Fine tuning

Often used to dismiss the masses of evidence for fine-tuning of our universe, as opposed to chance. From Tim Barnett at Salvo: This response may have some rhetorical force, but it makes a fundamental mistake. To expose the error, let me give you another illustration. Imagine your best friend has been murdered and the lead suspect is on trial. In fact, DNA evidence puts the suspect at the scene with the murder weapon in hand. As a result, the defense attorney turns to the jury and says, “The DNA evidence makes it highly unlikely that my client is innocent. But unlikely things happen all the time. For example, for you to exist, your mom and dad had to meet, fall Read More ›

I (News) usually run this kind of question on Sunday but at a recent post, “Intelligent design: The materialist double standard” there was an exchange: Bob O’H: Seriously, what is the IDers’ answer to the “who designed the designer” question? (failure to answer this will – of course – immediately condemn all IDers as poopyheads, despite any efforts by the Federation of Creationist Scientists, International/Overseas to suppress this categorisation) and it was replied to: Barry Arrington: Bob, have you ever heard the old saw “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” It is false. Stupid questions abound. The one you just asked is one of them. As has been pointed out on these pages 1,303,261 times (all of which Read More ›

The firestorm ignited by Ijjas, Loeb & Steinhardt’s blog post in Scientific American,  is very much worth your time reading. It engages Peter Woit’s string-theory criticism on his blog. But the scientists do not divide into sides very rationally, as Woit notices, “This is getting very weird. It’s not normal to respond to a scientific argument by enlisting letter writers on your behalf, even less normal to put your university press office to work on a response..” Abraham Loeb is a cosmologist age 55 at Harvard who came from a Jewish farming community in Israel. He is known for creativity and writing on many sides of an issue. Paul Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist age 65 at Princeton, Read More ›

Astrophysicist and neuroscientist Casper Hesp wrote a piece at BioLogos, reviewing physicist Peter Bussey’s Signposts to God. Hesp thinks that fine-tuning of the universe is not a good argument for theism. After all, despite massive evidence and the utter improbability of other approaches, we could find out some day that we are wrong. From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz: Last week I posted on what I see as a growing (and concerning) trend among BioLogians: the gravitation towards full-on naturalism (even beyond cosmology). I also speculated that Bussey’s arguments had been badly misrepresented. I decide to ask Dr. Bussey directly about some of the Hesp’s claims. In a really splendid way Bussey has offered a response. I am cut-pasting Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter,, author of Shadow of Oz offers a response to Casper Hesp’s concern that we not take fine-tuning of our universe to be evidence for God: It’s odd to review a review, but a few things came up in Casper Hesp’s review of Signposts to God (by physicist Peter Bussey), and I felt they needed to be pointed out. First let me say that it is apparent that Hesp’s views are not that representative of BioLogos in general (which begs the question, why is he writing for them?). Namely, if his views are correct then both Francis Collins and Robin Collins, and a good many other BioLogians, are wrong. In fact, most Christians are wrong, because most of us Read More ›

In “BioLogos: One shouldn’t use fine-tuning as an argument for God’s existence, Wayne Rossiter was quoted as saying that he had predicted hat theistic evolutionists would go to war against fine-tuning. So, we naturally asked, where? Where’s your sealed, time-stamped, notarized envelope? Turns out, it’s in his book Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, and he helpfully provided us with some quotations: After unwrapping the anthropic argument from ‘fine-tuning,’[Bruce] Glass [a theistic evolutionist] crosses the finish line with, ‘It should not go unnoted that there are plausible alternatives to the idea that our universe was specifically designed for the purpose of producing life. None of these alternatives, however, do anything to exclude the possibility of God as Read More ›

From Casper Hesp at BioLogos: I believe it is unwise to turn fine-tuning into an argument based on the gaps in our understanding, because the properties of the universe could become more amenable to scientific explanation in the future. Watchful readers will have noticed that the pitfalls discussed here have almost one-on-one equivalents in common arguments of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. ID proponents have used arguments from probability, entropy, and gaps in our current understanding of nature to make inferences about the existence of a “designer.” More. Has the author any reason to expect that more discoveries will lead to fewer perceptions of fine-tuning? Has that been the pattern so far? If not, what is his basis for thinking it Read More ›

No, we hadn’t heard of it either. At Cerebral Faith, Christian apologist Evan Minton explains, Recently, William Lane Craig debated atheist Michael Nugent in Ireland on the existence of God. One of the arguments that Dr. Craig employed was The Fine Tuning Argument for design. I’m going to assume that readers of this article already have some familiarity with the fine tuning, so in case you’re new to the God debate, or this website, or apologetics in general, I discuss The Fine Tuning Argument in this blog post here. In response to the Fine Tuning Argument, Nugent said the following: “Theists believe that this God fine tuned the physical constants of the universe to allow life. But while these constants Read More ›

We’ve yet find any dark matter, let alone dark energy, actually but Luke Barnes notes at Nautilus: Our cosmic environment is the result of a delicate balance of cosmic forces—gravity and pressure, cooling and heating, expansion and collapse. The final product, when all these pushes and pulls come into balance, is our Milky Way galaxy, where stars form in a rotating disk of gas and a diffuse halo of dark matter. … Even prior to the observational confirmation of dark energy, Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had wrestled with the theoretical overestimate and suggested a remarkable solution. He noted that the amount of vacuum energy can vary from place to place, depending on how all the different fields in Read More ›

From Stuart Clark at : Particles can become entangled when they interact, and once they do, no matter how far apart they are, measuring the properties of one automatically fixes the properties of the other – changes its socks, as it were. Einstein decried this “spooky action at a distance”, yet many experiments have shown it is an essential ingredient of our world. “Without quantum entanglement, we could not have quantum theory as we know it, and quantum theory is the basis of chemistry, our semiconductor industry, even life,” says Caslav Brukner of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, Austria. But here’s the really weird thing. There’s nothing stopping the quantum world having different levels of Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie kindly writes to say, This coming Saturday, at the usual time of 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST /12noon PST, I am going to be hosting another edition of the *Apologetics Academy* live interactive webinar. This week, our guest is astrophysicist Dr. Luke Barnes of the University of Sydney. Dr. Barnes is arguably the world’s leading authority on the fine-tuning evidence for the existence of God. There will be plenty of opportunity to interact and ask questions (you can even do so anonymously!). Go here and make sure no one sees you install the Zoom software (a minute or two). See also: Cosmologist Luke Barnes on fine-tuning of the universe Webinar with Scott Minnich: Reinterpreting long-term evolution Read More ›

From Hugh Ross, author of Improbable Planet, at the Reason to Believe: For plants, animals, and advanced life to possibly exist, the liquid water and ultraviolet habitable zones must sustain their region of overlap for at least a few billion years. This longevity requirement creates a problem for all stars more massive than the Sun. Such stars burn up much faster than the Sun and their luminosities change much more radically than does the Sun’s. The faster and more dramatic burn-up histories of stars more massive than the Sun eliminates the planets orbiting such stars from possibly possessing plants, animals, or advanced life. As noted earlier, for a planet to remain habitable it must avoid at least five different kinds Read More ›

Avoiding flap doodle is becoming important today. We are living in an age of well-funded fake physics (space aliens could be hiding in dark matter and such). At the end of the day one would want to learn something… A friend says that Luke Barnes’s A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos is a good resource: Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it – and life as we can imagine it – would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back Read More ›

From Sciencedaily: New research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals that the Earth’s unique iron composition isn’t linked to the formation of the planet’s core, calling into question a prevailing theory about the events that shaped our planet during its earliest years. Lin said that one of the most popular theories to explain the Earth’s iron signature is that the relatively large size of the planet (compared with other rocky bodies in the solar system) created high pressure and high temperature conditions during core formation that made different proportions of heavy and light iron isotopes accumulate in the core and mantle. This resulted in a larger share of heavy iron isotopes bonding with elements that make up the rocky Read More ›

From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: New Evidence for the Strange Idea that the Universe Is a Hologram One of the great mysteries of modern cosmology is how our universe can be so thermally uniform—the vast cosmos is filled with the lingering heat of the Big Bang. Over time, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, but it can still be seen in the faint glow of microwave radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background. In any direction we look, the temperature of this cosmic background is basically the same, varying by only tiny amounts. But according to the standard “cold dark matter” model of cosmology, there wasn’t enough time for hotter and cooler regions of the Read More ›