The Fine-Tuning of the Universe: Evidence for God? With Allen Hainline—The Alisa Childers Podcast #21
Is there positive scientific evidence for the existence of God? Today, we focus on the fine-tuning of the universe with special guest, Allen Hainline.
Links:
Allen's articles on cross-examined.org
Allen's Youtube channel
Overview of Fine-Tuning by Reasonable Faith
Recommended book:
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For me, the key problem with fine-tuning arguments isn't the science, but rather the probability judgments involved. It seems to me that the analogies we usually hear, like dart boards or firing squads (or selecting a grain of sand, to follow Hainline), fail to do justice to the issues at play here. This is because we don't know what if any mechanisms are behind the formation of the universe. Hainline himself seems to acknowledge this. He said (regarding the gravitational constant G): "there's no underlying theory that's driving that value [G] to anything in particular" (8:20). But that's actually a problem for the fine-tuning apologist, not a boon. Since we don't know what drives the values, we have no way to make probability judgments about where they will be driven.
Allen Hainline
6/2/2018 01:04:39 pm
The probability judgments are simply derived from the principle of indifference. Our best theories indicate a wide range of possibilities and the lack of any known constraints on the values for fundamental parameters within the theories forms the basis then for estimating the probability of obtaining a parameter in the life-permitting range. In the lack of any known constraints or distributions, the principle of indifference then leads one to assume a uniform distribution of values among possibilities. For further details on evaluating probabilities – this article by Luke Barnes may be of help:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.03965.pdf
For the fine-tuning to go away would require new physics that just happened to provide exceedingly narrow constraints in the life-permitting range which would still be a very narrow range among logical possibilities. There are so many parameters that are currently seen as being finely-tuned that even non-theists like Martin Rees indicate that "even if all apparently anthropic coincidences could be explained in this way, it would still be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also those propitious for life."
Any science-based argument is always subject to change based on new scientific discoveries but this falsifiability is I think more of a strength than a weakness. You'd be hard-pressed to find many physicists who have studied fine-tuning in detail who assume it would just go away based on new physics – most appeal to the multiverse if they're not theists. Many non-theistic physicists quote the same probabilities that I do (although I try to stay on the conservative end of their assessments) – e.g. Weinberg, Smolin, Susskind, Rees, Tegmark, …
Thank you for the response.
Unfortunately, the principle of indifference is extremely controversial, and a naive such version is known to be false when applied to continuous random variables such as we see with the fine tuning constants. To my knowledge, Barnes doesn't address this. Robin Collins does, but his "restricted" POI has some pretty absurd consequences, such as being certain that given values won't obtain unless they come from a set of positive measure. And even if it didn't have absurd consequences, the fact remains, it's simply not justified.
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