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How does the fine tuning argument support theism?
lumberjohn:
Can anyone explain to me how the "fine tuning" arguments supports theism? How does the fact that there is human life in the universe make it any more probable that there is a God? Isn't it just as likely that if there were a God, he/she would create a lifeless universe? Or a universe with an entirely different form of life than humans?
Theists always claim when explaining the existence of evil that we can't claim to know the motives of God (in fact, the message of the book of Job seems to be that none of us can understand those motives and shouldn't even try). So then how is it that they could claim the existence of human life (and a universe finely tuned for such life) is consistent with those motives?
And if the relatively brief (in cosmological terms) existence of humans were the ultimate goal of God, then what was going on the 13+ billion years prior to the emergence of humans on the scene? Why wouldn't the universe have been tuned to produce humans right away?
ting-bu-dong:
--- Quote from: lumberjohn on Feb 22, 2012, 04:19:43 PM ---Can anyone explain to me how the "fine tuning" arguments supports theism?
--- End quote ---
It doesn't. The observation that the universe is capable of supporting life is not at all extraordinary because the conditional probability of that happening given that life is around to make the observation is 100%.
amysrevenge:
I always thought that this one was about adding benevolence to an pre-assumed watchmaker God. If you assume that God created the universe, the fact that there are humans in it means God is good, or some such.
jomike:
--- Quote from: lumberjohn on Feb 22, 2012, 04:19:43 PM ---Can anyone explain to me how the "fine tuning" arguments supports theism? How does the fact that there is human life in the universe make it any more probable that there is a God?
--- End quote ---
Paley's Watchmaker argument, essentially. Modern, sophisticated versions of the argument such as that used by William Lane Craig invoke modern cosmology, physics, and biology.
How to defend the fine-tuning argument just like William Lane Craig
--- Quote ---if you’re not clear on the fine-tuning argument, click here and read Walter Bradley’s exposition of it....
...The argument goes like this:
The fine-tuning of the universe to support life is either due to law, chance or design
It is not due to law or chance
Therefore, the fine-tuning is due to design
What does it meaning to be fine-tuned for life?
Here are the facts on the fine-tuning:
Life has certain minimal requirements; long-term stable source of energy, a large number of different chemical elements, an element that can serve as a hub for joining together other elements into compounds, etc...
a) The strong force: (the force that binds nucleons (= protons and neutrons) together in nucleus, by means of meson exchange)
if the strong force constant were 2% stronger, there would be no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars...
if the strong force constant were 5% weaker, there would be no stable stars, few (if any) elements besides hydrogen....
b) The conversion of beryllium to carbon, and carbon to oxygen
Life requires carbon in order to serve as the hub for complex molecules, but it also requires oxygen in order to create water....
If you mess with these forces even slightly, you either lose the carbon or the oxygen.
...Either way, you’ve got no life of any conceivable kind.
--- End quote ---
Those such as Craig who regard the anthropic principle as a circular non-explanation, and the idea of the multiverse as an absurdity conjured by atheistic cosmologists as an obvious attempt to deny the possibility of a Creator, find the fine-tuning argument compelling.
lumberjohn:
As Vic Stenger and Lawrence Krauss have recently pointed out, the universe is not "finely tuned" for any sort of life. There are ranges for many constants that could plausibly allow for some form of life. So the "poker hand" analogy seems especially off base since many hands other than a royal flush would work. Perhaps our definition of life is even too narrow.
But the more significant question, it seems to me, even if you spot them the poker hand analogy, is how does that imply a designer God? If the entire purpose of creating the universe was that there would be life (and in particular for the Judeo/Christian religions, a tribe of people living in ancient Israel over 2,000 years ago), why the long prologue and immense amounts of wasted space? Why is the vast majority of the universe inhospitable to life? The constants could surely have been tweaked further to allow for life everywhere, which is what I would define as a royal flush. Our universe is more akin to a pair of twos.
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