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

[BoltzmannBrain]

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Matthew. I found it really interesting to see someone else’s perspectives on faith. It kinda made me talk about some of my experiences a little as well.

@pevaquark

It Began with An Experience
I think it’s a great question without a perfect answer. I’ve been meaning to respond to this for a while. I personally began with a ‘personal encounter’ that changed the course of my life in a rather sudden and dramatic way. It was not a very ‘intellectual’ thing, and looking back, while I can try to explain away what my experiences with God actually were, I can’t change the events and reactions that I had to such experiences.

That is a area which I have some trouble understanding to be fair. In fact, it has been my main difficulty integrating the church community in the past months. Everyone there talks about how ther faith made such a big change in their lives, or how much of a personal connection and relationship the fell to God and Christ, and that really makes me feel a bit out of place there. I guess I am a very weird theist, because I have a really hard time relating to that, to the point which I’ve been questioning if I can be called a christian at all due to the way I deal with belief (although I do believe). In fact, I was about to start a topic discussing about this things these days, but I postponed it because I’m a little overwhelmed with work.

@pevaquark

Facing the Apologetics
So then, where does that leave me with the Christian apologist? Well they tended to exaggerate things or somehow pretend that Genesis actually predicted the big bang theory. I quickly found them all to be antithetical to the science they argue supports them, where they readily insert God into things that we do not have an explanation for: like the matter/antimatter asymmetry, or the origins of the cosmos, or the fine-tuning arguments.

I also don’t really like apologetics all that much. I love to see talks about science and religion, but I prefer it when they are not trying to convince anyone of the existence of God, but rather talking about the consistency of science and religion and how the things we learn from science impact the way we look at religion (I.E. neuroscience and free will, etc). I think apologists can do a good job answering to some atheist objections to fate, like the idea that “An universe from nothing” proves that God does not exist, but are rather sloppy when they are exposing their own arguments rather than answering those of atheists. One good example is John Lennox, I think he handles the claims by famous atheists very well, but when he goes to defend what he believes himself he start making some really questionable claims such as saying that the positive impact faith has on peoples lives is strong evidence for God or claiming that even if evolution is true, humans must absolutely have been created by special creation.

@pevaquark

What I Realized About Fine-Tuning
I think the fine-tuning is interesting, but it usually drives me batty in Apologetics. To talk about any probabilities, one needs to know all of the possible choices of which we know absolutely nothing about. Nobody can pretend to imagine that they actually know how and what the odds are of getting certain fundamental Constance or laws of nature. I am thinking in particular of one graph that I saw by Luke Barnes his most recent book… Here is the graph:

Fine tuning itself is not something that I ever saw as being all that relevant to the debate about the existence of God myself, although it seems to be one, if not the most popular argument today, which I find weird. Even if we proved 100% sure that the universe absolutely needed fine tuning, that would just put God as some kind of tinkerer existing inside the universe in order to propoerly adjust its inner workings, as if they already existed prior to God and God is nothing but a maintenance guy living inside it, whiile the God I believe is the creator of the whole thing. So it doesn’t really matter to me how the universe got in the state it is right now, but rather the fact that it is even possible for the universe to get in that state. Like John Polkinghorne says (even though he is one of the guys that use the fine tuning argument a lot), the universe was “pregnant” with the possibility of life from the very start, or else we wouldn’t be here today, the same goes for a multiverse or whatever the framework which includes us as a possibility is.

@pevaquark

My Brute Fact: A Choice by Faith
So where does that leave me today? Well, I realized that everyone needs a brute fact. I will be the first to grant anybody that the laws of nature themselves are sufficient to produce everything that we see here including our universe. Maybe there’s a multi-verse, I don’t really know but think that would be so awesome. But, for me it’s either the laws of nature or some kind of deity are my brute fact. So perhaps the laws of nature are just there, and there a fact that you just accept. Or, my brute fact is that there actually is a creator who fashioned and up holds such laws of nature. And this is where I have no amazing knockouts apologetics, but a simple thing that I choose to believe by faith.

And then even this doesn’t get me anywhere past deism. 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 totally agree with you on that as well. In the end it is a matter of faith, but I do think that choices by fate can be at least “informed opinions” rather than purely irrational choices like some atheists (and even some theists like Martin Gardner) suggested. I think the fact that the universe exists in within a framework that possibilitates life and cosciousness is a indicator that there is some intrinsic meaning on it, which indeed puts me on a deistic position. What differs me from deists is mainly the fact that I think that if that “deistic” God doest in fact exist, he is personal, given the nature of our universe. I mean, if God just wanted to see bits of matter randomnly clashing he could have made a universe without consciousness in the first place, evolution would have proceded unhindered and we could get pretty much to where we are, bar the fact that we would be philosophical zombies without consciousness. I agree in the end that as much as I try to rationally justify my beliefs with these arguments, they are just brute facts that I’m accepting on the basis of faith, but I like to think that they are “informed opinions” rather than just crazy stuff I chose to believe because it feels good or due to irrational cognitive biases evolution put in my brain.

Anyway, I just thought it would be nice to use this reply as a way to expose some of these ideas which I thought could be interesting discussing. Thanks for the thoughtfull reply!