Scientific evidence for any fine tuning?

And then there is God’s providence.

Whatever could have happened would have been. It explains nothing at all.

Que sera, sera. How do you say “…and God is impotent” in French? How about “omnitemporal”?
 

It explains everything.

If the meteor had hit a different spot on the Earth the dinosaurs may not have gone extinct. The massive crude oil and limestone deposits in what is now the Gulf of Mexico may have made the impact even worse.

What would it have taken to change the path of the meteor by just a little bit? Imagine a tiny, tiny change in the interactions that kicked the meteor out of the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud, that’s all it would have taken for the dinosaurs to possibly survive, and for mammals not to flourish.

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Fascinating. A couple of hours either way rotationally.

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Timing. Placing. Do you detect a theme here. :grin:

I think you are avoiding the question posed by the fine tuning argument.

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I question that.

Not in the slightest, no. Why would I? How could any rational person, including those of faith?

The theme that I have so subtly been proclaiming all this time and cleverly nuanced that I thought you might have picked up on by now is that God in his providence is sovereign over time and place, timing and placing.
 

Many of faith believe that (do you recall hearing of Maggie or George?), but most of us are not as rational as you, since you believe God is impotent to act interventionally.

There’s nothing clever or subtle in the thought of God committing geocide and micromanaging(=fine tuning) some arbitrary love child while watching others hang and burn. As in Arthur C. Clarke’s terribly beautiful short The Star.

Do straw men and red herrings come any bigger?
 

A Father caring for his children is micromanaging. Whatever.

Does irrelevance? Irrationality?

Speaking of relevance, I bet you didn’t see or didn’t read the Bonhoeffer I posted, or perceive it as applicable to you. Just in case, here it is again:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I read it. You should not let fiction determine your worldview.
 

To a nihilist, maybe.

On the question of whether things would turn out the same evolutionary, opinions reflect the opiner’s inclinations to determinism or indeterminism rather than conclusive evidence. Evolution has both some highly unpredictable aspects and some tightly constrained aspects. Another challenge is what do we mean by things coming out the same? For example, if a rewind of evolution produced somewhat human-like, spiritual beings descended from cephalopods, is that basically the same result or not? Simon Conway Morris emphasizes the similarities. Roger D. K. Thomas and students have done analyses showing that most of the imaginable body plans had been exploited by end of the Cambrian, suggesting that most of the options have been taken and another version of evolution would turn out broadly similar. Gould emphasized the variation of the Cambrian forms - arthropods show combinations of appendages in ways that are not found in any of the major arthropod groups present for the rest of the Phanerozoic (how many antennae, limbs, mouthparts, etc.) But the average non-biologist might easily dismiss them as a bunch of bugs and shrimp, whereas no one has trouble telling a butterfly from a standard beetle from an ant, which are all holometabolous insects. Which disparity is more impressive?

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Perhaps I have not been clear - fine tuning as it is discussed deals with events from a beginning, such as formation of stars, elements and subsequent events (molecules, planets etc). These are shown to be critically dependent on scientific calculations, and thus the use of the unfortunate ‘fine tuning’ phrase. The various discussions on biological evolution are relevant after the formation of stars, planets, molecules etc. and are thus not the basis for a repeat of the creation.

My point has been that if the conditions covered by ‘fine tuning’ differed, science shows that nothing would be as it is. Critics have brushed this aside by denying a beginning, denying scientific constants, and so on, without producing any substantial scientific data.

Discussions on evolution would be mute, since under different conditions, elements and molecules as we know, could not form.

Which conditions?

A detailed discussion and views for and against this notion can be found in places such as:

Fine-Tuning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I’m fully conversant with the myth of fine tuning. Nature self tunes a few, a polydactylic handful of measured constants which cannot vary but will derive from the intersections of the prevenient laws nonetheless. If God is the ground of being, He still may not have to omm them.