Avoiding the Anthropic Principle?

[buffalo]

If you want to give up the scientific adventure, and invoke a non-empirically verifiable supernatural designer, be my guest. Part of the adventure of science is to figure out how multi-verses might be testable, not to give up the challenge prematurely.

Is there a limit on how much taxpayer money should be spent?

 

[buffalo]

Actually, that problem would belong to epistemology. But anyways, knowledge of a supernatural being can be justified differently, since it is a priori knowledge (independent of experience). Whereas a multi-verse, if it is going to be scientific, is a posteriori (dependent on empirical evidence). Of course, we could try to argue philosophically for a multi-verse, though I’ve never heard such an argument. So it’s still hard for me to see how anyone can prove the existence of a multi-verse either philosophically or scientifically.

It would have to be revealed by someone outside our frame.

 

[MormonHero]

So it’s still hard for me to see how anyone can prove the existence of a multi-verse either philosophically or scientifically.

Don’t let your present lack of knowledge stop the scientific adventure.

 

[MormonHero]

Is there a limit on how much taxpayer money should be spent?

Are you looking to extend the Bush tax-cuts for the purposes of multi-verse research?

 

[fhansen]

The Anthropic Principle basically states that all physical and cosmological quantities are just right as to allow life to develop in the Universe.

QUESTION: How do Atheists and others avoid the implications of this principle?

With the Misanthropic Principle, of course. Sorry

 

[Anselm33]

With the Misanthropic Principle, of course. Sorry

Rim shot!!!

 

[anEvilAtheist]

ALSO:Is there any evidence for this multiple universe theory and what are others ways atheists (and others) diminish the Anthropic Principle?

I don’t think multiverse theories are a good explanation, though they do seem better than the God explanation. We have good evidence that at least one universe exists, while I have not seen any good evidence for the existence of a god. I think that all else equal it’s a better explanation to postulate more of some known entity than to postulate some completely different and unknown entity.

The bigger problem is that it has not been shown that things like our universe’s constants really are incredibly unlikely to have come about by chance. There’s a problem with the way the odds are typically calculated. If you want to know the chances of rolling a number less than 3 on a die, you take the number of numbers less than 3, which is 2, and divide by the number of possible numbers, which is 6. But imagine that you had no idea how many sides the die has. There would be no way of calculating the probability of getting less than a 3 since there would be nothing to divide by.

So before you can say that it is improbable that a constant takes a life-permitting value, you need to say what the range of possible values would be. Of course if there’s an infinite range of numbers, then the chance of drawing any one number is 0. In fact, even if a constant only had to be between 0 and a googolplex for life to exist, this range would still be infinitely smaller than the range of all real numbers. But just because we don’t know the range of values the constants could take doesn’t mean we should assume the range is infinite. An absence of evidence is not evidence of fine tuning.

However, for some constants, it may be possible to set some kind of upper limit. Let’s say you want to know the probability that a randomly chosen rock is smaller than one cubic meter. You know that it must be bigger than 0 and smaller than the size of the universe. But you clearly don’t find the odds of it being smaller than one cubic meter by just dividing 1 by the number of cubic meters in the universe. Some rock sizes are likelier than others and it doesn’t make sense to say that it’s just as likely that a rock will be between 0 cubic meters and 1 cubic meter as it is that a rock will be between 500 and 501 cubic meters. If you just assumed that all rock sizes are equally likely, you would see it as incredible fine tuning if a random rock was smaller than one cubic meter. But if you realized that small rocks are much more likely than larger rocks, you wouldn’t be surprised at all. In order to show that a constant is finely tuned, you need to show the range of possible values that the constant could take and about how likely that constant is to take any given value. Only after we have an approximate probability distribution can we say how likely, or unlikely, it is that the constant took a life-permitting value. Otherwise, you are merely making a God of the gaps argument, saying that just because we don’t know why the constants take the values they do, there must have been some God that set it up that way. And God of the gaps arguments have an abysmal track record.

But we shouldn’t automatically reject the God hypothesis. In order to see whether fine-tuning provides evidence for God, we need to apply Bayes theorem. I’ll spare you the technical details, but Bayes theorem is really just what we do every day. We start with what we currently know about the world and adjust our beliefs as we learn more. We start with what is called the prior probability. If we want to see how likely it is that God exists given the fine tuning evidence, we have to start with the likelihood that God exists. We then adjust this probability based on the evidence of fine tuning and how much more likely that evidence would be if God existed then if God did not exist. Without considering the prior plausibility of a claim, we would reach crazy conclusions, like the conclusion that there has been a super secret conspiracy for hundreds of years at all levels of government to make sure the U.S. has exactly 50 states. It’s true that such a conspiracy would make it very likely that we would end up with 50 states, more likely than without such a conspiracy, but the prior probability of the conspiracy is so low that it would be silly to believe in such a conspiracy. Knowing that we ended up with 50 states, you can hypothesize a conspiracy behind it, and knowing that we ended up with humans, you can hypothesize a God that wanted to create humans, but in neither case do you have evidence for your hypothesis.

One of the big problems is in defining God. If you define God as merely the creator of the universe, then we wouldn’t even know if he would have desires, let alone whether creating humans would be one of those desires. Knowing merely that something created the universe doesn’t tell you anything about the probability of there being intelligent life. Without reason to expect that the likelihood of fine tuning is higher with a creator than without a creator, even solid fine tuning evidence would not be evidence in favor of a creator. However, if you instead say that God is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good personal being who cares about humans, the likelihood that God would create humans increases. However, as you add a list of attributes to God, the prior probability of such a God existing decreases. Even if there was good evidence of fine tuning, this would not be good evidence in favor of God, it instead would merely show that if God exists, he would be the type of God that would want to fine tune the constants of the universe. Similarly, there being 50 states is not evidence of a 50 state conspiracy, but it is evidence that if there’s a conspiracy, it’s a 50 state conspiracy and not a 49 state conspiracy.