Fine Tuning Argument
A reader with the royal yet Caledonian name of Kingmcdee writes:
Just today I witnessed an atheist in Youtube comments … Responding to someone talking about fine-tuning, he asserted that no God was necessary to explain the unlikely course of events on Earth, because there existed Natural Laws which guaranteed that evolution would produce the results that it did.
Apparently he was not aware that Natural Laws are immaterial, eternal, unchangeable, and everywhere applicable – something that no physical thing could ever be.
So, he either believed that the Universe was ordered by immaterial and universal principles (a strange form of atheism indeed), or that the order of the Universe simply needed no explanation (hardly very rational).
My comment:
Allow me respectfully to disagree in part, and agree in part.
I agree with your dismissal of his backdoor fatalism with warm agreement.
His idea that natural law guarantees anything is absurd on its face. Such laws are descriptions of regularities seen in nature. Such laws are not commands written in the imperative that unwilling nature must obey out of fear of punishment.
Life arose from non-life one and once only, a unique event, and causes are unknown, whether natural or supernatural. Even if we know by faith that the Creator created life, we do not know how it was done: not even Dr. Frankenstein can reproduce the event.
Hence the origin of life is not a regular event, therefore no regularity can possibly be observed in this event, and no law of nature of how life arises from non-life can be articulated.
That said, I respectfully disagree with your dismissal of his belief that the laws of nature are immaterial and omnipresent.
The material objects we see with our senses suffer change and entropy, and hence cannot be immaterial and ever-present, but the laws governing the behaviors of these things is not and cannot be material, are not and cannot be merely local.
Myself, having been an atheist all my adult life without once doubting the existence of my mind and the mental objects my mind was able to contemplate, was never in doubt that the laws of nature, of geometry, of logic, of morality were immaterial, eternal, unchangeable and omnipresent.
I would not have called these things supernatural, only because I would have said these things were what nature was, what made nature “nature” as opposed to something else.
By the same token, when blindness fell from me, it was no strain for me to believe that the supernatural realm had the same properties (immaterial, eternal, unchangeable and omnipresent) as the immaterial aspects of nature.
That said, both sides of the argument miss the point.
Life could be likely or unlikely, inevitable or unique, either if it arose spontaneously by blind natural process or arose deliberately by the hand of the Creator working through nature.
The degree of fine-tuning of the universe needed to bring forth life is an unknown factor, so it can neither be used to give weight to arguments in favor of a Creator, nor against.
Such argument center around one of two points: (1) the degree of fine tuning needed to produce a universe with physical constants, such as gravity and electromagnetism, needed to produce atoms and molecules, or (2) the degree of fine tuning needed in and around earth, the environment of our solar system and galaxy, the size and position of the moon and so on, needed to maintain life on a planet surface.
As for the first form of the argument, regarding universal physical constants, we have no second universe to which to compare this one. As for the second, regarding astronomical conditions, we have no other example of other forms of life evolving under other conditions on other planets, or elsewhere.
Any argument about the likelihood or unlikelihood of a given event must fail if and when the event is unique, and there is no other example.
Even if we knew the likelihood that life would be found on any given world, this would not tell us whether it arose there spontaneously rather than deliberately.
And, again, even if we agree there is a certain number above which that matter must be blind chance, and below which it must be deliberate, the argument fails unless experience tells us the number.
For example: if I throw a coin and lands heads four times in a row, this is not very unusual. If I throw it a hundred times, and it lands heads each time, one the other hand, at that point I am wise to conclude the coin is weighted, or two headed.
But if I walk into a room and find a coin sitting head’s up on a desk, and no other coin is near, there is no evidence, not even an scintilla of evidence, that the coin was deliberately placed to be head’s up, or was spun or flipped and landed as blind nature determined. If, on the other hand, I find one hundred coins on the same desk sitting head’s up, I will suspect they were placed deliberately to be so. But if I then turn a coin and find they are all two headed, I again can conclude nothing.
Argument based on the idea that random events are likely to be natural, and non-random events to be deliberate are meaningless arguments unless the ratio of random to non-random is known. In the case of a balanced coin, the ratio is fifty-fifty; in the case of a two headed coin, the ratio is one, for it cannot land tails.
But how to we know we live in a balanced coin universe versus a two-headed coin universe?
Consider:
If life arises on one solar system out of a billion, and the galaxy is a trillion stars, then were are a billion life-bearing stars in such a galaxy. Each one is a billion-to-one shot.
Likewise, if it is logically impossible for any imaginable universe to have fundamental physical constants, such as Plank’s number or the ratios governing electromagnetic and gravitic forces, differ in any way from what we find here, then pointing at the unlikelihood of having those physical constants be just so arranged as to give rise to life is a pointless argument.
We do not know if the physical constants in other possible universes can be changed, or only admit of small variation, or large, or astronomical.
We will have to wait for the unified field theory even to propose an argument. Without a unified field theory, we do not know whether fundamental physical constants are independent of each other, dependent, or inevitable.
Suppose that, in Ben Franklin’s day, one heard that argument that a cosmos could have been created with magnetism but without electricity, or a second cosmos created with electricity but without magnetism, and that neither of these worlds would have nor could have brought forth life. Only this, our cosmos, has both. Since with live in a cosmos with both electricity and magnetism, the cosmos is fine tuned to produce life!
The argument is based on the assumption that electromagnetism is two difference forces that can exist independently of each other. If that is not the case, any cosmos with one force holds the other. Nothing else is logically possible, unless the Creator abandons the concept of electromagnetism altogether, and builds worlds made of forces unimaginable to us. So argument about how “likely” it is to have a cosmos with electricity but lacking magnetism is a meaningless argument.
Likelihood is seen when a group of witnesses events take place under roughly the same conditions. In this case, the universe is unique. We would have to see one hundred other universes in which life could have arisen but did not, before we can make any comment about the percent chance of life arising.
As for things like the size of the moon, or the convenience of Jupiter sweeping the solar system clear of asteroids, or the lack of eccentricity of the star Sol in orbiting the galactic center, et cetera, all we can do is observe that life as we know it could not have arisen if these factors are necessary for life to arise.
If there is only one planet of one star in one solar system per galaxy with these characteristics, that means there are, on average, two hundred billion earthlike worlds in the visible universe. If we further say that only spiral galaxies allow for galactic orbits conducive to life as we know it, this number drops to one hundred twenty billion.
However, I do note that, so far, we have found not one iota of evidence that life exists outside of our earthly sphere, not even a hint of a hint.
There may be an exoplanet some 120 lightyears hence (K2-18 b) which has carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, which may be evidence of organisms respiring, or may be indicative of some other chemical process.
However, the whole argument is inconclusive either way. If we discovered every planet teamed with life, all this would mean is that God created life abundantly. If we discovered that Earth is absolutely unique, and no other world of any star holds life, all this would mean is that God created life here and not elsewhere.
Likewise, for the atheist, if life is abundant, all this proves is that natural processes create life abundantly. If life is scarce or unique, all this means is that life is rarely or uniquely created by a natural process.
One cannot settle a metaphysical question by appeal to empirical physics. The physical facts remain the same, regardless of the metaphysical model used to interpreted those facts.
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.
