Tough Questions Answered

“How do non-theists respond to the fine tuning of the universe? …” – strawman constructed by Bill.

“ … I think we would all like to know why all 50 people in the firing squad missed us.” – strawman still standing.

Bill,
Perhaps you are correct that the argument is not a complete strawman, but you present it in the post as how “non-theists respond to the fine tuning of the universe.” Perhaps I would take less exception if you posted it as how Dawkins responds in his book.

However, I think Dawkins point still stands that the anthropic principle is an alternative explanation of why the cosmological constants are what they are. On the one hand, we can suggest that there is a god or “knob twiddler” as Dawkins puts it that tuned the cosmological constants just right to support life. There is, as always when god is suggested, no proof for this premise aside from conjecture. The anthropic principle offers the explanation that the cosmological constants have the life sustaining values, because if they were values that were not life sustaining, we would not be here to observe them. The reason this is not a satisfying answer is because the question “why are the values of the cosmological constants the values that they are?” is not a rational question. They simply are because they cannot be any other way. The anthropic principle just states the obvious. To draw the conclusion that god exists because cosmological values cannot be any other value than what they are seems absurd to me.

Looking at your firing squad analogy; if the firing squad were to only fire once at a single person, it would be unlikely they missed and in fact a strange coincidence. But even that does not necessitate someone designing the miss. If we were to modify the scenario, one might not be surprised to be alive if they knew that they were to be one of a trillion executions performed and that perhaps the squad might completely miss every now and then. Similarly, Dawkins says in The God Delusion, “If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. The chance of finding any one of those billion life-bearing planets recalls the proverbial needle in a haystack (back to the anthropic principle) and beings capable of looking must necessarily be sitting on one of those prodigiously rare needles before they even start to search.”

Aside from the anthropic principle, I find myself and Dawkins in agreement on another point regarding the idea of fine-tuning. I found this quote from Dawkins in his eulogy of Douglas Adams, which is closely in line with my last post on the subject that when we look at the universe through the lens of time, it is not an environment built for human life, he says more eloquently:
“… imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

To me the more accurate ‘shooting’ analogy is the sharpshooter fallacy. We’re talking about hits here, not a bunch of misses – with the ‘hit’ being ‘the right scenario to allow life’. In the sharpshooter fallacy we take a wall punctured with holes and we draw targets round them, saying ‘Look, the targets have been hit’.

The point is that the ‘goal’ has been asserted after the fact.

Humans could say “The world was set up to allow ape-like creatures to rule”. A different run of evolution might have seen smart lizards in charge, figuring it could have been no other way. We could imagine a thousand different ways evolution could have gone, with different creatures dominating – many wouldn’t even have the intelligence or self-awareness to imagine it was a deliberate result – but they’d be wrong if they COULD think it.

Now, instead of thinking ‘We’re in charge, that must be deliberate’, change the thought to simply ‘We’re alive and self-aware, that must be deliberate’. isn’t this still the same principle of drawing the target after the fact?

Imagine there are a thousand different ways the universe could be to sustain intelligent life. For each one, we can imagine a lifeform saying “The universe is set up perfectly for US. It must be deliberate”. I think we can all agree that each would be wrong – they would be indulging in Douglas Adam’s fallacy of the puddle. Just because THEY are the life the universe has produced, doesn’t mean the production of them was deliberate, or the universe’s ‘rules’ were made just for them.

Now, if we re-jig that so that that there are still a thousand different ways to allow life, but only a couple of them lead to INTELLIGENT life, then obviously only two scenarios would lead to lifeforms saying “It’s deliberate” – by definition the other 998 wouldn’t be able to think it. But if they COULD, they’d be wrong too.

Now, re-jig it again – imagine we have a thousand different ways the universe could be, and only ONE allows intelligent life – why is it any less of a fallacy for the life in that one scenario to say “It must be deliberate”?

But the puddle hasn’t found physical constants and complex forces of nature that are balanced on a razor edge, has it? It’s not just that we humans look around and say, “Wow! The earth is warm and provides us food. The universe was finely tuned!”

No. It’s far more incredible than that. Here is one example of the fine tuning:

“Many have estimated that the cosmological constant—a fundamental number that governs the expansion rate of empty space—must be precisely set to one part in 10 to the 120th power in order for life to occur; if it were too large, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for galaxies and stars to form, and if it were too small, the universe would have collapsed back on itself.”

Comparing this kind of precision to a puddle on the ground just isn’t convincing. The analogy doesn’t work.

The anthropic principle is based on the same reasoning that makes casinos rich: misunderstanding probabilities. It’s looking at the problem of ‘tuning’ from the wrong end where the odds are long against it; instead start with what is.

What are the chances that this lottery winner won? The probability is 1. It happened. No matter how unlikely it may be from the front end, no matter what the odds might be calculated that the lottery winner turned out to be the lottery winner before the draw , the result is now assured; this ticket, and this ticket alone, was the winning ticket. This universe and this universe alone is the winning ticket regardless of how unlikely we calculate how unlikely it turns out to be.

Those who wish to use unlikeliness to suggest agency are not thinking straight. For example, if you tried to calculate the probability of you being you right this instant, starting from the first sperm out of tens of millions to fertilize the egg from which you developed, and factored in all the probabilities of survival from that moment until now, all the necessary and formative experiences you underwent, you might be surprised at how unlikely the chances are for you to be reading this… perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of one chance out of a trillion trillion trillion. How can such a slight probability be made manifest without divine agency?

The answer is all around you: billions of such slight probabilities have become manifest in every human being there is, was, or shall be. In fact, the odds are just as long if not more so for many other life forms here on earth.

Let’s extend the point. What are the probabilities that all life is exactly the way it is right at this moment? The result is a probability of 1. It is. But the calculation for taking all variances that could have produced a different result means multiplying all the trillions of trillions of trillions to one by each and every life form on earth. Yet here we are. Here they are. The chances are almost at zero when measured from the front end but assured when measured from the final result. And that’s the key point: almost. In that word lies exposed the false assumption believers in the fine tuning argument hold… that ‘almost’ means something along the lines of ‘therefore Jesus’, or ‘therefore Allah’ or therefore Shiva. But in not one single case is there good evidence for divine fine tuning – not in your life, not in mine, not in the geranium in the old apartment. This is the way life is here on earth, the way life has become, subject to understandable natural forces and process over time. For these we have remarkably good evidence overlapping in every line of inquiry we follow… except in much of theology that presumes the need for a divine lottery commander, a divine erosion commandant, a divine evolutionary engineer.