Naturally Fine Tuned for Life - A Defence of Metaphysical Naturalism

Douglas Adams dismissed the fine-tuning argument far better than I ever could:

How could we possibly know? Genuine question.

Seems to me that anything we can empirically observe, directly or indirectly, is not another universe; just a remote or exotic part of our universe. We can postulate that other universes exist, if their existence provides an answer to otherwise hard-to-answer questions of cosmology, but we can never empirically verify that they do (or do not) exist because, if we could, they would not be distinct universes.

(Unless cosmologists use "universe' to mean something different from what I understand it to mean. In which case, what does it mean?)

But, then, it seems to me that the multiverse hypothesis for explaining the existing of a universe capable of supporting us is just as speculative, just as faith-based, as the God/intelligent designer hypothesis. In both cases there is, and can be, no empirical evidence by which the hypothesis can be verified or falsified. Neither can claim to be more scientifically respectable than the other.

Or am I missing something?

this article seems relevant

Sorry if I was unclear. My use of "God/intelligent designer" was intended to broaden the concept - we could be talking about the classical notion of God, or we could be talking about any intelligent designer, who might not have any of the other characteristics conventionally attributed to God. All the intelligent designer has to have is (a) intentionality, so it can form a desire for a universe capable of supporting the development of conscious life and (b) the capacity to shape the universe to realise that intention. Which is a lot, but is not nearly enough to make it the Christian God. The intelligent designer doesn't have to be omniscient, for example, or all-loving.

I don't see the intelligent designer hypothesis as inconsistent with an undirected process such as natural selection, or more generally with the idea that undirected, chance events occur in our universe. An intelligent designer could intelligently design a universe in which chance and/or undirected events can and do occur; I don't see a conceptual problem there.

I agree, if you're asserting intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution, that's profoundly unscientific. I'm looking at an intelligent design hypothesis that is offered purely to explain the phenomenon pointed to in this thread; the fortuitous setting of the fundamental constants of the universe.

Thanks for this. Couple of thoughts:

In defence of the "made man in his own image" concept, even in my childhood back in the late middle ages, the sixpenny catechism did explain that "this likeness to God is chiefly in the soul" - i.e. it is is humanity's spiritual capacities that are supposed to image God, not our genitals (or in any physical characteristic).

As for why just one designer, SFAIK nobody specifies just one designer. The designer could certainly be a collective - e.g., I mischievously suggest, a Trinity. 😉

And, as for why just one designed universe - again, I don't think the hypothesis requires that. But two thoughts do occur. One is that we have to define "universe". If we assume a designer, then a perfectly cromulent definition of "universe" is "all that the designer has designed". In which case, we might have a single "universe" that embraces a number of parallel, segregated, mutually inaccessible realities. Obviously, existing in one of those realities, we would have no way of empirically observing any of the others, but they would all be part of the "universe", and you would defend that by saying that the designer can observe them all. But that's just a semantic point about what we mean when we say "universe".

The other, slightly more substantial, thought is that I can see William of Ockham getting very shirty. We're not supposed to postulate entities unnecessarily. If the "necessity" for the postulated multiverse is to avoid the need for an intelligent designer, where is the necessity for postulating both an intelligent designer and a multiplicity of universes?

No doubt, though, it's unfair to suggest that the multiverse is hypothesised simply to avoid the embarrassment of an intelligent designer who might or might not share something in common with the Christian concept of God. I somehow doubt that that is a consideration which would have carried much weight with, say, Hawkings; no doubt he had much more scientifically respectable grounds for hypothesising a multiverse.

But that brings me back to a question I raised earlier. To what extent is the multiverse hypothesised as an alternative to asserting that it is a fortuitous coincidence that our universe has just the "right" constants? If we take intelligent design off the table completely and assume that the choice comes down to just those two, surely Ockham would say, well, the "fortuitous coincidence" explanation is to be favoured? Is there a reason for not going with Ockham on this?

...and of course doesn't answer the question of what created the creator...

Where do you put "there's just this universe, and the fact that the universal constants favour the development of consciousness is just fortuitous" in your hierarchy of likelihood?

I'm not making any argument based on human consciousness. And the argument based on consciousness, as I understand it (and, health warning, it may be that I understand it poorly) is not so much that consciousness is all that crash-hot in itself, but that the conditions that allow consciousness to develop — the conditions that allow the universe to develop large interconnected networks from which intelligence will emerge — have extremely narrow parameters and, if the characteristics of the universe are randomly set, the likelihood that the universe would fall within those parameters is vanishingly small. And yet, it does fall within those parameters, as evidenced by our own existence. And to explain this apparently improbable coincidence we hypothesise (a) intelligent design or (b) the multiverse.

My problem is that, while the likelihood that the universe would have the particular characteristics that it does may be vanishingly small, it is no smaller than the likelihood that the universe would have any other particular set of characteristics. Whatever kind of universe popped out of the big bang, it could be said that that precise universe was an incredibly unlikely outcome. An extremely unlikely event was, in a sense, inevitable, and therefore the fact that it was this extremely unlikely event doesn't look to me like providing robust grounds for hypothesising either the intelligent designer or the multiverse.

Which leaves me curious as to why you would put random contingency below the multiverse explanation. My instinct would be to favour random contingency as the simplest explanation, ahead of both the multiverse and the intelligent designer, and to argue that it's impossible to rank those two as they are both wholly speculative and unevidenced.

Consciousness biologically always seems to me to have derived naturally as a necessity for complex organism to make decisions rather than depending on say tentacles with a limited amount of perception of what's out there beyond their immediate vicinity. Those decisions will depend on their survival as a species, otherwise if there was no consciousness capable of making decisions they would be wiped out by naturalistic events, e.g there is a volcano erupting lets make a run for it.

As for the fine tuned universe, and taking Roger Penroses' theory into account which isn't exactly a multiverse, but that the big bang is one of a series of sequential universes i.e not existing at the same time but linearly, one universe after the other after the other, then if this has gone on to infinity in the past and will go in the the future then all sorts of scenarios in terms of concussions could exist. What I'm saying in consciousness may not be limited to biological organisms, even in our iteration of our universe.

I must say I've always thought a one off big bang that expands into heat death over time to be implausible. Because that would be a one-off event even if it takes a very long time to play out, so I'm with Penrose on his theory.

In the discussion below, William Lane Craig argues that the mystery of our existence, i.e abstract ideas, mathematical truths, and personal experiences, can be explained by a divine creator. I'm impressed with Craig's knowledge of cosmology and quantum physics him being a theologian. But as Penrose says here, Craigs 'explanation' doesn't add any value, i.e, you can't test his theory to see if it's true. And Craig can't explain how an entity can not just 'design' a naturalistic universe but even create it in the first place no mind design it. So I don't think Craig's argument that the universe can't be created out of nothing, self create say, when he himself is saying that God created it out of nothing as well.

I think it's no more implausible that time goes infinitely to the past therefore there was no beginning than his divine solution. Both are mind bending but his is more mind-bending imo and a lazy solution.

Those initials are appropriate

I think Penrose came off badly in that discussion.

Craig is a philosopher as well as a theologian, and he certainly knows his stuff. Penrose is 'just' a theoretical cosmologist, and nothing else. Well we can all have theories. His theory on sequential universes isn't really an idea that even a child couldn't muster up. In fact I've even thought of that possibility myself before I ever heard of Penrose, because the idea of a one off big bang where the universe eventually expands till it's dead as a one off event never seemed plausible to me.

What I would say to Craig is we don't need a transcendent being to have moral values, which is what Craig always says. He says that moral values have to come from somewhere otherwise moral values are just relative and that any particular moral value is just subjective.

But I don't think that's right. We (humans) can decide what moral values are ourselves without them being dictated to us by a divine creator.

Well I did knee-jerk react in response to @robindch left wing-ish comparison of WLC to Peterson. I thought we didn't do that sort of thing here.

WLC makes the point that there is such a think as transcendent time, and this has noting to do with Einsteins theory of general relativity, where for those that don't know is that time does not pass at the same rate for 'everything' in the universe or more precisely at every point in space.

Been getting my head around the idea that time slows down the closer and closer a thing moves in space to the speed of light. This has been proven, but it seems to me that all that happens is the movement of quantum particles slows down the faster they move through space (not time itself), and this has noting to do with transcendent time, as WLC pointed out to Penrose.

I don't think Penrose's cyclical model does anything to prove there was no beginning of the universe, or universes, aeons he has christened them. It is only Quantum mechanics that can prove that, not cosmology.

So again we are still left with the age old problem, how can the universe form out of nothing. Until Quantum Mechanics can show that either time is infinite in the past or particles can form out of nothing we're really not any closer than we ever were to proving there was no divine creator. Not that I'm saying there was a divine creator just that we still can't disprove it.