Fine Tuning argument / The best argument for the existence of God

[McBell]

You took the article out of context…. Therefore you failed

You did not fool anyone.

Well, perhaps yourself.....

 

[Subduction Zone]

You took the article out of context…. Therefore you failed

Trolling does not help your case. Once again, when you made your errors they were made clear to you. All you had was denial at the time. Now you are falsely accusing me of your sins. You requested a link, I gave you one. No comments made about it. No claims made about it.

 

[leroy]

Trolling does not help your case. Once again, when you made your errors they were made clear to you. All you had was denial at the time. Now you are falsely accusing me of your sins. You requested a link, I gave you one. No comments made about it. No claims made about it.

No you haven’t explained how did I took the article out of context…………you made the assertion without any justification and you even admit it and invented some crazy excuse for why you are not supposed to support your accusation.

 

[leroy]

You just said "at least in theory you can have life and “no-FT”." This does mean that fine tuning isn't necessary for life, doesn't it?

Given the laws that we have, we need FT for life to excist, ….. but in some other hypothetical reality with different laws this could not be the case…………

70+ years ago nobody knew about the FT of the universe, it could have been the case that life could have evolved within a wide rage of values (like black holes for example)…… but it simply happened to be the case that in this universe the life permitting rage is narrow

 

[Subduction Zone]

No you haven’t explained how did I took the article out of context…………you made the assertion without any justification and you even admit it and invented some crazy excuse for why you are not supposed to support your accusation.

And I told you that I am not going back since you only denied or did not understand the corrections that first time. It would be pointless for me to do so.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Given the laws that we have, we need FT for life to excist, ….. but in some other hypothetical reality with different laws this could not be the case…………

70+ years ago nobody knew about the FT of the universe, it could have been the case that life could have evolved within a wide rage of values (like black holes for example)…… but it simply happened to be the case that in this universe the life permitting rage is narrow

Classic argument from ignorance. We don't understand, therefore FT. It is not going to fly with anyone that understands logic.

As you have pointed out this is a relatively new problem. Some of the parameters are understood right now. I know that I posted of at least one that you seemed to have ignored. Expecting immediate answers to relatively new problems is not being reasonable. Unanswered problems are only unanswered problems. They are not evidence for or against an idea.

 

[leroy]

As you have pointed out this is a relatively new problem. .

Which means that this is a good time to select your favorite “solution” for this problem and make predictions……. Then see if your predictions turn out to be true.

Design would predict that more and more FT will arise as new observations and discoveries are made.

So what is your favorite hypothesis and what predictions can you make………….o wait you are an atheist you don’t propose predictions nor alternative hypothesis.

 

[leroy]

Evidence for the Evolutionary Model

Classic argument from ignorance. We don't understand, therefore Evolution. It is not going to fly with anyone that understands logic.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Given the laws that we have, we need FT for life to excist, ….. but in some other hypothetical reality with different laws this could not be the case…………

At this point, I'm not really sure what you're arguing.

70+ years ago nobody knew about the FT of the universe, it could have been the case that life could have evolved within a wide rage of values (like black holes for example)…… but it simply happened to be the case that in this universe the life permitting rage is narrow

- what is "the life permitting range?"
- what is the range that's possible?
- for both of these questions: how do you know?

 

[leroy]

. Some of the parameters are understood right now. I know that I posted of at least one that you seemed to have ignored. .

Care to share it once more? I didn’t notice your post

 

[McBell]

Classic argument from ignorance. We don't understand, therefore Evolution. It is not going to fly with anyone that understands logic.

You did not fool anyone.

Well, perhaps yourself.....

 

[leroy]

At this point, I'm not really sure what you're arguing.


- what is "the life permitting range?"

it depends on each value, in the OP you can see some examples, for example the cosmological constant is tunnued to the 10 ¨120

- what is the range that's possible?

no body knows,
Perhaps this is the only possible rage or perhaps there are many possible rages……..it all depends if determinism or indeterminism is true
.... but its irrelevant the FT argument is not affected in ether case


-

for both of these questions: how do you know?

With respect to 1 ……You can do simulations and see what would happen if say you increase the force of gravity 1%.........if you have a universe that collapsed in a black hole then presumably you wont have life in this universe

 

[Subduction Zone]

Which means that this is a good time to select your favorite “solution” for this problem and make predictions……. Then see if your predictions turn out to be true.

Design would predict that more and more FT will arise as new observations and discoveries are made.

So what is your favorite hypothesis and what predictions can you make………….o wait you are an atheist you don’t propose predictions nor alternative hypothesis.

The best "solution" is to admit that there are problems that one does not know the answer to. That is all. Trying to claim that there is a FT problem is unwarranted and not supported by the evidence. The evidence only points to currently unanswered questions.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Care to share it once more? I didn’t notice your post

I did in the past. If you start acknowledging your errors I will do so again. Otherwise it is simply a waste of my time. People that are willing to have a proper discussion can make demands. Those that don't will simply have to wait. Or do their homework and find the earlier posts.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Classic argument from ignorance. We don't understand, therefore Evolution. It is not going to fly with anyone that understands logic.

LOL, oh my god. Another epic fail. There is scientific evidence for the theory of evolution. There does not appear to be any for your beliefs, at least you cannot provide any.

Here is a learning opportunity for you. Since you do not understand the concept of evidence are you willing to have a discussion so that you will not repeat this error of yours?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

it depends on each value, in the OP you can see some examples, for example the cosmological constant is tunnued to the 10 ¨120

I don't know what "tuned to the 10^120" means.

Can you tell me the specific values for the cosmological constant where life becomes impossible?

no body knows,
Perhaps this is the only possible rage or perhaps there are many possible rages……..it all depends if determinism or indeterminism is true
.... but its irrelevant the FT argument is not affected in ether case

No, by my reading, that's the whole argument. It's entirely relevant.

Edit: I mean, at the one extreme end of what might be the case: if every single possible combination of all the constants for the universe is compatible with life, then the fact we have life wouldn't be special at all.

-
With respect to 1 ……You can do simulations and see what would happen if say you increase the force of gravity 1%.........if you have a universe that collapsed in a black hole then presumably you wont have life in this universe

I can do these simulations? I don't think I'm in a position to do them. I'm not even sure where I could find the software to run a simulation like that.

Have you done this?

 

[joelr]

Thats kind of the point if many things could have gone wrong...... But things happened to turn out "ok" what explanation do you suggest?

If it was tuned for life then it should show. At least the fact remains it doesn't look tuned.
Yes life happened. Hundreds of millions of years of non-mammal life dominated then by chance mammals became dominant. The chances of apes becoming intelligent is not likely. But it did happen. This does not suggest tuning but rather random chance. The way in which everything happened looks like things happened and evolved by chance. Not by a plan.

 

[joelr]

Yes, But in reality, "_ in the gap" notions are a primary driver of science, metaphysics, and pseudoscience (among much else). It seems to me completely unreasonable to say that because our universe was finely-tuned, this implied a "tuner". But it is just about equally ridiculous to turn our backs on a long tradition of principles within physics that have proved so fruitful and simply accept a process in which we use experimental precision to cancel out divergences in a series of delicate processes in order to finely-tune models to match what can be observed when tiny deviations from certain of these values drastically alter the possibility of cosmic structures or a cosmos at all for reasons we have no explanation for. Likewise, it is nearly as fantastical to posit cosmologies involving speculative metaphysics (e.g., multiverse cosmologies) based on the vary same reasoning used in the fine-tuning argument(s) for God.

Not at all. When we only knew of one galaxy it wasn't at all absurd to posit there might be many galaxies. Same for universes. We have no evidence for Gods outside of fiction.

This is just wrong.

Taking a quantum of super compressed unified energy and making a claim that this looks like something "tuned for life" is what would be wrong.

This is misunderstanding QM, completely getting annihilation wrong, and mistaking a bunch of theoretical notions while confusing them with incorrect inferences from observation (all the while mistaking the nature of randomness in QM and physics more generally).

The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. It didn't and we do not know why. Even if we come to an understanding it's still possible that the problem of matter/antimatter annihilation could be a problem for matter. This still does not impact the fact that the state of the early universe does not appear to be tuned for life.

This is almost as controversial as "god did it" and is accepted by Tegmark and not really anybody else. It is an appeal to faith, aesthetics, and the same kind of reasonining underlying so many theistic arguments that are similarly to be dismissed as unscientific.

Again, same problem. we already see mathematics embedded in the universe. We do not see Gods anywhere.

Wrong. Firstly, a rather interesting paradox in QM is that one can not only make predictions regarding the evolution of quantum systems with certainty, but one can prevent this evolution altogether so as to make the system more "deterministic" than is possible in classical physics. Secondly, future predictions are impossible in classical physics not only due to impossible precision required for even a 1-body system, but also because the deterministic laws hold only for idealized systems that do not exist (i.e., those which are isolated, which would preclude even in principle our knowledge of them, and those which require a level of measurement accuracy which is even in pricinple impossible as the entire set of possible measurements we could ever make given any technology form a set of measure 0 in comparison with that required of classical physical systems, properties, and processes). FInally, the statistical structures and probabilistic nature of QM are irrelevant here in the manner you seem to suggest.

No, they are not. The early universe was a quantum system. There is no way you can take this and say it looks like something tuned for life. You cannot make future predictions and say what the future state will be once it expands.

And what is our evidence for this? Violations of metaphysical assumptions in observation that lead to speculative pleading (like the kind you dismiss so readily and for exactly the same reason). The "evidence" for other universe described in multiverse cosmologies is basically fine-tuning.

What is the evidence? First the upper atmosphere and out to the moon were the upper heavens were divine beings lived, including temples and heaven. This gets pushed back, to God helping out the motion of the planets and so on. Now right before the big bang some God created everything at this spot. It's more of the same, right where our science cannot explain, there is God. This speculation continues to fail for starters. Where is the evidence for a multiverse? We have evidence for a universe. We live in a universe. The only evidence that is against more universes is we cannot see them?
But we know universes are possible. Gods are made up fiction.
We don't know there is a multiverse but it's a reasonable hypothesis. For Gods we have 2 choices, one of the myths - Zeus, Yahweh, Brahman and so on or some deity that created a universe but doesn't interact.
No evidence for either. For nature, mathematics, we have evidence. Nature is capable of fantastic things and yet it's not enough? People want to invent mythical beings that are sort of like us but better?

Yes one line of evidence is the idea that the physical laws may evolve and vary which would explain why this universe is what it is. But we already see nature doing things like this. We only see creators of universes in stories. There is no evidence for anything along those lines.
I cannot believe you would call the multiverse "speculative pleading"? This is apologist nonsense. By that logic all new science ideas would fall under that? /there are several multiverse models in science. No way to test them yet. But we know universes are a real thing. Show me one model where God did anything.

 

[joelr]

The point is that the fine-tuning problem is sufficient evidence to warrant outlandish, otherwise completely speculative metaphysical nonsense that is akin to the nonsense one finds in Craig's argument and other arguments from design, in which e.g., there are googols of universe so that ours doesn't appear designed. The point is that to say that improbable, highly unnatural seeming "coincidences" or appeals to aesthetics or even appeals to the fact that our universe shouldn't seem to be designed is a central driver of research, model-building, and theoretical work in cosmology and related fields. The point that the same evidence motivating design arguments by theists are used by cosmologists and theoretical physicists for the same reason: to explain fine-tuning problems.

I cannot argue for Graig but I have listened to his lectures and I can tell you he does not believe in Many-Worlds to make our universe not appear designed or to explain fine-tuning problems. He backs the theory because he believes it's the correct interpretation of QM. I heard him debate the various interpretations with Neil Turok, Kip Thorne and a few others who each subscribed to a different interpretation. Craig believes Relativistic State solves the wavefunction collapse issue.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I don't know what "tuned to the 10^120" means.

On this, see below and references therein (I can provide the more complete in-text citations if desired)
“Pure geometrical Λ and vacuum energy have the same dynamical behaviour in GR. Estimating the latter via QFT calculations and comparing the result with the observed value leads to the famous fine-tuning problem of the cosmological constant. See e.g. Weinberg (1989). This roughly goes as follows: the observed value of ρΛ is about 10^−47 GeV^4 (Ade et al. 2016a). The natural scale for the vacuum energy density is the Planck scale, i.e. 10^76 GeV^4. There are 123 orders of magnitude of difference! Even postulating a false vacuum state after the electro-weak phase transition at 10^8 GeV^4, the difference is 55 orders of magnitude. See Martin (2012) for a comprehensive account of Λ and the issues related to it.

Another problem with Λ is the so-called cosmic coincidence (Zlatev et al. 1999). This problem stems from the fact that the density of matter decreases with the inverse of the cube scale factor, whereas the energy density of the cosmological constant is, as its name indicates, constant. However, these two densities are approximately equal at the present time. This coincidence becomes all the more intriguing when we consider that if the cosmological constant had dominated the energy content of the universe earlier, galaxies would not have had time to form; on the other hand, had the cosmological constant dominated later, then the universe would still be in a decelerated phase of expansion or younger than some of its oldest structures, such as clusters of stars (Velten et al. 2014).

The cosmic coincidence problem can also be seen as a fine-tuning problem in the initial conditions of our universe. Indeed, consider the ratio ρΛ /ρm, of the cosmological constant to the matter content. This ratio goes as a^3. Suppose that we could extrapolate our classical theory (GR) up to the Planck scale, for which a ≈ 10^−32. Then, at the Planck scale we have ρΛ /ρm≈ 10^−96. This means that, at trans-Planckian energies, possibly in the quantum universe, there must be a mechanism which establishes the ratio ρΛ /ρm with a precision of 96 significant digits! Not a digit can be missed, otherwise we would have today 10 times more cosmological constant than matter, or vice-versa, thereby being in strong disagreement with observation.

So, we find ourselves in a situation of impasse. On one hand, Λ is the simplest and most successful DE candidate. On the other hand it suffers from the above-mentioned issues. What do we do? Much of today research in cosmology addresses this question. Answers are looked for mostly via investigation of new theories of gravity, extensions or modifications of GR, of which DE would be a manifestation. There are so many papers addressing extended theories of gravity that it is quite difficult to choose representatives. Probably the best option is to start with a textbook, e.g. Amendola and Tsujikawa (2010).

A different approach is to accept that Λ has the value it has by chance, and it turns out to be just the right value for structures to form and for us to be here doing cosmology. This also known as Anthropic Principle and exists in many forms, some stronger than others. It is also possible that ours is one universe out of an infinite number of realisations, called Multiverse, with different values of the fundamental constants. Life as we know it then develops only in those universes where the conditions are favourable.” (pp. 11-12; emphases in original)

Piatella, O. (2018). Lecture Notes in Cosmology (UNITEXT for Physics). Springer.