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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 do allow life, they don’t seem to be related to that or indeed any purpose. And in any case, from a theist’s perspective, life doesn’t have anything to do with physical constants. It’s spiritual. It could exist alongside any sort of physical constants or even without any physical matter at all. The whole point of theism is that life is not bound to our physical bodies, or physical constants, but is spiritual in nature.”
This argument is one I’ve heard from atheists that I myself have encountered on the internet. In fact, it was even used by an atheist Hugh Ross debated on The Fine Tuning (though I forget the name of that atheist). What Nugent appears to be saying is that since, on Christian theism, man can exist as a mind without a body, as a spirit or ghost, then we need not have a finely tuned universe in order to exist. On the Christian worldview, life could have existed anyway no matter what kind of values the physical constants and quantities took. Everyone could have been created as just spirits. We all could run around as just bodyless ghosts. God didn’t need to finely tune the universe for us to exist.
I have to say, this is quite a poor argument (much like all of Nugent’s other arguments). The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t refute either premise of the fine tuning argument. Both premises of the argument still stand. More.
Arguments against the fine tuning of the universe do not need to be good arguments. They just need to be the right kind of noise in the right venues.
See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
and
Free live interactive webinar Saturday with fine-tuning astrophysicist Luke Barnes
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