “should” pretend that it doesn’t exist, or that I “should” accept only the most likely outcome, is wrong. One should NOT ignore, reject, or pretend the small probabilities do not exist. That’s how the mortgage debacle blew up in people’s faces. It’s a black swan type argument.

          A low probability of an event occurring means the event actually occurs.

          Futhermore, you’re continuing to miss the point of the analogy. If the person assumes s/he picked the shortest straw as a function of chance and probability, IT’S STILL OBTUSE TO “EXPLAIN” THE SITUTATION BY SAYING, “If I hadn’t picked the shortest straw, I wouldn’t be here.”

          You already said this. Saying it a second time won’t make it any less false.

          It’s fascinating to watch as you focus on the wrong parts of this analogy in an attempt to dismantle it.

          It’s even more fascination how you actually believe you know what the heck you’re talking about, both of the AP, and of what I said. You are not getting either correct. It’s also fascination how you believe that using the word fascination somehow signals some sort of strength in the validity of your false claims.

          Nothing is wrong about that conclusion other than that you’re missing the significance of the analogy!

          The analogy is flawed. I reject the significance of it. It violates a key foundation of the anthropic principle, and is hence an analogy for some other theory you have in your head.

  4. Yosef says:

    Wow, this was a long post just to say that Daniel has restated the anthropic principle.

    Well, since it is impossible to find yourself in a cave that didn’t support you, and for all we know there are loads of of such caves, but since they didn’t support people we don’t know about them, I would say I side with Daniel

    (This cave is probably part of a multi-cave system. Actually some theories that explain this edible slime have as their consequence the existence of multiple caves…)

    Honestly though, you and Daniel just seem to arguing conditional vs. unconditional probabilities. So:
    P(We observe a universe suited for life)= P(We observe a universe suited for life given that a universe is suitable for life)*P(A universe is suited for life)+P(We observe a universe suited for life given that a universe is not suitable for life)*P(A universe is not suited for life)

    Daniel is saying that the first part of the first multiple is 1 and the first part of the second multiple is 0. You are saying that the second part of the first multiple is really small, and is the results of fine tuning.

    But the real thing you both are concerned with is the unconditional chance, the probability of observing a universe suitable for life. And this is the first multiple. Which is the product of the two things you each stress. (Jesus would turn this into a parable about how this means you two should work together. This is a Sunday post)

    • Egoist says:

      And the whole reason there is a debate in the first place is because the unconditional probability is unobservable. The unconditional probability collapses to the individual themselves.

      • Yosef says:

        Egoist, the reason there is a debate in this instance is because Bob and Daniel were arguing at different things, namely the different parts of the first multiple. The fact that the unconditional probability is is unobservable is irrelevant. Bob was arguing about one part (probability of a suitable universe), and Daniel about another. (probability of observing a universe give that it is suitable).

        Essentially Daniel was saying “A is a letter” and Bob replied “B is also a letter”.

        • Egoist says:

          I think you completely misunderstood the motivation of my last post. It wasn’t an antagonism. It wasn’t to say you’re wrong about anything. It was a totally separate argument I made concerning the very existence of these kinds of debates.

          The fact that the unconditional probability is is unobservable is irrelevant.

          It may or may not be relevant to what you said, but it is entirely relevant to what I said. Unobservables are far more likely to be the source of debates such as these.

          I really don’t have a dog in the race between Murphy and Daniel. I was just making a tangential point.

  5. Mattheus von Guttenberg says:

    For Determinists of all stripes, this is a non-issue. The universe is the way it always must have been, and it could not have been any other way. There’s no point arguing about “what if” certain properties of matter or energy were different than how they were; that’s irrelevant. The universe is ordered the way it is ordered and we’re alive to see it. Now I understand that doesn’t impress the non-determinists in the room, but it is a viable answer (What I’m wondering is how a theist can possibly be a non-determinist, but that’s another question).

    But what’s the big deal about carbon-based life forms anyway? Our own observations have barely made it anywhere noteworthy in space concerning other planets, solar systems, whatever. Even our radio waves have barely made it beyond our neighborhood of star clusters. For all we know, carbon-based life is the exception, not the rule. Who are we (mostly you, actually) to suggest that if some universal constant were a fraction of a degree different, life could not exist?! Stephen Hawking has a documentary called “Into the Universe” on the Discovery Channel and guess what the first episode of the first season is about: Aliens! And the diverse possibility of other, non-carbon, lifeforms existing in all sorts of ways and places. For goodness’ sake, we are still discovering vastly different forms of life in the deepest part of the oceans that routinely shatter presuppositions scientists have about the “necessary” conditions for life. Some bacteria and algae can only grow at extraordinary temperatures, others must survive at pressures we find simply crushing, still others develop without any light at all.

    Now, you might make the argument sharper and say that it’s not about the possible existence of simple sets of repeating proteins (that have essentially been manufactured in a lab) but about Rational agents who can perceive the universe, logic, beauty, and other advanced functions that could not exist. But again, where is the justification for that assertion? I understand that it is important for theists to believe there is a god watching them and is intimately concerned with our physical environment (let alone our sex lives!), but I don’t understand how you get from that belief to a bulletproof conclusion.

    • Egoist says:

      Who are we (mostly you, actually) to suggest that if some universal constant were a fraction of a degree different, life could not exist?! Stephen Hawking has a documentary called “Into the Universe” on the Discovery Channel and guess what the first episode of the first season is about: Aliens! And the diverse possibility of other, non-carbon, lifeforms existing in all sorts of ways and places. For goodness’ sake, we are still discovering vastly different forms of life in the deepest part of the oceans that routinely shatter presuppositions scientists have about the “necessary” conditions for life. Some bacteria and algae can only grow at extraordinary temperatures, others must survive at pressures we find simply crushing, still others develop without any light at all.

      As far as I know, the slightly changing constants stuff is a little more certain than you give it credit for. It has to do with the ability of atoms to even form molecules at all, or for protons to be able to form into heavier atoms. Stuff like that. I think a universe where matter cannot even form, where everything remains pure energy, can never develop sentient life. I don’t think finding bacteria that challenges some of the more superficial claims of what life requires, are strong enough to represent challenges to statements like “If this constant were different by this much, then protons cannot combine to form heavier atoms, and thus life cannot exist.”

  6. Dan Lind says:

    How would you deal with the infinite regress problem?

    If the universe is so finely tuned that it must have had a tuner – a creator (1), then you’re compelled to argue for the same reason and a fortiori (a creator is “superior to” or “more finely tuned than” or “more intelligently designed than” what it creates, yes?) that creator (1) must have had a tuner – a creator (2).

    And so must creator (2) have had a creator (3).

    Etc.

    The usual counter argument is:

    That which had a beginning was caused to be.
    The universe had a beginning.
    Therefore the universe was caused to be.

    and…

    That which had no beginning was not caused to be.
    God had no beginning.
    Therefore God was not caused to be.

    And so there’s no need for creator (n+1).

    Is this your approach or is it something else?

    • Egoist says:

      This is a good argument Dan.

      It does seem true that if a fine tuned universe requires an intelligent designer, then by implication the intelligent designer must have itself been fine tuned to be in a position to create the universe.

      Just consider all the things that have to be perfectly right for there to be a creative being! Then have your mind blown when you realize you’re actually talking about yourself.

      I as an egoist hold that God is created when the unacknowledged egoist attempts to put their ego into something outside themselves, in the realm of thought for example. But we get a strange loop, and the ego remains unshaken, for it is the ego that is the creative force in the universe.

      We perceive an external creator because we ourselves create. Water waves splashing up against a rock that forms a human face isn’t an act of creation until we as creative beings look for ourselves in that event.

      Theists attempt to deny their own ego and are in a perpetual state of searching for it. They can search as close by as their homes, and they can search the far reaches of outer space. They insist that the creative force that is themselves, really exists outside themselves.

      So they as perfect creators observe a universe, and their egos manifest themselves in a desire of learning how this universe be used to gratify their egoist desires. Theist creators believe they can do this by discovering a creator behind the creator. By learning of the creator behind the creator, the theist believes he will find a place of tranquility, where he can absolve himself of his own creativeness, his own ego.

      It is the result of the antagonism created by the theist creator running against a physical wall, in finding out the ego is not that wall. The unacknowledged ego deals with the wall by making the wall a fixed idea, and to serve that fixed idea. He then asks himself why he has chosen to serve the fixed idea behind the wall, rather than asking how the wall can be used as a tool to satisfy his creative ego.

      Ergo God is believed to be behind the wall.

      • Dan Lind says:

        It really isn’t a good argument.

        The flaw in the first syllogism is the minor premise.

        The second syllogism, well, where to begin?

        You could just as well do this:

        That which has no beginning was not caused to be.
        The universe or “existence” or “that which is” had no beginning.
        Therefore the universe was not caused to be.

        I was curious about Bob’s belief in God, his faith; I suspect he’d be ok with calling it “faith.”

        Bob’s a very sharp guy.

        Somewhere I read him say with an approving smile in his words that Hulsmann is more than happy to throw Mises under the bus if it’s warranted. That’s a symptom of intellectual integrity, of looking for the truth no matter where it takes you.

        It’s a little hard for me to figure out how you get to a belief in God, let alone “the Bible as the living word of God” Christianity, when you’re really smart and have intellectual integrity in spades — which seems to describe Bob pretty well.

        • Egoist says:

          I think it was a good argument, because I find the kind of self-referential analysis you’re doing highly productive in shaking and testing epistemological foundations. Quite often in my experience, self-referential analysis can expose previously ingrained and widespread convictions as self-contradictory. Rejecting bad theories I submit is an improvement.

          The rest of your post I pretty much agree with.

  7. JoshuaM says:

    Dr. William Lane Craig, in addition to having many excellent resources on Christian apologetics generally–and the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence in particular–has a well-developed analogy (though admittedly less colorful than your own) that disposes of the argument presented by Kuehn:

    “Some people have argued that no explanation is needed for why we observe a life-permitting universe because that’s the only kind of universe we CAN observe! If the universe were not life-permitting, then we wouldn’t be here to ask about it. . . .

    “This reasoning is fallacious. The fact that we can observe only a life-permitting universe does nothing to eliminate the need of an explanation for why a life-permitting universe exists.

    “[A]n illustration can help. Imagine you’re traveling abroad and arrested on trumped-up drug charges. You’re dragged in front of a firing squad of one hundred trained marksmen standing at point-blank range. You hear the command given: ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!’ You hear the deafening sound of the guns. And then you observe that you’re still alive! That all of the one hundred marksmen missed! Now what would you conclude?

    “‘Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they all missed! After all, if they hadn’t all missed, I wouldn’t be here to be surprised about it! Nothing more to be explained here!’

    “Of course not! It’s true that you shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t observe that you’re dead, since if you were dead, you wouldn’t be able to observe it. But you should still be surprised that you do observe that you’re alive, in light of the enormous improbability that all the marksmen would miss.” William Lane Craig in his book On Guard.

    The problem appears to be that Kuehn takes human existence as a given, and asks, in effect, “Given that humans exist, what is the probability that the universe that humans exist in is one consistent with their existence?” Put another way, Kuehn misunderstands the proponents of the fine-tuning argument to be saying, “Isn’t it amazing that we OBSERVE a universe that is consistent with our existence?”, when, in fact, the proponents are saying, “Isn’t it amazing that a universe that is consistent with our existence EXISTS?”

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      I’ve never been all that impressed with Craig, and he’s been really mean to Dawkins and Hitchens who as far as I know have always said he’s an estimable theist.

      re: “The fact that we can observe only a life-permitting universe does nothing to eliminate the need of an explanation for why a life-permitting universe exists.”

      Right. Nobody has said there’s no need to explain it. This is what atheist, agnostic, and theist physicists and biologists do every day. And we economists contribute in our little corner of biology (social behavior of highly evolved primates) precisely to provide an explanation for the social order we observe.

      I don’t see what the big deal is about this observation. Once again, like Bob’s example, the firing squad missing is not just an improbability. It also contradicts what we know about firing squads. The cave isn’t just an improbability. It contradicts what we know about caves and algae and water. This is not true of these physical constants. We can write out what constants that are life-promoting would look like and we can write out what constants that would not be life-promoting would look like, and neither would jar our fundamental understanding of these physical constants. So whereas the firing squad and the cave actually challenge our understanding of the world AND are improbable, the fine tuning is simply improbable. So what you need is high frequency, and that doesn’t seem like much of an obstacle since it’s already an inherent property of many models of the universe.

      With the firing squad and the cave you do need to reassess your understanding of how the world works (or question your lying eyes), but that’s because those examples challenge our experience in a way that fine tuning doesn’t.

      re: “The problem appears to be that Kuehn takes human existence as a given”

      Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something, but it seems to me this is the most reasonable way to proceed… what’s an alternative that won’t lead me to questioning your mental faculties?

      re: “Put another way, Kuehn misunderstands the proponents of the fine-tuning argument to be saying, “Isn’t it amazing that we OBSERVE a universe that is consistent with our existence?”, when, in fact, the proponents are saying, “Isn’t it amazing that a universe that is consistent with our existence EXISTS?””

      I’m pointing out that that’s a dumb thing to marvel at. I mean, I guess in a sense it’s beautiful because it’s special. I’d agree with that. But it’s a black swan. These things exist. Perhaps I should put it this way: it’s much less remarkable than me observing a universe that is not finely tuned.

      • Egoist says:

        I would argue that a universe that contains human pain, suffering, and death, is a universe that can be argued as not finely tuned.

        Wouldn’t the intelligent designer argument then have to be reinterpreted as a non-intelligent designer argument?

        Who would purposefully design a universe that contains all that suffering, that both believers and non-believers can experience? I would argue an unintelligent being. A being that messed up huge. A being that is not perfect, not loving, not anything on the side of “good” only.

        Yes, there is good and bad in the universe. But isn’t that what we would come to expect from a universe not created by any intelligent designer? That in order for us to believe in the intelligent designer theory, we would have to accept that intelligence includes causing pain, suffering, and death?

        At what point do theists finally realize that the creative force that can do good and bad, that they think exists in God, is actually THEMSELVES?

      • Bob Murphy says:

        DK wrote:

        So whereas the firing squad and the cave actually challenge our understanding of the world AND are improbable, the fine tuning is simply improbable. So what you need is high frequency

        Whoa, hold the phone, this is some kind of blog foul. Daniel, you specifically took the multiverse explanation off the table in your post. You said it “overcomplicates” things. Then, without reference to the multiverse or inflationary universe or any of that, you said point blank that the conditional probability of observing the universe etc. was one. So nothing to marvel at.

        Then, yes, you went into stuff about the multiverse etc., but that’s why I edited that out. I was focusing on your first argument, which said that we don’t even need to talk about frequencies etc.

        Maybe I misunderstood you. If you meant, “Yes of course we need an infinite number of iterations, so that the rare life-supporting ones can manifest themselves, I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be a multiverse,” then OK I apologize for misunderstanding you. In that case, I completely withdraw this whole blog post.

        But I thought you were saying something more than that. I thought you were saying the mere fact that we have to be alive to observe the universe, implies that we should in no case be surprised that we are alive to observe the universe, end of story. And that is what I was challenging with my goofy cave story.

        • Daniel Kuehn says:

          I said the multiverse wasn’t necessary because an expanding and contracting singularity would give you high frequency too (at least in eons of deep time beyond our comprehension).

          But I’ve been pretty clear throughout that multiverse is an important – if perhaps unnecessary – part of the answer.

          re: “You said it “overcomplicates” things.”

          I’m sorry to have confused this point. I meant it overcomplicates things in that you really don’t even need to go as far as the multiverse to dismiss this. You can stop at conditional probabilities. Multiverse, a singularity exploding, expanding, contracting, and exploding, and presumably other solutions will take care of the discomfort we have at the frequency point.

          • Bob Murphy says:

            DK, ooooh okay. So to be clear, you admit that there needs to be some mechanism to generate a trillion trillion trillion different combinations of physical constants, and then we shouldn’t be surprised that in a tiny subset of them, life would evolve and then people will be scratching their heads, observing the “coincidence”?

            If that’s your position, OK fine, then we just revert to my problem with asserting a trillion trillion trillion other universes to explain this one. But there’s nothing illogical about the position, I grant you.

            • Daniel Kuehn says:

              Or see my new comment at the end of the thread.

              Nothing should marvel anyone about observing the ability to observe. We may wonder how we ended up here though. We have a couple options:

              1. God did it.
              2. Lot’s of trials (weird multiverse or not)
              3. We don’t really understand how rare it actually is.

              1. seems like the biggest leap of faith to me (which is probably why they call it the Christian “faith”).

              • Ken B says:

                Even 1 gets you only a tiny step towards *christian* faith. Even proving the existence of some unmoved mover doesn’t prove Bob’s god anymore than it does Zoroaster’s god.

                Actually it’s amusing. I don’t think we can prove there is *no* god. Our inability to answer this question either way is evidence for that. We can however disprove Bob’s particular god.

            • Daniel Kuehn says:

              Yes – and I think that was my fault. In the first conversation I think Gene was really slamming the multiverse, so I wanted to downplay that. But yes, frequency is important and my own feeling is the multiverse is likely an important way of addressing that.

    • Egoist says:

      So as a person who isn’t surprised by much, this statement:

      “But you should still be surprised that you do observe that you’re alive, in light of the enormous improbability that all the marksmen would miss.”

      Speaks nothing to me. Why SHOULD I be something I am not?

      What if a million people have walked up to the firing line before me, and they all died because enough of the marksmen in the total population of marksmen fatally shot them, but this one time, for me, enough of them missed such that I survived?

      This doesn’t violate any universal laws as far as I can tell.

      The interesting thing about this analogy, is that the seeming strength of it is only increased the more “perfect” we assume people are, and it is decreased the less “perfect” we assume people are.

      Well, given the fact that people make mistakes, that means the probability in the analogy is greater than zero, and that is ALL the anthropic principle requires. It could be one in a trillion trillion trillion to the power of a trillion, and the explanatory power would remain in full force.

      It seems like the only defense Dr. William Lane Craig can muster is to minimize, belittle, and talk down the positive, non-zero probability, and pretend as if it is actually zero. Of course that just means he is just pleading that we ignore the non-zero probability for HIS sake, to gratify his beliefs.

  8. Martin says:

    You’re right to be flabbergasted, but Daniel is right; you guys got very lucky there. In terms of yes / no / uncertain multiple choice question, I’d go for uncertain on the existence of God based on that cave. I wouldn’t say it was zero and I would say the probability of the existence of God has improved to above that of the existence of a pink elephant as a result of discovering said cave.

    • Martin says:

      It would go down though when I would discover the ‘natural’ mechanism why such caves exist and the more of such caves I’d discover, it however would never go down by as much (in absolute terms) as it went up.

  9. Peter Surda says:

    Daniel Kuhn is correct in this case. Conditional probability refutes the fine tuning argument. Causality does not work backwards. If we already know that we exist, even though the conditions for that appear to be unlikely, it does not mean that the conditions are more likely than we originally thought.

    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability

    I would go as far and say that abstract thinking, math and logic refute most arguments for the existence of god, because they are exposed as rhetorical tricks that are logically fallacious. For example, the cosmological argument uses causality to question the origin of the universe. But causality already requires a universe to exist, it is defined through spatial changes over time (I submit no other than Mises’ axiom of human action as proof). The concept of causality outside of the frame of reference of our universe, outside of time and space, is self-contradictory, like the sound of a clap of one hand. Furthermore, even if there was something outside of the frame reference of the universe (e.g. god), since it’s not a subset of causality, it’s irrelevant for the purposes of human action.

    Obviously, from that you cannot conclude that god does not exist, just that the arguments for the existence thereof are crappy and the theists did not think it through. But hard logic is difficult and most people prefer comfortable biases rather than the search for truth.

    Sorry to disappoint you professor Murphy. Even if there is a god, it probably does not work as presented in the popular mythology.

    • Blackadder says:

      If we already know that we exist, even though the conditions for that appear to be unlikely, it does not mean that the conditions are more likely than we originally thought.

      True but irrelevant. The fine tuning argument doesn’t claim that the fact the universe is fine tuned for life means that fining tuning is not unlikely. Just the opposite, in fact.

  10. Niels van der Linden says:

    Hi Robert,

    I have a question for you about the bible. Do you think it’s all divine wisdom, or do you think parts of it are folklore/myth. Even if God is real, why must it be that this collection of man-written texts are correct interpretations of God and history? I’m interested in your take on that.

  11. Greg Adams says:

    “Fine-tuning” as an argument for an intelligent designer uses similar logic as the argument “the government funded the development for the internet, therefore the government should fund more R&D projects.” I think you’re viewing the livelihood of everything being fine tuned on earth, right here, right now. For the problem to work out correctly, you have to consider the entire universe.

    The conditions for life as we know it are not at all met in the center of the sun, but that doesn’t mean a conscious being could not exist in that place. There are no necessary conditions for conscious beings to exist, but there are necessary conditions for brain chemistry, muscle tension, etc. That being said, the concept of “fine-tuning” is a thought experiment analogous to wondering what would have happened if the South won. With small changes, all things being equal, yes, the material universe WOULD be different, but so what? We still have not eliminated the possibility that a conscious being could exist.

    In the physical world, teleology is a concept left only for human action. Any other apparent teleology can only stem from our own concept of action. The only field of science where this is done is biology, but that’s because we are acting beings reflecting upon our own vital condition. I think, maybe to some extent, you’re caught up in the issue that Mises pointed out: That a perfect, all knowing being can not act. Would a precise dialing in or “fine-tuning” of the physical conditions of the universe not be an action? What is it about the size of the electron being slightly bigger that displeased an intelligent designer? As long as other slightly different conditions were considered by an intelligent being, that would count as an action.

    • Greg Adams says:

      “Where there are conditions, there are limitations and not perfection; there are endeavors to conquer obstacles, there are frustration and discontent.”

      Could an intelligent being create such limitations? Perhaps, but the “why” is not a scientific question. Perhaps he lives in the land of Cockaigne, wherever that is.

  12. Daniel Kuehn says:

    A couple thoughts:

    1. You included ellipses so I’m not accusing you of being deceptive, but what I had in those ellipses was really quite essential. You do need a sense of frequency to really drive the argument home, I think. In those ellipses I basically said a multiverse shouldn’t surprise us and if you don’t like that we can just take a single universe that expands and contracts (yes, I know we appear not to be doomed for contraction – I like the multiverse better anyway). Frequency of trial is important. What’s amazing about the cave is that it violates not just our sense of probability, but our sense of possibility. Fine tuning doesn’t do that. These relationships between matter are going to be set in some way so the fact that they are set in a certain way doesn’t sound impossible at all – just highly improbably. That’s not true of a cave with all these crazy properties. A more apt example is to say consider a ship wreck in the Pacific, with another boat coming along and rescuing survivors (this is improbable but does not contradict what we know about the world – and it happened at least once, although my own ancestor on the ship didn’t survive to meet the rescuers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_%28whaleship%29#Survivors). I’m sure many of them saw God’s hand in it, and that’s fair enough if you had other reasons to think there was a God in the first place. But this rare but reasonable event is very different from your story, and more akin to the observed fine tuning.

    2. Another point I didn’t make initially is that I find it it amazing that people think the solution to a hard to explain improbability is invoking something even harder to explain and more improbable. Gene called the multiverse an ad hoc response to fine tuning. It seems to me God is the ad hoc response. Again, this isn’t to say that there aren’t other reasons to believe in God, if you think you’ve witnessed him for example. But to take fine tuning as proof seems to raise more questions than it answers (aren’t we lucky to have been on a plane of existence where there happens to be a God who happens to be capable of fine tuning an entire universe?). You seem to be kicking the can down the road.

    3. Conceiving of the design of a cave seems to ask less than conceiving of the design of a universe, but perhaps that’s just me. I probably would consider the prospect of Atlantis or aliens or a secret government project. But that’s because, within my realm of experience, I have grounds for conceiving of something that could engineer the sort of thing you describe. I don’t have grounds for conceiving of something that could engineer the universe.

    4. All this talk of proof and grounds for belief misses the whole point of at least the Christian faith. Sometimes I think Paul (presuming we can attribute Hebrews to him – I know that’s not entirely clear) was wiser than modern Christians in recognizing this. If such proofs were reasonable, why invoke faith?

    • Dirk says:

      I have to agree with Daniel here. The analogy is too far away from the situation it’s trying to explain to be meaningful. Also this whole ad hoc invoking of God to explain unknown phenomenon feels like we’re going back to the pagans! “I don’t know why I see the sun moving across the sky so it must be God!” vs. “I don’t know why the charge of an electron is what it is so it must be God!”

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        Very well said.

        People should be content to not understand. We don’t really understand the origins of the universe or whether there are others. We have some reasonable stabs at it. We should be willing to say that rather than extrapolate to God.

        This is not an argument for atheism, I should emphasize and reemphasize. It’s an argument against bad arguments for God, and it’s an argument against conjuring up a God that serves our purposes and compensates for our frailties. If there is a God I doubt he’d appreciate it. In fact, if there is a God I doubt he’d be something “outside the universe” or supernatural or anything like that. He’s probably a force beyond our comprehension but still well within our plane of reality. Or he’s an alien that our dumber ancestors treated as a God.

        I’m digressing now, but the point is we invent properties for God that we really have no warrant to invent. If there is a God I doubt he appreciates that, and if he has those properties, they can’t reasonably be inferred from the holes in our own understanding.

        • Gene Callahan says:

          “People should be content to not understand.”

          Why, then, are you not understanding in such an agitated way? It seems more like, “People should work very hard to not understand, because if they understood… Eeeks!”

          • Ken B says:

            Theology test: do you understand the trinity?

            • Egoist says:

              3=1

              1=3

              It makes perfect sense. You take the first number in the first line and match it up with the second number in the second line, and you take the second number in the first line and match it up with the first number in the second line.

              QED

              • Gene Callahan says:

                Willful resistance to comprehension is an amazing thing to watch. I explained this to you the other day, but you simply roll on with the dumb “3 = 1” remarks.

                Patrick showed the Irish a three-leaf clover to explain the trinity. Three leaves, but one stem. Are clovers bad at math as well?

              • Egoist says:

                It’s not reading comprehension that is the problem.

                It is you claiming 3=1 that is the problem.

                You didn’t explain anything except desperately trying to backtrack.

                First you said

                A subtle point, but three persons, one being.

                See that? Three PERSONS.

                Then when I challenged you on that, you completely backtracked and said:

                “…one person who has three jobs.”

                Then after I called you out on you backtracking into changing three persons into one person, you then contradicted yourself by writing:

                But, Callahan said no such thing — he said “one person with three actions from that person.”

                So you went from three persons to one person, then you denied ever having said three persons.

                Then after I called you out yet again, you gave up and said it was just an analogy.

                In other words, I was right all along. To you, 1 is an analogy for 3, and 3 is an analogy for 1.

                1=3

                3=1

                Now you’re using yet another silly analogy to cover your tracks, this time “3 leaves, one stem.”

                Except none of the leaves are independent entities, and the entire clover is one entity. One being. 1=1. Three leaves is a property of the single entity that is the clover.

                Next thing you’ll tell me that I am a single human, with millions of cells, and so 1 million = 1, and 1 = 1 million by analogy.

                But we all know that to you everything is just a property of God, so to you 1 = N.

          • Daniel Kuehn says:

            I’m not agitated! I’m nonplussed, remember!

            • Ken B says:

              If I were up to obscene things with RPM that drive him to his confessor I’d be both!

      • Gene Callahan says:

        ‘Also this whole ad hoc invoking of God to explain unknown phenomenon feels like we’re going back to the pagans! “I don’t know why I see the sun moving across the sky so it must be God!” vs. “I don’t know why the charge of an electron is what it is so it must be God!”’

        It’s amazing to hear atheists repeat this sort of chowder-headed boiler-plate all the time: it’s as though you guys have a dogma, in which you have blind faith!

        To try to turn Bob’s post into a “God of the gaps” argument quite obviously does not work: if, say, there is a law explaining why the charge of the electron is what it is, then Bob’s argument applies to that law in the EXACT same way it applied to the charge of the electron, and so on, as far back as you wish to push it.

        But, whatever helps you keep the faith, Dirk!

        • Egoist says:

          Then why don’t you apply it to the gap created by the belief in God?

          What caused God? Nothing? If nothing, then your chowder-headed response to Dirk the chowder-head is just accepting the point Dirk the chowder-head is making.

          The same way you view God as a creative nothing, since it itself is the creator, so too do I view myself as created by nothing, since I am a creative nothing.

          If you say I am wrong because I was created by God, then I will say you are wrong because God was created by you.

          PS Dirk I don’t view you as a chowder-head, I just wanted an excuse to type chowder-head because I think the phrase chowder-head is funny.

          • Gene Callahan says:

            “What caused God? Nothing?”

            This argument has been refuted for hundreds of years now. God is not another object in the physical universe for which a cause is necessary. God is being itself.

            • Egoist says:

              This argument has been refuted for hundreds of years now.

              No, it hasn’t. Various arguments have been proposed, but you can’t say “refuted”.

              God is being itself.

              Being is an abstraction. As is “I”.

              I, as I, consume all that is mine. I am its master. For it is only my opinion, which I can change at any moment.

              In ME, being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is MY being, and it is MY thinking.

              Nothing whatsoever is justified by being. A tree in the forest is, and my notion of it is too. Both are only in different spaces. One outside me, the other in me.

              Saying God is “being itself” carries no more weight to me than the thought of God, and the thought of the non-existence of God, being a being.

              • Ken B says:

                I must bemisreading the name, because this response from ‘Egoist’ seems really good to me.

                🙂

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Egoist has been lighting it up this thread. I think it’s because he’s been telling us that our opponent is wrong, and we both say, “You’re darn tootin’!”

          • Dirk says:

            I’m not insulted. I think Gene was calling my argument “chowder-headed” not me personally.

        • Dirk says:

          “chowder-headed bowler-plate”?! That’s a little mean, don’t you think? I understand we get a little forceful with our arguments here but name calling is just silly.

          As an aside, I have been a Christian for more than ten years so the only faith I am keeping is to God. I just don’t like poor arguments for God’s existence. Appealing to God for why things are the way they are doesn’t seem to be clever or convincing. I could just as easily go the other way around and say God created us in such a way that we can flourish in the environment that exists.

          In the end, I certainly believe that man and the environment are made together and in many ways compliment each other. This will never conclusively prove anything to people who don’t already have faith. Faith is a gift from God not a logical argument that convinced you that He exists.

    • Blackadder says:

      A more apt example is to say consider a ship wreck in the Pacific, with another boat coming along and rescuing survivors

      Okay, let’s take this example. Suppose that after being rescued the survivors talk among themselves about how amazing it is that they have been rescued. One of the survivors does a rough calculation of the odds of one ship randomly coming upon the wreckage of the other, and concludes that this is so improbable that the captain of the second ship must have psychic powers.

      That would be a really bad argument. But it would be no response to this argument to say that if the second ship hadn’t found them they wouldn’t be around to argue the issue. The fact that absent an improbable event we wouldn’t exist has zip zilch nada to do with whether the improbability requires some sort of explanation.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        OK but these are two separate issues Blackadder.

        Let’s say the numbers didn’t work out that drastically. Could the observation of being saved give a good reason to see any design or power on the part of the rescuers? No, of course not. Nor is it cause for thinking that the rescuers value you in any unique way (more than any other person stranded at sea, that is).

        That’s my argument.

        Now – IF the numbers worked out for this to be an unusual circumstance, we’d have to explain that. But we can’t even say whether this is unusual or not. Neither Bob nor I knows whether there are multiverses, or multiple runs at this universe, and neither of us really know how these constants emerge anyway. We don’t know whether other types of life emerge in universes with other constants. So we’re really not in a position to assign probabilities and even say whether this is fantastic or not.

        But these are two very different points, it seems to me. Observing something with a conditional probability of one tells us nothing at all about whether there is some kind of design behind these occurrences, and it seems to me we’ve got no probabilities to work with but the conditional probability – and my point is that THAT doesn’t tell us anything.

        • Ken B says:

          We don’t even know how many constants there are. Maybe 19, and that leaves a lot of adjusting to do. But maybe there aren’t that many degrees of freedom. We do not know. Nor do we *know* that life of some form is impossible in those other universes.

        • Blackadder says:

          Dan,

          Here is what you said in your post:

          If certain conditions are required for us to exist and observe reality, and if we do exist and observe reality, then you really only have two options:

          1. We exist and observe and the universe does not meet these conditions, or

          2. We exist and observe and the universe does meet these conditions.

          The conditional probability of 1 is zero, so the conditional probability of 2 is one. Far from being something to marvel at – an apparently “fine tuned universe” seems like a logical necessity to me.

          My quarrel with you here is with this argument. It’s a bad argument. You can see that it’s a bad argument by applying the argument to your example of the rescue. “If we hadn’t been rescued, then we would not be around to observe that fact. Therefore the fact that we were rescued seems like a logical necessity to me.” Etc.

          Note: the argument you make here doesn’t involve multiverses or repeating universes or anything of the kind (perhaps you’ve made other arguments that invoked such things, but if so they are independent of this argument).

          • Bob Murphy says:

            Blackadder wrote:

            My quarrel with you here is with this argument. It’s a bad argument.

            Blackadder, right, that’s why I went off and wrote up this whole blog post in the first place. I thought DK was intending that as a stand-alone argument. But now he is saying that the high-frequency part is indispensable to the position (though it need not come in through the mechanism of a multiverse). So DK isn’t saying that argument.

            • Daniel Kuehn says:

              Nothing about observing a fine-tuned universe is remarkable. That’s the point of what you quoted.

              People act like the mere existence of a fine tuned universe is noteworthy. That’s wrong. We couldn’t observe any other.

              Any remarkableness comes in the “data generating process” – to use an econometrics term – which is precisely what most citations of fine tuning gloss over.

              While we know little about the DGP, the little that we do know doesn’t volunteer a God (doesn’t rule one out either of course).

              • Blackadder says:

                People act like the mere existence of a fine tuned universe is noteworthy. That’s wrong. We couldn’t observe any other.

                You can’t observe any event unless it happens. Does that mean that no event is noteworthy? Of course not.

                The whole “we wouldn’t be here otherwise” thing is a red herring. Totally irrelevant.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Blackadder wrote:

                You can’t observe any event unless it happens. Does that mean that no event is noteworthy? Of course not.

                Bingo. I realize that we’re all arguing in our free time in the comments of a blog, so we are not being masters of precision with our statements. Even so, it disturbs me that a lot of you guys arguing with me (and I guess Blackadder and some others), are making statements that “prove” we should never be surprised, period. Watch:

                ======
                Bob: Holy cow, I just observed X!! That’s freaking amazing!!

                Daniel: Well Bob, given that you just observed X, it obviously happened. So why are you amazed that you observed something that just happened in front of your face? If you observe something that didn’t happen, then give me a call! That would be surprising!
                ======

                I submit that Daniel Kuehn is literally doing the above, with reference to fine-tuning.

              • Ken B says:

                @Blackadder: Equivocation on ‘noteworthy’.

              • Ken B says:

                Bob I assume you are parodying comments from DK like “People act like the mere existence of a fine tuned universe is noteworthy. That’s wrong. We couldn’t observe any other.”
                But of course he’s not saying we should never be amazed. He is parsing WHAT we should be amazed at. He is noting that GIVEN we exist then the fact we CAN exist is not really that shocking.
                He never denied there is some reason to be puzzled/struck/amazed/uncertain that we DO exist.

              • Blackadder says:

                Ken,

                Daniel isn’t saying that we should never be amazed at anything. He is, however, making an argument that, if valid. would prove we should never be amazed at anything.

                See the difference?

              • Ken B says:

                @Blackadder: yes, but that doesn’t follow. And it doesn’t follow *from DK’s anthropic point* in particular. There seems to be no necessity for slime mold based on the fact WE exist. But slime mold can be amazing.

                Bob Murphy is a reamrkably unlikely, and one hopes, unique event. But *given* the existence of Bob Murphy and the nature of human reproduction, the existence of his parents is not that stunning. That’s a sound argument, it is DK’s argument, and it does not entail “oh life evolved from nothing, yawn”.

              • Blackadder says:

                Ken,

                Here’s what Daniel said:

                People act like the mere existence of a fine tuned universe is noteworthy. That’s wrong. We couldn’t observe any other

                Can we observe slime mold that doesn’t exist? Nope.

                Does that mean slime mold can’t be amazing? Of course not.

                Does Daniel’s argument imply otherwise? Indeed it does.

                Perhaps you will say that the anthropic principle is limited to cases where it is the observer that wouldn’t otherwise exist, not simply the observed (though that’s not the way he phrased it). Fine, but it’s easy enough to come up with absurd examples based on the observer not existing.

                Q: Why didn’t America and the Soviets annihilate the human race by starting WWIII?

                A: That’s a nonsense question. If they had, we wouldn’t be around to ask it.

              • Ken B says:

                @Blackadder:
                I think in the first part, about slime mold, you just are not applying the anthropic things, so your remarks miss the point.
                The bit about nuclear war is better. But let’s rephrase it a bit so that it gets closer to the fine tuned universe case.
                “Isn’t it amazing that, given the fact we are still here, we we weren’t nuked?”
                “No, not given the fact we’re still here. A priori, from the point of view of 1946, us being here in 2012 might be a low probability event though.”
                “Aha, Just like fine tuning!”
                “No aha. MAYBE like fine tuning but maybe not. We don’t know that there really IS that much tuning, and we don’t know how big the sample space is. So we don’t really have a good prior. Strong conclusions should not be drawn.”

              • Bob Murphy says:

                “Isn’t it amazing that, given the fact we are still here, we we weren’t nuked?”

                Nobody talks like this, Ken. You are inventing dialog and attributing positions to us, to salvage the last 36 hours of our lives in debate with you. Blackadder and I haven’t been saying, “Isn’t it amazing that, given that we are here, we are able to observe the charge on an electron?”

                No, we have been saying, “Isn’t it amazing that the charge on an electron is what it is, when there was only a very small range (so Feynman et al. tell us) that would support life?”

              • Ken B says:

                Bob: Did you not notice that when I wrote

                “Isn’t it amazing that, given the fact we are still here, we we weren’t nuked?”

                which you find so objectionable, I was responding to this from Blackadder:
                Q: Why didn’t America and the Soviets annihilate the human race by starting WWIII?

                A: That’s a nonsense question. If they had, we wouldn’t be around to ask it

                And what did you object to?
                “Nobody talks like this”. But they talk like this, which you place in Daniel’s mouth: Look, if we hadn’t sunk into a cave with these properties, we would have drowned. So stop being so awed every day about ‘oh wow this cave is so cool,’ you’re really getting on my nerves with that broken record.

                Seriously? Bob can use platonic dialog but not YOU Ken B!

              • Blackadder says:

                Ken,

                Here’s my hypothetical question:

                Why didn’t America and the Soviets annihilate the human race by starting WWIII?

                And here is yours:

                “Isn’t it amazing that, given the fact we are still here, we we weren’t nuked?”

                Do you really not see the difference between these two questions?

                There is nothing particularly amazing about the fact that, given we survived the Cold War, we were not all annihilated in WWIII. Which is why no one ever professes to be amazed by this fact.

                On the other hand, there is something amazing about the fact the human race wasn’t annihilated during the Cold War, and the fact that we wouldn’t be around to be amazed if we had been annihilated in no way detracts from the amazingness of this fact.

            • Daniel Kuehn says:

              That was more a reply to Blackadder.

  13. Scott H. says:

    Hmmmm… here is a situation and a question that I think is relevant to this conversation…

    As a teacher, I go in front of a class with a 20 sided die (dungeon and dragons style). I roll that die 15 times and record my roll each time. At the end of the exercise I inform my class that the chances of me rolling the exact sequence I just rolled was 1 in 32,768,000,000,000,000,000. I tell them the amazing thing is, however improbable, I DID IT!!!!

    Question: should the class be impressed with my accomplishment?

    • joeftansey says:

      Only if you predicted the sequence in advance.

      • Scott H. says:

        Exactly. No one was here at universe state t=0 to predict anything. Where we are is, simply, where we are (ie what was rolled.). Our universe is “perfectly” formed for what happened from t=0 until now, and “imperfectly” formed for the infinite number of things that never happened in that time. Nothing to conclude here.

        • Bob Murphy says:

          Scott H. wrote:

          Our universe is “perfectly” formed for what happened from t=0 until now, and “imperfectly” formed for the infinite number of things that never happened in that time. Nothing to conclude here.

          If you only believed in one universe–i.e. that this were a one-shot random event–you still wouldn’t think there was anything odd about your explanation? Suppose there were only a 1 in a trillion chance that the universe could support life in any form. You would be fine with a cosmology that said, “There is only one universe that ever existed, and it was just dumb luck that the randomly chosen physical constants happened to support life”?

          If you’re invoking the multiverse, then fine, but that’s a totally separate argument from what you’re saying in the quote above.

          • joeftansey says:

            “Suppose there were only a 1 in a trillion chance that the universe could support life in any form”

            The conditional probability argument you quoted in the OP says that the we are sampling a conditional probability, and that it is equal to 1.

            The unconditional probability is never sampled, and therefore unknown.

          • Egoist says:

            Maybe there was a trillion less one iteration of the universe, and they all had zero life, and this is the trillionth version, and this one does have life because the low probability was finally hit?

          • Scott H. says:

            Between my example above and what joeftansey says below I can’t think of a way to make it much clearer. I will try though — below where there is more room.

    • Gene Callahan says:

      Scott, it is only relevant if, say, your roll spelled out the name of the teacher.

      • Egoist says:

        So it is “relevant” when someone’s name is spelled out on a Ouija board the first and only time a group of people play the game?

        • Gene Callahan says:

          Now who is bad at math, confusing a 1-in-32 quintillion chance (which is what Scott described) with a what, 1-in-100 chance?

  14. Ken B says:

    Is this Make Daniel Look Good Week on FreeAdvice? Because you’re doing a heck of a job.

    “People should be content to not understand.” Yep. Feynman siad “It’s OK to say I don’t know.”

    Another point worth mentioning, is we do not know that the ‘constants’ are constant, or that they are actually independent of each other.

  15. joeftansey says:

    “Daniel, I just realized, how come we haven’t suffocated?! Our breathing should have turned all the oxygen in here into CO2 by now, right?”

    You can say this because it is so radically different from your past experiences. With cosmology, you have no past experience.

    To make the analogy better, you would both have to wake up Tabula Rasa in the amazing underwater room. Your dialogue would be identical to that already found in the cosmological debate.

    It’s also a little strange that, in reality, you believe the “chaotic” world is ordered, and BY ITSELF evidences design.

  16. Gene Callahan says:

    “I don’t want to share any indecent details…”

    I knew it, I knew it! What did you picture you and Daniel doing?

  17. Ken B says:

    While we’re considering implausible tales …

    One day Bashar al-Assad asked RPM to give a talk on Austrian economics to his cabinet.
    On his way to Damascus Bob saw a bright light.
    It was a burning bush, and in the bush was a man with a serene expression, and long flowing hair.
    The fire was visible through holes in his palms.
    He was busy turning fishes into loaves, loaves into wine, and wine into fishes.
    Priming the pump of aggregate demand he called it.

    “I say unto you there is no god Bob, nor is there His son, nor His spirit.
    All this is but fairy tale and wish fulfillment, like the Fed.
    Go thou and believe no more.”

    A ladder appeared and he climbed out of sight leaving the bush untouched.

    Should Bob be convinced?

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Not sure what you’re getting at, Ken B. If some supernatural being appeared to me and told me to stop giving talks in support of libertarianism, yeah I’d definitely think long and hard about that. But if an apparently supernatural being told me supernatural beings don’t exist, then that would be weird but wouldn’t make me doubt the existence of supernatural beings.

      • Ken B says:

        I was playfully suggesting that if god himself told you he did not exist, you would not believe him.
        And I was right!

        • Bob Murphy says:

          You have an odd sense of humor, Ken B. If you’re trying to do something besides make jokes (not that I’m knocking such an enterprise; I do it all the time on other people’s blogs), I will say this: If what appeared to be God Himself told me that the Old Testament were a hoax, and said, “I can’t believe you’re going around, explaining why I would tell my chosen people to slaughter infants,” then I would certainly stop doing that.

          But obviously, God telling me, “I don’t exist,” is a bit different of a claim.

          • Ken B says:

            What if he told you the NEW testament was a fraud?

            Mostly I’m just making a joke Bob, but there is a small barb in it. After all, you created a crazy story to suggest DK is *ahem* ‘overly committed to his preferred conclusion’, so I created an equally plausible scenario to suggest the same of you. You won’t even take God’s word for it if it contradicts you … One might consider it a criticism of your cave tale and its moral.

            • Bob Murphy says:

              Ken B. wrote:

              …so I created an equally plausible scenario to suggest the same of you.

              Well then you obviously failed, right? I told you I would definitely revise my view of the world, if God Himself (apparently) told me otherwise. In fact, that’s why I dropped my atheism, so I speak from personal experience.

              Are you really going to stick to your guns on this, when you designed your scenario to see if I’d believe God telling me, “I don’t exist”? Surely this is a big joke, right? Even Egoist has my back on this one.

              • Ken B says:

                Ummm I said “Mostly I’m just making a joke Bob” so I don’t know what you mean by stick to my guns.

                I’m not sure I failed btw. I was sugggesting, in strict parallelism to your impliciation about DK’s *atheism* , that your *theism* was unshakeable despite incredible evidence …
                The point about god telling you there is no god is I would think a fairly obvious jest.

                There seems to be an irony deficit this week. On Landsburg’s I showed his argument was equivalent to telling a muslim we have to reject his religious objection to being forced to buy a crucifix because to accept his objection would be tantamount to establishing Islam. Ironic right? Steve agreed I had his argument right but did not see the irony.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Ken B., I define irony as, “Advancing argument X against Murphy, then admitting argument X is nonsense. Still thinking I zinged him good, and wondering why he doesn’t agree.”

              • Ken B says:

                The thing is Bob you still don’t see the point of my small barb, which was the beaselessness of your argument based on a crazy story.
                “WOW DK wouldn’t be convinced even by a crazy magic cave!!”
                “WOW Bob wouldn’t be convinced even if GOD told him!!”

              • Bob Murphy says:

                I’ll say it once more, Ken, mostly for the benefit of onlookers: I *would* be convinced of any claim that I actually believed God Himself told me, *except* if He told me, “I, God, do not exist Bob.” It would be harder to imagine how your argument could fail harder, except if you had said, “Bob, suppose God told you that Moses never existed, would you believe Him?” and I said “Yes.” But I imagine even in that scenario, you would congratulate yourself on your wonderful argument.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Let me help you out, Ken. Try this: You could say to me, “Bob, suppose what you thought was God–it was the same personal experiences you had, that led you away from atheism–apparently ordered you to go commit a bunch of violent crimes. Would you do it?”

                I would not do it. It would make no sense to me that the God I believe in would order me to do that, and I would worry that I was just nuts or hearing demons pretending to be God, etc. I would be aware that God ordered Abraham to kill his own son, and still I would not trust the “evidence” in this case, that in another context led me to believe God existed.

                OK, are you happy? You can point to that as a contradiction in my worldview if you want. But this stuff about, “Ha ha, Bob wouldn’t believe a self-referential paradox if he thought God uttered it!” is goofy.

              • Ken B says:

                I think I see how you are misreading me Bob.
                You think I am makling an argument about YOU and your theism, *based on* my burning bush tale. I am not.
                I am making a satire of your *cave story*. I think the density of biblical allusions and the god-says-no-god bit — together with the Fed and the Keynesianism for extra measure — make it plain this is a joke. I am implying your cave fable and the conclusions you draw from it are equally valid — that is, they are piffle.

              • Ken B says:

                @Bob: Re http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2012/06/the-fine-tuning-argument-for-an-intelligent-designer-of-the-universe.html#comment-39392

                This just confirms what I said. You are reading my fable as a direct attack on your religious positions. My fable is not that. It is a clearly and self evidently absurd story meant as an attack on your FABLE not your religion.
                Attacks on your religious claims will come later, I promise.

              • Blackadder says:

                Ken B’s problem is that he isn’t telling the joke right.* Atheist watermelons, that’s how you do it.

                *Note, this comment is made wholly for the purpose of humor and is not intended to illustrate any serious philosophical point.

              • Ken B says:

                @Blackadder: Guilty.

                Great vid; merci.

                (Will Bob explain, churlishly, why the watermelon proves nothing?)

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Oh heck, why not: Ken B., let’s try this again, since at least it may amuse Blackadder.

                You keep thinking I must not “get” your brilliant point. I assure, I do.

                You think I’m setting up an unfair test for Daniel’s position. I posit some ridiculous scenario, since Daniel’s representative fails in that absurd scenario, then I conclude Daniel in the real world is wrong too.

                So to show me how silly this is, you then posit some absurd scenario, like where an apparition tells me to doubt Austrian economics, and to even doubt that the apparition itself exists.

                Then I say, “Yes, that would indeed shake my views in Austrian economics, but the last part involves a self-referential paradox, so no, obviously I wouldn’t go that far, because that doesn’t make sense.”

                Then you smell victory, because I just admitted I wouldn’t change my views even in the absurd scenario you cooked up… Oh wait. I did say I would change my views in the absurd scenario you cooked up.

                So again I state, Ken, it would be difficult for your argument to fail any harder than it did. The fact that you keep saying, “Jeez Bob it was a joke, man you’re dumb” only makes it more annoying.

              • Blackadder says:

                Ken B,

                You ask: “Will Bob explain, churlishly, why the watermelon proves nothing?”

                Suppose that someone actually found a watermelon like the one in the video. Would that prove that God doesn’t exist? It’s hard to see why. Existing beings can at least theoretically send messages testifying to their existence, but a non-existent being can’t do this (because a non-existent being can’t do anything).

                Ironically, if a watermelon was found where the seeds spelled out “There is no God,” the best assumption would be that the watermelon had been put there by some intelligent force (by an atheistic prankster, say).

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Exactly Blackadder, which is why that video was funny whereas Ken B.’s thought experiment wasn’t. (But Ken B. you were funny a few days ago, as I admitted at the time.)

              • Egoist says:

                Ken B:

                You’re busy attacking some idea by USING Murphy as the means, when Murphy wants to have his actual statements addressed.

              • Ken B says:

                “Then you smell victory, …”
                This is just false Bob. This is perhaps where you started reading into things.

              • Ken B says:

                I know it’s pointless but let me point out yet another place where Bob strangely misreads me. In a mostly accurate summary we get this:
                “So to show me how silly this is, you then posit some absurd scenario, like where an apparition tells me to doubt Austrian economics, and to even doubt that the apparition itself exists.”
                I did no such thing. My apparition tells you bupkis about austrian economics. I know its grossly unfair to care about accuracy, still it illustrates you sloppiness in these matters.

    • Egoist says:

      This is a self-contradictory set up.

      You’re setting it up so that a supernatural being exists, then you’re demanding that whoever sees it, ought not believe it.

      Oh, and your labeling the productive activity as “priming the pump of aggregate demand”, shows you accept Say’s Law that demand arises out of production.

  18. Egoist@hotmail.com says:

    Dr. Murphy,

    What is the connection between accepting the notion that the universe’s constants have to be what they are and not anything slightly different or else human life could not exist, and the notion that there was an intelligent being who decided on those constants (because it wanted human life to exist)?

    I don’t see the connection. It is just two people walking along the beach and finding a rock formation that looks exactly like a human face. The first person says “It was the result of natural laws”, and the other says “The natural laws were chosen by a creative intelligence so that this result can take place.”

    How can the second person’s beliefs be stronger than the first person’s beliefs?

    • Bob Murphy says:

      I like this beach analogy, Egoist, and I am going to use it next week. Are you OK with that or do you want to amend it in any way? (Obviously I am not going to give you a high-five, but I think you’re raising a very neat distinction that often gets jumbled in these debates.)

      • Egoist says:

        You can do whatever you want with that beach analogy. Add to it, take away from it, amend it. You don’t even have to credit me with it.

        If not a high five, can at least I take your response as a mid-height pinky finger?

  19. Egoist@hotmail.com says:

    I will agree with your point about DK’s reaction to the fine tuning comments made by physicists. It does seem like a cop out to fall back on the anthropic principle. But then again, the AP is taken very seriously by many physicists and cosmologists.

    Your shipwreck analogy seems to be intended to convey the thought: “there is just no way that something this good for our lives could have come into existence without an intelligent creator!”

    But would you really consider the universe to be like that “Utopian” box? I notice you did not mention anything “bad” that happens in there. Seems like this box sustains your life and that’s it.

    What if however you find that in addition to things you said about this box, there are poisonous snakes that can kill you. There are occasional events in the box that cause you pain. There is a woman in there who is giving birth, but the baby is still born. The box occasionally makes a loud bang that causes one of you to go deaf. Even rarer still, sometimes a sharp shape suddenly jets into the room, slicing off one of your limbs.

    Think of all the “bad” stuff that can happen in such a box. Use your imagination.

    Now, given the good and bad stuff that happens, does the intelligent designer argument make as much sense? Notice how the intelligent designer argument becomes less and less attractive the more “random”, “bad” stuff that happens? Notice how you had to deliberately make the box a place of relative health promotion to make your point?

    Suppose that you remain convinced however that this box was intelligently designed, because it looks like life is advancing more than it is being imposed upon. You’d be trying to convince DK that a psychopathic, disgusting being of untold evil must have designed that box. Who else would make a box that contained that much pain in addition to the good?

    Doesn’t the non-existence of an intelligent designer make more sense now?

  20. Daniel Kuehn says:

    One more thought –
    People often make the mistake of imagining that aliens look something like us because they assume they have the same carbon-based structure, the same dependence on the same senses, etc. etc.

    You can’t really blame us for doing that, but at it’s heart its wrong.

    The same probably goes for universes. So let’s say we have constants that don’t allow for matter as we know it (and therefore life as we know it) to emerge. So what does that mean? I’m guessing some kind of unstable soup of energy. Who is to say that different sorts of “life” couldn’t live in those universes?

    So even if Bob convinces you about a sort of God that presides over our sort of life, why are you being so parochial with your intelligent designers?

    The other point to make is that from what I understand, we don’t really know much about why the cosmological constants are the way they are. We know very little about what went on at the very beginning of this universe. We are all implicitly assuming here that cosmological constants are completely randomly assigned across possible universes. Even I was implicitly assuming that.

    Why?

    What gives you or I warrant to assume that? Nothing.

    Perhaps there’s a process by which cosmological constants emerge that tends towards life-sustaining constants. Perhaps there’s a narrow band of cosmological constants that could emerge.

    We don’t know so we really shouldn’t infer too much of significance from it. Our sense of this universe’s improbability is strongly contingent on our assumptions about the generating process for these cosmological constants.

    As I mentioned above, this all leads me to say “F@#k if I know”. I’d certainly feel silly using this uncertainty about what to think as an opportunity to extrapolate out an even more confusing God that I claim to have specific knowledge of. That’s completely indefensible.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      DK wrote: “The same probably goes for universes. So let’s say we have constants that don’t allow for matter as we know it (and therefore life as we know it) to emerge. So what does that mean? I’m guessing some kind of unstable soup of energy. Who is to say that different sorts of “life” couldn’t live in those universes?
      So even if Bob convinces you about a sort of God that presides over our sort of life, why are you being so parochial with your intelligent designers?

      Daniel, would you have felt better if I had said something like this in my original post?

      “Now, there is healthy debate within the ranks of cosmologists, astrophysicists, etc. on whether “fine-tuning” is a big deal or not. Click the Wikipedia link to read more on this. But if you want to grapple with it, the way to do it is, say, argue that for all we know, all sorts of non-carbon-based life would emerge in a universe that couldn’t support solar mechanics the way ours can.

      I realize there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding flying around, and I contributed to it in this post, Daniel, because I thought you were denying the absolute necessity of having a high frequency of universes. But I’m really not as incapable of recognizing a decent argument as you and others seem to think. I acknowledged in the post most of the things people are talking about as criticisms, and I was merely focusing on what I thought your own mistake was, which I realize now was due to a misunderstanding on my part.

    • Blackadder says:

      We are all implicitly assuming here that cosmological constants are completely randomly assigned across possible universes.

      Clearly theists aren’t assuming this, since they don’t believe it.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        Well they are assuming that if God didn’t calibrate it that way it would be a rare, random thing to see a fine-tuned universe.

        • Gene Callahan says:

          Noooo. God is a necessary condition of a universe.

  21. Vojtech says:

    Two thoughts:
    1. What is the probability distribution on the values of fundamental constants? If we want to talk about probabilities, we need to pick one. But since we are talking about infinite number of possibilities, we can’t use uniform distribution.
    If we choose one that is concentrated in the area, that can support life, the probability of life is then very close to one. If we choose a more uniform one, we get low probability of life. But I don’t see any way how to justify the choice of the distribution.

    2. Assuming we have the probability distribution and assuming there is only a small probability that the universe is life supporting, doesn’t this fact alone rule out God? Why would God create universe probabilistically, and with only a small probability of life support? I think, that if God wants to do something, He does it with certainty.

  22. Lucas M Engelhardt says:

    Not sure if this is adding much to the debate, but I find it useful to think of the “fine tuning” argument for God in terms of a Bayesian updating of prior beliefs. The fine tuning argument works something like this:

    P(humanity existing | God) = 100%
    P(humanity existing | no God) = 1%

    [In words: if God exists, he will create a universe where humans can – nay, will – exist. If God does not exist, then the probability of humanity coming into existence is small. Here, I arbitrarily made it 1%, though many would say it should be much smaller.]

    Prior beliefs:
    Let’s say we’re perfect agnostics. 50/50 chance between God existing or not.

    Then we realize that humanity exists, so we update our beliefs about God’s existence.

    P(God| humanity exists) = P(humanity exists | God) * P(God)/ [P(humanity|God) * P(God) + P(humanity|no god) * P(no God)]

    Plugging everything in and doing the math, we find that the posterior probability of God’s existence is about 99% in this case.

    [I’ll note here that even a “Pretty sure” atheist would be swayed by this evidence, if they accept the premises. Someone who put a prior probability of 1% on God’s existence would end up an agnostic leaning slightly toward theism.]

    So, the fine tuner says “Wow. Humanity exists. Therefore, instead of being an agnostic, I’m going to become a reasonably certain theist.”

    And that conclusion is reasonable – if we accept the assumptions.

    It seems that DK’s argument is really that

    P(humanity existing at some point| God) = 100%
    P(humanity existing at some point| no God) = 100%

    Put another way, DK is saying “Meh. People are going to exist whether there’s a God or not. So the fact that people exist tells us nothing about whether there’s a God.”

    That’s probably why those who reject the fine tuning argument also reject your analogy – they agree that the probability of the cave existing conditional on a designer being there is much higher than the probability that the cave exists if there is no designer. They disagree, however, that the same is true of the existence of a universe that supports life.

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      I think that’s a fair assessment of my thoughts – which is why Bob shouldn’t be too apologetic above. One thing I agree with him on is the problem with these “proofs that God doesn’t exist” that people like Hitchens offer. Hitchens has great insights, but I think he expects too much of them.

      “Meh” more or less sums it up.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        Wow I was expecting you to reject Lucas’ argument Daniel, because that’s not what you have been saying! 🙂

        Here’s what I think you have been saying Daniel:

        P(humanity existing|humanity is making observations) = 100%

    • Tel says:

      All of your probabilities are guesswork. We have one single sample that humanity has been observed to exist and no samples outside that.

      How can you get any probability other than 100% when your statistical sample size consists of a single sample? Your margin for error is also 100%.

      • Lucas M Engelhardt says:

        Right…

        This is an exercise about Bayesian updating of beliefs, not about establishing the true probability of God’s existence. So, all the probabilities involved are subjective.

        Trying to cram this into a objective, frequentist framework is very much like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. My point wasn’t to prove that God exists – it was to show where the fundamental disagreement lies.

        Feel free to plug in your own probabilities, run the exercise, and the point remains: If we believe humanity’s existence would be very unlikely in the absence of God but certain in his presence, then humanity’s existence increases the subjectively perceived probability of God’s existence – that is, teh fact that we’re here provides evidence (though not “proof”) that God exists. If we think that humanity would exist in either case, then humanity’s existence provides no information whatsoever.

  23. Bob Murphy says:

    What’s also interesting, Daniel, is how many people have chimed in saying “Daniel is right” referring to the view I attributed to you in the blog post. I.e. they seem to agree with the fictitious Daniel, who doesn’t think we need high frequencies to not marvel at the combination of physical constants.

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      Well… so I would make a conditional-probability-independent-of-high-frequency argument myself simply as a way of asking “what the hell would you expect to observe?”.

      High frequencies aside, I’m still shocked people marvel at this.

      But then we have to consider what that means. Frequencies are relevant, but so are the unconditional probabilities. We’ve got a lot of uncertainty on both those ends. But yes, I tried ham-fistedly to say “we can think about frequency without resort to multiverse”, but that was probably just a giant monkey wrench in the discussion on my part.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        DK wrote:

        High frequencies aside, I’m still shocked people marvel at this.

        OK, if you think your conditional probability argument works, whether there is an infinity of universes or just one, then we’re back to my original post.

        Note: I’m not saying that your computation of the conditional probability is wrong, I’m saying you are wrong to use it to stifle one’s astonishment at our existence (if it turns out that our existence has an extremely low ex ante probability).

        • Daniel Kuehn says:

          Perhaps I should put it this way – and I’m sorry that I’m muddying the waters (but I do think we’ve had a great discussion on here).

          Observing the fact that I observe things doesn’t in and of itself surprise me at all, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone else. It’s a logical necessity.

          Obviously it gives us a few things to think about. We need to assess the likelihood of this occurring and the ways that it could occur (you are just assuming a designer that is capable of accomplishing this feat – you’re lucky we’re letting you even get away with that possibility).

          It seems to me we all start at the logical necessity and the theists zoom ahead past all the hard work and draw their conclusions, when all we’ve really established is the logical necessity.

          That strikes the rest of us as jumping the gun. That’s why we’re all picking apart the nature of this cave that you and I found ourselves in, what is and isn’t surprising about this cave relative to our expectations, what our expectations even are, etc.

          • Bob Murphy says:

            That’s why we’re all picking apart the nature of this cave that you and I found ourselves in, what is and isn’t surprising about this cave relative to our expectations, what our expectations even are, etc.

            OK, but you agree that that is a totally different argument from, “Conditional probability of one, meh,” right?

            At this point I have no idea what your view is. It’s almost like you have generated a trillion trillion trillion different positions on this issue…

            • Ken B says:

              I think DK is saying, the only actual probability in this we can say anything about is 1, so meh. He is pointing out that AT BEST your argument shows the need for more investigation — which could mean waiting and doing more physics — rather than crying, look at THAT probability OH BOY OH BOY. Because you haven’t exhibited any enormously small number yet.

            • Daniel Kuehn says:

              Hell, I don’t think I know what I’m saying anymore!

              I think a lot of people do see this as an unconditional probability, and that is very very wrong and that’s why I bring up the unconditional probability point. To smack down this unconditional probability based proof of God. That doesn’t work and all you need to show it doesn’t work is to demonstrate the logical necessity of fine tuning.

              Does that end the discussion? Of course not – and in that sense I agree that there are different arguments to be made.

              We don’t ultimately know much about the unconditional probabilities. We do know about the conditional probabilities. I’m just saying the conditional probabilities don’t point to God and unjustified confidence in the unconditional probabilities are not valid arguments. So while it’s all interesting I don’t see a proof of God here.

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      I guess my point is also that once we get over “what would you expect to see?” – the designer is one of the last things it seems sensible to reach for to explain the improbability. It is a little surprising that you would conjure up a solution even harder to explain the existence of which we have no empirical basis for, rather than thinking that maybe we are not entirely understanding what we’ve already got in front of us.

      • Ken B says:

        Bob NEVER thinks he doesn’t entirely understand.

  24. integral says:

    Sounds like some alan wattsy philosophising right up in here.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s_FMyuTTjg

  25. Derek Dixon says:

    After reading through the original post and several of the comments, I’ll offer some of my own general thoughts.

    I think it is fruitless to continually argue so passionately when it comes questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and I really think that is what all of these discussions on God and multiverses ultimately boil down to. I’m no philosopher, but I don’t think it is even possible to know how and why anything exists at all. Now, I am not saying that you cant find some worthy evidence for, say, a multiverse or a loving god. I am saying that all that does is push the question back one step. What created God or what created the multiverse? These questions are unanswerable in some sense and humans just have to accept that our understanding has its limits.

    Also, the possible answers to the questions of “ultimate” origins always seem to break down into concepts of either infinity or nothingness, both equally incomprehensible.

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      Lawrence Krauss has some interesting answers that certainly seem to win the Occam’s Razor award.

  26. konst says:

    The problem is that no you are not wrong to be flabbergasted by the cave or the universe, I would be too. The problem is that it’s not science. And I’m saying that and I’m not an atheist.

    I think Daniel is wrong cause the many-worlds views doesn’t make any sense. it’s a limitation of imagination and a human centric view of the world.

    I think mostly the reason people can’t get their minds around this issue is that they think in terms of 3 dimension while the universe is at least 4 dimensional and static not a dynamical 3 dimensional universe in which we move through the 4th dimension.

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      Ok – I’ll bite. How is a multiverse human-cetric?

      • konst says:

        Well it’s usually described as the universe splitting off into an additional universe to explain the outcomes of events.

        I say it’s human centric cause rather than admitting that possibly it’s the human mind which has problems understanding reality , a theory, MWI or many-worlds, was invented to conform to human biases and preconceptions of what the world should be from the point of view of human beings.

        Nobody bothers to question that the preconceptions might be wrong, e.g. time and space are not what they appear to be from the human point of view.

  27. Jorge says:

    The universe is so fine-tuned it must have been created by God. Why isn’t the same logic applied to God to postulate he too must have been created? Why is God exempt from needing a creator?

    • Daniel Kuehn says:

      This wins the thread.

      I’m very curious to hear Gene, Blackadder, and Bob’s answer.

      No one who thinks a fine tuned universe needs a designer is on solid ground embracing an undesigned God. Something here has to give.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        I think I’ll have to come back to this again next week in a new post, since this observation seems to tickle so many of you. Let’s change the context, though, to give a hint of how I would respond.

        Let’s say I come home and see dog feces smeared all over my garage in the following pattern: “IRISH GET OUT OF OUR NEIGHBORHOOD”.

        I am devastated, because I am thinking my neighbors must have done that.

        But then Jorge comes along and says, “What makes you think that? This is the result of natural forces and blind chance.”

        “Are you crazy?” I ask. “There is no way that could have happened by chance. There must be an intelligence involved.”

        “Oh boy, here we go,” Jorge says. “You’ve just pushed the problem back one step. If you can’t explain that dog feces without invoking some higher intelligence, then how do you explain the higher intelligence? It’s an infinite regress. Just use Occam’s Razor, and try to explain what our senses can actually observe. Don’t go inventing unseen causes, that’s very unscientific of you.”

        ===

        Now, I know what (at least some of you) will say in response to the above. You’re right, Jorge sounds ridiculous in that scenario, because you think it’s perfectly obvious and “scientific” to invoke human intelligence in the dog feces example.

        Well, it’s the same principle with a finely tuned universe. If something is wildly, inconceivably improbable without invoking an intelligence behind the pattern, then there is nothing wrong with invoking such an intelligence. It’s not your job to explain the intelligence too, you can start with the first point.

        • Egoist says:

          I think the invoking of the infinite regress argument is not to evade granting the “fine tuning means intelligent designer” argument. It’s rather a DEFENSIVE argument that atheists are using to justify their own “It just IS” position.

          It’s basically them saying (bear with me):

          “How can you theists say I have an arbitrary worldview that appears as empty? Why can’t I say that there are natural causes, and that’s it? Why do I have to go one step back and ask what caused those natural events and admit an intelligent designer? If I listen to you theist’s argument, you too are “stopping” at an arbitrary and empty position. You are stopping at “God did it”, and you’re not attempting to find an intelligent designer behind YOUR final stopping point. Why do I have to go one step back from my current position, when you theists are not going one step back from your current position?”

          I hope I made it clear as to why the “OK then buster, who designed the designer?” type rebuttal from Jorge, is a defensive argument rather than an offensive argument. It’s basically asking theists “Why do atheists have to go one step back from what they believe, but theists do not?

          Why do theists get to stop at their position? Why do theists not have to explain further?

          Why do atheists have to go one step back? Why do atheists have to explain further?

          I have an answer to all this, but I’ll save it for next week too.

          • Bob Murphy says:

            You kind of scare me, Egoist, because it seems like you are very rational and I probably can’t convince you that your worldview is wrong, even though it gives me the willies. (For people who don’t realize why I’m picking on the guy, it’s because of an argument he had with a Randian named Carrie on this blog a few weeks ago.) You are the Magneto to my Professor X, if you take that as a backhanded compliment.

            • Egoist says:

              You kind of scare me, Egoist, because it seems like you are very rational and I probably can’t convince you that your worldview is wrong, even though it gives me the willies.

              I’ll be honest. I gave myself the willies too, for a while, after I became an Egoist and I contemplated just what I was getting myself into. I dared myself, and I haven’t looked back. I can tell you that it was probably THE awakening moment for me. I was first jostled in my sleep by Objectivism. Then I dreamed of Libertarianism. I finally awoke with Egoism. Why is that? Because Objectivism, Libertarianism, all of these frameworks I learned are fixed ideas, religions so to speak, that can only oppress my sensual, Earthly desires.

              I thought I reached the end game with Objectivism, then I learned it is too restrictive on me. It makes sacred the “rational.” Well, I learned that I enjoy myself when I occasionally act “irrationally.” Objectivism says obey the rules of rationalism. So I abandoned it.

              Then I thought I reached the end game with Libertarianism, but I then learned that Libertarianism is a calling for the freedom of MAN, rather than freedom of ME. It can only give freedom to the concept of man, and thus all of my Earthly pleasures are to be oppressed when they conflict with Libertarianism.

              I am not saying I just want an excuse to do what Libertarians say is wrong, it’s just that I want to be owner of such an idea and retain control over when I will act in accordance with it, and when I will not. I think if I am starving, and I require food to eat, and my only alternative is to steal, then I as an Egoist do not respect property rights. I use my might to take what is mine and respect property only when it suits me.

              The willies you have is almost certainly a consequence of you knowing what the egoist is capable of doing. But we’re all egoists. We’re all just either acknowledged or unacknowledged egoists, so really, the willies is you conceiving of your own ego. You contemplate what I am willing to do, and you see a portion of you that has that conception, whether you intend to do it or not.

              If you say I am rational, I shall say it is because virtually everyone here on this board is rational. Using irrational means won’t accomplish much from rational people. I tend to use rationalism to suit my pleasures of debating those who either value rationalism, or worship it, like Objectivists. When I am around those who don’t mind being “irrational”, I tend to use irrationalism to suit my pleasures there.

              I think Egoism is the final final end game. I truly think it is the pinnacle of evolution of philosophy. I have a completely different conception of Egoism than I did for Objectivism and Libertarianism.

              In fact, I would even go so as far as saying I’ve always been an Egoist, I just thought I found out who I was with Objectivism and then Libertarianism. But I realized how incredibly oppressing they both are. It also occurred to me that philosophies that promise freedom, are usually anything but free for the unique individual. It’s like the adherents try to overcompensate for the actual lack of freedom, so they use the word freedom to delude themselves.

              As an Egoist, I promise no freedom for anyone, and I think that is what a REAL freedom promoting philosophy would in fact look like. I mean, just look at the free market. It doesn’t promise anyone free goods, but so far it is best system discovered at maximizing the production of goods that can be given. Another example, look at money. Money is a symbol of self-interest, and yet money as a tool has been very successful in the area of charity.

              Maybe it’s a cosmic joke, but I find that quite often that that which is best at achieving X, is that which does not even intend to promote X, but does anyway because of it being a side effect in the never ending flow of means and ends of Egoists.

              I look beyond the ends, and there is only me there.

              I learned Egoism from writers such as Benjamin Tucker, Max Stirner, and the plagiarist Friedrich Nietzsche. If you’re interested, those are my greatest influences.

              (For people who don’t realize why I’m picking on the guy, it’s because of an argument he had with a Randian named Carrie on this blog a few weeks ago.)

              Did Carrie declaring that she wanted me to die give anyone the willies? Probably not, because the death of egoists is the name of the good, which is that which the ego is to be oppressed under.

              You are the Magneto to my Professor X, if you take that as a backhanded compliment.

              I am the Smith to your Neo. The Vader to your Luke.

              As an Egoist, I see no difference between any of these people, except some are possessed by the ideal of evil, while the others are possessed by the ideal of good.

              I much rather prefer characters in The Game of Thrones. Morally nebulous. They show signs of both good and evil. They sit down and have dinner and drink wine and talk politics, then they go out and slaughter their enemies with swords. Incidentally, it’s one of the most popular shows on TV. I think it is tapping into that which rarely bubbles to the surface in most people, but nags at them constantly.

              Jesus was an egoist. He wanted everyone to serve HIM. To obey HIM. To hold HIM as their master. He married a prostitute. He positively granted the validity of all the violent OT laws that granted permission to “good” theists to kill people.

              Maybe Jesus is another cosmic joke that 99.9% of his followers don’t get.

              BTW, the X-Men kill people. But they are “good” because they kill not in the name of gratifying their own egoism, even though they do, but rather they kill in the name of peace between humans and mutants, so as to gratify their egoism. It’s rather devious, isn’t it? They get to kill, and they’re good. Magneto kills, and he’s evil. Why? Because Magneto represents the Ego, and anything done in the name of the Ego is evil/wrong/bad/immoral/suspect/etc.

              Notice also that Magneto has both good and evil to him. He is primarily Egoist, so he’s considered primarily evil, but his egoism does occasionally manifest itself in him doing “good.” For example, when he teamed up with the X-Men to fight the oppressive government.

              When you antagonize the state, and any other universal abstract under which individuals are expected to obey, I am your ally.

              • Derek Dixon says:

                Ok, I’m a little astounded by this response.

                “I think if I am starving, and I require food to eat, and my only alternative is to steal, then I as an Egoist do not respect property rights. I use my might to take what is mine and respect property only when it suits me.”

                So are you saying that you largely act within a libertarian framework of non-aggression but are very willing to abandon it in so called “life-boat” scenarios? To what extent will you abandon the non-aggression principle?

                “As an Egoist, I promise no freedom for anyone, and I think that is what a REAL freedom promoting philosophy would in fact look like. ”

                I want to be clear what you mean by “freedom” here. The two typical definitions of freedom are the negative and positive types. Which type are you using here, or is there some other alternative that I am leaving out? You say that promising no freedom is, in fact, real freedom? Explain.

                Lastly, I want to know if there are any real limits on behavior in your philosophy. It seems to me that you are a libertine (not that I think this is wrong, I’m merely curious), or in some sense a moral nihilist.

                You have sparked my interest here, so I might peak at the authors you have listed.

              • Gene Callahan says:

                “I can tell you that it was probably THE awakening moment for me.”

                The process by which demonic closure and self-absorption can feel like “awakening” has been described often. You might see Chogyam Trungpa on this point, for instance.

              • Egoist says:

                Derek Dixon:

                So are you saying that you largely act within a libertarian framework of non-aggression but are very willing to abandon it in so called “life-boat” scenarios?

                Yes.

                To what extent will you abandon the non-aggression principle?

                To whatever extent pleases me. I adhere to no fixed, rigid set of ifs and thens.

                I want to be clear what you mean by “freedom” here. The two typical definitions of freedom are the negative and positive types. Which type are you using here, or is there some other alternative that I am leaving out?

                Positive freedom.

                You say that promising no freedom is, in fact, real freedom? Explain.

                It’s somewhat different. I am saying that philosophies which do not promise a thing, are often the philosophies that accomplish the maximum of the thing. It is something I just noticed, that’s all. I am not saying promising no freedom is in fact real freedom.

                Lastly, I want to know if there are any real limits on behavior in your philosophy. It seems to me that you are a libertine (not that I think this is wrong, I’m merely curious), or in some sense a moral nihilist.

                Yes.

                You have sparked my interest here, so I might peak at the authors you have listed.

                This is, I can tell you from all the readings I have ever done, THE most “dangerous”. It cannot be taken lightly.

              • Egoist says:

                Gene Callahan:

                The process by which demonic closure and self-absorption can feel like “awakening” has been described often.

                Yes, theists have no other explanation for egoists other than to consider them of being possessed by the opposite of what they are possessed with.

                But the egoist transcends both good and evil.

                The awakening was actually a realization not to engage in evil, but to take ownership of the ideas, actions, and thoughts you consider to be evil.

                That angels and demons are but illusions in the minds of those who attempt to put their ego in something alien to them, be it in God or Humanity, and then finding that Earthly humans are not the ideal you want them to be.

                I am not possessed by evil, nor am I possessed by good. I am ME, and only ME.

                You might see Chogyam Trungpa on this point, for instance.

                It’s funny that you cite me a Buddhist, rather than a Christian.

                Buddhists are no less deluded than you. Trungpa isn’t talking about an awakening. He is talking about remaining asleep, and going from being possessed by good to being possessed by evil. One cannot awaken by merely changing one’s possession.

                I own everything you seek to put over me, including your angels and demons.

              • K.P. says:

                Derek Dixon,

                If you want a more succinct, less existentialist, view of Egoism try James L. Walker or even Ragnar Redbeard.

                It’s can be explained fairly straight-forwardly.

        • konst says:

          @Bob Murphy

          The problem with your argument is that we have experience of situations and we use our memory and common sense to form a hypothesis of the garage door incident.

          We have no such experience or intuition in the case of the universe. We haven’t experienced other universes to infer that it must have been an intelligent designer who created the universe.

          • Ken B says:

            We also know how some forms of intelligence came about: they evolved by natural selection. Are there ANY forms of intelligence that did not? None. Even AI is the result of the efforts of evolved carbon based bipeds. We know of no ‘free standing’ intelligence.

            Bone for Bob: this is related to a problem in Landsburg’s metaphysics too, where you accuse him of believing in god.

            • Gene Callahan says:

              “We know of no ‘free standing’ intelligence. ”

              Wrong-o, Ken B. ALL intelligence we know of is free-standing. In fact, as Berkeley decisively showed, the physical world depends upon consciousness, and not the other way around.

              • Egoist says:

                I am more than my thoughts.

                While thoughts can have freedom if you seek to have them own you, you can become free by owning the thoughts.

                Thoughts are not free when they are owned by me.

                In fact, as Berkeley decisively showed, the physical world depends upon consciousness, and not the other way around.

                You keep using the words “shown”, and “refuted”, when you’re considering mere thoughts alone. In thought world, where all thoughts are free, where they are not grounded on any Earthly foundation, then “shown” and “refuted” is totally inappropriate language.

              • Daniel Kuehn says:

                I prefer to sit.

              • Ken B says:

                Unlike Hitch I am sorry there is no christian god. And on occassions like this I really wish He existed so I could thank him for not clouding my mind like Gene Callahan’s!

          • Bob Murphy says:

            konst wrote:

            The problem with your argument is that we have experience of situations and we use our memory and common sense to form a hypothesis of the garage door incident.

            That’s one difference in it, yes. But I can come up with other analogies where human intelligence couldn’t possibly be at work, and it would still be the “rational” and “scientific” thing to conclude that the observed phenomena weren’t the result of mindless matter obeying the laws of physics. Or at least, not unless you would say the same thing about observing me giving a lecture (which perhaps some of you would…).

            • Ken B says:

              These analogies being?

              Not I hope TV signals showing aliens juggling — that would be too like ‘human’ intelligence. You got any where there are no evolved intelligent beings?

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Just so I can try to anticipate some of the objections, Ken, please elaborate on why it’s OK for you to say that a broadcast of an alien TV show was produced by “intelligence,” whereas it’s unscientific to say that a statistically improbable collection of natural constants can be as well.

              • Ken B says:

                Huh? You said you had analogies. I asked you tell us some. I indicated one particualr kind of analogy — where you key on ‘human’ rather than ‘evolved creature’ — that won’t be very convincing. I’m trying to save time is all.

        • Jorge says:

          Bob said: “It’s not your job to explain the intelligence too, you can start with the first point.”

          Why is it not your job to explain the intelligence? Why does the explanation “job” stop at the intelligence? Your answer didn’t add anything new.

          • Ken B says:

            Yes. And note the dodge Bob is pulling here. Jorge CAN tie the phrase back to random process and natural selection if he goes back far enough. The intelligence required to produce the graffiti is not a given, it is a product. That intelligence was produced by other processes with less intelligence.

            • Bob Murphy says:

              Ken B. wrote:

              Yes. And note the dodge Bob is pulling here. Jorge CAN tie the phrase back to random process and natural selection if he goes back far enough. The intelligence required to produce the graffiti is not a given, it is a product. That intelligence was produced by other processes with less intelligence.

              And let’s take it just a few more moves ahead, oh shortsighted one. You guys “explain” the intelligence of humans (who wrote the anti-Irish statement on my garage) by pointing to the natural conditions of the universe that were in place for billions of years, making human evolution a statistical possibility. Then I say, “Whoa, why in the world would we expect those natural conditions to be juuuuust right? How do you guys explain that?”

              So you can go a “there must have been an infinity of possible universes” route, which I think is problematic, or you can say, “I don’t know, dumb luck I guess.” But either way, eventually you are going to get stuck. You’re not going to be able to keep explaining it. And then, when you throw in the towel, you will say something like, “But Bob, this is silly, really. Science has to start somewhere. Don’t deride my explanation of citing human intelligence for your garage door. Just because eventually I hit a link in the chain of my argument that I can’t explain, doesn’t rule out the fact that the first move down that chain is a good one.”

              So however you justify your worldview, I’ll do the same thing. The universe looks to me like it was designed by something intelligent. Maybe it wasn’t the God of the Bible; maybe we’re living in the Matrix and the computer designed (what appears to us as) the charge on the electron etc. But first thing’s first, let’s admit that the best hypothesis for our empirical observations is either (a) an infinity of possible universe + anthropic principle or (b) intelligent design of this universe.

              • Ken B says:

                “How do you guys explain that?”

                I don’t. I’m content to say I — and we — do n ot know. I’m the one who cites Feynman repeatedly here Bob: “It’s OK to say I don’t know.”

                Maybe the universe simply MUST exist. This is what landsburg, says. And its what Blackadder and Callahan say too, but they use the word ‘god’ for ‘universe’ so they can get it closer to Jesus is LORD and hope no-one notices.
                Or perhaps the universe oscillates a lot. Or a multiverse. Or some other quantum many-worlds. Perhaps only one particle exists, and it goes back and forth in time weaving a Feymnman tapestry. I don’t know. The only claim I’ll defend is you don’t know either.

                It is 1700. We see disease and Mob Burphy, itinerant Austrian mercantilist preacher, decides he sees evidence of intelligence and purpose in the diseases, he notes a huge number of coincidences, and concludes they are proof of god. In 1700 I would have no good answer for him, just a prudent skepticicsm.
                “I don’t know Mob, maybe there’s something we don’t understand here.”

              • Ken B says:

                George C Williams has an interesting approach. “I prefer to define things so atheism is defined out of existence.” Whatever you decide is necessary, the nub, the unmoved mover, be it great uncle Jesus or just cold material reality, call that god. Then move on to the more interesting questions, like is god good? ANd then of course the answer must be no.

              • Blackadder says:

                Ken,

                You say: Maybe the universe simply MUST exist. This is what landsburg, says. And its what Blackadder and Callahan say too, but they use the word ‘god’ for ‘universe’

                I can’t speak for Gene, but I certainly don’t equate God with the universe (I’m not a pantheist).

                Unlike God, the universe is not a good candidate for being a necessary entity. To claim that, you would have to say that there is no contingency in the universe, i.e. that everything in the universe (including quantum fluctuations, human choices, the ordering of atoms, etc.) all happens as a matter of metaphysical necessity. I doubt that you really find that very plausible.

              • Ken B says:

                @Blackadder: Perhaps I have mistaken what you said, but I took you as arguing god MUST exist. I think we can lump that with Landsburgism. You may have other ideas about god but for the structure of the argument …

              • Egoist says:

                Ken B:

                The reason why people get to such conclusions as “God MUST exist”, is that they have put ideas above themselves. They have given ideas freedom. In the realm of free ideas, God indeed MUST exist.

                But when take ownership of ideas, when ideas become MINE, when I become master of ideas, rather than ideas being the master of me, when I can create and destroy them, then the concept of God can be destroyed.

    • Joseph Fetz says:

      Divine, divine birth.
      😉

    • Egoist says:

      If you asked me, it is because the Ego is indescribable.

      Note that any theist who would challenge me on this would be hypocritical, because while they reserve that conviction for God, they nevertheless believe in God anyway, and any atheist who would challenge me on this would be hypocritical as well, because while they reserve that conviction for the origin of the universe, they nevertheless believe in the origin of the universe.

      God as ultimate cause is a sacred belief that unacknowledged egoists develop, as they cannot shake their own egoism, which nags and nags at them because it has become an alienated thought.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        OK, that sounded like bullshit to me but I can’t be sure.

        • Egoist says:

          Yeah, I can see how it would look like bullshit. It’s difficult for me to make clear what I hold as indescribable. Unique beings are indescribable.

          I’ll try to rephrase, assuming of course you’ll read this:

          The self is impossible to completely exhaust in terms of explanation.

          I can only ever explain the properties of me. As much as I explain these properties, I will always be MORE than those properties. For example, I have the property of being a man. You have the property of being a man. But I am more than the property of man. Thus “man” does not fully explain me.

          This is true for every other property of me. I will never describe ME that has all those properties.

          This is what I mean by the unique Ego being indescribable. Each one of us is unique.

          But I know that I am me and no other. I just can’t describe it, because every time I do try to describe it, the new description immediately becomes another property that just adds to the list of properties that do not exhaust me. I own thoughts. Thoughts do not own me.

          My guess is that the last sentence I wrote in my previous post is what sounded like bullshit to you.

          So I will flesh that one out more.

          We are all egoists. We are each either an acknowledged and voluntary egoist, or an unacknowledged and involuntary egoist.

          Unacknowledged and involuntary egoists are those who seek to reject their own egoism and wish to eradicate it. They are those who hold things as sacred. Murphy holds God as sacred, and you hold Humanity as sacred. He wants the ego to be sacrificed to God, and you want the ego to be sacrificed to Humanity. From my perspective, you are possessed like theists. Your possession isn’t God, it’s Humanity. They are alike in form. They just differ in details of how to sacrifice the ego to it.

          God as ultimate cause derives from a failure to recognize that this nagging you have is a drive from the creator, the theist, from losing themselves. The higher essence is believed to not be the egoist creator, but something alien, which then becomes sacred.

        • Ken B says:

          “OK, that sounded like bullshit to me but I can’t be sure.”

          Ahhhhh, Egosit is tenured.

    • Blackadder says:

      Jorge,

      You ask: The universe is so fine-tuned it must have been created by God. Why isn’t the same logic applied to God to postulate he too must have been created?

      Because the existence of God, unlike the existence of a finely tuned universe, is not contingent.

      • Ken B says:

        Then why drag fine tuning into it in the first place, if god just *must* exist?

        • Blackadder says:

          Ken B,

          I think you are confusing metaphysical necessity with epistemic certainty. God is a necessary being (by definition). If God exists, then it is necessarily true that he exists. If God does not exist, then it is necessarily true he does not exist.

          It does not follow from this that there is no need to offer arguments for or against God’s existence. Goldbach’s conjecture, for example, is also a necessary claim. If Goldbach’s conjecture is true, then it is necessarily true. If it is false, then it is necessarily false. But people can still make arguments trying to prove whether it is true or false, and we can still be unsure whether it is true or false even though we recognize it is true or false of necessity.

          • Ken B says:

            It is quite possible there are models in which Goldbach is true and models where it is false. There certainly are models wherein the continuum hypothesis is true and models in which it is false.

            I think you’d like Landsburg’s blog btw if you don’t read it already.

            • Blackadder says:

              It is quite possible there are models in which Goldbach is true and models where it is false.

              I only use Goldbach to illustrate the point. If you have some quibble about that example, just substitute some other necessary claim. What’s important is whether you got the point I was making.

      • Egoist says:

        Only is one holds the universe as finely tuned. It is defining the universe as contingent.

        If one holds God as finely tuned (for the same arguments creationists use for the finely tuned universe, such as “It’s just too perfect to have happened by accident”, and so on, then God becomes contingent as well.

        So then we can demand an explanation for a (finely tuned) contingent creator God.

      • Jorge says:

        And why is the existence of God not contingent?

        • Black adder says:

          Because God is, by definition, a necessary being. That’s just part of the concept of God.

          • Jorge says:

            Then it sounds like you just defined god into existence.

            • Blackadder says:

              Then it sounds like you just defined god into existence.

              Nope. I’ll repeat what I said to Bob:

              When I say that God is a necessary being by definition, I’m not claiming that God exists. All I’m saying is that either God exists in all possible worlds or he exists is none. An atheist could agree with that.

  28. konst says:

    Regarding the argument concerning what came before now and infinite regress, the problem is that there is no regression necessary. All time past, present, and future exist at once. That’s supported by the equations of physics and it’s called block time. The real problem is free will and the popular conception of time and space.

    Also I think one of the necessary foundation of Keynesianism rests on the assumption that people are like robots with no free will and that they respond to stimuli and can be controlled by plugging in the right parameters.

    I’m not an atheist so I’ll give you a different interpretation of creation and free will that’s consistent with both science and the bible (Septuagint translation).

    In the beginning when God created the heavens (the realm of bodiless intelligent beings, i.e. angels) and the universe (i.e. the physical universe – a 4-dimensional static object the exists from time t=0, the beginning to time t=infinity all at once), the universe consisted of empty space-time so you can say it was a formless void. In other words it doesn’t exist in 3 dimensions evolving in time, it’s a static 4-dimensional object.

    And God said (actually the Greek is “καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός Γενηθήτω φῶς. καὶ ἐγένετο φῶς.”) “light come into being and light was made to come into being”. (Not an exact translation)
    In other words, light was made to come into being from time t=0 to time t=infinity all at once as a 4 dimensional wave object not as something evolving through time.
    The same for the rest of creation.

    The problem people have though is that they think of free will as a being acting and putting things into motion through the 4th dimension. Man being created in the image of God can create new futures by his free will being independent of the universe, i.e. similar to God acting and creating from without the universe man changes the 4-dimensional structure and therefore in a small way creates a new future. So the real issue is not putting into motion that then evolves on it’s own but the physical manifestation of man’s creative thought and free will.

    • konst says:

      I guess my argument above of why it’s a non-sequitur “that there must be an intelligent designer” is just too cerebral for the usual commenters here.

      • Ken B says:

        No, we just all know Kurt Godel’s model of GR. Around my office in fact we talk of little else.

        • konst says:

          Do you really or are you kidding?
          It’s not exactly GR. GR has the same problem of first cause or the limits of a singularity. What I said was different in that it’s both consistent with biblical creation and physics.

          • Ken B says:

            I was taking a swipe at your unwarranted ‘too cerebral’ comment.

            Personally I DID know KG’s model but it’s been quite a while. I’d hesitate to say more than it has a kind of looping time without re-reading.

            I’ll let you guess if it’s really a topic at the water cooler here!

            • konst says:

              If you work at CERN or some physics department of a university it would be a topic at the water cooler. I don’t know if you so it’s a possibility.

              • Ken B says:

                I don’t mock Bob’s theory nearly enough to be a physicist!

                🙂

          • Ken B says:

            Well konst I don’t really see what you’re getting at but I think you raised an interesting idea. We can — per GR — think of spacetime as manifold. In Landsburg terms it’s a mathematical object, for ost of us its a model of reality. But the point you are making (I think) is that this object has no ‘existence in time’. It just IS; ‘time’ is part of it. There seems to be no logical reason why anything must ‘precede’ the manifold.

            • Egoist says:

              What is the kernel of the homomorphism in the multiverse manifold?

              Hint: It’s you.

  29. Ken B says:

    RPM :
    “No, we have been saying, “Isn’t it amazing that the charge on an electron is what it is, when there was only a very small range (so Feynman et al. tell us) that would support life?” ”

    No-one has denied you said that. here’s waht some of the rest of us have said:

    “Maybe it’s amazing. Just because it’s amazing doesn’t prove there’s an intelligent being designing things.”
    “Maybe it’s amazing. We should look into it but not jump to conclusions.”
    “Maybe it’s not so amazing. After all in a universe with us in it it has to be in that range.”
    “Maybe it’s not so amazing, because maybe all possible values have been ‘tried’ somewhere or sometime.”
    “Maybe it’s not amazing because what seems like arbitrary tuning is actually explicable by a deeper principle we are as yet unaware of.”
    “Maybe it’s amazing but maybe we’re not good judges of this sort of thing.”

    Let me add another possibility
    “It’s amazing, but it’s inelegant and messy. I detect the work of a committee. There must be a committee of gods.”

    • Bob Murphy says:

      ??

      Ken, right, and I myself acknowledged some of these legitimate responses to the point. What I was doing in the post, though, was pointing to one particular response that was not legitimate, namely, to say, “Well duh, of course the natural constants can support life, otherwise we wouldn’t be measuring them. Meh.”

      If you agree that that is a silly reaction, then you agree wholeheartedly with my original post and we can get on with our lives. But it sure sounded like you thought my original post was wrong.

      • Ken B says:

        No I don’t agree it’s a silly reaction, and I don’t agree it’s what DK argued.

        It *is* an incomplete response. I listed several possible completions, there are others. DK’s completion was (I think) along these lines:
        “Well the only actually calculable probability here is equal to 1, so meh. By ‘meh’ I mean you haven’t proven anything yet, you haven’t displayed any long odds yet. However there are certainly unresolved questions, and you might be able to build an argument when you pin some difficult questions down. But not yet, and it doesn’t look like soon.”

        • Ken B says:

          Hands up anyone on this thread who HASN’T pretended to know what DK meant ….

          No, not you Daniel!

          🙂

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Actually Ken I didn’t read your list carefully. Your third reaction is the one I was saying is goofy.

      It seems when it comes to Sunday posts, I’m not allowed to point out what I consider to be an invalid argument, without first giving a full-throated defense of the opposite conclusion.

      • Egoist says:

        It seems when it comes to Sunday posts, I’m not allowed to point out what I consider to be an invalid argument, without first giving a full-throated defense of the opposite conclusion.

        I think that’s because what you (rightly, I think) consider to be purely analytical philosophy and logical argumentation, APPEARS to the atheists on this board as an agenda driven used car salesman who is trying to play bait and switch: Advertising a rebuttal to a sloppy atheist argument, after which you then come out with the sales pitch for what you “really” wanted all along, to convince people God exists and they’d be stupid to think otherwise.

        I think you would agree that atheists try to sniff out these tactics the way they can sniff out a used car salesman. They just want the salesman to get to the point and stop bedazzling them with talk about how bad the competition is.

        You’re getting this treatment EVEN IF you’re an honest used car salesman, EVEN IF you’re truly concerned about your customers’ well-being, EVEN IF you really do think the competition is worse.

        You have a clientele on this blog that just doesn’t have a positive image of used car salesmen. They treat you poorly even if you don’t deserve it.

        It’s nothing personal. You’re just being USED by unacknowledged egoist atheists here. You are providing atheists here, some of whom may have had a rather harsh religious upbringing, a couch upon which they can tell you their problems, and they are making you the enemy in the process, because they need a face to argue against a faceless God.

        You won’t “win” by being logical with atheists with a bone to pick. Atheists with a bone to pick are often less logical, less rational, than theists with no bone to pick at all.

        I’d rather have an emotionless theist than an emotional atheist over for dinner. The chit chat will almost certainly be more pleasant.

  30. Jorge says:

    Bob,

    You’re right, atheists are stuck and cannot explain the first cause of existence. But that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t make sense to postulate an explanation that bypasses science and nature altogether. Nature is by definition all there is, so it marks the limits of our comprehension. No one can grasp in their minds the supernatural concept of an agent who sits outside of space, time and existence. Our language cannot describe such a concept. It seems ludicrous to go further and assign to him human attributes like “designer” and “creator”.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Jorge wrote:

      Nature is by definition all there is, so it marks the limits of our comprehension.

      OK, if that’s your move, fine, but then I hope you don’t ever say something like, “Science has shown us that there is no evidence for God.”

      (I’m not saying you personally did that, Jorge, just that a lot of people on this blog rule out evidence of God by definition, and then are pleased to discover that their empirical investigations confirm their atheism.)

      • Jorge says:

        Agreed. I would say evidence for God is not possible, let alone observable.

        • Jorge says:

          Wait, I read that too fast. I’m saying that anything supernatural will by definition be incomprehensible and non-observable. God, being supernatural, is, by definition, beyond the purview of evidence. You agree with that, right?

          • Bob Murphy says:

            God, being supernatural, is, by definition, beyond the purview of evidence. You agree with that, right?

            Of course not. I have listed lots of things that I consider evidence for God. Maybe I’m wrong, but no, I disagree when you say God is, by definition, not capable of exhibiting evidence of His existence.

            • Jorge says:

              Just to clarify, when I said God is incomprehensible, I didn’t mean too complex, such that with bigger brains we might understand. I meant self-contradictory, as in being outside of nature is akin to 2+2=5. We cannot look at plain logical things (stars, galaxies) and infer from them the agent who invented logic itself.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Jorge wrote:

                We cannot look at plain logical things (stars, galaxies) and infer from them the agent who invented logic itself.

                I understand what makes you say that, but I declare that it is simply an assertion on your part. E.g. we can look at an apple pie, and infer from it the agent who created it. I can look at a novel, and make inferences about the agent who wrote it. Etc.

                If the stars tomorrow night spelled out, “I, God, created the universe, just like the Bible says,” I would say that is pretty good evidence from nature that God exists. We would want to make sure it wasn’t a hoax etc., and we could never be sure that it wasn’t very powerful aliens playing tricks on us, but I don’t see how you could rule that out, a priori, as evidence of God.

              • Egoist says:

                E.g. we can look at an apple pie, and infer from it the agent who created it. I can look at a novel, and make inferences about the agent who wrote it. Etc.

                Following that logic…

                We can consider the concept of God, and infer from it the agent who created it and wrote about it.

                You see your own life as a long term improvement, of becoming peaceful versus an unstated past.

                We can consider the concept of God according to, and infer from it the agent, you, who created it and writes about it. You said God was harsh in the past, but is now peaceful and loving. We you harsh in the past but are now peaceful and loving?

                There is no universal agreement on the concept of God, precisely because each Ego is manifesting their own uniqueness.

                Callahan believes God is being itself. He considers his Ego as manifesting in being itself.

                You believe God is an intelligent designer. You consider your Ego as manifesting in an intelligent designer.

                Each and every believer of God is creating a unique God. A sloppy inference is made however, by saying that everyone is talking about the same God. But they really are not. It is only an illusion brought about by apprehending a universal agreement among all believers that God is outside themselves.

                This may sound trite, but it’s like a population of school children each having an imaginary friend, and the children then make the sloppy inference that they are all talking about the same external imaginary friend, since after all, they all have an imaginary friend!

                If every child has one, then “obviously” that means they are all sensing an allegedly singular being that exists, but cannot be fully described, which appears as various morphisms.

                In my view, each and every believer of God is talking about their own unique Egos.

                There is no single “monopoly” creator. There are as many creators as there are egos.

                Now, a likely rebuttal to this is that most theists have indeed settled upon a rigid and unchanging list of properties of God, such as omnipotence and omniscience. So it would appear that the claim of unique Gods is falsified. Not so fast. Omnipotence and omniscience are wishes that are quite common among egoists, so in my view, it is not surprising that there are a list of properties of God that are commonly believed by most believers.

            • Jorge says:

              Bob said: ” If the stars tomorrow night spelled out, “I, God, created the universe, just like the Bible says,” I would say that is pretty good evidence from nature that God exists.”

              That’s a challenging thought experiment. It’s so contradictory to everything we know that I’m not sure how I would react. What would you do if tomorrow night the stars are aligned to spell out “I God created the universe, just like the bible says. Also, slavery is good. Begin enslaving others immediately”??

              • Ken B says:

                Bob also said (in effect) if the stars spelled out there is no god, he wouldn’t believe it. So there’s that.

                I confess if it happened I’d be troubled and, and consider I had been wrong in my unbelief. But rather than running off to commit human sacrifice to the glory of god — and most gods historically seem to like it, so I’d be playing the odds; a bloody Pascal’s Wager — I’d investigate to see if there exists creatures who can move or produce stars like we can move and produce light bulbs. Or if someone faked the pictures.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Ken B. wrote, Bob also said (in effect) if the stars spelled out there is no god, he wouldn’t believe it. So there’s that.

                Yes, Ken B., you always have your completely useless self-referential paradox argument. Hold on to it dearly, it’s apparently the gift that keeps on giving.

                By the same token, there are lots of people on this blog who say they adopt whatever view seems to be the most reasonable, and best fits the empirical evidence as they understand it at the moment of inquiry.

                But they are clearly lying. You know how I know? Consider this: Suppose at some point their reason and the empirical evidence led them to conclude, “Reason and empirical evidence are an awful way to decide scientific matters.” Then what would they do! Either way, they’re screwed!

                Ken B. has given us all a powerful weapon in our Internet battles. It can destroy any position. All it takes is constant repetition, a lack of perspective, and a massive dose of self-confidence.

              • Blackadder says:

                Bob also said (in effect) if the stars spelled out there is no god, he wouldn’t believe it. So there’s that.

                There is an asymmetry between between the stars spelling out a “There is a God” and them spelling out “There is no God.” An existent God could send a message attesting to his existence; a non-existent God can’t send a message attesting to his non-existence, because he doesn’t exist.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                Jorge wrote:

                What would you do if tomorrow night the stars are aligned to spell out “I God created the universe, just like the bible says. Also, slavery is good. Begin enslaving others immediately”??

                I wouldn’t begin enslaving others immediately, but this is a great question (unlike Ken B. “I God do not exist” silliness). I admitted this in another spot in these comments to Ken, that even if the same sensory evidence that led me to believe God exists (where I thought I heard Him speaking in my mind etc.) then led me to think “God” was ordering me to commit violence, I wouldn’t obey that voice. If you want to say, “Aha, so you actually don’t believe all this nonsense, phew! You had us going there for a sec, Bob!” OK you can do that, but I think I’m being consistent. I believe in the God of the Christian Bible because I think that’s the best hypothesis for all of the evidence, which obviously includes the Bible itself and my understanding of where it came from. I didn’t hear a voice in my mind and on that basis alone conclude, “Of course! There must be an omnipotent Being that sent His only begotten Son to die for us and cleanse us of our sins.”

              • Ken B says:

                RPM:”I wouldn’t begin enslaving others immediately, but this is a great question (unlike Ken B. “I God do not exist” silliness). ”

                I think they both highlight an interesting point. You don’t trust the CONTENT of the message just the FACT of a message. After all the implausbility — the miraclulousness — is more about the length than what it says, if you ignore the actual message. As you would with the command to enslave.

                So, if the stars spelled out the whole of Why I Am Not A Christian or just the 10 commandments it wouldn’t matter? Because I think it would matter to you.

    • Black adder says:

      Nature is by definition all there is

      You can define nature that way if you wish, but if you do it doesn’t follow that God does not exist. It just means that if he does exist he is a natural being (and the same goes for angels and vampires and ghosts, etc.)

      Definitions are useful, but you can’t define something out of existence anymore than you can define it into existence.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        Blackadder wrote:

        Definitions are useful, but you can’t define something out of existence anymore than you can define it into existence.

        Blackadder, you should probably clarify your positions, because next to this post you also wrote, “God is, by definition, a necessary being.” I think I know the distinctions you are making, but you should probably clarify.

        • Blackadder says:

          Blackadder, you should probably clarify your positions, because next to this post you also wrote, “God is, by definition, a necessary being.”

          The difference is between defining something and trying to define it into or out of existence.

          When I say that God is a necessary being by definition, I’m not claiming that God exists. All I’m saying is that either God exists in all possible worlds or he exists is none. An atheist could agree with the claim that God is by definition a necessary being (and should agree with it, unless he is being churlish). He would just have to say that God’s existence is impossible.

      • Jorge says:

        That’s not my personal definition of nature. That’s how it is defined by society. That’s why God is said to be supernatural.

        • Blackadder says:

          That’s not my personal definition of nature. That’s how it is defined by society.

          Most people believe God exists. Most people also believe that he is supernatural. So no, it’s not true that most people define nature as being all there is.

        • Blackadder says:

          Also, even if a society did use this definition, it wouldn’t make any difference as to whether God exists or not. At the risk of repeating myself, I will repeat myself: you cannot define something into or out of existence.

          • Jorge says:

            “Most people believe God exists. Most people also believe that he is supernatural. So no, it’s not true that most people define nature as being all there is.”

            That’s not the only option. People may be asserting a self-contradictory concept. That’s how I see it when I hear: “god is outside of science, yet I know he exists.”

    • konst says:

      No one can grasp in their minds the supernatural concept of an agent who sits outside of space, time and existence. Our language cannot describe such a concept.

      You may have guessed these types of discussions have been debated many time over thousands of years.

      This is the way it’s descibed in the Orthodox Church:
      from http://orthodoxwiki.org/Apophatic_theology

      Apophatic theology—also known as negative theology—is a theology that attempts to describe God by negation, to speak of God only in absolutely certain terms and to avoid what may not be said. In Orthodox Christianity, apophatic theology is based on the assumption that God’s essence is unknowable or ineffable and on the recognition of the inadequacy of human language to describe God. The apophatic tradition in Orthodoxy is often balanced with cataphatic theology—or positive theology—and belief in the incarnation, through which God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

      • Egoist says:

        This derives from Plotinus’ influence on Christianity.

  31. konst says:

    “Our universe may exist inside a black hole.”
    http://www.insidescience.org/?q=content/every-black-hole-contains-new-universe/566

    Problem solved.

  32. Daniel Kuehn says:

    I’m responding to Bob here on the infinite regress point. He writes:

    “Now, I know what (at least some of you) will say in response to the above. You’re right, Jorge sounds ridiculous in that scenario, because you think it’s perfectly obvious and “scientific” to invoke human intelligence in the dog feces example.”

    I agree. That dog poop writing has a writer is not something that ought to be disputed. The trouble comes in the next thing Bob writes:

    “Well, it’s the same principle with a finely tuned universe. If something is wildly, inconceivably improbable without invoking an intelligence behind the pattern, then there is nothing wrong with invoking such an intelligence. It’s not your job to explain the intelligence too, you can start with the first point.”

    But these are not analogous. First, we have arguments for the emergence of finely tuned universes, and as we’ve pointed out ad nauseum above we really don’t have access to the unconditional probabilities. So the extrapolation seems to overcomplicate things to begin with.

    But let’s say you think the extrapolation to God is required because you don’t buy the other explanations. The infinite regress is relevant because you’ve just proposed an even more serendipitous and implausible entity – and in this case you’ve proposed an entity that we don’t even have empirical access to. You say it’s not your job to explain this ratcheting up of the “inconceivably improbable”, but this strikes us as very troubling. Think about it Bob.

    We have empirical access to a pretty crazy serendipity: the finely tuned universe. You expect us to explain it. Fine. We’re willing to have that conversation.

    Now you come along with something that you don’t have empirical access to that’s even more implausible: God. And now you say that “it’s not your job to explain the intelligence” (your words) even though you INSISTED that the earlier inconceivable improbability required an explanation??? Why?

    Why are we out of bounds when we give physics’s best answer to how order can emerge from chaos, but you are allowed to propose a God that gets to reign over the universe without providing any explanation at all? Hell, let’s even lower the bar for you! Let’s take explanation off the table for now. Theoretical arguments can be tough to construct. Let’s lower the bar and just ask that you provide some evidence that this God even exists. Can you do that?

    No?

    You see why this is so frustrating.

    There has been a lot of use of the term “atheist” on here. As a colloquial matter, that’s probably fine, but let’s be clear what has been offered by myself, Ken B, and others. It’s not atheism – it’s agnosticism. We are willing to say (1.) evidence and explanation are both very important, and (2.) neither are there for God. Then you come along with this most remarkable of entities – this God – transcending in complexity, power, and properties anything that we could ever know – and you suggest that we don’t even have to worry about the evidence and explanation part. Unless I’m misunderstanding your statement “it’s not your job to explain the intelligence“, this is what you’re saying.

    You can understand our frustration, right? If you don’t have to explain God then why couldn’t we just say that when you were insisting on the need to explain fine tuning earlier?

    • Ken B says:

      Bravo.

    • Ken B says:

      RPM: ““Well, it’s the same principle with a finely tuned universe. If something is wildly, inconceivably improbable without invoking an intelligence behind the pattern, then there is nothing wrong with invoking such an intelligence”

      Daniel has done a fine job dismanting this, but let me add a mite he left out. Just because we agree there’s an intelligence behind the copography does not mean we agree there is an irreducible, needs-no-further-explanation intelligence there. So even if the analogy were good, it wouldn’t prove what Bob says.

    • Tel says:

      In terms of the dog poo example, we have a reasonably large data set to consider what sort of everyday events are probable and what sort of things are not probable. So we know a highly unusual event when we see it, because we have seen so many usual events.

      Not so with alternative universes. We could speculatively imagine that alternative universes might exist, or even deduce that they should exist, but basically we have no dataset whatsoever. We don’t even have a large dataset when it comes to this universe (at least, not large in comparison to the size of the known universe itself). We don’t really know whether the laws of physics have any oddball zones where they apply differently, it seems reasonable to presume the laws of physics are uniform, but that’s entirely guesswork.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        Agreed, but the point is we have a better dataset on the physics than we have on God. There are a lot of question marks prancing around here, and I think its incumbent on my side to acknowledge that.

        But if we are going to acknowledge all the wrinkles of the materialist case, Bob can’t expect us to just not ask the same questions in response to his preferred extrapolation.

        We have a bad dataset to work from, but we still have a better one than theists do (geez – now I feel like I’m defending fiscal multipliers!).

    • Tel says:

      “We are willing to say (1.) evidence and explanation are both very important, and (2.) neither are there for God. Then you come along with this most remarkable of entities – this God – transcending in complexity, power, and properties anything that we could ever know – and you suggest that we don’t even have to worry about the evidence and explanation part.”

      I think there’s a deeper point at hand which is Occam’s Razor. You don’t go around believing in things for which you have no evidence either for or against. The default state should be disbelief, because if you make the default state into belief then you are in a position where you must believe EVERY religion.

      This is the same problem with Pascal’s Wager, the wager tells you that believing in God is low cost, and potentially high return, but Pascal’s Wager cannot help you discover which God is the real God, so to make it work requires belief in EVERY religion (even those not invented yet, regardless of the contradictions between them), and that is high cost.

      I can disbelieve things much more efficiently than believing them. Disbelief is effectively free (and yes, Occam’s Razor is fundamentally an argument regarding efficiency, not an argument regarding correctness). Possibly it is fair to say that Occam’s Razor itself requires a leap of faith (the recognition that correctness does not matter if the problem is not completely solvable in practical time, so a simplifying assumption that makes it solvable is worth having).

      By the way, that old Green favourite “The Precautionary Principle” is also Pascal’s Wager, and also maps to the same problems.

    • konst says:

      I agree with the first part of your comment.

      Re: evidence of God, it’s impossible to know God in his nature but it is possible to know/experience God in his energies, i.e. his “purposeful action” in the world/universe. In other words, God by his action in the world chooses to reveal himself to people so you can’t experience God unless he reveals himself to you.

      There is also the qualities you can discern by apophatic theology and cataphatic theology.

      Some apophatic descriptions of God are:
      From Scripture
      * No one has seen or can see God (John 1:18).
      * He lives in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16).
      * His ways are unsearchable and unfathomable (Job 11:7-8; Romans 11:33-36).
      By saints
      * The true knowledge and vision of God consists in this—in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility (The Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa).
      * God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility (On the Orthodox Faith, John of Damascus).

      So in a way both you and Bob are correct.

      References:
      http://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/what-is-apophatic-theology

    • Egoist says:

      Neat, I think I made the same argument.

      It looks like a double standard is being presented. Atheists/Agnostics are expected to go one step back beyond the limits of where they are willing to go, and the refusal is supposed to constitute some sort of concession, a giving up, but the Christian who expects atheists/agnostics to go one step back isn’t himself willing to go one step back beyond where he is willing to go, and not only that, but his refusal is supposed to constitute some sort of “well, duh you silly atheists” argument, as if it is “crazy” to expect anyone to explain their position one step back when it is “obvious” that no explanation is needed!

      He wants everyone to go one step back to God, and THEN we can all talk about intelligent designers designing intelligent designers. Of course that will be the moment when the egoist creates a sacred concept (or a new sacred concept if you’re an unacknowledged egoist, for example a humanist) which he then calls a new home for his own Ego.

      Going from a finely tuned universe to “there must be an intelligent designer”, is actually the unacknowledged egoist enslaving himself to a master, a sacred idea, where exalting it gratifies their own egoism.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        Egoist wrote:

        It looks like a double standard is being presented.

        No, it’s not. I grant you (and Daniel Kuehn) that plenty of Christians in practice commit this mistake when arguing with atheists, but that’s not what I’m doing here.

        If you want to explain the dog writing on my garage by reference to an intelligence, that’s perfectly fine. I am allowing you to do that. If you then want to explain the intelligence by reference to natural selection, random mutations, and billions of years to play with, that’s fine, I won’t object that that move by itself is a bad one. I will, however, say that it isn’t the whole story, because you still have to explain why the background conditions of the universe were apparently juuust right to allow this “unconscious” process to yield intelligence.

        Now, switch to my worldview. I explain the apparent fine-tuning by reference to an intelligence. And then BAM! Daniel Kuehn et al. declare, “No Bob, you can’t do that, you’re just pushing the problem back one step. That’s very unscientific of you.”

        Do you see what I mean? If Daniel merely said, “Yes, that’s fine Bob, but it’s not the whole story, because now I want you to explain where God came from,” then fine, we’re back on even ground. I have no problem if you say that.

        What I have a problem with is the attempt to call foul for me invoking intelligence halfway through the argument. On the contrary, we invoke intelligence all the time.

        Last point: Even in the year 1600, before Darwin came along and gave a coherent explanation for how human intelligence could have arisen from unintelligent natural forces, nobody would balk if I explained dog writing on my garage, by reference to intelligence. So Daniel et al. are simply mistaken when trying to dispose of my analogy by saying, “Oh, but we can explain human intelligence, we have no idea how to explain God.” Nope, that’s simply wrong. Back in 1600, people had no idea how to explain the origin of human intelligence; it was effectively a given that they just knew from observation existed. And yet, it was perfectly acceptable in 1600 to explain things that couldn’t possibly have come about by blind natural forces, as being due to intelligence.

        • Daniel Kuehn says:

          I’m not sure I say pointing to God is “unscientific” (although lack of empirical evidence is disconcerting). It’s a valid argument. We just get a little frustrated when we muse “well isn’t that convenient” and get smacked down for it. Somehow for fine tuning the “well isn’t that convenient” reaction was OK, but when we do it its not OK.

          In other words, what you say you’d be fine with me saying is (I think) all I ever said! So what is the explanation? Isn’t it reasonable to expect one if you want us to consider your answer to fine tuning a good answer?

          • Bob Murphy says:

            DK wrote: I’m not sure I say pointing to God is “unscientific” (although lack of empirical evidence is disconcerting).

            But that’s the very point under discussion. You are defining away the very possibility of God leaving His mark on empirical evidence, with some of the moves you’ve made in this debate thus far. If you want to say that by methodological decision it is an unhelpful move to try to “explain” empirical evidence by reference to an unseen intelligence, OK you are free to do that, but then don’t think your atheism is the result of an evenhanded weighing of the empirical evidence. No matter what, God could never “reach you through Nature” if that’s the way you are going to decide to view the world.

            • Daniel Kuehn says:

              “You are defining away the very possibility of God”

              If I’ve given that impression I didn’t mean to. It’s certainly not what I think. I think it’s very possible that God exists. I’d probably even assign it a high single digit/low teens range.

              I suppose I would call it a methodological point… if we think that the serendipity of a fine-tuned universe ought to be addressed, then I think we ought to have the same attitude towards a designer that’s equally serendipitous (or probably more so, given all the additional attributes he gets). That’s all.

              • Egoist says:

                I’d probably even assign it a high single digit/low teens range.

                What does that even mean?

                That out of 100 universes in a multiverse, God is expected to exist in 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 of them?

                Or that out of 100 repetitions of a single universe, God is expected to exist in 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 of them?

                Or something else

                If you hold there is only one universe, and only one universe forever, then either God exists or it doesn’t.

                I for one cannot even grasp “God exists with probability 8%”.

                I think Richard von Mises is right that probabilities, in order to have scientific, quantifiable meaning, require repetitions.

                I suppose I would call it a methodological point… if we think that the serendipity of a fine-tuned universe ought to be addressed, then I think we ought to have the same attitude towards a designer that’s equally serendipitous (or probably more so, given all the additional attributes he gets). That’s all.

                I agree with that.

              • Ken B says:

                Not “God exists with probability 8%” but
                “I assign 8% to the possibility that God exists.”

                Let’s debate Bayesianism here too. This thread is nowhere near long enough yet.

              • Egoist says:

                “God exists with probability 8%” but
                “I assign 8% to the possibility that God exists.”

                What does that second 8% really mean though? 8% is a ratio. A ratio of what?

                Certainty? If so, then it’s a subjective judgment. But we’re still left with asking what the 0.08 means. Does it mean in 8 universes, he would have been certain, and in 92 universes, he would not have been certain?

                Does it mean he lacks 92% of what he needs to know, and knows only 8% of what he needs to know, in order to make a certain judgment one way or another? If so, how does he even know he’s lacking 92% specifically, and not 93% or 91%?

              • Daniel Kuehn says:

                I don’t imagine you’d believe that I just said that to fuck with you, would you egoist 🙂

                I am not a very thoughtful probability theorist. Would it make more sense for me to have said that I might give eleven to one odds (or so) against the existence of God?

                And btw – that’s a reference to a general transcendent/conscious/omnipresent divine consciousness. I think the existence of a specific God is considerably less likely.

                These numbers are largely pulled out of thin air of course, but the fact that I’m relatively comfortable typing them indicates to me they more or less approximate what I think.

              • Ken B says:

                “I don’t imagine you’d believe that I just said that to fuck with you, would you egoist?”

                I make it about 8%

              • Egoist says:

                I don’t imagine you’d believe that I just said that to fuck with you, would you egoist

                Well, I’ll be honest and say I wouldn’t have expected that, but I can accept it.

                I am not a very thoughtful probability theorist. Would it make more sense for me to have said that I might give eleven to one odds (or so) against the existence of God?

                Maybe we’re both not very thoughtful probability theorists, because I can’t grasp what “11 to 1 odds against the existence of God” means either. Does that mean somebody is collecting money and balancing the books such that the winners will get $11 for every $1 they wager?

                I’m just at a complete loss as to what these numbers really mean for events that are not repetition related.

                These numbers are largely pulled out of thin air of course, but the fact that I’m relatively comfortable typing them indicates to me they more or less approximate what I think.

                Fair enough. My question however has more to do with that those thoughts mean exactly. I of course won’t doubt that you think what you think. I am more interested in what they mean, or at least what you are trying to convey them as meaning.

                This is why I think what’s really going on when people say things like assigning numbers such as 8% to the existence of something, is that they are making a subjective judgment, and they’re trying to convey some sort of strength of conviction along a sliding scale of uncertainty to certainty.

                Maybe what’s happening is that you are taking the totality of all that you know, and then thinking something like “About 92% of this information suggests to me God does not exist, and about 8% of the information suggests to me God may exist.”

                I am not about to drag this out until the cows come home, I will just say I don’t know what these fractional numbers that accompany expectations of single events really mean, even if they are subjective judgments.

                It’s kind of like the difference between cardinal and ordinal utility. Personally, I hold that utility can only be ordinal, of wanting this more than that, and that more than another thing, and so on, so maybe that’s why I don’t get these…”cardinal convictions” I guess you can call them.

              • Bob Murphy says:

                I think it’s very possible that God exists. I’d probably even assign it a high single digit/low teens range.–Daniel Kuehn

                (I have nothing to add to that. What could one possibly add to that? Daniel I hope you become famous, just so more people will appreciate such an amazing quote.)

              • Ken B says:

                DK’s wicked little comment is getting a lot of notice:
                “I think it’s very possible that God exists. I’d probably even assign it a high single digit/low teens range.”

                Presumptuous! Hubris!

                No actually. DK has seen arguments for and against. None are dispositive. Some are subjective. Change it to a discussion of, was Napoleon murdered, or was OJ guilty, and no-one would bat an eye, except maybe at the lowness of the number.

        • konst says:

          In my opinion, it’s not the value of the constants that’s a problem cause there’s a much bigger problem that’s like the elephant in the room.

          Sure you can take the view that there was a first cause and that God was the first cause that set everything into motion and 15 billions years later here we are and the universe evolved the way it did from those initial conditions and momentum…

          The problem is that there are fundamental errors in physics that even physicists gloss over and don’t address and just take for granted e.g. “what is time?” and “what is space?”

        • Egoist says:

          I don’t think it’s unscientific to postulate an intelligent designer for the dog feces on the wall, because we have empirical evidence that intelligent entities can and do write meaningful words. It’s an induction based on past observations. As far as I know, that’s scientific.

          But when you don’t have empirical evidence of something, but you insist that it exists, then that is when you get closer to non-science. You’re not definitely unscientific, but you’re getting close. If you postulate an intelligence is responsible for an event occurring, based on the nature of the event as it appears to you, then there is a pretty large difference between inferring that a natural entity is responsible, and inferring that a supernatural entity is responsible.

          To me it’s apples and oranges.

          I will, however, say that it isn’t the whole story, because you still have to explain why the background conditions of the universe were apparently juuust right to allow this “unconscious” process to yield intelligence.

          If you say we still have to explain why the background conditions of the universe were apparently juuust right to allow this “unconscious” process to yield intelligence, then why can’t atheists/agnostics use that argument on you, and demand that you explain why the background conditions of the intelligent designer were apparently juuust right to allow for an intelligent designer to exist in the first place?

          If you scoff and say “Pfft, there are no background conditions of the intelligent designer, for the intelligent designer is “by definition”, or “by the limits of my ability to think otherwise”, unconditional and no conditions need to be juuust right before an intelligent designer can exist. I don’t have to explain further! That’s the end point!”, then can you see why your demand that atheists explain the fine tuning of the universe can appear as a double standard?

          Indeed, the very phrase “fine tuning” is kind of biased, because it already implies that “something” capable of intelligence is responsible for tuning the dials, so to speak.

          If there were a trillion trillion trillion…trillion universes, each with a random distribution of physical constants, and in only a handful of universes intelligent life can exist, then is “finely tuned” really the best unbiased phrase we can use to describe those few universes? Have these universes really been “tuned”?

          So if we approach understanding our universe in this way, and we don’t use the phrase “fine tuning”, but rather “luck of the draw”, or something like that, then how strongly do you feel you need to infer an intelligence behind that? I mean, the opposite of intelligence is what, randomness? If the distribution of universes is completely random, and it just so happens that in only a few universes life can exist, and we happen to be in one of those universes, then isn’t the ultimate foundation, the stopping point, the explanation of all explanations, UNintelligent?

          Do you feel any desire to explain the intelligent designer’s existence in the intelligent designer idea? Do you ever think to yourself something like “An intelligent designer is just too perfect, too special a thing, to be simply accepted without explanation. There’s gotta be a reason why there is an intelligent designer rather than 1 million stupid designers. What are the conditions that have to be present in order for there to be a single intelligent designer? Are there even such conditions? How can a complex, sophisticated concept like an intelligent designer be unconditional? All the evidence in the universe points to intelligence itself being conditional.

          I am an intelligent designer. But I am conditional. I am conditional on unintelligent matter and energy.

          Intelligence implies complexity, and complexity implies something has to be present to allow for such complexity to arise.

          If this universe being what it is strongly suggests a sophisticated, complex being that has the wherewithal to design it is responsible, then my mind cannot rest at simply accepting such a designer as a given. I would feel compelled to dig deeper, to get the back of the intelligent designer.

          Do you know why I would feel unrested until I explained the intelligence? It’s because…dun dun duuun, I have tried to put my Ego outside myself, and I am searching for my own Ego by looking in the heavens and in hell, when I had it the whole time.

          I am the intelligent designer. I am the ultimate given of ME. I do not look for my Ego high and low, far and wide, underneath big bangs or above the clouds. I will not find my Ego there. My Ego is me. I am the master that creates. I am the creative nothing. I do not fall into the infinite regress trap of always searching out for an intelligent designer that explains the intelligent designer before it. For the infinite regress is my Ego manifesting itself in a repeating phone call saying “It’s me, it’s me” over and over again. My putting an intelligent designer behind an intelligent designer behind an intelligent designer is me creating myself over and over again, continuously transcending my past self that is immediately annihilated, as I am never able to shake my creative nothingness.

          I create God by trying to put my creative nothingness in a place alien to me, where I will continue to search the back of, but never finding it, because I am looking for me.

          • Bob Murphy says:

            If you say we still have to explain why the background conditions of the universe were apparently juuust right to allow this “unconscious” process to yield intelligence, then why can’t atheists/agnostics use that argument on you, and demand that you explain why the background conditions of the intelligent designer were apparently juuust right to allow for an intelligent designer to exist in the first place?

            They *can* ask me that. I specifically said they could. That’s a perfectly fair question.

            But Daniel et al. weren’t even letting me get to that stage of the argument (nor were you, a few sentences earlier in your comment).

            • Egoist says:

              That stage of the argument?

              You mean the process of getting atheists to turn theist, right? Then the stage will be set to talk about designers of designers of designers. But we all first have to accept the intelligent designer God argument. That’s a pretty big leap you’re asking atheists to make, is it not? Theists have the strong impression that the intelligent creator God is unscientific, and that impression isn’t easily shaken.

              What is easy for you to do, is very difficult for atheists to do, and I think vice versa. I think that’s why there was the immediate “NO! That’s not science!” response. You’re just humbly saying let’s assume it exists for the sake of argument, then we can address questions about it.

              Yet it’s not exactly an open arms type thing here. You’re asking atheists to turn theist, THEN you’ll address the designer behind the designer question.

              This does seem like a double standard against you, but this is a debate between skeptics and believers. Skeptics tend to ask for answers, believers tend to give answers. So while it looks like you being drained of everything scientific, while atheists are just sitting around like priests, it’s really atheists wanting you to consider yourself as not knowing if God exists, and then joining them, rather than you claiming not to be ignorant, saying you believe God exists, and then expecting them to give you an inch.

              You want a more fair debate, it’s clear, but this is perhaps one of the most profound question anyone can ask. We’re dealing with people’s subconcious, their emotions, everything they take for granted and cannot articulate as well as they can the quality of a restaurant.

              Plus there is the fact that you are willingly putting yourself out there to discuss these matters, so you’re kind of like a business oligopoly who is like a neon sign in the middle of a forest, attracting all manner of vermin who use you to argue against their straw men.

        • Jorge says:

          Yes, the atheist and the theist stories are both incomplete, since neither can account for the first cause of existence. But we call foul half way through the theist story because part of that story invokes a non-science explanation. We fundamentally reject non-science theories.

          We have an additional, secondary critique that says, ‘even granting non-science theories, if the universe justifies inferring intelligence, it doesn’t make sense to stop the inference process once you reach god

          • Egoist says:

            I feel for theists. They are overwhelmed academically – and I mean that in terms of the number of people – and so they have set up the “intelligent designer” shield, as over the course of centuries religion has given way to scientific advances.

            Since theists have put their egos in God, atheists who seek to eradicate belief in God represent new masters coming to take away the freedom of theists. This is why theists, very much like atheists, refuse to let go. They cannot shake their egos!

            Theists, do you really think one universal method of faith can shake the atheist’s egos?

            Atheists, do you really think one universal method of inquiry can shake the theist’s egos?

            You’re all looking in the wrong place. You’re all looking “out there”, outside of you, when the place that has the answer IS you. Do you not see this yet? Isn’t it a tragedy that an event such as your own existence, is wasted by the thing itself looking outside of itself, for itself? Creators arise with creativity. That you are creating is the arising of a creator!

            Atheists can give all the empirical and scientific evidence humanly possible, and theists can give all the logical and deductive evidence humanly possible, but this will never eradicate the ego.

            I think the intelligent designer argument is probably one of the last, if not the last, argument theism has to offer. For the intelligent designer argument is so very close to a realization of one’s own ego, that it is really just a small cosmic hop away.

            If theists can just learn that they can be at home in their egoism, to recognize themselves as absolutely unique, then no explanation for themselves is necessary, and the concept of God can be destroyed without fear or emptyness.

            Theists and atheists, please, you can dig deeper outside yourself as much as you want, but you’ll only be able to find yourself by creating yourself as owner of those rugs.

            • Egoist says:

              I forgot to add this as second last paragraph:

              If atheists can just learn that they can be at home in their egoism, to recognize themselves as absolutely unique, then no explanation for themselves is necessary, and the concept of Humanity can be destroyed without fear or emptyness.

            • Ken B says:

              “Atheists, do you really think one universal method of inquiry can shake the theist’s egos?”

              No. But’s that not why we do it, toiling in the fields of reason day after day for such meagre reward. We do it for the children.

              Technically I’m an agnostic not an atheist as far as this kind of abstract ultimate cause god goes.

              • Egoist says:

                No. But’s that not why we do it, toiling in the fields of reason day after day for such meagre reward. We do it for the children.

                You say you toil away in reason for the sake of the children. Don’t know what you mean by “we.”

                At any rate, what you said is, to an egoist, just another divine sacred vow.

                Why not toil away in the fields of wheat day after day for such meager Earthly rewards, for the sake of God respecting your good works and promising you rewards?

                In your view, one sacred concept is to be replaced by another. Instead of for the sake of God, it is for the sake of the children.

                What about for the sake of you?

                Technically I’m an agnostic not an atheist as far as this kind of abstract ultimate cause god goes.

                So you’re in limbo, calling for help.

  33. Ken B says:

    They both mispronounce “Bob Murphy” but otherwise pretty good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HooeZrC76s0

  34. Ken B says:

    Two more videos, both making good points

    Is the uni actually tuned for black holes? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6FQdyHUXwc

    A good overview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt-UIfkcgPY&feature=related

  35. konst says:

    By the way, on his show “Up with Chris Hayes” in Nar 25, 2012 the topic was atheism. Someone posted it to youtube in 2 parts.

    Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPI0ooykcbQ

    Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dR1CWy6YB0

  36. konst says:

    Comment previous to this contains 2 links so it’s “awaiting moderation” so I’ll post it in 2 comments.

    on his show “Up with Chris Hayes” in Mar 25, 2012 the topic was atheism. Someone posted it to youtube in 2 parts.

    Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPI0ooykcbQ

  37. Ken B says:

    As I take it Bob’s argument is this:
    There’s an astounding number of possible universes, almost none of which allow life.
    The parameters were in fact chosen in a very particular way that allows life.
    The probabilities tell you there must be an intelligence choosing for that to be, otherwise it’s 1 in a gazillion.
    Hence, god.

    Now imagine a physicist proves tomorrow that in fact we missed a point, and only one universe is possible.
    Does anyone doubt we will hear some thing like,
    “Aha! The laws of the world were framed juuuuuuust so.
    Of all the possible laws we get such a perfect one. That must be the result of intelligence.
    Hence, god.”
    Because I don’t.

    • konst says:

      For me the constants are not really the problem, it’s that the universe actually exists that’s the bigger problem.

      Btw, I posted youtube 2 links to the “Up with Chris Hayes” episode where they discuss atheism with guests including Richard Dawkins but the comment is awaiting Bob’s moderation.

      • Egoist says:

        For me the constants are not really the problem, it’s that the universe actually exists that’s the bigger problem.

        This is the ego manifesting itself in a desire to destroy and consume what is not itself.

        The external universe appears as a fetter, a limitation, a barrier for the unbridled ego, but communicated as an inexplicable given that has to be uncovered.

    • Blackadder says:

      “Aha! The laws of the world were framed juuuuuuust so.
      Of all the possible laws we get such a perfect one. That must be the result of intelligence.
      Hence, god.”

      Um, isn’t that what the fine tuning folks say now? They aren’t claiming that the physical laws are very inhospitable to life, but that they are very hospitable to it (and that even a slight change in the laws would make them inhospitable).

      • Ken B says:

        No, it’s not what the fine tuning folks are saying now. Bob etc is saying that of all the possible values for the McGuffin constant a designer CHOSE just the right one. There was a panoply of configurable paramters carefully configured. The argument as Bob presented it depends on this choice being improbable. The WIDE CHOICE is given as a reason to believe in god.
        I am saying that if it turns out there is no choice, this alleged fine tuning is the result of our misunderstanding, that we will then see the fine tuners latch onto the LACK OF CHOICE as a reason to believe in god. Apologies if I worded this unclearly before.

        • Blackadder says:

          You have to distinguish here between

          1) the probability of life developing given the physical laws of our universe, and

          2) the probability of life developing if the physical laws governing the universe had been different.

          The fine tuning argument has to do with the second. Given the actual physical laws, the fact that life developed in our universe may not be so surprising. But it turns out that if the physical laws had been even slightly different, life would have been all but impossible (for example, if the strong nuclear force were either a few percent stronger or weaker, then you wouldn’t have gotten the developments of stars, planets, etc.)

          Suppose science were to establish that, given the physical laws that govern our universe, the development of life was inevitable. That wouldn’t undermine the fine tuning argument. If anything it might strengthen it.

          To undermine the fine tuning argument, you would have to show either that life could have easily developed given other physical laws, or you have to show that it is metaphysically impossible for there to be other laws.

          Needless to say, science itself can’t prove that different laws are metaphysically impossible (and frankly the idea that they would be metaphysically impossible strikes me as implausible). However, if you could somehow demonstrate that there is only one possible world, then that would undermine the fine tuning argument.

          • Egoist says:

            Suppose science were to establish that, given the physical laws that govern our universe, the development of life was inevitable. That wouldn’t undermine the fine tuning argument. If anything it might strengthen it.

            Not if there are a trillion trillion trillion other universes with different constants, with no life in some, and life in others.

            Our universe wouldn’t suggest any fine tuning. It would be just another universe in a distribution of universes, where we got lucky because this universe’s constants allows for life.

  38. Ken B says:

    RPM, who of course deplores name-calling, calls many of us liars:

    By the same token, there are lots of people on this blog who say they adopt whatever view seems to be the most reasonable, and best fits the empirical evidence as they understand it at the moment of inquiry.

    But they are clearly lying. You know how I know? Consider this: Suppose at some point their reason and the empirical evidence led them to conclude, “Reason and empirical evidence are an awful way to decide scientific matters.” Then what would they do! Either way, they’re screwed!

    They might simply admit they don’t know. They might check their assumptions to see where they went wrong. They might doubt.

    A similar thing happened when Max Planck got the black body radiation equation. A similar thing happened when Bell’s inequalities were confirmed. A similar thing might happen if string theory pans out.

    Science is built on humility and doubt. Not voices in your head.

    • Ken B says:

      In a very real sense much of the scientific progress of the past century has taken the form of learning that something we thought was obvious actually is incoherent.
      To go back further in time ‘how far to the edge of the earth?’ seems a sensible question, but we have learned it is in fact without meaning. ‘What is the position and momentum of that electron?’ is also inchoerent in some sense. When our reason and the evidence lead us to a blind alley, we re-think, and that often means abandoning clear ideas we once had but now see we must not.
      This is disturbingly true of Bell’s inequalities.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Ken B. wrote:

      RPM, who of course deplores name-calling, calls many of us liars:

      OK Ken, I’m done talking with you on this thread. You have exhausted my patience.

      For anyone who is just dabbling in these comments and came across Ken’s comment above, he is taking a reductio ad absurdum I invented, and he thinks I was being serious. No, I wasn’t calling people who are committed to reason and science a bunch of liars. I was showing that Ken’s argument, that he has been using to try to show me I don’t really believe what God says after all, could just as well “prove” that you folks don’t really believe in reason and science.

      • Ken B says:

        So THAT”S what Bob’s other cheek looks like. Cool.

        OK Bob, I will admit I let my irritation get the better of me, color my reaction, and I took you seriously. Indeed the more natural interpretation is that you were being hyperbolic. I amend to

        “Bob satirizes some of us:”

        My reading, while literal, was incorrect and my comment unkind. I apologize.

      • Egoist says:

        I for one thought your argument is fair in its motivation, because Ken B’s statement:

        “Bob also said (in effect) if the stars spelled out there is no god, he wouldn’t believe it. So there’s that.”

        was silly, as it conflates the stars merely spelling out “God does not exist” with those words being evidence of the content of the orientation appears to us.

        Imagine if the wind and water erosion spelled out “Ken B is wrong about everything” on a rock face. Imagine watching Ken B trying to explain how this isn’t evidence that he is wrong about everything. Then Murphy says “The reason why I reject the stars spelling words as evidence of what they say, is the same reason you reject this rock face as evidence of what it says.”

        I can grasp the stars spelling out “God does not exist”, and theists remaining steadfast and saying God exists despite what the “evidence” shows.

        I cannot grasp reason and science being capable of falsifying reason and science.

        Or maybe I totally missed something, like for example it being purposefully incoherent so as to point out the incoherence of the argument that the stars spelling out “God does not exist” is proof of anything one way or the other.

    • Egoist says:

      Science is built on humility and doubt. Not voices in your head.

      Absolutely false. Nothing can be BUILT on a foundation of humility and doubt. The only way one can BUILD anything, is by being not humble and by being sure of the previous layers that constitute that which is being BUILT.

      If the incredibly fallacious positivist view were right, then building knowledge would be impossible, for we could never get beyond the doubt and skepticism of the first layer.

      I am rather perturbed at how many times I hear the claim that science is all about being humble, whereas religion is all about being certain. BOTH are all about being certain. The veneer of skepticism that scientists like to convey is a political tactic only for competitive purposes. It is to protect their own certainty from criticism. It is not an integral component of knowledge building.

      Technological progress, scientific advancements, knowledge building, these IMPLY non-humility and non-skepticism as a modus operandi. You will never be able to build anything unless you’re sure of the previous layers upon which to claim this latest layer is the best we know.

      You’re setting up a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t between humility and skepticism or voices in your head. You are ANYTHING but humble and skeptical, Herr Ken B.

      • Tel says:

        As a software engineer I can tell you that a lot of stuff gets built on uncertain layers.

        Bugs in the foundation layers (such as the many Intel CPU bugs) do get discovered on a regular basis. People just shrug and keep going, we know there’s still undiscovered problems, but most likely they won’t cause a problem right this minute.

        • Egoist says:

          You mean built on a foundation that is not full knowledge. Sure.

          But CPUs get better and better only because knowledge derived from past technology is in fidelity with reality.

  39. Scott H. says:

    You know, we could take another route…

    According to Nick Bostrom the probability we are living in a matrix-like computer simulation is quite high (no link, look it up). The good news is that Bostrom’s matrices contemplate a designer. The bad news is that simulations don’t have souls. (Hmmm… maybe I should let RPM and the gang weigh in on that issue first?)

  40. Stephen says:

    You would not be wrong to be flabbergasted by the cave, but you would be wrong to assert that it was created by some Intelligent Designer of the Universe. Stating a belief is one thing; asserting that something not supported by reason and evidence is true is another.

  41. Jorge says:

    Bob wrote: “we invoke intelligence all the time”

    Not so. When you infer God from the universe, you postulate an agent that is both non-physical and intelligent. But “intelligence” as we know it only applies to physical things with brains. So you are redefining “intelligence” to mean precisely the opposite of what it means. You’re also attributing the non-physical agent the ability to produce matter from nothing. So ordinary non-theist invocations of intelligence in fact rely on concepts and definitions that contradict the God inference you want to make.

    • Egoist says:

      What about an intelligence as we currently do not know it? I can’t claim to know an intelligence that won’t be discovered until 1 trillion years from now.

      Is pure energy intelligence possible? Perhaps not, but I don’t know enough about energy.

      • Jorge says:

        If you go that route, then we can arbitrarily say anything currently meaningless b/c in 1 trillion years it might make sense.

        • Egoist says:

          I disagree.

          For what you’re saying makes the tacit assumption (the one I disagree with) that everything we claim to know in the present, can be overruled and falsified in the future.

          If you want to go that route, then you cannot even say that what you said in your last post is even true, because that argument too, if you’re right about knowledge and history, could very well be falsified 1 trillion years from now.

          In other words, if you’re right about knowledge and history, then I can’t even accept the content of what you’re saying now to be true, because what you say can be falsified 1 trillion years from now.

          You might believe you’re just following my logic, that you’re not actually saying the above, but I didn’t say anything that makes what you said follow. I have to treat it is your own belief.

          I think 1000 trillion years from now, self-contradictory, violation of reality statements will still be self-contradictory, violation of reality statements, and irrefutable, consistent with reality statements will still be irrefutable, consistent with reality statements.

          Having said all this, I don’t see how me saying “What about an intelligence as we currently do not know it? I can’t claim to know an intelligence that won’t be discovered until 1 trillion years from now” conflicts with any of it. I can claim to know certain things now, and admit that there things I don’t know, but might be discovered 1 trillion from now. I don’t have to throw my hands in the air and say I can’t know anything about anything.

  42. konst says:

    Let’s try to clarify some things. Just trying to explain some things and no offense to anyone on either side of this debate.

    For the record I am a theist and I’m not a physicist but I know a little about the “standard model” which is the physics theory of how the fundamental forces and particles interact and from which these so called “constants” are from.

    First of all these “constants” are called constants for a reason, i.e. they don’t vary so there is no fine tunning. The standard model doesn’t predict the values of the constants and you have to do experiments and measurements to find their values. The theory is incomplete. I think that’s the reason this “fine tuning” argument, aka the anthropic principle, began in physics.

    There is no fine tuning. The fine tuning is by physicists because of their ignorance of the incomplete parts of the theory and the 30 arbitrary parameters.
    (for more info google: standard model free parameters)

    That doesn’t detract from the beauty of the universe and I do think you can see a deeper meaning in it but I don’t “fine tuning”/”anthropic principle” holds water.

  43. UnlearningEcon says:

    I’ve always thought the ‘tailor made for man’ is a false premise. The universe is the way it is and we evolved to fit it, not the other way around.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      UnlearningEcon wrote:

      The universe is the way it is and we evolved to fit it, not the other way around.

      Yes, our electrons changed their charge because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to reproduce.

      • UnlearningEcon says:

        Obviously I didn’t mean the cosmological constants – I see arguments here along the lines of ‘but everything is just so tailor made to fit MAN.’

        • Bob Murphy says:

          UnlearningEcon, right, I knew exactly what you meant. If we had been saying, “Wow, it’s really amazing that land developed right where people happen to be standing–what are the chances?!” then you’d have a great point. But we’ve been saying, “Wow, it’s really amazing that the charge on the electron is within a narrow range that many physicists think is necessary for the formation of any type of life as we know it.” That’s an entirely different claim, and one that biological evolutionary theory has more difficulty answering.

          • Ken B says:

            You expect evolutionary biology to explain the underlying physics? A sort of reverse reductionism?

            I can hear Krugman now: “Austrian Economics is all very well, but it doesn’t explain why Planck’s constant is what it is.”

            Poor Linus Pauling. He derived the chemical bond from the quantum theory. But now we see that’s backwards! Take back that Nobel!

          • konst says:

            I don’t blame people for misunderstanding cause the science hasn’t been explained correctly.

            The electron charge is not within a narrow range. It’s a constant and doesn’t change at all. Period. Same with the other constants.

            • Ken B says:

              That’s not Bob’s argument. He is saying, ‘Aha! the constant is 1 Ezekiel unit. But if it has been even one tiny little Hezekiah unit smaller or one minuscule Obadiah unit greater then the universe would be different enough life would be impossible.” He is NOT arguing that electron charge changes within a range.

              • konst says:

                Again that’s a non-sequitur.
                Bob is a brilliant economist and knows a thing or two about energy since I think he works for an energy consulting company but…

                it’s meaningless to say that “if the electron charge was a little different…”
                I used to think there was something to the anthropic principle but it’s philosophy, it has nothing to do with science or the universe. The reason those scientists proposed it is because they don’t know how to derive the constants from their theory not because there’s some deep meaning to it.

  44. konst says:

    Thought some of you might enjoy this youtube channel on the fundamental nature of time http://www.youtube.com/user/FQXi

    I think some deal with some aspects of the fine tuning argument.

    especially this video: A Mock Debate on Time with JULIAN BARBOUR AND TIM MAUDLIN

  45. Sam Geoghegan says:

    Long time viewer, first time poster

    I’m quite impressed at this blog’s ability to produce a faily affable discussion on theist-based arguments.

    It’s now tradition to ostracise believers into the bronze age.

    • Ken B says:

      Per Gene Callahan, they choose the Bronze Age.

  46. Michael G says:

    “Since we’ve solved business cycle theory by Day 7, eventually Daniel and I begin discussing the finer things.”

    Ha.

  47. Joe L says:

    The question really is this: “Is the universe fine tuned for human life to exist, or life in general?”

    Considering that a human being, and most other life would die instantly in 99.9999% of the universe suggests to me that if any fine tuning was done it certainly wasn’t done for us. Even on our own home world we can’t live on the vast majority of it even with a little extra fine tuning of our own… like building houses and clothing to keep warm in. This isn’t even bothering to mention the time factor and how it took 14.7 billion years to produce humanity so again it seems pretty clear it wasn’t intended for us.

  48. James says:

    Every single person on this earth with a mind knows this universe was designed and created by God.
    When they meet God they will NOT be the least bit surprised.

    What some modern arrogant humans do is very different than the ancients, in which every culture, independently, had their own Creator. They openly reject the one who gave them existence. This is a matter of the heart and nothing else. It clearly identifies those who are completely lost.

    All science has done is shown without question what every human without any scientific knowledge knew throughout history in all of 5 seconds………This universe should not be here. There is simply no way for there to be things such as particles, the strong nuclear force, gravity, or even laws themselves..let alone it all clumping together forming LIGHT so the world can be seen by beings that spring up out of the dust.

    Only a complete and utter fool would think that. And an infinite universe maker is even worse. Not only do you have one universe–but you have a mechanism that created every variation of universe? Just the fact people have suggested multiverse shows this is about pure rejection of their Creator. These people have allowed their minds to become so distorted that they NEED for there to be no god at this point as they have completely spit on Him. Bias runs their lives now. All they need do is turn to Christ and ask for the truth and it will be put directly in their minds…but thats just too ickky to them. Pride and arrogance have got them thinking they are the master race.
    So again..this is not about science. Science and Logic have clearly shown Time, space, laws, and us are designed and created. Knowing the mechanisms such as the Big Bang, the 4 forces, Evolution, etc only serve to leave no doubt even to the most biased of humans. God has been at the top of the mountain in all of human history–the only thing that has changed is the heart—as science has revealed an impossible reality with zero probability.

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