A Fruitful Conversation with a Non-believer

I would suppose that fine-tuning, in varying respects, would apply to a large part of the planet – which could have been too liquid or too hot or too cold or too near the sun etc for life, had not some tweaking gone on with respect to the whole of it. Same for the universe itself – lest it come crashing in on itself and obliterate us all…a thing that may some day occur. As for fine tuning, I think there are many tiny details in nature and in the atomic or subatomic worlds that were very well tuned for life as we know it…It’s a big subject, and I agree with some of the objections made by others re the puddle concept.

Life tweaks itself. And vastly modifies its environment. Life arose in the Hadean. When Earth was Hell. Utterly alien and inhospitable to 99.9999% of life now.

Just found this info online. Never heard of “the Hadean” before. Source here says: The Hadean Era lasted about 700 million years, from around 4.5 billion years ago (bya) to around 3.8 bya. As you might imagine, no life could have survived the Hadean Era. Even if there were living things back then, they would all have been destroyed by the heat caused by comet and asteroid impacts

Saw another site listing the beginning of life from a date that would have been somewhere in mid-Hadean (possibly, it says) but mostly just after …

and from Newscientist.com
It has long been thought that the ingredients for life came together slowly, bit by bit. Now there is evidence it all happened at once in a chemical big bang

Read more: How did life on Earth began? A radical new theory rewrites the story | New Scientist.

Klax…I think my remarks, however, were in response to another sort of comment. Astrid said that fine tuning “would have to apply only to a thin film on a small portion
of this planet’s surface, which is an awful small percent of the universe”

That remark MAY, for all we know, be a bit flippant. For “an awful small percent” to be “just right” (like that bowl of porridge) for life, there had to be some massive fine tuning in the positioning and formation of the planet(s) where life began — for it to thrive…The chances of this happening in 3.5 B years or 13.8 B years is difficult—not enough time for the complexity of it all to be “accidentally” right. Just think of the balance of nature in the human esophagus — one wrong thing and (as does happen) the human being wrapped around that esophagus is gone. It would take a looooooooooong time for the right accident to put all that in balance. And we would have that if the universe was much older…

That’s looking down the wrong end of the telescope. It’s not how evolution works. It works from what works. Life fine tunes its environment. Life makes air and rock. Makes it rain. As Dr. Malcolm said. Life finds a way.

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yeah it finds its way…with gazillion billion quadrillions of quintillions of years of time…fine tuning is one thing…but how does one decide which is the finest tune? Like the statistics people say, not enough time…there is an infinite number of ways to screw up, but sometimes that makes you late to the dance.

Which is not the case.

99.9999999 percent is empty space which would not kill you instantly. 15 seconds without a space suit. There is a list of needs according to decreasing priorities by which you can live longer.

Now if you restricted yourself to planets you might be a little closer to correct. But we really don’t have enough information for a percentage on that one.

It found a way through abiogenesis in hundreds of millions of years. At most. It found a way to you and me and everything else, one step at a time, a hundred trillion steps, a quadrillion, in bifurcating directions, 10^30 bacteria alone, before more complex life arose a billion years ago. Less. I don’t know where you get your figures from. In terms of life years now it’s about 10^40. How much is a gazillion?

Not being flip at all. Universe fine tuned but only so miniscule a fraction usable seems an odd concrpt.

You seem to be using the fine tuned mud puddle argument.

As for " enough time", we need to see the work.

Time for tight accident involves room too.
With 330 million cubic miles of ocean, fantastivstillion carbon atoms, the well known habit of orgsnic compounds to self assemble, the fact that life is chemical in nature and follows the rules of chemistry, seems reasonable to me that most anything that can happen would happen.

Yes misunderstood

who made the rules of chemistry? It all sounds fine, but sometimes people who want to argue that it all happened without any direction from something that “had a plan,” so to speak, seem to be hoping that “blind chance with nothing doing and a long afternoon” was able to make sensible and complex organisms (just by chance and just at the right time to connect with some other accidental stuff that just happened to occur and just happened to be here and not in the Andromeda Galaxy at the moment that it was needed here …and …)… that hummed along. If I walk by a garage and see the smoke coming from the tailpipe of a car, I do not presume that occured by blind chance. I am generally positive that someone sat behind the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition (not accidentally because they knew that a key was needed, that it had to be inserted, that it had to be inserted in a certain location at a certain angle, and then turned a certain direction, started the ignition which engaged the starter cylinder which engaged (gosh – do cars still have spark plugs? ok)…I just know that someone did all this (and had the car in neutral so that it did not accidentally jump forward through the wall in the garage – or bolt in reverse and slide down the driveway) And you also, seeing that, know that the car’s engine is running and you do not demand proof. You just know that someone, not blind chance, started the engine…If you accept that all that happened randomly but nonetheless came together in a nice maroon package with a classy name on the side (Lamborghini, perhaps), then you have faith of a sort yourself…

I do sometimes wonder whether there may be any intentionality on the part of the cosmos in light of various considerations. But even if some teleology is at work here there is no reason to suppose that would look anything like it would if we were God. Assuming a set of rules attached to matter in order to obtain the order we find in matter may be more the fault of our own limitations in understanding how teleology actually works. I know the Bible talks about ordering chaos in Genesis but I don’t think divine intention requires that random, messy matter should follow a set rules by divine decree. I’ve always thought the ‘rules’ were more descriptive than prescriptive. Maybe our language just isn’t equipped to make sense of teleology even if it exists?

Physics isn’t a who.

I got the idea with a lot fewer words.
Heres a q. Who made the rule maker. That’s way harder than making a universe . How about the rules of math? Maybe they would be the same if theres no universe! 2 plus 2 gotta be 5.
Who needed to make thst

Next time around please spare us the
rquivocatiom game with " faith"?

And you did mot actually address what i said, .

Thanks for the good thoughts,Mark…I appreciate your thoughts. Yes, the Bible does talk about ordering chaos. But I have the impression that this has to do more with arguing against some philosophical/religious stance of its era (thousands of years ago) than as the idea of chaos or randomness in the scientific sense.
I am not sure that we just “assume” things require a set of rules or even some sort of creative force/entity for no good reason. I think we somehow know instinctively that the odds are against some other explanation. I still think back to Hoyle’s remark that a certain stage in the development of the carbon atom “shook his atheism” — as if to say that the odds were stacked too heavily in one direction even for him to take, at least for a moment. “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged by chance is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from materials therein.” — rgi.com/story/life/2021/06/24

Right distance from the sun…right atmospheric pressure for liquid water at our surface…right ingredients at the “right balance of heave elements and organic molecules” for life to arise…etc… see an article in www.forbes.com for more

the below is from a site called blog.magiscenter.com

Scientific Evidence for Fine-tuning: Further Evidence for God

In order for any complex life form to arise in a universe, certain conditions are necessary. When scientists examine these conditions, they agree that they are exceedingly improbable. Since these conditions are extremely improbable, scientists are left with two possible explanations…

Before diving into which explanation is more likely, we should take a closer look at some of the conditions which make our universe so improbable…

  • In order for life to develop, the universe needs to start with very low entropy. Mathematical Physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of our universe starting with such low entropy purely by chance were 1 out of 10^10^23 (see the video below for more on this).
  • In order for life to develop, it needs habitable planets. Physicist Paul Davies has determined, however, that if the gravitational constant or the weak force constant were different by 1 in 10^50, the universe would either have expanded or collapsed, catastrophically. Galaxies would not have formed, let alone stars or habitable planets.
  • Similarly slight differences in the nuclear force constant would either cause there to be no hydrogen, or only hydrogen. Either way, complex life would not have been able to develop.
  • Slight changes in either the gravitational constant or the fine structure constant would have resulted in all stars being either red dwarfs or blue giants. Neither kind of star is suitable for life.

This is a fairly common misunderstanding of what God is. If God is just another being in the universe (that then must have been created by some other being or some other higher process), then God would not be God. Because God is, by classical Christian definition, the ground of all being - the originator of everything. Such a deity cannot have origins because if they did, whatever originated them would then be God.

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OK Astrid…I got your questions…fewer words this time:
some of the conditions which make our universe so improbable (and not so easy to explain without allusion to some sort of Intelligence behind it)…

  • In order for life to develop, the universe needs to start with very low entropy. Mathematical Physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of our universe starting with such low entropy purely by chance were 1 out of 10^10^23 (see the video below for more on this).
  • In order for life to develop, it needs habitable planets. Physicist Paul Davies has determined, however, that if the gravitational constant or the weak force constant were different by 1 in 10^50, the universe would either have expanded or collapsed, catastrophically. Galaxies would not have formed, let alone stars or habitable planets.
  • Similarly slight differences in the nuclear force constant would either cause there to be no hydrogen, or only hydrogen. Either way, complex life would not have been able to develop.
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Nobody. The rules are prevenient of God. He - if anything - instantiates them. From eternity. He has no choice. He’s humble like that.

Therefore it has nothing to do with those spurious probabilities. Nature self tunes.

Its no misunderstanding, and i do know how
people claim to define their way out of the problem.

So is that considered proof of God?

( i have seen the fine tune thing argued with fact n logic from both sidrs)