Pevaquark Doesn't Like Fine Tuning Apologetics and Neither Should You

Faith & Science Conversation
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The road I took is the road of the Big Bang. If you disagree with that road, you have to disagree with the road of science and neither you nor Matthew have given me any reason to say that the Big Bang is not true.

The only difference is that the Big Bang does not say that the universe did not come out of nothing, although it does strongly imply this. I say that it did for reasons which are largely based on logic and fact, not science per se.

May be you and Matthew have pointed to cracks in my argument, nothing is perfect, but you have not revealed any serious flaws. I can understand now how the evolution debate has poisoned the discussion of natural theolog, but we can and must do better.

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On that, all of us can agree.

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I’m don’t fully accept Gould’s “Non-overlapping Magisteria” (NOMA), but there is some wisdom in it, and I think this is one are where it offers some insight. The evolution debate poisoned the well because creationists misrepresented the facts. This kind of ruined it for anyone coming after them who wanted to talk about how nature and theology could be united. When theology leaves its magisteria and starts attacking the facts of science, then there are hard to resolve conflicts which theology usually doesn’t win.

Thankfully, there are those who don’t see a need to put theology and science at loggerheads, which is why this website is a breath of fresh air. There may be some missteps here and there, but no more so than any other honest human enterprise.

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Terms such as infinite to describe God are considered inadequate. We may speak of God through analogical terms, but these are not applicable within the context of the sciences - thus, it is more likely that we would say God is beyond infinity, or God transcends all scale (time, mass, distance etc) and so on.

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First of all we do need to acknowledge that God does not need a defense or an apology.

Second, it is humans who need to understand the universe and God. We need faith seeking understanding. We need to understand who we are and atheism can never explain that.

Third, we need to criticize non-belief where it is most vulnerable, which is the Logos. This is not really a theological issue, but a philosophical issue.

Fourth, there are many other vulnerabilities of non-belief, but they depend on a new understanding of Reality, which Christianity can provide. Sadly many Christians are content with worn out truths that no longer function in God’s world. I would hate for y6tou to be one of them.

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I do not understand your thinking. Yes, you are right to criticize those who misuse science to “prove” the existence of God, but to say that because they are mistaken that existence of God is less sure is also clearly false.

God is true because God is real. If the multiverse is true, then it must be real also, but we have a long way to go before we can say this. Nothing in the information you quote says that the multiverse is true or real, only that it maybe within the realm of possibility.

Again the evidence indicates that the universe had a beginning, t = 0, which means that time and space along with matter and energy had a Beginning. Beyond that we cannot scientifically go. That is why we need philosophy and theology as well as science to understand the reality in which we live. .

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Let me try to rephrase: if our lack of knowledge about something is used as ‘proof’ that God supernaturally did something and then we figure out the natural process behind it, the ‘proof’ of God is then gone. There are certainly better ways to engage the unknowns of scientific inquiry, but god of the gaps is the go to for many Christian public speakers.

Never heard it phrased quite like that before. I don’t quite understand your words since you could literally put nearly any noun there and make the same statement. Like my glasses are true because my glasses are real. Quarks are true because quarks are real. What are you saying here exactly?

I know. Did I say otherwise?

No. Well maybe. We don’t actually know yet! General relativity (again) which cannot describe the earliest era of our universe is what tells us ‘beginning.’

Not yet but maybe someday.

Well yes and no. I can certainly agree that there are limits to scientific inquiry and certain questions which it cannot answer (unless your Sam Harris apparently-which I disagree with his approach). However, these questions came about via scientific inquiry and will be decided by such. I’ve mentioned this before but Cosmologists were able to falsify the Steady State model and affirm the Big Bang model not by philosophical debate our scouting reigious texts… but by building telescopes and measuring electromagnetic radiation that’s been traveling for billions of light years. *That’s how these questions are ultimately going to be answered- not by philosophical and religious debate that has never actually told us anything ever about how the natural world actually works.

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I agree that the God of the Gaps is bad, because God is God of the Facts, that is God is responsible for the facts of the universe. God is the Source of the Universe and all that is, which means God is behind the natural processes which form the universe.

This is what it means to say that Science and Faith are not opposed to each other, which is the Good News of Jesus Christ and Bio Logos. I can understand your anger at apologetic speakers, but Christians are not called to anger, but reconciliation and correction.

God created each of us in the womb of our mothers as the end of a long historical and natural process. It was “supernatural” in that God did it, but God did it in a most natural and common way

You said before that you do not know if the multiverse exists or not.

That is not the real issue. There is evidence for what we call the Big Bang, but before that or very shortly before that there is no evidence for the existence of the universe. The question is not exactly how the universe happened, but when it happened.

Sounds like a No God of the Gaps to me.

Methinks that you are contradicting yourself. First you say that “may be” science can and will beyond t = 0, then you say only science can settle problems of how nature works, which is not true if there are always questions as to how nature works… There must be limits to scientific knowledge if science is to be able to settle anything. And there must be limits to philosophical and theological knowledge if they are to settle anything.

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What are you saying here Roger? I’m not following. Looking back throughout the history of scientific inquiry- we never ever knew what the boundary of such inquiry would be. Does that mean that science has never been able to settle anything in the past?

Where is the boundary today? Nobody knows! We never have known where such a boundary is and never will. But maybe this time we’ve hit a real boundary. Throughout the ages, the religious have been the first to swoop in and argue:
“scientists don’t have an explanation for x, y or z… but I do: God!” The idea of the multiverse or the beginning of our cosmos are presently some of the hot topics that fall into these types of categories.

I wouldn’t know what it looks like to ‘settle’ anything in a philosophical or theological sense. I certainly can grant the same type of consensus building amongst scholars in each field but at the same time, especially for the theology side- it’s not like you can go out and collect new data to test your hypothesis. But maybe you can show me how such fields positively help scientific inquiry (other than just filling in gaps that are either temporary or permanent we don’t yet know and then stepping to the side as we figure more out about creation).

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The boundary today is the Beginning of the universe.

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OK. But we don’t know if this is any kind of true boundary so to speak. What you are arguing is that at today’s boundary we need theology and philosophy to help answer these boundary questions. However what I’m trying to argue is that in the past they were different boundaries. And theologians and philosophers Certainly push themselves all the way up to those past boundaries insisting that they had the answers that science couldn’t answer. However science did figure out answers to those types of questions and the theologians and philosophers had to retreat. Theologians and philosophers and apologists certainly push themselves all the way up to boundaries of the past insisting that they had the answers that science couldn’t answer. However science did figure out answers to those types of questions and theologians and philosophers had to retreat.

Theologians and philosophers have been retreating for hundreds of years in regards to this type of thinking And I would argue that the particularly good ones have stopped making such silly arguments anymore I certainly think that theology and philosophy and professionals at those disciplines are amazing and I love to read that work, but I’m arguing that this is a different type of question. and philosophers have been retreating for hundreds of years in regards to this type of thinking. I certainly think that theology and philosophy and professionals at those disciplines are amazing and I love to read that work, but I’m arguing for caution in any of these types of arguments that rest at the boundaries of today. The boundaries of today may be no boundaries at all, we don’t know! Just like this past generations did not know what the boundaries were.

But again in every era who shows up at the boundaries of scientific inquiry to argue that God is the answer? The apologists.

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@pevaquark

First of all it seems to me that you are looking at things from your own perspective, which is not a broad one.

You are hanging on to the apologists issue as if it is universal, rather than a problem for one relative small segment of the Church in one part of the world and one period of time. You need to get aq better perspective by reading more widely and listening more carefully.

Evangelicals see themselves as the Church, but that is far from the truth. Former evangelicals seem to have the same problem. People can discuss without debating.

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Matthew,

I and most people who are port of BioLogos are Christians. That means that we believe in Jesus Christ, not God per se, and not natural theology.

To me that means that I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, because He died for my sins and rose from the dead to provide eternal life. This is a fact, but I do not count it as a brute fact, it is a living and loving relationship that grows and expands.

Our faith is in Jesus Christ Who is the Logos, but He is the Son of the Creator, Who created all things out of nothing.

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Hi Matthew (pevaquark),

I am new to this forum, but a friend invited me to read your post, so I decided to offer a couple of comments, hope that’s OK.

There is much in what you say that I agree with. (1) I think a lot of christian apologetics is very poor, especially that trying to defend 6-day creationism, etc. (2) I observe that some christians believe because of an experience of God, some because of faith, some because they believe what they are told, and some because of evidence and apologetics, and that is all OK. (3) And I agree with you that many christians claim too much certainty. Our knowledge is always incomplete because we are human.

But there are 3 areas where I see things differently, and I thought they might be worth sharing.

“Now I hope that you could see why such a statement is nonsense, because nobody knows what’s range of values these constants can take and with the probabilities of getting each of those values even is.”

I don’t have the background in science that you do, but I have read Luke Barnes’ blog for years and read the Lewis & Barnes book you reference. When they show that graph, they are talking science, cosmology, which is their field of expertise, not apologetics. They say they have selected the ranges of the values allowed by theoretical physics. That is, using the best knowledge we have, those ranges are theoretically possible. If our knowledge changes, then we’ll change our theories and the possible ranges. But until then, if someone wants to limit the ranges, the authors say they need a good hypothesis, some good data and some good arguments. And as they say, it would take absolutely massive changes in these ranges to change the basic fact of the improbability of our universe by chance.

“a God of the gaps argument that all the best apologists use”

“God of the gaps” is a scare argument that I think we need to think a bit more about. Gaps in our understanding are the places where we look to advance our knowledge. That’s what science does - find an apparent anomaly and see why the current understanding cannot explain it, and look to extend our understanding to find why this anomaly occurs.

So when we consider all that we know, there are questions that science doesn’t seem to be able to answer. If we can see that a little more work is likely to give us an answer, then let’s do that work. But if it seems like the question is fundamental and unlikely to be answered by science, then it is quite reasonable to look to answers from philosophy.

In the case of fine-tuning and the beginning or cause of the universe, we can see why science is unlikely to find answers. No matter what question science answers, we can always ask: ”Why is it so?” If the multiverse is the explanation of fine-tuning, we can then ask how the multiverse got to be so fine-tuned that it produces zillions of universes, each with different parameters? And so on.

So I think we should treat “god of the gaps” objections with a little scepticism. If an apologetics argument claims God as the answer, but it turns out to have a scientific answer, then we update our understanding, just happens in science generally as one hypothesis replaces another. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

“I personally think that natural theology can only ever bring someone to perhaps a deist position, and anything beyond that also enters this realm of what I’ve discussed as personal experience and faith in a ‘brute fact.”

I agree that science + apologetics can only take us so far - to deism, and I think to theism. But as a christian, I also have history, and the historical analysis of the New Testament gives me an objective basis for believing in the christian God.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

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Welcome! And certainly your perspectives are very welcome and despite your disagreement, your gracious tone is doubly appreciated!

First the Barnes graph:

Perhaps I missed it and would have to try and grab a copy of the book again, but they have a graph that allows the gravitational constant to vary from 10 billion times smaller to 10 billion times larger and the fine structure constant to vary from 10 billion times smaller to 10 billion times larger. While I will certain grant that the regions under the curve and above the curve (that is the region in which star formation and other processes are possible and the region in which they are not) are actually based upon legitimiate astrophysical processes, the range of the graph is what my problem actually is. Do they have a source that says:

“Oh our universe’s gravitational constant could have been either 10 billion times smaller or larger” AND “we know what the probability of getting the specific value we have is.”

You could double check the book, but I highly doubt they have any such thing available - that is a rigorous mechanism and formulation of what values the fundamental constants are allowed to take and what the probability of getting our specific constant actually is. The 10 orders of magnitude in both directions just makes for a pretty somewhat symmetrical graph but is completely arbitrary!

So… how would you know where this boundary actually is? You don’t and if we were arguing 100 years ago, the boundary of knowledge would be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay further back than it presently is. I’d also suggest that not once, in the history of our inquiry into the natural world has philosophy provided significant advances in how we look at the world (though maybe some ancient Greek philosophy like Democritus and his atoms could count- but even then we didn’t know they were real until Einstein’s Brownian motion work in the early 1900s).

Yes indeed, and thus how I just ended with some brute fact if you will. The line of dominoes keeps going (for how much longer nobody knows) and I personally am tentative to stick God at certain spots along that line of dominoes given that such a tactic has resulted in a constantly retreating deity.

So you are saying it’s perfectly reasonable to posit God as an unknown in scientific inquiry and when (if at all) we find a “natural” explanation for something, we update our argument and posit God as the explanation for the next thing? That’s a pretty huge deal to me and part of why I stopped using even any fine tuning arguments that are ultimately based upon ignorance.

Side note: Part of the fine-tuning argument is okay in a sense which is we can theoretically play around with various values that constants of nature can take on and find what combinations lead to conditions for life like us. But given that we are the byproduct of 4 billion years worth of natural selection that is heavily influenced by local conditions- it is not at all impressive or surprising to me to find myself waking up like Goldilocks. As for the general laws of physics themselves, I shared one recent paper that Barnes’ name was on that varied the Cosmological Constant by a lot and the most ‘fine-tuned’ thing ever might not be so fine-tuned anymore; not to mention in my post, I explained that the so called fine tuning of this parameter is definitely based upon our lack of how to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity, i.e. a gap.

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This is very interesting!

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What has always struck me is the futility of arguing from a finding that conditions are exactly as they need to be for life to occur to a conclusion that they have been dialed in that way intentionally by some agent capable of doing such a thing.

Also the fact that we as life forms discover that conditions are exactly right for life to occur is hardly surprising since if they weren’t we wouldn’t be here at all.

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Hi Matthew, thanks for your reply. I think a key thing to clarify here is that there are two distinct things being discussed here. One is the science of fine-tuning and the other is the apologetics of it.

This is definitely a matter of the science of fine-tuning, not apologetics. It is a simple question - is there a scientific basis for the ranges they show in their graph, or a scientific reason to doubt those ranges? I think Lewis & Barnes answer this question and say something close to what you ask. In chapter 7 they discuss all sorts of objections to the science, including the possibilities they consider. Essentially their answer is that every cosmological theory entails certain equations, limits, interpretations of the data, and these can be different. For example they point out that travelling faster than light is permitted in Newtonian physics but not in Einsteinian physics.

So they say they have considered the ranges allowed for in current understandings of cosmology. They add this: “If you believe that there is some stronger principle that dictates what is possible and impossible, that for some reason disqualifies certain mathematically consistent universes, then define it, defend it, and explain why it is fond of stars, planets, chemistry and life. These are exactly the kinds of explanation we are looking for!” But of course mathematical modelling of the cosmos is Barnes’ current research area, so presumably he knows that currently there are no such alternative theories that stand up to peer review. Until then, surely it makes sense to stick with what is consistent with current theoretical physics?

“So you are saying it’s perfectly reasonable to posit God as an unknown in scientific inquiry and when (if at all) we find a “natural” explanation for something, we update our argument and posit God as the explanation for the next thing?”

This is clearly a philosophic question, and I don’t think that, and I think you missed where I thought I made that clear. I said four things:

  1. We need to look at anomalies and unexplained things because that is where new knowledge will be gained.
  2. If we can see a scientific way to attack a question, i.e. it is a scientific question, we should work at it using science. (so I didn’t say God should be used in a scientific enquiry).
  3. But when we have questions that seem to fall outside science, then it is legitimate to look at philosophy. (As well as origins of the universe, consciousness, freewill, ethics, etc, might fit in here).
  4. If we make a new science discovery that changes our hypotheses, we change them. Likewise, if a discovery changes our philosophy, we change it too. Life goes on.

Let’s illustrate. We have to decide many questions every day, and some big ones in our lifetime. Should I marry this person, will I still be happy in 50 years time with him/her? Is it right or wrong to abort a 7 month fetus, kill an enemy soldier, kill a murderer, cheat on my taxes or on my wife, etc? Who should I vote for? What purpose will I have in life? If we avoid answering those questions because one day science may show us our answer was wrong, we would be paralysed. So we make choices, and adjust as we go.

Even in science that can happen. I used to be an environmental manager, and we never (in Australia) had enough data for the management decisions we needed to make. So we did the best we could, monitored and adjusted as time went on.

I suggest it is the same here. There is information and anomalies and questions staring us in the face. It isn’t only gaps in our science understanding, but our understanding of the whole of known science. In the case of cosmology, put all we know in a box and then ask, why is it like that? What caused it? If we gain new scientific knowledge and fill up a gap, we put that knowledge in the box and we can still ask the same questions. Even if we get a theory of everything that explains everything, we can still legitimately ask why was it like that? What made it happen (breathes fire into the equations as Hawking said)?

If we adopted your cautious approach, I doubt we could say anything very much about anything very important at all. Even your own experienced-based faith could be shown to be wrong by some future knowledge. Likewise Dawkins’ scepticism.

So we each have to decide what balance we’ll keep between knowledge, certainty, practical living and deep questions, and that is the balance I have adopted. It seems consistent to me, and it’s worked for 55 years as a believer so far.

Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss and disagree thoughtfully and civilly.

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Hi Mark, nice to run into you again. (I presume you are the same MarkD who visited my blog?)

You have raised two issues here, both of which have been well answered by proponents of the fine-tuning argument, and the second by non-apologetic cosmologists also.

“the futility of arguing from a finding that conditions are exactly as they need to be for life to occur to a conclusion that they have been dialed in that way intentionally by some agent capable of doing such a thing.”

The argument is this:

  1. The fine-tuning could have been different, or it couldn’t have been (necessity, based on some physical laws). If it could have been different, it must either have been by chance or by design. These are the only possibilities (can you think of any others?) and they are mutually exclusive.

  2. So the probabilities must add up to 1.

  3. But the scientists say it definitely didn’t happen by chance, that has been calculated as too small a probability, and so far no-one has been able to find a physical law that makes the fine-tuning necessary, and many cosmologists think the evidence points to this being very unlikely.

  4. So if those two possibilities are improbable, the remaining one (design) must be probable.

The argument can be argued in great detail, but that is the nub of it. The only way I know to argue against it, and the way most often adopted, is to postulate the multiverse, which changes the probability of “chance”.

“Also the fact that we as life forms discover that conditions are exactly right for life to occur is hardly surprising since if they weren’t we wouldn’t be here at all.”

This is known as the Anthropic Principle, and it explains why we observe a universe, but not why we and it are here at all. The famous analogy is a man before a firing squad composed of 20 expert riflemen, and they all fire and none of them hit him. He wonders why he is still alive. It is true that it is only because he is still alive that he can ask the question, but that offers no explanation as to why, against all the odds, he is still alive.

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Here sure. But Fine-Tuning is one of the hottest things in apologetics- i.e. its scientific proof of God creating the universe and such. I would agree though that fine-tuning questions are scientific questions and thus our best chance of understanding such is through scientific inquiry - not philosophy/theology/etc.

This doesn’t sound like much of an answer to me. Their answer to me sounds like: well you don’t know what values these constants can take and unless you have a really good idea, you can’t tell us we’re wrong.

You didn’t demonstrate at all why they chose such values for the graph - since nobody knows what values any constants can take - it is entirely misleading to even make the graph in the first place!

Did you frequently posit God as an explanation for what you didn’t know or have adequate information on adjusting as you found that he didn’t seem to be micromanaging as much as you originally thought?

Righto, which is why I end with a brute fact and a choice by faith.

I said:

Are you saying that if we don’t posit God as the reason for unknowns in scientific inquiry we aren’t going to be able to say anything important about anything at all? I think I’m a bit lost in where you are trying to take me when all I am doing is being very cautious to posit God as the explanation for unknown phenomenon in Cosmology and pointing out that it’s actually what many Christians (especially apologists) do in a very confident manner.

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