Fine Tuning the Fine Tuning Argument
Our own VicRuiz writes:
I have heard fine-tuning advocates argue that a physical universe would be impossible for which (for example) the gravitational constant was not identical or near-identical to the extant value we observe. Therefore our universe bespeaks creation by someone or something capable of selecting that value.
This causes me to consider that something vaguely analogical to the Euthypro dilemma could be in play.
Is God constrained by the value of G if his intent is to create a universe with living, corporeal beings?
If yes, then God’s choice is limited by something beyond God’s control.
If no, then that phrasing of the fine-tuning argument does not seem particularly strong.
My comment:
Your thoughts run parallel with mine. When I was an atheist, the fine tuning argument did not strike me as particularly strong, nor now when I am faithful Catholic.
The Fine Tuning argument makes the informal fallacy of ambiguity, using the word “impossible” both to mean logically impossible and statistically impossible.
The Fine Tuning argument also makes the formal fallacy of irrelevance. The conclusion that if an event is unlikely, therefore it is deliberate, does not follow. If an event is unlikely, all that means is that it is unlikely.
If we compare it to other events that happened under similar circumstances then we can determine the unlikelihood, and this indeed can rouse our suspicion that the matter was deliberate, but it does not prove it so.
And these suspicions can only land in cases where we see parallel cases.
If I live in a world where monsters rarely eat cookies and children often do, and I enter the kitchen to find the cookie jar raided and junior with crumbs on his cheeks, practical wisdom tells me to disbelieve his tale that a monster ate the cookie and slapped his face.
If, on the other hand, I live on Sesame Street, and the only cookies I ever saw eaten were by a cookie monster, and no good little boy nor girl ever tells a fib, my wisdom would urge the opposite conclusion.
But if we are discussing the conditions of the universe, that is, everything that exists, there can be no discussion of other universes or parallel universes, because then they do not exist, by definition.
For purposes of clarity, let us call realms that exist but are outside the lightcone of the Big Bang continua, and call the area of the universe in which we dwell this continuum.
But, again, by definition, any discussion of other continua is therefore outside any empirical reach. It is, at best, philosophical speculation.
That said, let us speculate:
Suppose life could not arise except in the universe where ratio between circumference and diameter is the irrational number pi. If pi were equal to three, as it is in some variations of non-Euclidean or spherical geometry, life would never arise.
Let us say that some nuance of how a DNA helix worked required strict Euclidean geometry to be the rule, or somesuch. Or, if that is no good, let us pretend it were found that if the value of pi were different the inverse square ratio of how much sunlight or gravity reaches orbiting planets were not allow for life to arise, or atoms to be formed from plasma.
Now, I sit down with R2D2 and he has his adding machine in hand (if he had hands), or, if I am from Arrakis, sit down with my loyal Mentat, Piter, and ask it or him what are the odds of pi being equal to pi?
The tenth digit of pi is “5” so the chance that it could be another digit, including zero, is nine out of in ten, right? The hundredth digit is “9”, as if the thousandth, and the ten-thousandth digit is “8”, one hundred thousandth is “6”, millionth is “1” — if any of these digits are out of place, the value of pi is not equal to pi, and life is impossible.
Now probabilities of this exact sequences of numbers (5, 9, 9, 8, 6, 1) occupying the first six tenfold digit positions is 0.00001, or one in a million.
Does this mean the chance of the universe having the Euclidian ratio of circumference and diameter be exactly pi is one in a million?
No, because the millionth digit of pi is not the last digit of pi. As it so happens, or so my mathematician friend tells me, the final digit of pi is, in fact the same as the ultimate prime number.
And if we compare ever longer strings of numbers in the sequence, as the ten millionth digit, the hundred millionth, the billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth, quintillionth, and so on and so on, we will never reach an end. The probability calculus drops an order of magnitude (or three) with each additional digit considered.
So let us suppose instead of asking Piter the Mentat or R Daneel Olivaw, we ask a Star Trek computer to calculate pi to the last digit. By this calculation, the chance of pi being equal to pi are indistinguishable from zero!
Which means that this universe, the one we inhabit, is impossible, and we do not exist. Only Descartes exists, because he thinks. I do not think, or else I would not have embarked on this fallacious argument.
I trust any reader patient enough to read this far sees the fallacy in the argument. The word “possible” is here being used in an ambiguous way. It is “possible” for pi to be equal to three only in the sense that I can write the sentence “pi is equal to three” and the sentence is grammatical. It is possible in words only.
Is it possible in reality? Well, only if there is more than one spacetime continuum in the universe, and at least one of these other continua can and does conform to a non-Euclidian geometry where pi equals three.
Such continua can exist in the imagination: I have written science fiction stories about parallel dimensions, as have most men in my genre. Is this a coherent imagination? It is possible for non-Euclidean geometries to have physical existence? This is not an empirical question, and may not be a meaningful question. If I invent an imaginary world for a science fiction story, any unexpected logical contradiction which would prevent it from ever being real can be brushed aside, so that what we pretend is possible in fact is impossible, that is, logically not possible. Indeed there is a whole genre of such stories: they are called time travel stories.
So, in sum, here is the argument and here is the fallacy.
The argument is that pi must be pi in order for life to exist. Pi has an infinite number of possible other values it could have been, but was not. Which means the percent chance of our universe being the only one where life arose is infinitesimal, that is, indistinguishable from zero. Life is impossible! But life exists, so an impossible event, a miracle, must have created the universe, and this all men know to be God. Voila!
Here is the fallacy: in a universe where Playfair’s Axiom is true, the geometry is Euclidian. In such a universe, pi cannot have any other value. It cannot be equal to three. It is not logically possible for pi to be three, nor for the Pythagorean Theorem to be wrong. Such things are matters of logic, hence not subject to probabilistic statements.
The statement “what are the odds of pi being three?” as written, is meaningless. It is not a question of odds. We are talking about other universes as if such things were real. Real in what sense? They are not empirically real. Are they real in the sense that they could have existed, but just happen not ever to have been? Well, if so, by what reasoning do we deduce that they could have been as opposed to could not have been?
Any speculation of other continua involves areas of timespace, or, perhaps, areas of some unimaginable matrix of intervals indescribable as time or space or any combination thereof , without being part of our continuum of time and space, that is, something outside the reach of our sense, and perhaps subject to other laws of nature, if the idea of “other laws of nature” even makes any sense, outside of idle speculations of science fictioneers.
We do not know what could have been. We do not have a hundred universes to examine to see in how many Euclidean geometry obtains as opposed to some other geometry. We do not know if Playfair’s Axiom is necessary for life, or an irrational value of pi, or any other reality of geometry or mathematics.
If the gravitational constant is determined by the geometry of spacetime, it cannot be any different than the value it is, any more than pi can be different from the value it is. We do not know what, if anything, constrains the value of the gravitational constant. I can imagine a universe with a different value, but, then again, I can imagine a time machine. This does not mean my imagination is making a logical picture of anything rather than simply propounding a paradox.
I can also draw an Escher drawing, with endless stairways or millwheels or one hand drawing the other out of nowhere. Such drawings do not make sense on closer examination.
So we cannot know what the odds are of life existing in this continuum without other continua being available to examine. By definition, if something exists in another continuum, we can never examine that something. If light or gravity or any signal could reach from the alien continua to ours, we would be the same continuum, because that is what the word “continuum” means, namely, continuity of phenomena.
But if it should happen that we somehow deduce the existence metaphysically of one hundred continua, perhaps by some philosophical argument showing these exo-dimensional areas of timespace must exist, and we can count how many have life and how many do not, how many have the gravitational constant and how many do no, how many have pi and how many do not, then would could make statements of percentage.
If life exists in half of the hundred continua, the percent of a continue holding life if fifty out of a hundred; if only one, then one in a hundred. This statement could be written in numerals with a percentage sign, to make it look like a scientific statement, rather than a philosophical deduction, as is the custom in these corrupt and mentally unfocused times.
Even then, without knowing what initial conditions or dependencies established what continua could versus could not exist, such a statement would not be a statement of probability. A statement of probability is one where, as when one flips a coin to tosses dice, one knows the range of possible outcomes (heads or tails, snake-eyes to boxcars) but does not know the nuances of forces acting on coin or dice cup to predict which outcome comes to pass. Here, even if we knew after the fact what conditions existed in parallel continua, we would not know what the range of continua as yet uncreated might be, nor what factors, if any, go into the decision as to how they shall be created.
And if it should happen that a more pellucid explanation of the laws of nature should even show all the ratios and relations between the various universal constants, it may be proven that these values cannot be other than they are, any more than pi can be three in a Euclidian geometry. In which case continua established on other grounds will be logically impossible, not merely statistically impossible.
There is a final fallacy: even if it were somehow conceded or proved that in this universe, only a universe where pi was a given value would life arise, or the gravitational constant, or any other physical property, in the parallel universe next door, where pi is three, there may simply be no DNA nor planets in round orbits no anything else we recognize, because the life forms there are organized on entirely different principles, and have no relation whatever to life as we know it.
And such strange forms could arise naturally, by blind chance, or be created by divine fiat, depending on what role, if any God plays in creation.
The nearby universe where the gravitational constant was different, and the primordial singularity never unfolded into monolinear timespace filled with matter-energy that divided into four fundamental forces, combined primal plasma into atoms and molecules, creating stars and planets and life bearing chemical seas.
Instead, the primordial reality issued into musical and moral dimensions, forming note, chords, hypernotes and nonquantum glissades of intertangled axioms and imperatives, giving rise to purely intellectual beings with no physical extension, and with neither future nor past, but able freely to move sideways in time, into the bluer and redder being-conditions, and form dodecahedra out of twenty essential filaments and ratiocinations.
Now, do these non-dimensional paratime creatures composed of living musical ratios count as being alive? Were they made by God, or did they arise naturally from the conditions that erupted forth into the musical directions during the Prime Action? Are they possible or impossible? Just because a science fiction writer can throw words at a page and fury of ink does not mean the thing is real in any meaningful sense of the word.
In sum, the Fine Tuning Argument has no persuasive value unless we know, if anything, form the limits that Omnipotent God or primordial nature labor under when bringing continua into being. And then we have to know or deduce two things: first, the limits of God are less than the limits of nature (and I would argue that we know this by definition, as God is defined as the author of nature).
Second, we have to know our present conditions of the universe are such that it could not have been created by nature, but only could have been created by God.
In other words, we would have to know what the set of all possible universes actually was, and where in that ranking of possible universes this present universe we inhabit actually falls, and moreover where the threshold of naturally occurring universes rests, and where the threshold of deliberately created universe rests.
And we would have to know that if a universe had one in fifty chance of coming about naturally, it could be natural, but if one in fifty zillion chance, it could not come about naturally, as that is too unlikely.
But we do not know any of these things. In order for the Fine Tuning Argument to work, we already have to know that some universes are too beautiful, complex, well-tempered, and well suited for divine design to have arisen by blind nature.
But even a simple man, looking up into a starry night, and hearing a distant night-bird cry, knows this instinctively. Any child knows it.
There is no need to bring in a Fine Tuning Argument, and ponder the value of pi or Planck’s constant when a midnight stroll will convince anyone who sayeth not in his heart that there is no God.
The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of His hands.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
