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

That should be “narrow range of allowing life as we know it” Life may exist in a different form. Not carbon based and using water as a universal solvent. We can speculate but there is no way to rule out life in other forms.

I here this objection to fine-tuning as well, but it seems equally unconvincing. Given some constants of the universe, if they were different, no life in any hypothetical form whatsoever could have existed. One constant, if it were different, would only leave us with one element, hydrogen. You can’t have life in any form with just hydrogen. Another, the mass of the higgs boson or something, gets to decide whether or not protons and neutrons even come together to form atoms.

@MarkD

It is still good fortune for us that the conditions do permit for our existence, but why I wonder should we use the expression “fine tuned” to express the aptness of the fit? Wouldn’t fortuitous serve equally well? Otherwise should we not also describe a pleasant day as fine tuned, or arriving at the check stand at a moment when the line is short? Does “fine tuned” carry some other significance than simply expressing our gratitude at finding the life supporting capacity of the universe to our liking?

Well, fortuitious doesn’t really work since it means, by definition, that something is by accident rather than design. That’s a judgement that hasn’t been established, though. As I’ve noted in my first comment on this thread, it still appears to me the exact opposite – design, not accident.

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Of course. Sometimes I forget that most people here have a core belief regarding how the natural world came about that is different from my own.

But is this true for all constants in all of their possible values? How would you even know this?

Part of what defines good science and a good scientist is the ability to figure out possible sources of bias in your hypotheses and conclusions. Confirmation bias is something the human mind does all on its own, so you always have to have your guard up. One could even argue that the main purpose of the scientific method is to counteract our natural penchant for confirmation bias.

The most obvious source of confirmation bias in these calculations is the assumption that our universe is the only universe. The claim that there are multiple universes AND that there is just one universe both need evidence to back them, and there simply isn’t evidence for either position. Therefore, even if we knew the different values constants could have and all of the possible starting conditions we still couldn’t know how improbable our universe is because we don’t know how many universes there are.

As you can see, there are many levels to the fine tuning argument. First, how dependent is carbon based chemistry on the values of specific physical constants. Second, how dependent is star formation on the conditions found during the initial expansion of a universe. Third, how many universes are there. Each level involves very different questions and very different calculations. They really cover different things, and this causes confusion when there is a single term that spans all of them.

Hi. This is the second time in this discussion someone has mentioned bias to me, and I wonder why that is. Being mistaken (or not) is a factual matter that we can reasonably identify and discuss, but confirmation bias is an accusation about a psychological state that others cannot know about, and even the person themselves may not fully realise. It can occur in anyone, both people who hold my viewpoint and those who don’t. It is tempting to infer that those who we disagree with are afflicted with bias, but I don’t think it is helpful to make such comments, and I don’t do so. I have at least explained how I try to avoid or limit such bias. So if you have some specific example you wish to raise, please do so, otherwise I think we should eschew such discussion. Thanks.

I suppose we could equally say that the world we apparently experience might be a computer simulation, or it might not, and there is no evidence for either position. But that doesn’t stop us doing science. So uncertainty doesn’t stop cosmologists looking at both options and testing them using what is known.

That is your view, but it doesn’t appear to be the view of a large number of cosmologists working in the field. Scientific fine-tuning doesn’t depend on knowing how many universes there are, it is based on the observation that of all the possible universes allowed by theoretical physics (where possible means not ruled out, and therefore at least theoretically possible), only a very small number would permit life. They have examined this and tried to find an explanation, and several have been proposed. Reducing the number deemed possible is the unachieved hope, and many think it unlikely. Postulating an ensemble of universes is the most popular explanation, but it lacks evidence, faces problems, and doesn’t negate the fine-tuning, it simply explains it - and then begs the question of the explanation of an apparently fine-tuned multiverse that can produce zillions of universes, each with different parameters.

These are all factors that have been considered, and some of them answered, of course.

Thanks.

I don’t know if it’s true for all constants because I don’t know all the constants. But it’s certainly true for some of them, at the very least, which is all that’s really relevant.

@MarkD I forgive you :wink:

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First off, pointing out the possibility of confirmation bias isn’t meant to be derogatory in any way, shape, or form. I suffer from confirmation bias. We all suffer from confirmation bias.

Where confirmation bias can creep into discussions about fine tuning is in thinking that our universe was pre-destined or was the goal. Another source of confirmation bias is in thinking that our universe is the only universe.

You have to know how many universes there are before you can calculate the probability of any specific universe existing. We can use the lottery as an example. If we look at a single winner we can say that the lottery was fine tuned for that winner. The odds of a specific person winning the Powerball lotto is something like 1 in 150 million, so the way in which those ping pong balls interacted had to be finely tuned for that person to win. If the only data you have is who won and you try to make claims about how improbable it was that someone actually won, then you have an obvious source of confirmation bias. You are ignoring all of the losers. Given the number of tickets that are sold for the lottery it is nearly guaranteed that someone will win.

The problem with calculating the probability of our universe existing is that we don’t know how many tickets have been sold. Our methods can only detect the winners, which happens to be one universe, the one we live in. We can’t detect any losers, if there are any.

The claim that our universe is the only universe lacks evidence as well.

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The claim should be that our universe is the only one that needs to be taken seriously, because that is the only one that we know and it is the only one we can know. It is the one for which we are responsible.

Except when it comes to theorizing about origins it should give anyone pause who is inclined to think that the big bang was everything coming from nothing. Not knowing that our universe is the only one means that there is an alternative to its having come from nothing, and that is an idea that is intellectually less hard to swallow. Of course Christian origins doesn’t rely on a true nothing either as it has God eternal to point to. The multiverse as a backdrop for the big bang gives us a secular alternative for avoiding our natural repugnance toward the notion of everything from nothing.

Surely that isn’t a big loss for Christianity. It isn’t likely to change people’s belief status in regard to God, though it may take a weapon from the arsenal of those who think they can coerce belief through logic, science, smoke and mirrors.

I think its is kinda like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. We would expect certain characteristics from a universe created by God, but a universe with those characteristics is not necessarily created by a God.

Nice. After all It is at least possible we evolved without guidance to believe certain things about God, and what we expect of a universe designed by that God might fit perfectly with one that evolved without guidance too. We can of course disagree about that, but at the end of the day science isn’t going to settle the matter for us. Theology too will win over some but not all.

Confirmation bias: “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.” So it is possible to have confirmation bias by thinking the evidence points to either one universe (if that is our belief) or many (if that is our belief), but not both (because we can’t belief both of two contradictory ideas). I wonder which one you think I may have???

It shows to me that it is a foolish thing to even bring up, because I don’t have a belief either way on that matter, so how can I have confirmation bias? Let’s put that aside as a red herring, shall we?

You said this before, and I said that the cosmologists I have read think differently. Some quantify the im probability of our universe, most only use words. But to be sure you understand what I am saying, here are some quotes (compiled from my own reading and from a blog post by Luke Barnes:

Martin Rees: “These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I take the view that it is neither. An infinity of other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile.”

“Any universe hospitable to life – what we might call a biophilic universe – has to be ‘adjusted’ in a particular way. The prerequisites for any life of the kind we know about — long-lived stable stars, stable atoms such as carbon, oxygen and silicon, able to combine into complex molecules, etc — are sensitive to the physical laws and to the size, expansion rate and contents of the universe. Indeed, even for the most open-minded science fiction writer, ‘life’ or ‘intelligence’ requires the emergence of some generic complex structures: it can’t exist in a homogeneous universe, not in a universe containing only a few dozen particles. Many recipes would lead to stillborn universes with no atoms, no chemistry, and no planets; or to universes too short-lived or too empty to allow anything to evolve beyond sterile uniformity.”

Leonard Susskind The Cosmic Landscape): “can science explain the extraordinary fact that the universe appears to be uncannily, nay, spectacularly well-designed for our own existence? …… To make the first 119 decimal places of the vacuum energy zero is most certainly no accident.”

“The Laws of Physics … are almost always deadly. In a sense the laws of nature are like East Coast weather: tremendously variable, almost always awful, but on rare occasions, perfectly lovely. … [O]ur own universe is an extraordinary place that appears to be fantastically well designed for our own existence. This specialness is not something that we can attribute to lucky accidents, which is far too unlikely. The apparent coincidences cry out for an explanation.”

Gribbin & Rees (Cosmic Coincidences): “The conditions in our universe really do seem to be uniquely suitable for life forms like ourselves.”

Paul Davies (“The Mind of God”): “There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all….It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe….The impression of design is overwhelming”.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle (“The Universe: Past and Present Reflections”): “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Lee Smolin (“Life of the Cosmos”): Perhaps before going further we should ask just how probable is it that a universe created by randomly choosing the parameters will contain stars. Given what we have already said, it is simple to estimate this probability. For those readers who are interested, in the arithmetic is in the notes. The answer, in round numbers, comes to about one chance in 10229.”

“Our universe is much more complex than most universes with the same laws but different values of the parameters of those laws. In particular, it has a complex astrophysics, including galaxies and long lived stars, and a complex chemistry, including carbon chemistry. These necessary conditions for life are present in our universe as a consequence of the complexity which is made possible by the special values of the parameters.”

Roger Penrose, former Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University and a cosmologist who worked with Stephen Hawking (“The Emperor’s New Mind”): “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. This is an extraordinary figure.”

Frank Wilczek: “life appears to depend upon delicate coincidences that we have not been able to explain. The broad outlines of that situation have been apparent for many decades. When less was known, it seemed reasonable to hope that better understanding of symmetry and dynamics would clear things up. Now that hope seems much less reasonable. The happy coincidences between life’s requirements and nature’s choices of parameter values might be just a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work.”

Stephen Hawking: “Most of the fundamental constants in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. … The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it.”

Andrei Linde: “the existence of an amazingly strong correlation between our own properties and the values of many parameters of our world, such as the masses and charges of electron and proton, the value of the gravitational constant, the amplitude of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory, the value of the vacuum energy, and the dimensionality of our world, is an experimental fact requiring an explanation.”

Alan Guth: “in the multiverse, life will evolve only in very rare regions where the local laws of physics just happen to have the properties needed for life, giving a simple explanation for why the observed universe appears to have just the right properties for the evolution of life. The incredibly small value of the cosmological constant is a telling example of a feature that seems to be needed for life, but for which an explanation from fundamental physics is painfully lacking.”

I will go through some of these when I have some more time but I am a bit surprised to see you bring up some of the numbers we’ve discussed in depth and I’ve even made videos on (Smolin and Penrose’s numbers).

Most of the quotes though concern arbitrarily picked bounds of parameter space scans- of which we’ve spent a good amount of time discussing thus far. They don’t mean much of anything at all and should not be part of any argument.

Hi Matthew, this illustrates why I decided to finish our discussion. I keep saying one thing, you keep saying something like this, the general idea is clear but several times I think I understand the specifics I apparently haven’t. It could easily become lime two kids in a playgroup arguing: “Yes it is!” “No it isn’t!!” “Yes it is !!!” etc.

But those guys are the experts. They keep saying things that you seem to disagree with. You seem to think your discussion of Penrose’s and Smolin’s numbers settles the matter, but (1) most of my quotes don’t use numbers, and (2) Smolin and Penrose are experts so I must logically accept their expertise over yours.

So it could easily become tedious or worse to continue, so it is probably best I don’t reply again. Thanks.

‘May exist where the numbers are different’- I.e. he doesn’t know but it could be

Indeed. Is this also Rees? But again he doesn’t know what ‘recipes’ are possible.

Indeed it’s no accident. But what does he mean or this quote mean? To the apologist- it means proof or evidence of God’s handiwork. To a physicist- it means that what quantum mechanics predicts the energy of space should be is 120 orders of magnitude larger than what we measure. But until we get an adequate theory of Quantum Gravity- this will remain unknown.

I ask- what would a universe not well designed for our existence look like? Nobody can say either way. But yes- an explanation is what early universe cosmologists are working on. However, until one has a theory for the laws and constants of physics or a theory of how universes are made that we can test- it’s unlikely we’ll have such an explanation. But to the eager apologists, this quote too is golden. However to a cosmologist, simply saying ‘God tuned stuff’ is no more of an explanation than ‘we don’t know.’

Uniquely? I’d have to check what they meant as this is likely another.

It is? Can someone show me what an undesigned versus a designed universe looks like?

I’ve already extensively spoken on the Smolin star probability and Penrose number as I’ve mentioned. I explained how they got their numbers and what their numbers mean. A few more quotes on the Dark Energy thing which I’ve explained multiple times. Yes these demand explanations and are not coincidences- but again this one is coming from a gap in knowledge and is certainly not ‘fine-tuning’ by an unspecified mechanism by an invisible deity (though I believe it ultimately was as per my brute fact of the intro).

Pevaquark special observation: all these statements are appearing in books, not academic papers.

Confirmation bias can also refer to the methodology you are using. For example, our current methods for detecting universes will necessarily only find one universe, and only a universe where we exist. That biases conclusions towards our universe being improbable.

Which of those scientists has determined the number of universes that exist?

On what basis? How many times have non-believers said that there is no evidence for the existence of God? Many times, and when asked about the Beginning of the universe, they would say that somehow that did not count. In effect they would say that I had to the prove that God did exist before I could claim that there was evidence for the existence of God. B.S.

There is NO way of knowing that there a universe beyond our own. To pretend or claim anything else under current conditions which so not appear subject to change is a lie based on wishful thinking.

The problem is that the choice seems to be Creation by God or the Multiverse and clearly many people for whatever reason do not what to concede that there is scientific evidence that points to the existence of God.

I do not think that there is a natural repugnance toward the idea something out of nothing that cannot be cured by pointing to the creation of the universe by God, as most people accept. I really do not think that we should give secularists a pass on this anymore than we should give YEC a pass on evolution because they find it repugnant.

The purpose of these pages is not to change the beliefs of others, but to try to get nearer to the truth, which might mean some changes of opinions on all sides I can sympathize with those who feel that others have ganged up on them in order to try through science and logic to convince them that God is not real or God is real.

The best we can do is insist that our concepts do not take us further that the evidence allows, and that is that the multiverse does not exist. Anything else is surely smoke and mirrors. .

What evidence demonstrates that there are no universes other than our own?

Thanks Matthew, this is a great thread! A couple of comments if I may.
A couple of things that stand out to me in the Bible is that, God makes the Law (moral / legal) and God is Love.
On the face of it, nature and the weather in particular, look chaotic, which is probably why ancient civilisations had unpredictable gods running the show. If you could go back in time and tell these ancient civilisations that the whole of nature was controlled by a consistent set of laws they would think you were mad.
The fact that we now know that nature is controlled by laws doesn’t prove God, but it does fit nicely within his nature.
Personally, I’ve really struggled with the dismantling of a literal Genesis as well as the brutality instigated by God in old testament. I can even explain away most of my spiritual experiences by the trickery of the brain. My faith has often hung by a thread. However, I do think loving your neighbour, forgiveness and compassions, like Jesus lived, is the best chance for us humans.

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On the basis that we don’t know whether or not there are or have been other singularity expansions such as has been postulated as the origin of the known universe. Without knowing that, there is no basis for claiming the universe came from nothing. If ours is part of some larger pattern across the cosmos, then there is no basis for assuming a true nothing. For that, you would have to know that the singularity postulated for the known universe is the only one there is or ever was. But we don’t know that.

But others would say the deceit comes in promulgating the idea that the universe we can see is all there is when in fact that isn’t known.

Yes, including most of the people I talk with on these boards. It doesn’t mean most people here don’t believe in God or His role in creation. It just means they do not think the clever use of science can force God’s hand in showing Himself. I appreciate the intellectual humility most people here demonstrate in that regard.

That handles it for those convinced of God through theistic arguments, but for the rest of us it is a false dilemma. If you think everything was always there in potentia, then you don’t think all was null and void either; because you think God and all he is capable of was always there.

Since we don’t know that the universe we can see is all there is, we cannot in good conscience say there was nothing before the big bang.