Since I moved to the Freethought Blogs network, I have a bunch of new readers who aren’t familiar with my greatest hits from my old, pre-FTB blog. So I’m linking to some of them, about one a day, to introduce them to the new folks.
A nifty pull quote:
If the universe was “fine-tuned” for life by a perfect, all-powerful God… why did he do such a piss-poor job of it? Why was the 93- billion- light- years- across universe created 13.73 billion years ago… just so the fragile process of human life in one tiny solar system could blink into existence for a few hundred thousand years, a billion years at the absolute most, and then blink out again? Why could an asteroid or a solar flare or any number of other astronomical incidents wipe out that life at any time? If the universe was “fine-tuned” for life to come into being, why is the ridiculously overwhelming majority of it created to be so inhospitable to life? (Even if there’s life on other planets, which is hypothetically possible, the point still remains: Why is the portion of the Universe that’s hospitable to life so absurdly minuscule?)
Atheists are often accused by religious believers of being arrogant. But it’s hard to look at the fine-tuning argument and see any validity to that at all. Believers are the ones who are arguing that the Universe was created just so humanity could come into existence… and that the immeasurable vastness of stars and galaxies far beyond our reach and even beyond our knowledge was still, somehow, put there for us. Maybe so we could see all the pretty blinky lights in the sky. Atheists are the ones who accept that the Universe was not made for us. Atheists are the ones who accept that we are a lucky roll of the dice; an unusual bio-chemical process that’s happening on one planet orbiting one star that happens, for a brief period, to have conditions that allow for it. (I know this is kind of a buzz-kill; here’s a nice humanist philosophy about it that might cheer you up.)
Yes, the existence of humanity is unlikely. But so is my personal existence, and the existence of the Messier 87 galaxy, and the roll of a die in the sequence 3241154645. That doesn’t mean these things were designed to happen. We are a puddle that evolved to fit in a convenient hole. There is no reason to think that the hole was created for us. And there is every reason to think that it was not.
We are a puddle that evolved to fit in a convenient hole.
This is really the atheist’s problem — why are there laws that compel this evolution, guiding it towards consciousness? Why didn’t the puddle remain a puddle or degenerate into something lesser? If the laws of the universe are deterministic, it seems that at least one of their designs is life. It is at least as intuitive as not that there was some “intent” behind the laws.
Arguments about why it took so long, or why there is comparatively so little life in the universe, are beside the point. A building may take years to build, and not full up the whole universe, but that does not mean that some form of consciouness was not behind it.
Because in a universe _without_ such laws, we wouldn’t be able to make that observation. It’s selection bias, that’s all. (This is also known as the weak anthropic principle.) I also note that by using the verbs “compel” and “guiding”, you’re implicitly anthropomorphizing said laws, as if they were making a choice to act. To characterize Greta’s position, it might be more accurate to say, “The laws of the universe are such that that the evolution of life and consciousness is possible.”
This sentence is a non-sequitur. “Deterministic” doesn’t have anything to do with design. If you mean one of the _consequences_ of the laws of the universe is life, then you are correct, but that’s hardly a new observation.
Agreed. Humans find it very intuitive to believe that agents are responsible for things.
This doesn’t make it true, it simply means it feels intuitive. It also feels intuitive that particles are little hard spheres like ping-pong balls, or that space and time are absolute. These aren’t true either. “What feels intuitively true” is a really, really bad way of getting information about the universe.
I watched a “debate” between Craig and Hitchens at some holy roller U. with a format set to make Hitchens look bad. When the point was made that the “fine tuning” was time dependent, Craig just answered christians had that covered. They will be off in the afterlife with Jeebus. Don’t you just want to smack him?
Oh I know – not very intellectual but the guy is such a BS artist that you are well advised to wear a hat if you go to hear him.
@1: First, you have to show that the laws that govern the universe as we know it are deterministic.
It’s a lot like the arguments against evolution that say it couldn’t happen randomly, but turned around.
As far as we know, the laws of physics (and evolution) are based on random processes with stochastic properties. It’s the combination of those things that make life possible but not necessarily a foregone conclusion. Likewise, the randomness and stochastic processes that drive evolution make intelligence possibly, but not necessary.
Rolling a die ten times and getting 3241154645 is not a great analogy for the universe being hospitable to life. A better analogy would be getting the sequence 4444444444. Life in general is a remarkable thing; observing something remarkable and improbable, like a sequence of ten 4s, generally ought to make us pause and wonder if something funny is going on.
A much better critique of the fine-tuning argument is the anthropic principle, which appears a bit later in the article: “If life […] hadn’t happened, [… w]e just wouldn’t be here to wonder about it.” This is a good reason for why we should be surprised by rolling 4444444444, but not be surprised by the existence of life.
Nisan @ #5: But part of the point is that a roll of 3241154645 is every bit as unlikely as a roll of 4444444444. The latter just seems less likely to our brains, which don’t process probability very accurately.
Conscious life may not be any more or less likely an occurrence in the physical universe than, say, the rings around Saturn. It’s just that we’re alive, and our consciousness is at the center of our own world, and we therefore think it needs a special explanation. It doesn’t. There is no reason to think that the laws of the universe were guided in the direction of conscious life coming into being for a blink of an eye on this one tiny planet. We are just one improbable outcome out of many.
In fact, if you look at the way in which things like probability and randomness have to be defined in order for them to actually be used to figure anything out, you will find that talking about how likely it is that the laws of the universe are a certain way is nonsensical. You have to have some set of universes existing that you knew about, some of which have “life occurred here because the laws of physics in this universe made it possible” as a property. Then you could express the probability of the laws allowing for life as a fraction. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about the probability of a single event that you know occurred. Even if you assume that each possibility for physical laws occur in some universe, and they are equally distributed, you could talk about the probability that life would exist in this one, but that’s not really going to help the theist draw the conclusions he wants. This argument is just another example of the usual thing of theists hearing about some scientific notion which they have never actually been interested enough in to find out about, but still desperately trying to use their vague misunderstanding of it to shore up the beliefs that mean so much to them — just like when creationists start babbling nonsense about the second law of thermodynamics.
The argument is that we exist, therefore God exists.
The fact that our planet is hospitable to us is only an argument for God’s existence if we know somehow that God would necessarily want us to exist. We could even say that the purpose of God is to create us, but that would give away the game.
MisterJohnGalt (#1):
It’s only a problem for someone who accepts your premise – that there are laws that compel or guide evolution towards consciousness. And even if we recast this claim in less teleological language, it’s not clear that it is true.
The “Drunkards Walk” model favoured by Stephen Jay Gould to explain the existence of more complex forms of life posits that this complexity emerges as an indirect consequence of increased diversity. I.e., organisms as they adapt to different niches become more diverse in their make-up and behaviours, and part of this diversity will be reflected in some lineages becoming more complex, others more simple, and others remaining at more or less the same level of complexity. But while there is a lower limit to which organisms can easily simplify further and still remain reproductively viable, there is no upper limit to how complex they can become. Consequently, over time, the upper end of the distribution curve of complexity will tend to shift to the right (i.e., towards greater complexity).
Bear in mind that the vast majority of living things (in terms of both numbers and biomass) are in fact micro-organisms. Complex multicellular organisms are the exception, not the rule.
I think you’re taking the puddle analogy way off on a tangent here, but the answer is – most of them did remain puddles or “degenerate”. Again, the puddles that develop into more complex puddles are the exception, not the rule.