Recently, Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity interviewed cosmologist Luke Barnes, a noted defender of the fine-tuning argument. Despite the numerous attacks directed by critics at the premises of the fine-tuning argument, Barnes is more convinced than ever of the merits of this argument.
By construct, James Fodor, a neuroscience grad student, has produced a video critiquing the fine-tuning argument. I have to say it’s about the best critique of the fine-tuning argument I’ve ever seen. The points Fodor made about divine psychology, the low prior probability of a God who wants to create life, and the evidential double standard employed by apologists arguing for theism, were especially telling. I’ll let readers decide whether Fodor has successfully refuted the fine-tuning argument.
Comments are welcome.
Two points:
(1) The Fine Tuning argument is the best argument that the ID proponents have;
(2) The Fine Tuning argument isn’t very good.
The video that you provided does do a pretty good job of pointing out the weaknesses of the argument.
As for your title: No, the argument isn’t dead. It really isn’t an argument to persuade people. Rather, it’s an argument that allows theists to feel good about their beliefs. And I don’t see that changing.
I think the part about arguments making you feel good about your beliefs applies to nearly all arguments.
People who make things have to pay attention to how things work. The rest of us can get by and feel smug.
This is so true.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Those who rely on things made by artisans have to face reality when they break
I’ve always consider it a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument. We (and all we know about the universe) exists, this can only be the case if conditions are exactly right, therefore conditions must have been crafted to be as they are. The probability that every necessary detail is just so at random is essentially zero.
Or as Douglas Adams puts it, imagine a puddle suddenly becoming conscious and observing that the container it’s in just happens to be an absolutely perfect fit, in every complex detail. The depression the puddle is in must have been carefully designed to be such a perfect fit. What else could the puddle possibly conclude?
There are those of us who are not mostly interested in arguing about God:Yes/No, but who very much want to think about evolution. My impression is that people who want to argue for fine tuning often do so to make arguments against evolution, or against adaptations being due to natural selection. But it seems to me that a fine-tuned universe is one in which things are sufficiently orderly that the fine-tuning makes evolution by natural processes easier, not harder. Thoughts?
I suppose any stable universe where evolution is possible, can be considered fine-tuned for whatever that process produces. So there may be many different stable universes, each with its own set of tunings. Maybe the set of all such universes are ongoing experiments in the Divine Creator’s lab. Each experiment’s inhabitants might consider themselves divinely ordained due to their unique special conditions. Would they all be right?
Are you suggesting you are not interested in arguing for God?
You are searching for truth, right? And not as you would like it to be?
Fine tuning is a bit like calculating the odds of your own existence, given the probabilities of your conception happening at just the right moment.
I’m more entertained by looking at the evidence that earth-like planets are rare.its equally useless, but at least we are accumulating data.
I think it’s more a search for reality, for facts and evidence, and how each fact raises more questions to investigate. This search has nothing to do with finding “truth” in any religious sense. Reality, examined up close, is never exactly what we expect, and whether it’s what we’d like is totally irrelevant. If we took a poll, we’d find that much of reality is NOT what we would like it to be. Which might lead some of us to imagine an alternate reality more congenial to our preferences.
That seems exactly right to me: whatever arguments are presented for the “fine-tuning” of the universe for the emergence of life are also arguments that weaken the need to posit the intervention of any intelligent beings in order to explain abiogenesis.
Put otherwise, the stronger the case for CID (cosmic intelligent design), the weaker the case for BID (biological intelligent design). There aren’t any good reasons why someone should accept both CID and BID.
On Fodor’s claim regarding the fixation of constants by fine tuning advocates, I don’t know how accurate this is. But if it is true I wouldn’t say it invalidates their argument, it just limits its scope. The universe seems fine tuned under certain conditions.
I was under the impression they are more fixated on the properties of matter and they speculate on how changing the constants would change the behaviour of matter as we know it. Of course reality potentially encompasses much more than human science has discovered so far, and entirely different laws may apply.
Can we be sure that variations on matter and the fundamental laws of nature as we know them need apply to all possible universes?
Fodor is arguing against those who believe in an all-good and all-powerful God. I believe in an all-loving but not all-powerful deity, so although I find it interesting I don’t feel I have to defend the position he is criticizing.
It’s a pity there aren’t more theists here to argue their case.
From Fodor’s argument from Ignorance he states,
This is a good point. It is possible that we live within higher dimensions, populated by beings that we do not have the necessary senses to be aware of. If he can postulate other universes totally different from the one we perceive, then why not a higher reality that we are living within? How would he know?
CharlieM,
What value does the point have? You can make this “we can’t be sure” argument about anything. How would someone propose life with particles that are unpredictable?
Do you think his claim is anything more than asking fine tuning proponents to prove life is impossible without the exact conditions we are observing.
Another good point.😊
James Fodor critiques fine tuning by speculating on universes that we know nothing about. He talks about equations and plays about with probabilities. What I don’t see him doing is observing actual processes in the world that we experience and noting the multitude of conditions that have enabled physical life to appear.
The fact that life is here in our universe has a probability of 1. I can’t see how anyone can question the fine tuning that has brought this about. Physical life as we know it is held in balance. Think about the relationships between sun, earth and moon; and the properties of water or carbon. Life has been enabled by the astronomical conditions and the chemical properties of the concentrated substances of the earth. The conditions and substances that living processes use remain within strict bounds. This balance has been maintained for the vast ages that physical life has existed on this earth.
We can speculate about multiverses and unknowable worlds all we want, or we can humbly look at the world of our experience and wait patiently for it to give us answers.
In essence our universe is not a theatre of things. It is a flux of processes withing processes in the act of becoming.
We’re talking about the fine-tuning argument. Whether or not God exists is irrelevant to assessment of the argument for whether the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ for life and/or sentience.
I believe that a fine-tuned universe makes evolution in general possible. And I’m not talking about just biological evolution.
I believe also that adaptations due to natural selection result in populations being restricted in the future evolutionary path available to them.
For example observe the limbs of primates. “This piece with the heading, “Hands and Feet” says regarding primates:
Primates (excluding humans) have prehensile hands and prehensile feet, and so the range that populations travel for foraging and hunting tends to be very limited. Humans are not so specialized. Feet designed for walking and running allows us to be able to travel long distances while our forelimbs are free from such special adaptations. We embody both higher and lower functions within each individual.
Yeah, like going extinct