From philosopher Hans Halvorson at Nautilus blog:
This new fine-tuning design argument claims the imprimatur of physics, and is presented in quantitatively precise terms: among the set of all possible universes, the percentage that could sustain life is so small that the human mind cannot imagine it. By all rights, our universe shouldn’t have existed. What wonder that our universe has given birth to life, especially intelligent life. It seems the only explanation for this wildly improbable outcome is the supposition that there is a Designer.
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There’s a deep problem lurking in the background of the fine-tuning argument, which rests on two factual claims. One is that a life-conducive universe exists. And the second is that this kind of universe is improbable.* It’s the second fact that is responsible for the resurrection of the design argument, and fine-tuning advocates are so focused on using it as a premise that they’ve failed to see that it needs explanation. That is, why is it the case that it’s unlikely for an arbitrary universe to be conducive to life? It’s not plausible to write it off as a brute necessity, because it’s not obvious that this had to be the case, nor could it have been discovered by pure reason alone. The reason to believe the second fact is because it is a prediction of our best physical theory.
But even if we do find the much-needed explanation, it will be disastrous for the fine-tuning argument, because it would disconfirm God’s existence. After all, a benevolent God would want to create the physical laws so that life-conducive universes would be overwhelmingly likely. More.
But that’s a ridiculous objection. We believe our universe to be fine-tuned on the basis of evidence for the fine-tuning. We know of no other universes to compare it with. There is no way of evaluating the question of whether it would be more benevolent to create more universes as we have no idea what the ramifications would be, from a divine perspective.
Is this the best argument against fine-tuning available, this side of crackpot cosmology?
See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
and
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“After all, a benevolent God would want to create the physical laws so that life-conducive universes would be overwhelmingly likely.”
This reminds me of the theistic evolution argument, that it is possible to consider that a god could produce a law set and a big bang that would inevitably produce life without intervention. Therefore to suggest that God did intervene is to suggest him to be less that the imagined uber-god. So theistic evolutionists believe in a greater god than those who believe in an intervening God.
All well and good, but God could intervene. What if God wanted to intervene? Lets get past what some mythical god could have done and find out what really happened!
Let’s unpack that.
If a benevolent human artisan creates the most intricate, precise, beautiful and unique artifact possible, then it is overwhelmingly likely, because he takes extreme care to make sure it actually gets made.
It’s only unlikely if there were some obscure virtue in masterpieces appearing spontaneously whilst the artist watches TV and hopes the materials will come together.
Fine-tuning is a question of probability versus design, not probability as part of design.
I’m glad someone knows for sure what a benevolent God would want. Did he come to this understanding through science? or is this a religious belief?
“After all, a benevolent God would want to create the physical laws so that life-conducive universes would be overwhelmingly likely.”
That only follows if God’s sole objective is to maximize the likelihood of the cosmos generating life – something which, I might point out, He has no need to do, as He knows which way the chips will fall.
But if God has a second objective – namely, to reveal His existence to the sapient beings who come into existence in the cosmos He creates – then making a finely tuned cosmos would be a very smart way for Him to leave a calling card.
https://afortunateuniverse.wordpress.com/
Philosopher Hans Halvorson starts his argument out as such:
The ignorance displayed by the learned professor in these first few sentences is breath-taking.
If anything, today, due to advances in our knowledge, the supposed evolution of the eye is even more ‘absurd’ than Darwin himself freely admitted in his day:
To be sure, Darwin tried to counter the absurdity, and the cold shudder, he felt about the eye by making up a vague just so story about how the eye could have have possibly come about by unguided material processes.
Yet, to point out the blatantly obvious, making up a vague ‘just so story’ for how the eye could have possibly ‘evolved’ does not equate to a actual good scientific explanation for how the eye actually did come about. Not in the least.
To be sure, the just so stories of today’s Darwinists have grown more sophisticated in there make-up than Darwin’s orginal story was, but that does not make their imaginary ‘just so stories’ any more scientific than Darwin’s original just so stories were.
Here is a classic from David Berlinski, circa 2003, in which he, with characteristic wit, took apart Nilsson & Pelger’s ‘just so story’ on eye evolution
As mentioned previously, if anything, today, due to advances in our knowledge, the supposed evolution of the eye is even more ‘absurd’ than Darwin himself freely admitted in his day:
First off, the fossil record for the supposed evolution of the eye is thoroughly non-Darwinian in what it reveals.
Secondly, the complexity of the eye is simply amazing. Certainly far beyond what Darwin imagined it to be:
That Darwinists have no real clue how Darwinian processes produced the eye is revealed in the following article:
Moreover, even if Darwinists had a clue how unguided material processes could possibly produce such jaw dropping sophistication in the eye, they still would have no clue as to what is actually ‘seeing’ in the human body.
In other words, although a person may equip a computer with a camera, no one in his right mind would ever claim that there is a conscious person within the computer that is able to ‘see’ the images from the camera.
i.e. It takes a conscious person to actually ‘see’ an image
Along that line:
Verse and Quote:
Halvorson says this:
His mistake is thinking that fine-tuning arguments merely evoke a sense of wonder and not a design argument from scientific observation.
Then he says this:
I shouldn’t be surprised that a contemporary philosopher does not even understand the basics of the design argument.
The bad odds tell us that chance cannot be the cause – only God could be. Twisting the improbable origin of the universe into an argument against the existence of God is absurd. All he’s left with is it was a lucky chance occurrence, and that has already been discounted.
Hello vjtorley @ 4: “But if God has a second objective – namely, to reveal His existence to the sapient beings who come into existence in the cosmos He creates – then making a finely tuned cosmos would be a very smart way for Him to leave a calling card.” ______________________________________________________________________
Surely, there is nothing smarter than people seeing God witnessing publicly, accompanied by the sound of trumpets (Exod 19:16-20), flashes of lightning, smoke, darkness of cloud, not to mention the fear of God in the Israelites (v18), and a shaking Mountain—that he created in six days, and in plain speech (Num 12:3-9), and devoid of other circumstantial days.
Fine tuning figures, are they the result of evolution, or the result of fine tuning of a mature cosmos in six days? How do we test such against a supernatural smart God?
His Calling Card; two stone tablets, plus, a backup book placed next to the ark and carried with fear and utmost respect after what they saw at Sinai, and from then on, daily for forty years. Divine law given through an intelligently designed statement by the Almighty which He wrote and testified to. Him being untuned to taking a long time for anything.
Alternatively, it may seem, blindness and deafness are factors at Sinai; the witness statement of the Judaeo-Christian God folly, a primitive God. Still, there can only be one divine truth, perhaps it is the Big Bang Theory which is primitive next to Sinai? One day we will be finely tuned with His judgment. What are the odds on a divine law being unclear, wrong, or inaccurate when establishing a way to live for sapient beings?
VJT at #4
He left something more clear than a calling card. He used language. — a phenomenon that big bang cosmologists and Darwinian evolutionists cannot explain.
They’ll all come around eventually, but will it be too late for them?
Hans Halvorson gets everything wrong. Unreadable nonsense.
Origenes, don’t blame Hans Halvorson. After all everything ‘he’, (whatever ‘he’ means in evolution), is seeing with his evolved eyes is merely an illusion in the first place. So it is no wonder that ‘he’ calls the design ‘he’ sees in nature untrustworthy and potentially illusory. Given evolutionary premises, ‘he’ simply can’t trust anything ‘he’ sees.
In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.
Although Hoffman tried to limit his results to just our visual perceptions, as Plantinga had pointed out years before Hoffman came along, there is no reason why the results do not also extend to undermining our cognitive faculties as well:
Thus, in what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality, and cognitive faculties, are illusory is NOT a worldview that can be firmly grounded within the scientific method!
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the math of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that all their observations of reality are illusory!
Of supplemental note: It is interesting to note that all these ‘illusory’ perceptions that atheists are having about what they see in life always seems to be ‘illusions of design’ that they are seeing in life:
Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, seems to have been particularly haunted by seeing the ‘illusion of design’ everywhere he looked in molecular biology:
Illusory perceptions producing illusions of design. Let the insanity of what atheists are claiming sink in for a minute.
And to top it all off, atheists also claim that we are not real persons but that we are merely ‘neuronal illusions’.
Thus we have illusory perceptions producing illusions of design for neuronal illusions.
Hippies on LSD could not ‘escape from reality’ as much as Darwinian theory itself has escaped from reality!
Whereas back in the real world, in the following video, after demonstrating through the mathematics of population genetics that Natural Selection is grossly inadequate as a designer substitute, Dr. Richard Sternberg states:
Thus in conclusion, either the design we see in life is really real or else everything that we hold as being real in reality is an illusion.
Verses:
Given materialism, how does one ground ‘observation’? If there is no person who observes, then such an attempt falls at the first hurdle. Moreover, if there is no aboutness, then there can be no internalized picture about the external world.
Origenes @12:
Professors Roger Penrose and David Chalmers may have the answer to your question: The hard problem of consciousness. You may want to ask them and then share their answer with everybody else here. 🙂
Here’s a hint:
Are they between a rock and a hard place? 🙂
vjtorley @4
Interesting metaphor.
Dionisio, to be frank, I find Chalmer’s writings utterly uninteresting. He seems to hold that, from a naturalistic point of view, there are easy and hard problems wrt consciousness. So what?
In short, I’m unimpressed — the more important point is that his beloved naturalism doesn’t make sense at all ; e.g. see #11.
OT: Dr. Cornelius Hunter, one of my favorite critics of Darwinian evolution, now has a channel on Youtube:
Origenes @15:
Did you notice these two sentences in my comment @13? They were hints:
They represent how far the highly educated academic thinkers of this world can reach when trying to understand the ultimate reality in their materialistic terms.
But Chalmers kept a whole Ted Talk auditorium literally hypnotized with his worldly description of the mystery in eastern philosophical terms.
No questions asked.
Welcome to this world! Spiritually lost and blind.
It’s sad. Pathetically depressing, isn’t it?
Fine tuning no more indicates fine tuning over 13.8 billion years or six days. It just indicates fine tuning, the rest you have to believe without fine tuning a commandment to suit the Big Bang Theory.
In Judaeo-Christian terms, the Holy Trinity through Yahweh the Father made a major public announcement at Sinai. In Genesis, the Holy Spirit fine tuned what plain speech, no-nonsense, no riddle “day” means in that context (Num 123-9); a day being bounded by “evening and morning.”
Equally important, sacrificed each morning and evening an unblemished lamb (Exod 19:30). Comparatively, if six days does not mean six days, Yahweh has blemished the Ten Commandments and his divine laws.
In addition, sacrificed were two unblemished lambs on the sabbath morning and evening (Num 28:9). God was fine tuning us to believe exactly his word, joining six-day creation to Christ/Himself/God as worthy to be sacrificed for: the truth.
If God publicly stands in his divine court at Sinai, testifying he created in six days, sealed in stone, you do not expect him later to come back with further evidence to undermine his first witness statement, and not even attached to a divine law!
Still, on secondary circumstantial evidence, Hugh Ross teaches the Almighty needed 13.8 billion years to fine tune the universe. Against any plain reading of scripture, the Big Bang Theory is not gas tight. For some dissent against the view of fellow Christian Hugh Ross see http://creation.com/search?q=hugh+ross
BA77 @ 16: Love the video. Thank you.
A few more notes on the eye that Hans Halvorson and other Daewinists hold to be a happenstance product of evolution:
There is a biological computer in the retina which processes and compresses the information from those millions of light sensitive cells before sending it to the visual cortex where the complex stream of information is then decompressed. While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged.
Gullible, thy name is Darwinist