Fine Tuning

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

… That God could have chosen any set of an infinite number of laws which would have done the job. Which makes those laws arbitrary.

…

I think there are such things as less infinite and more infinite. Less eternal and more eternal. (Those being terms of measurement.) Less caused and more caused. Less causing and more causing.

You may be using the word “arbitrary” in too narrow or wide a meaning for the circumstances. Probably, all we could say is, “seems relatively arbitrary”, with all the questions that begs about “seems”.

“Laws of nature” according to my fragile understanding of Godel’s theorem, enter and exit from (transcend) a spectrum of visibility (sometimes but not always in groups of three interestingly). That’s why there will always be more need for real science in the eyes of genuine theists and atheists alike.

No-one should expect their own or others’ answers to be pat, just yet!

At least you get to act and not just react, even if it doesn’t feel like it. That at least, is a bit of purpose to be getting on with.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

So God was constrained by the conditions. He was restricted in the manner in which He designed the universe for us. You are saying that He was limited in His options.

In the universe where you and I as persons have the importance of acting (regardless of what any authority might say), He prioritised His options specially to support us in acting.

Omnipotent doesn’t mean tyrannical and totalitarian - those things are just a caricature.

God is breathtakingly subtle. Very “fine” tuning indeed is what it is about!

 

[ericc]

God is not constrained or required to

1. Create a universe.
2. Create a universe with life in it.

If he wish to, he could create a universe with simple life forms, or with just prairie dogs. Or just rocks with interesting formations. Or he could create life forms that are non-carbon based. There is no reason to suppose a Supreme Being endowed with unlimited powers could not create something else but has to be straightjacketed into arbitrary decision making.

Using a radio example rather than a watch, if one can fine-tune to this particular channel of universe, I can’t see why the radio maker couldn’t make other channels (universes) which may require fine-tuning also, if he so wishes. But this particular radio channel is meant for a particular audience only. Us. But the radio maker is certainly not constrained in his capability to make other stuff. Whether he has an audience or not is a separate matter entirely. Choosing between this universe and all others being arbitrary is just fallacious reasoning.

 

[ccmnxc]

Because if life were impossible, we wouldn’t be here talking about?

Impossible in the sense of: there are no living material beings since (among either things) there is no stable universe for them to exist in, and there is no atomic composition.

But more seriously, we don’t know. We don’t know whether other kinds of universes are possible and exist, or if other regions of space may have different values (for instance, there is some evidence that there were very small differences in the Fine Structure Constant’s value early in the Universe’s evolution).

Sure, we don’t know if there are other universes, though if there are, we certainly don’t know which model is correct and whether or not that model itself requires fine-tuning. In terms of different constants in different regions of the universe, I don’t see why we’d have any reason to think so. When it comes to the cosmological constant, for example, that strikes me as something that would be very obvious if the constants shifted based on time and location. As for constants governing the fundamental forces, to propose a change would make it such that there is something more fundamental than said forces that causes the change, which would require a pretty massive revision of the standard model(s) in particle physics. But this isn’t really my area of expertise; if someone wants to explain away fine-tuning through possible future breakthroughs in physics, I’m in no place to stop them.

Could there be a Prime Mover that kicked it off? Well sure, though I think that’s assuming an entity for no other reason than filling a gap in our knowledge.

There is only a gap if we are assuming fine-tuning will one day be not only explained, but explained away (in which case, we aren’t appealing to gaps, but rather the person hoping to explain it away is). If fine-tuning is here to stay, then the standard trichotomy of design, chance, or necessity applies. If saying “Well there could be another option” were a valid response, than any disjunction that isn’t a tautology all of a sudden becomes open to this charge, which seems to be pretty absurd.

But what Fine Tuning suggests is that even if there is such an entity, it had very little freedom in the physical laws that would lead to the kind of universe capable of producing life, or at least life in any form we know.

If Fine Tuning is an argument for God, it isn’t an argument for the kind of God most Christians believe in.

If God chooses to create life, and if He chooses to do so by making physical beings, and if that was carried out using a means whereby he establishes laws to govern things rather than directly conserving and causing everything Himself, and if He establishes those laws such that permit only a small range of options for the constants that describe matter, then yes, God is somewhat constrained.
But that is also 4 “ifs” that need to be fulfilled to get to your conclusion. That leaves a heck of a lot of room for divine freedom, as far as I can see.

 

[e_c]

There is a serious fallacy in trying to apply probability arguments where you have a sample size of one. Since we know nothing about the initial conditions that lead to the observable universe, we cannot apply a useful statistical analysis to the likelihood of a particular physical principle being one way or the other. About all the Anthropic Principle can really say is that if the universe weren’t like it was, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

And it’s not just theologians and philosophers that are bothered by it. Physicists, even those nasty rotten atheistic ones, ponder entities like the Fine Structure Constant. In fact, I’d say at least some of the motivation of those advocating brane and multiverse theories is to create some sort of statistically relevant sample size (as in, 3 out of 10 universes have a Fine Structure Constant that can support a large periodic table of elements).

What if only a narrow band of physical constants can lead to a universe capable of sustaining complex structures? What if the majority of possible starting conditions lead to universes that are stillborn; they don’t expand, they collapse back into a singularity, they are never capable of producing more than a haze of subatomic particles?

If, as you say, omnipotence cannot confer the ability to create logical contradictions (as in, not even God can make 2+2=5), then certain facets of inhabitable universe very likely are themselves derived from certain logical and coherent precepts. In other words, if there is a God, and that being did create the Universe, perhaps He had very little freedom in the starting conditions and fundamental constants that physical laws are built on.

I used the example in another thread of the proverbial pizza chef, who has a vast menu, millions, even billions of possible toppings, but only a very small subset of that menu will produce a pizza anyone could eat. Yes, he could put arsenic pellets and botulism bacteria on a pizza, so in that way he has near unlimited freedom, but if he’s going to make a pizza that anyone could or even would eat, he’s stuck with a menu of maybe twenty or thirty toppings.

So far as we understand it, that is what the Universe is like. Certain basic constants and physical laws may be variable, but those that can produce a universe capable of producing and sustaining complex structures of matter and energy are probably only a small subset of that larger set of values.

Almost. Remember that if we are talking about the infinite, there are, well, a lot of options and combinations out there that could work to have beings like us flourish that are not actually the same kind of beings as us, say, in that we are carbon-based, as an example. (Thus principle 1 that I enumerated.)

Remember also that we are talking about other more basic laws of chemistry and physics changing, which would affect biology. The discussion about what laws could change without somehow violating the PNC is another discussion entirely, which would involve too much subtlety for a message board, frankly.

So we run into a bit of a near-tautology. Human beings with our physical requirements need the universe to be conducive to those physical requirements in order to exist. So, yes, the universe is certainly fine-tuned in the sense that it is ordered just right for our flourishing. If one wants to word it in a way that constricts God’s action, so be it: To make these kinds of creatures that have these requirements for existence, God has to provide those requirements. Both are self-evident.

I will say again that this argument is useful mainly as rhetoric against a materialist. “You think that the universe just happened to produce the very intricate and delicate conditions for human life? What are the chances! Doesn’t it seem to fix that problem if we say there is an intelligence directing things to produce life? Etc.” Dawkins even has some respect for that, with his 747 gambit or whatever it’s called, unless I misunderstood what he was saying?

In any event, anyone thinking of God in terms of probabilities once he gets off the debate stage and cools off from the rhetoric is completely lost on the issue, at least in the Catholic philosophical vision of natural theology. The existence of God is self-evident once one understands what is meant by the word “God” and grasps the most basic metaphysical principles of act and potency, cause and effect, necessity and contingency, etc.

Also, for the record, I would say that the average Thomist would call “the universe” everything other than God, even in these bizarre multiverse theories… Oh well.