But, we can’t explain what happens when they put our baby daughter who is 3 minutes old into our arms and we can’t leave the wonder and the awe of that spectacular event alone without cherishing it and wondering what it all means.
I have wondered why there is opposition to the poorly termed ‘fine tuning’ and one opinion I have seen is from atheists who oppose a beginning and an teleology suggested by the discussions around the so called fine tuning. Digging further, I notice that (some) evolutionists (perhaps mainly atheists but I am unsure) who subscribe to the view that if the events unfolded again, the results would differ from those we observe (species and all bio-events).
On a beginning - I ask how can we state a time for the universe (many billion years) if we deny a biggining? That is how an age is understood; it begins and then unfolded for a given time.
On a random series defining the unfolding of the world and biomatter (and life), just how can any scientist claim it may turn out differently since this scientist has only this world to study?
I would be interested to hear of the reasoning behind these alternate views and not a debate on ID or Darwinism. This discussion seeks scientific evidence and not ideology.
There is no beginning of beginnings. No end of them, no end to them. Nature has no beginning. It is eternal. It eternally blows space-time bubbles. On the trillions of worlds with intentional life in our mediocre universe there will be all manner of ‘design’ failures as there are here, speciation couldn’t not be different. What does any of this have to do with the myth of ‘fine tuning’? And God?
I don’t know enough about how to calculate the age of the universe. I know that it centers on us isn’t the stars and looking at the expansion of the universe. Im not 100% certain of how time or space time places into this and I’m not sure the potential string theory ( multiverse ) plays into and if by expansion they mean our universes inflation and so on. It goes beyond anything I’ve studied.
As for would all processes work back out the same. I don’t know. I lean more towards no because I have no reason to believe that free will and chance would happen again. I guess the science of the gaps is essentially the same as god of the gaps in this situation. I guess if we have determined that the same particle can be in two places at once. Quantum superposition seems to indicate chance of choice in my mind. That is why I believe Einstein ended up with that whole “ god does not play dice with the universe. I just feel like if that is all possible than perhaps so is making a different choice. Again, this all goes beyond what I know.
What I would have to see is the other argument. If they can’t provide science for everything would happen the same or that something can be different then it’s sort of like Schrödinger’s cat and that means it can’t be used as evidence for fine tuning. That means we are left with what we can better interpret.
Something I would be curious in is if you had the same
exact program and changed nothing and ran it again and again as a simulation would the same choice story play out again and again each time. Or would it be random. If it was random each time then could we help use that to determine it.
Or would things like a multiverse just mean that out of the infinite universes would each universe always play out the same and if it did not then does that mean it would still be our universe or not. Let’s say universe 1 and universe 2 are exactly the same exact in 1 I wear a green shirt today snd in 2 I wear a blue shirt. If we were able to go back to yesterday in each universe and the color of shirt flips would that mean universe 1 changed or would it just mean within the multiverse that 1 is actually 2 since 2 is 1 since played out the same.
I don’t know. It may not even be a legitimate interpretation or scenario. But once we get into stuff we don’t know, I try to not let gap theology or science a see the question and remain open minded even if I contradict myself and think one way is more possible than another. What I do know is that a gap in understanding is not where I centralize my argument.
I saw that you are having a crisis of faith, Alex. For this, I am sorry. I have had dark times in my own walk and they are not fun…
What do you mean by a natural explanation for everything? Like, literally everything? I don’t think so, personally. And even if there is a natural explanation for something, how good is the explanation?
The fine-tuning of the universe, or rather a lack thereof. Evolution. Origins. Heat death. Even the multiverse. All of this must be examined through the lens of Christ. This is why it is so important that He is our rock, and not anything else. Other things are important, but they are not Christ.
If God as Jesus lived, died for sin, and came back from the dead, and will raise us to life too, then all else can be what it is and whatever it may be–because Christianity lives and breathes on these things. Jesus. He is the center. He is the rock. His resurrection. And I think there are good reasons to believe in Jesus and His resurrection. So do many others here, including those who are much more skeptical about things than myself.
Start with Jesus.
I shall say a fervent prayer for you and keep your struggle in my heart. Please let me know how you are doing in a little while, won’t you?
-Joshua W.
5 Likes
It is something akin to the Butterfly Effect. On somewhat of a tangent, this same concept takes some of the fun out of sci fi parallel universe tropes, at least for me. It is assumed that if history repeated itself we would get the same exact people, but that really makes no sense. Tiny, tiny deviations in events would change the circumstances of how people are conceived. If a different sperm cell fertilizes the ova you get a different person, and given the number of sperm cells . . . well, you get the picture. For evolutionary pathways, this is multiplied many times over.
More to the point, modern biodiversity is the result of that very experiment. We see very different species filling the same niches in different geographic locations, as one example. We also see different organs filling the same role, such as the different camera style eyes in vertebrates and cephalopods. Biodiversity itself and the nested hierarchy tells us of how evolution just doesn’t repeat itself.
Of course, there are more fundamental questions related to determinism, quantum fluctuations, and that whole bit.
2 Likes
hi Joshua, thanks for the answer! I was unable to reconcile the theory of evolution with Christianity and the Bible. Thanks to Biologos, I have found answers to many questions, but some questions remain. for example, what place does Adam occupy in evolution, is this a real person, was there original sin?
Biologos has been a great ministry to me and my family by extension.
I think there will always be questions for us, Altair. Even when we are restored to life and with Him for eternity, there will be questions. Because we are the created, not the creator. For this reason, I encourage you to be not afraid of questions but to acknowledge that this is a natural part of our relationship with God. Israel does mean, after all, “one who wrestles with God”. We wrestle. But we do not walk away. That’s the difference. 
Take care of yourself, now. I have been praying for you all morning.
-Joshua W.
6 Likes
Thank you very much, Christ bless you!
2 Likes
And you, my dearest sibling.
2 Likes
I was speaking in general terms; biodiversity (and indeed diversity a plenty) is obvious, and changing or tampering with any aspect of nature that we have would bring consequential and perhaps profound changes. My impression is that if events began from the same point in the distant past (with identical conditions), is there evidence that the result would be profoundly different? I cannot see any scientific data that would inform us of this, and in view of the repeatability of scientific experiments, one would suspect that a similar beginning would lead to a similar outcome (diversity included).
1 Like
Your comment brings a smile - I was asking how we can arrive at an age for the universe (13.7 billion years) if we do not begin at the beginning 
1 Like
If Mrs. Hitler had given Mr. Hitler the cold shoulder one night and Adolf was never born, how different would history be?
If you use the same ping-pong ball based lottery machine will you get the same result every time?
Yes. Chimps and humans started from the same point, our common ancestor, and we are different from one another. The histories of our lineages played out differently.
We could also look at this from the point of view of genetics. Mutations often interact with one another which scientists call epistasis. Given the size of genomes, the number of potential epistatic interactions is immense, well beyond the number of mutations that can happen in a given lineage. Therefore, which beneficial mutations a lineage gets is really down to chance, just like each lottery drawing is a chance event. Once that beneficial mutation becomes fixed it can affect which mutations in the future will be beneficial. New beneficial traits are often contingent upon the beneficial mutations that came before it. So you have a contingent process that is heavily influenced by chance events. That is why we would expect a different outcome, and why we do see different outcomes in different lineages.
1 Like
I have an age. The Earth has an age. Other stars and planets in our galaxy have different ages.
What we have to be careful of is confusing a beginning with the beginning. Many things have beginnings, but there was still a lot that came before them.
Right. I thought we began with now and worked backwards!
That is based on a presupposition, that, while it may be rational, is not necessarily true. Oh yeah, déjà vu all over again, from earlier above.
If I take this line of argument, why would anyone believe that another sequence for the unfolding of say the earth would include genomes and such? It would be just as likely that silicon based entities would form, or something that only science fiction can contemplate.
Most think that carbon based life is much more likely than silicon based life. But you are right, if we went back to before life emerged we wouldn’t necessarily expect the same outcome. Very different carbon based molecules could have served as genetic and catalytic molecules. One popular example is the relationship between tRNA anti-codons and amino acids. There is no physical law that says a CUC anti-codon on a tRNA has to match up with the glutamic acid attached to it. Although some recent work has pointed to possible chemical biases that may have roughly influenced the correlation between tRNA anti-codons and amino acid, for the most part we wouldn’t expect the exact relationships we see now if the tape of history were rewound and restarted.
So it is really a question of where you are restarting from. Perhaps another analogy is the development of languages. If we rewound the tape of history to the height of the Roman Empire would we expect people 2,000 years later to speak the exact English we are speaking now, with all of the same slang? Not at all.
3 Likes
If Chicxulub had missed then reptiles would have dominated just a while longer. For up to another 30 million years, half the time since, until the end of the last greenhouse period with the Late Cenozoic Ice Age. Which of course may never have happened. Mammalian primate evolution would have been constrained accordingly. Which could have accelerated it. Something looking like us or otherwise in the image of God would have arisen sooner or later. Even if it were cephalopoid.