The anthropic principle does technically work, but it admittedly feels like a cheat and I’d expect most audiences not familiar with it already would consider it such.
It’s not a knock-down counterargument, but it seems to me we don’t know enough about physics to say it’s actually possible that the universe could be fine-tuned differently. Sure, we can look at a lot of fundamental constants and say, “If that one were different by 1 unit, fusion wouldn’t occur,” but we don’t know if they are interconnected, and I don’t think we can accurate model what would occur, so it’s possible that it couldn’t be different, that other constants would vary with it, and/or that it would make a universe so entirely different from our own that we have no idea what it would be like, so it’s quite possible it could support life of some form.
Or, reduced into something more succinct, we don’t actually know what the universe would look like if we changed fundamental constants (if this is even possible) because the results are beyond our ability to model, so it’s quite possible that most possible configurations would support some form of life.
Multiverse works too, but again feels like cheating. I also admit there may be facts that undermine this, I’m not super-familiar with the necessary physics.
If there is no multiverse, “Why is the universe the way it is rather than any other way?” is a perfectly good question to which we haven’t found the answer yet. However, theists don’t merely ask that question, they use our ignorance as an argument for the existence of a deity. They think a creator is the best explanation for fine-tuning. The obvious counter-argument is that not only is a creator not the best explanation, it’s not an explanation at all. We can ask the exact same question about the creator that we asked about the universe: Why is the creator what it is rather than something else? Why isn’t ‘He’ something that couldn’t be called a ‘creator’ at all, like a quark, or a squirrel? Or, to put the whole thing in the right perspective, why is the greater universe formed by the combination of our universe and its creator the way it is, rather than any other way?
At this point the theist usually says that God is necessary, or outside of time, which could just as easily be true of the universe as we know it. Or the theist might say that God is eternal, while our universe probably isn’t, which is irrelevant. None of these alleged characteristics of God’s explain why He’s fine-tuned, anyway.
I was thinking along similar lines but didn’t post because I was talking myself in circles. So I gave up and weighted the hypothesis that this kind of philosophy is insoluble. Here’s what I wrote:
In such a debate, what is the end goal—what counts as winning the debate question? If they provide a hypothesis that invokes God, is it sufficient to just provide another plausible hypothesis that doesn’t? (Then, done.)
Or do you really need to address the root of the root of the question: Why are we here? (Even if you have multi-verses, why are they all here?) And “why” isn’t really the question anyway. It’s just a complaint, “I don’t understand the source of everything.” … “If there is a source ‘G’, I don’t understand the source of ‘G’.”
You can’t answer that question: The property “always existing” or the transition between “not existing and then existing” is a mystery; it’s the one thing atheists and theists can agree on. How does giving it a name mean anything more? So I think the best argument is that invoking God doesn’t answer the question either.
Unless is the problem really about whether or not this is evidence that something wanted us to be here? Then finding plausible scientific hypothesis for X,Y, Z would never answer the question. You would always have remaining, did someone want this all to be so?
And I got stuck there, because if something exists, to what extent was it “willed” has no meaning to me at the moment.
The anthropic principle does technically work, but it admittedly feels like a cheat and I’d expect most audiences not familiar with it already would consider it such.
It’s not a knock-down counterargument, but it seems to me we don’t know enough about physics to say it’s actually possible that the universe could be fine-tuned differently. Sure, we can look at a lot of fundamental constants and say, “If that one were different by 1 unit, fusion wouldn’t occur,” but we don’t know if they are interconnected, and I don’t think we can accurate model what would occur, so it’s possible that it couldn’t be different, that other constants would vary with it, and/or that it would make a universe so entirely different from our own that we have no idea what it would be like, so it’s quite possible it could support life of some form.
Or, reduced into something more succinct, we don’t actually know what the universe would look like if we changed fundamental constants (if this is even possible) because the results are beyond our ability to model, so it’s quite possible that most possible configurations would support some form of life.
Multiverse works too, but again feels like cheating. I also admit there may be facts that undermine this, I’m not super-familiar with the necessary physics.
If there is no multiverse, “Why is the universe the way it is rather than any other way?” is a perfectly good question to which we haven’t found the answer yet. However, theists don’t merely ask that question, they use our ignorance as an argument for the existence of a deity. They think a creator is the best explanation for fine-tuning. The obvious counter-argument is that not only is a creator not the best explanation, it’s not an explanation at all. We can ask the exact same question about the creator that we asked about the universe: Why is the creator what it is rather than something else? Why isn’t ‘He’ something that couldn’t be called a ‘creator’ at all, like a quark, or a squirrel? Or, to put the whole thing in the right perspective, why is the greater universe formed by the combination of our universe and its creator the way it is, rather than any other way?
At this point the theist usually says that God is necessary, or outside of time, which could just as easily be true of the universe as we know it. Or the theist might say that God is eternal, while our universe probably isn’t, which is irrelevant. None of these alleged characteristics of God’s explain why He’s fine-tuned, anyway.
I was thinking along similar lines but didn’t post because I was talking myself in circles. So I gave up and weighted the hypothesis that this kind of philosophy is insoluble. Here’s what I wrote:
In such a debate, what is the end goal—what counts as winning the debate question? If they provide a hypothesis that invokes God, is it sufficient to just provide another plausible hypothesis that doesn’t? (Then, done.)
Or do you really need to address the root of the root of the question: Why are we here? (Even if you have multi-verses, why are they all here?) And “why” isn’t really the question anyway. It’s just a complaint, “I don’t understand the source of everything.” … “If there is a source ‘G’, I don’t understand the source of ‘G’.”
You can’t answer that question: The property “always existing” or the transition between “not existing and then existing” is a mystery; it’s the one thing atheists and theists can agree on. How does giving it a name mean anything more? So I think the best argument is that invoking God doesn’t answer the question either.
Unless is the problem really about whether or not this is evidence that something wanted us to be here? Then finding plausible scientific hypothesis for X,Y, Z would never answer the question. You would always have remaining, did someone want this all to be so?
And I got stuck there, because if something exists, to what extent was it “willed” has no meaning to me at the moment.