That rather depends on the presuppositions you base your infallible rationality on.
I guess I can’t make the home argument work because we can tell what’s a home and how it was built. We know for sure hikes are built. I build them a few times a year.
Seems like most are in agreement that there is no concrete evidence of id. It’s a theological belief, not a scientific belief. Which is fine.
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Leastwise, not unless there is. While I lean toward the same conclusion I don’t think our opinion is privileged in any demonstrable way. While considering things rationally is often useful I don’t think the reality of the cosmos is obliged to make sense to our species.
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God or no there can’t be. Not all opinion is equal. Considering things rationally is always useful. The reality of the cosmos as nothing special makes perfect sense.
It’s just an analogy. If you’ve hypothetically only ever lived in one house and are unfamiliar with other constructions…
That’s what I was saying.
It still depends on your presuppositions what conclusions you rationally draw. You, for instance, presuppose that time had no beginning, contrary to what scientific relativistic equations imply.
I agree. That’s what I originally stated in my OP and so far seems to have been supported throughout everyone’s post. We all seem to be mostly in agreement. Which is good. But maybe we will all still find a way to debate on how we express our agreement lol.
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I just said that I enjoyed the home analogy 
, not that it was a compelling argument to anyone inclined to disagree, and certainly not a scientific one.
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I only have the presuppositions of rationality. Sorry, I’m cognitively biased, fundamentalist that way.
You have an irrational bias and believe what you want to believe. 
An irrational bias for rationality that I want to believe?
That be irrational.
We know that there are planets around the majority of stars, and that there are billions upon billions of planets in the solar system. We also don’t have a full understanding of what features a planet needs in order to have intelligent life. We don’t have any way of absolutely knowing how many planets conducive to the emergence of intelligent life could naturally arise in our universe. In essence, we are trying to determine if a lottery was finely tuned for the winner without knowing the probability of winning nor how many people were playing the lottery.
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I know. Most of my questions are ones that I already believe I have answers to. The answer is that there is no fine tuning. I just wanted to make a post to see if anyone wanted to defend that position blatantly instead of random small snippets within various discussions. I think that often people do believe it’s fine tuned just that they don’t have a reason for it and when pushed they realize it. Sort of like a disconnect between faith and reality. Something common within deconstruction.
I have a reason for it, but I readily confess that it is not a scientific one. It’s very analogous to believing in God – I have lots of reasons, including empirical evidence, just no scientific ones.
Are you from Yorkshire?
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I thought there were eight?! There are easily a trillion in our mediocre galaxy. Tuning doesn’t apply beyond the measured constants of physics, if it applies at all.
The above comments are interesting but bypass what I remember as the main points in the “fine tuning” discussion I remember from my younger days, when particle physicists liked to write popular books suggesting they were chasing down God.
The point made in those books is that, 1) we seem to be able to understand much about the material world by postulating a set of laws of physics and fundamental numerical constants of physics, 2) we have no answer as to why the laws or constants take the forms and values they do, 3) the range of values the constants could potentially take, to be plugged into those mathematical laws, is as far as we know unlimited, 4) a hypothetical universe in which those constants took even slightly different values would not have lead to material structures (atoms, carbon, molecules, complex organic carbon-molecular chemistry) that are the only known basis for living material organisms including humans.
After that, the argument gets sketchy. Because, under metaphysical naturalism, it’s not possible to speak of a process or agent that determined the laws and constants of nature. They just Are. And yet, still, that’s unsatisfying, so the mind wanders, and considers two hypotheses: an agent determined them (a god, minimally a deist god), or they came about by some unknown/unknowable non-agent process, that to us would appear random (whether it is or is not actually random). And, although it courts the “turtles all the way down” syndrome, the latter is more appealing to ontological naturalists (atheists).
Assuming the fundamental constants were randomly drawn from wide and independent probability distributions, then it would be exceedingly unlikely that any roll of the dice would yield a universe that could sustain life as we know it. That in essence is the fine tuning problem.
There are of course many counter arguments. None of which make much sense. As an agnostic I viewed them as akin to stage characters beating in angst against the fourth wall, and chose instead to live in humble not-knowing. (But now I think I know the playwright.)
Edit to add, as a former physicist, I think (but have no evidence) as a result of such considerations, the incidence of atheism among physicists is lower than among other sciences. In the search for an answer to “why” questions in the sciences, the buck stops with physicists, and to any physicist it’s obvious, if you ask “why”, and then ask it again in response to the answer, repeatedly, you must end up with “I don’t know”.
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There are only a handful of constants that so far cannot be derived mathematically and have to be measured: c, G, e, h, mu zero, emm ee, nothing to justify ID.
A handful is not zero. (And there are 19 required to support currently accepted theory.) Even if we eventually come up with theories that have no reliance on measurables (ie. all rational numbers or calculable irrational numbers), the fine-tuning problem will become an anchronism, but there will still be the question of why those laws apply.
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