The proponents of chance origins tend to make it look less likely all the time.
Fine tuning
Wintery Knight: Does the multiverse counter the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence?
Knight: The multiverse is not pure nonsense, it is theoretically possible.But even if there were a multiverse, the generator that makes the universes itself would require fine-tuning, so the multiverse doesn’t get rid of the problem. And, as Lightman indicates, we have no independent experimental evidence for the existence of the multiverse in any case.
Was the dinosaur destruction fine-tuned?
Okay but, seriously, if this data is correct, how would we know the extinction WASN’T fine-tuned?
Study: Enzymes act very specifically to control double-strand breaks
At ScienceDaily: “It’s like an engine mechanic who has a set of tools at his disposal,” Dr. Sung said. “The tool he uses depends on the issue that needs to be repaired. In like fashion, each DNA repair tool in our cells is designed to repair a distinctive type of break in our DNA.”
How do cells have the “talent” to just change their settings?
Hmm. Either cells are smarter than we think or some sort of fine-tuning underlies biology.
Paper: Inflation doesn’t solve fine-tuning puzzles
From Physical Review D: We investigate the initial conditions of inflation in a Bianchi I universe that is homogeneous but not isotropic. We use the Eisenhart lift to describe such a theory geometrically as geodesics on a field-space manifold. We construct the phase-space manifold of the theory by considering the tangent bundle of the field Read More…
Discussion of fine-tuning at Journal of Theoretical Biology
It would be nice to continue a civilized discussion of what fine-tuning means and implies in biology. Would incorporating an expectation of fine-tuning into biology hypotheses lead to quicker advances sooner? How will we test this—assuming that the village Darwin mob doesn’t storm the place, demanding that we shut down the discussion?
If the universe could only be infinitely old and causeless…
… all kinds of Darwinian flapdoodle might make sense. Or at least Darwinians could stall skeptics more easily. All kinds of other flapdoodle would make sense too. The trouble is, the universe isn’t infinitely old.
Guillermo Gonzalez: Earth’s position makes space exploration easier
Gonzalez: In the larger context of the Milky Way galaxy, our Solar System is in the best location to initiate interstellar missions. In summary, we here confirm and expand upon recent studies that argue that the Earth and the Solar System are rare in the degree to which they facilitate space exploration.
Luke Barnes, Q & A on fine-tuning of the universe
It’s not clear that massive evidence for fine-tuning of the universe makes much difference to most naturalists because it just increases their certainty that the zero-evidence multiverse must be out there. But the rest of us will learn something. Come to think of it, panpsychists might adopt fine-tuning as an argument for an intelligent universe. We shall see.
The mystery of water: In chemistry it is now almost a “religious” controversy
But the real goal is to rule out design in nature, which the controversialists can’t do, hence the “religious” nature of the controversy. A friend writes to remind us that this is basically the stuff of Michael Denton’s book, Wonder of Water.
Have you ever wondered why the world is three-dimensional?
Why not two or four spatial dimensions? One researcher, James Scargill, argues that we could possibly have made do with two dimensions.
At New Scientist: There’s a basic fact about the universe that we “still don’t understand”
Here’s a question: What if the basic fact we “still don’t understand” is that the evidence shows that the universe is fine-tuned and that therefore, fine-tuning is not an illusion that needs explaining away? Would that simplify things? If so, how? Another question (now that we’re here anyway): How much publicly funded cosmology exists simply to promote a naturalist atheist (no fine-tuning) worldview? And what is the science rationale for that?
Looking back at a 2017 paper that risks saying that ID is “not necessarily stupid”
One would feel vaguely sorry for Raymond Bergner if he found himself dealing with a horde of Darwin trolls. But it is so much easier to sympathize with people who are prepared to acknowledge facts more forthrightly and honestly.
Rob Sheldon on why string theory’s inflationary cosmos is a degenerate research program
Sheldon: The inflationary proposal has always been ad hoc. That is, a huge, faster-than-light expansion of the universe was proposed as a solution to the “flatness” problem, where the universe expands at a rate just sufficient to counter the gravitational attraction, where “just sufficient” means one part in 10^60 power. The inflationary model was invented to solve this fine-tuning problem.