As we noted earlier, in “Why the universe wasn’t fine-tuned for life” (New Scientist, 14 June 2011), Marcus Chown reports on physicist Victor Stenger’s “devastating demolition” of the argument that the laws of physics of our universe were “fine-tuned” to foster life, in The Fallacy of Fine-tuning:
Even if some parameters turn out to be fine-tuned, Stenger argues this could be explained if ours is just one universe in a “multiverse” – an infinite number of universes, each with different physical parameters. We would then have ended up in the one where the laws of physics are fine-tuned to life because, well, how could we not have?Religious people say that, by invoking a multiverse, physicists are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid God. But physicists have to go where the data lead them. And, currently, there are strong hints from string theory, the standard picture of cosmology and fine-tuning itself to suggest that the universe we can see with our biggest telescopes is only a small part of all that is there.
Thoughts?