Scientific evidence for any fine tuning?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I don’t know enough about universal cosmic constants that must be met. As far as I know , and I’ve definitely heard speculative science touch on it, is that this universe can be reshaped a lot.

If you are asking is things like matter and energy essential and would have to be he same. Most likely. As far as I know we don’t know of beings without being formed of matter and how would anything get done without energy. It’s difficult to imagine a universe without various temperatures. But I don’t see how any of that really works for fine tuning. It’s sort of like saying having eyes is proof of a creator bedside without them we could not see. But I’ll read through the encyclopedia you shared in a link. Though I’ll do it later. It’s 530 here and though
I’m awake if I was to try to read that I imagine sleep would come again lol.

So are you arguing that fine tuning can be interpreted as seeing necessary constants such as the development of matter, the development of energy and things like there was be temperatures would have to be the same and because it would have to be the same that implies it was fine tuned by a creator because if not, nothing would be here. It’s impossible
For us to live in a lightless, “energy-less” matter-less”‘space.

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SkovandOfMitaze made a fair number of points that I would tend to agree with also.

However, I might back off on the fine-tuning a little. Look at it this way. Suppose we find a way to mix a bunch of chemicals together in a flask, shake it, and a fish comes out. Does it really mean we don’t need God?

Suppose further that we could show (somehow) that there were a multitude of combinations of the various constants that would render some sort of viable solution where intelligent life could form? Does that mean we don’t need God?

Would not such findings be even scarier because now, we really think we are God? Yet you know just as well as I do just how rotten we human beings can be without the holy spirit to still our impetuous mouths. Even the best of us, even those who really try to follow Jesus can screw up big time. We can rashly lose our temper, we can be petulant, we can judge people cruelly, we can think we know people when we really don’t. We believe in our technology. We’re hardly different from the people who built the tower of Babel. Our construction can even bring us close to the heavens than even in that time, and google translate is often sufficient these days that we can understand the garbled translations it generates.

It’s probably good if God makes it so we are too thick to figure out how life came about so we don’t become even more insufferably overflowing with hubris about the power of our technology as “the answer” to life truth and everything.

Look more to the reasons for faith. Isn’t faith about doing what is right even when it will cost you severely? Faith is about being confident in God in the times when you might lose your job, maybe ruin your hard-earned career because you listen to Jesus instead of listening to power and authority who have gone astray.

Consider this point from John 12:37-42

37 Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him, 38 so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

“Lord, who has believed what he heard from us,
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said,

40 “He has blinded their eyes
and hardened their heart,
lest they see with their eyes,
and understand with their heart, and turn,
and I would heal them.”

41 Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him. 42 Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; 43 for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.

Whereas generally, we read this passage to be about people rejecting Jesus because they worship the world, at that time, the “synagogue” was an essential part of a person’s life. Today, going to church is a choice and hardly something that demands a great sacrifice. The modern “synagogues” are the institutions that symbolize success in modern society. If you are fired from your job, or you lose an election, in many ways, this is the synagogue for us now. Like most sin, it starts with the little things and graduates. Eventually, if you resist the powerful in doing evil or say something that superiors don’t want to hear, and you can be thrown out of these modern “synagogues”.

Isn’t the real point that if we actually accept Jesus, we will do what is right – even if it costs us dearly. Our struggle is to learn to trust in God, not to revel in worldly blandishments or quarrel about things that none of us can really answer. We want to do what is right in the world.

It is there you should be looking for Jesus. Although fine-tuning and evolution are very challenging problems to understand, they are comparatively easy questions. Yet, if God used evolution, what can we say? If God made a “world” where all multiverses (if they exist) could have different constants and in every one of them, intelligent, sentient beings could evolve, I don’t think that tells us anything. It is living out a life of repentance that matters and fine-tuning and evolution (true or false) makes no difference to that. Following Jesus is a way to say that you desire to do what is truly right from that 30000 ft perspective of God’s eyes, not your own. [Maybe, in terms of scale, that should be the astronomical or multiverse perspective of God’s eyes.]

by grace we proceed

[minor edits to remove some repetitive sentences and grammatical errors.]

179

The essence of the fine tuning argument is that if the physical constants and physical makeup of the universe had been different at its beginning then we wouldn’t have the universe we see now. Tiny changes in those values would have made big differences.

The debate is about whether this fine balance of constants and matter/energy required a fine tuner, a conscious creator who could produce these conditions. That is something we don’t know at the moment.

180

The debate often turns into someone/deity fine tuning it all or not, and I think the terminology of ‘fine tuning’ is unfortunate.

My impression is that the debate is skewed into areas such as ID vs completely random events, with some disagreement on a beginning.

I do not accept a notion that God is a technician who tinkers with this or that to get things right. So two outlooks are reasonable. (a) we believe God is the Creator and science is a human activity that seeks to understand the creation, or (b) we do not believe there is a God and what we observe has come about by some incomprehensible event(s).

Ones outlook would thus be a reflection of (a) or (b). I cannot see how our understanding of science would differ. While there is a general agreement on (a), I get the impression that some think science provides evidence for (b). I think this (if indeed my impression is correct) is mistaken.

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181

I think you meant to say “omnipotent”

182

One of the things I have been thinking about is that if we really found some genuine evidence that life really existed on Mar or maybe even exists on one of the Jovian moons, this would suggest that there is a natural tendency for life to form. If so, it would also tend to follow that the basic units that define an organism (RNA, proteins, lipids, etc.) would be rather similar. In that sense, it seems more likely that you could have a Captain Kirk going about the galaxy and meeting all sorts of interesting sentient humanoid-like creatures. I’m not so sure that would get down to the fine points of what would define a male and a female (or what sort of pheromones either would produce), so his love affairs would be somewhat challenging to argue, but, to some extent, the more likely it is to find life independently emerging within our own solar system, there far more likely it is that it would have many recognizable similarities.

183

I wonder … we have been told that fine-tuning is the totemic argument for “God did it”. Yet another feature we admire as engineers and scientists is “robustness”; the fact that no matter what we throw at some system to cripple it, it perseveres. Evolution is an example of a robust system where there are many redundancies. One of the problems that biologists often face is that they may isolate some protein that is associated with some malady, yet when they make a knockout, nothing happens. It can prove difficult to fully cripple a protein or an RNA molecule such that an organism simply cannot survive, at least in the lab. Hence, a lot of the arguments about “mutations” when examined in the lab can quickly fall off of evolution’s Teflon coating.

So should we be impressed there is this one and only one combination of constants, or should we be even more impressed were we to find that there were many such cases where some combination would lead to a viable solution? Or even if not, would it not be even more impressive if, by some feature of epiphenomena, all of the multiverses (assuming they exist) have exactly the same parameterization? Does it really say anything about God at all?

At the end of the day, God gets to be God. We, on the other hand, argue from our particular perspectives. We know, or can visualize, in the role of leadership, that we will be confronted by problems where there is no right solution. You have two kids who are fighting over something, sometimes the only answer is to send both of them to their rooms. We have some infinitesimal fraction of knowledge of what is really happening, and we evaluate it by standards we have generally found to work but move out to the 10 km perspective, and there probably is nothing that can be applied universally without fail 100% of the time exactly the same. Now move it out to billions of years and astronomical distances. Job wasn’t told “why?”, and it all looked pretty awful. Yet, I wonder, put us at the helm, I don’t think we have all that it takes to do better. Frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to make those kinds of decisions.

by Grace we proceed
wkd

184

No, I meant irony.

185

Hugh Ross has been saying for decades that he expects it (and/or on other solar system objects) from detritus blasted up by early cometic and meteoric impact with Earth.

186

I recall a sort of an early version I heard from Hugh Ross many years ago. At that time, I was under the impression that it was bacteria that drifted out of the earth’s atmosphere. I am not sure about comets or meteor impacts because of the massive energy involved, but that sort of “panspermia” from the earth seems at least plausible. That is why I tried to emphasize the notion of it really being “Martian”. I’m talking the hypothetically plausible, not necessarily the factual. At any rate, you would be talking about life that might have still flourished and then disappeared some 2 billion years ago when the Martian atmosphere basically leaked away.

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187

That suggests 50:50. It isn’t. It’s 100:0 There is no need to invoke intent in c, e, G, h, emm ee - electron mass (pee too? the proton) and mu zero - the magnetic constant until we have eliminated natural self tuning. The other 19 even more abstruse measured parameters will keep.

The 6 measured constants may have no relevance before the wave function collapse of the minimal quanta of existence emerging from nothing at all, when they come in to contact with the rest of nature. Intriguing, no?

188

I would agree. It is one of those unfortunate circumstances where a scientific term is easily misunderstood by the lay public.

I think almost all physicists and scientists at large agree that the universe, as we know it, started with the initial expansion of the universe some 13 to 14 billion years ago. In the same way, they would also agree that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and that they themselves were formed some years after that.

What the paragraph above is getting at is that “beginning” isn’t necessarily the same as “came from nothing”. I have seen many people in these conversations make that leap of logic, and that is where confusion often begins.

c) we simply admit that we don’t know how the universe came to be and do our best to figure it out through objective evidence, reason, and logic.

The advantage of science is we can actively work on questions, even if they end up being dead ends. Supernatural explanations usually don’t lend themselves to active investigations. I think Dennis Venema explained it quite well in reference to abiogenesis:

Perhaps God created a much deeper system that spawns universes, knowing that one such universe would be one where beings like us would emerge.

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189

I also was not arguing for anything being viable in other environments if it came from Earth.

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Nothingness is a difficult concept and the terminology (coming from nothing) is meaningless/ Thus Christianity states “in the beginning was the Word”… so a beginning is a meaningful term theologically.

What I find intriguing is the “isness” that science demonstrates. By this, I mean we may consider a myriad of molecules with vast variations, yet electrons remain that, atoms are the same, energies etc of every molecules can be understood with great accuracy. Indeed this “isness” (non-random nature) is the basis for the reproducibility so important to science.

In addition to this, the periodic Table shows us the elements created in stars, and we can observe, for example, the bulk of organic compounds are the result of combinations of a few atoms, H, C, O, N (with some S and small amounts of other atoms). This combination of non-random atoms with vast variations in ways they can combine (and displaying their unique properties) has interested me from the days when as a young student chemistry was so attractive. Simplicity combined with vast complexity. How good is that! :star_struck:

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191

I suppose that instead of self-tuning, I prefer the term “iss-ness” (reproducible).

192

Sorry, maybe I misunderstood.

I’d say that, whereas a terrestrial panspermia seems highly unlikely because of the radiation, nevertheless, perhaps by unimaginable luck, some spores could have made it all the way to Mars and become viable 2 billion years ago. So maybe if we found some 2 billion year old spores from the last vestiges of Mars, and they had the same DNA and amino acids (given 2 billion years of racemization), one plausible proposition would be that they came from earth.

The Jovian moons seems far more improbable, so if we were to find life and see the same sort of DNA/RNA protein, lipid story there, we would largely have to conclude that this stuff really does combine together in a predictable way.

It makes me wonder though, how would we recognize that something were alive if it were not made of these familiar things we are used to.

193

“The universe came from nothing” is a common phrase in these discussions, so I thought I would mention it. You are right, though. The particulars of how to define nothing is fraught with difficulties.

Matter and energy aren’t immutable. Protons and electrons can be smashed together to form neutrons. You can smash protons together and what you get out of it is a lot of stuff that isn’t protons. Fission reactions pump out energy and have less mass after the event.

But there is a constancy to the universe, which is what I think you are getting at. The same particles behave in the same way in both time and space.

Simple rules that give rise to complex results. The ability to describe nature in a short equation is pretty amazing.

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194

Tardigrades, maybe? :slightly_smiling_face:

195

Wow, I guess so. It seems they even can survive in space, so they might do better than bacteria.

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196

For a few years, OOM 10, 100 at the very most, once, unreproduced. For each order of magnitude, divide by that order of magnitude. Nothing survives a billion years. You’d have to stop time for real. There is no Earth life on Mars. I doubt it ever rained consistently on Mars, that that […hmm, I stutter sometimes, sustained] oceans formed. But there may be areas of intense physico-chemical gradients on Olympus Mons that reproduce Earth’s fertile deep sea vents.

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