Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: But also, this is a speculative hypothesis really just moves the improbability that we're dealing with of the fine tuning up a level, as it were, from the universe to this hypothetical postulated law itself. It's a bit like trying to get rid of a wrinkle in a carpet by stamping on the wrinkle in the carpet.
Well, that will just move the wrinkle along somewhere else. It doesn't really deal with the issue ID the Future, a Podcast about Evolution
[00:00:39] Speaker B: and Intelligent Design if a friend, family member or colleague lodges an objection to the fine tuning argument for Intelligent Design, are you ready to respond?
Hey everyone, I'm Andrew McDermott and welcome to ID the Future.
Today I conclude my two part conversation with philosopher and intelligent design scholar Peter S. Williams. We're discussing his comprehensive list of objections to the fine tuning argument, as well as responses that he's assembled along with information from others for each.
Now, in case you don't know, Peter, he's based in Southampton, England. Williams is an Adjunct professor in Communication and Worldviews at NLA University College in Norway and a Trustee of the Christian Evidence Society. He is author of several books, including An Informed Essays on Intelligent Design Theory. We've spoken about that one in the past, so you can look up that episode if you want to learn more about his book. Well, Peter, it's good to have you back.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Grant, nice to join you and your audience.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So in the first half of this discussion, we set things up by reviewing the fine tuning data that has emerged and you broke down for us the fine tuning argument. For those who have not enjoyed part one yet, can you go over just how the data becomes the argument for intelligent design?
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So we went into some of the detail of the data in that previous episode to kind of cash out the first premise of the argument, which would be that our universe exhibits this highly unlikely but also specific pattern of natural laws and constants and initial conditions that jointly permit the existence of kind of interesting functional complexity such as chemistry existing in the universe, let alone organic chemistry and complex life forms like us.
The second premise would be that we have one or more principled ways of inferring to design.
From data to ruling in design is the best explanation of some data set, and that can be cashed out in kind of multiple ways from a philosophical principle of credulity like the British philosopher Richard Swinburne talks about in terms of specified or indeed irreducible complexity, in terms of a full blown kind of Bayesian probability analysis kind of argument, and I think all of those kind of methods of making this kind of inference would applied to this fine tuning data, suggest that there is real design is the best explanation of that data. And then I would want to kind of move on an extra step and say it's one thing to arrive at a conclusion of design, and it's another thing to have an argument about whether the best candidate for the source of that design, that genuine design, is God. Say there are lots of other competing candidates that it could be. So you need another step in the argument to say that a theistic design explanation is the overall best explanation. But that's a step on from arriving at a design explanation.
You can agree that yes, we need real design to explain this, real intelligence is behind the universe. But then you can have an argument about, well, what is that intelligence like? Right.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Well, in part one, we covered two groups of objections. The fine tuning isn't even real Set. And okay, it's real, but it's not surprising set. So by way of quick review, let's just touch on just one objection that typifies each of those groups. Let's start with the fine tuning is just hypothetical.
How do we respond to that?
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Yeah, well, lots of things in science are just hypothetical in inverted commas.
So if you want to object to the argument on this grounds, you're going to be undercutting huge swaths of the scientific enterprise.
If you're just going to restrict science to what you can directly or indirectly observe about the world, that's a very restricted view of what we're doing in science and we're going to have to sack a lot of scientists.
If that's the definition of science that you want to work with, I think that's too high a price to pay in order to avoid grappling with this argument.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: And out of the second group of objections that we covered in part one, perhaps the most common is the anthropic objection. We can't exist in a life prohibiting universe, so why all the fuss about our particular set of laws and constants and initial conditions?
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Yeah. So the fact that something is a precondition of your being able to observe it, that fact doesn't explain the existence of that precondition, why it is the way that it is.
So of course the universe must be compatible with our existence, given that here we are observing things. But maybe there could have been a universe in which there were no things capable of observing anything.
Right. So the fact that we're here doesn't of itself explain why we're here.
It just means that, yes, we observe this data and then we have to explain it. But pointing out that we wouldn't be able to notice the data if it weren't consistent with our existence, well, that's kind of tautological. But that observation, that tautology doesn't explain the thing that we're observing.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: And there's a good analogy that you mentioned in part one, the firing squad analogy, to help explain that. Well, so that's just a little preview of what we touched on the last episode. Let's move forward to some new objections to the fine tuning. Let's start with this. Maybe fine tuning results from a more fundamental law. How plausible is that claim?
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Well, let me make just a few points in response.
First of all, the initial conditions that the laws operate upon can't be referred to any law. They're not laws, they're initial conditions. So this objection lacks what we would call explanatory scope. It's only dealing with part of the relevant data, even if, you know, if you're only trying to deal with part of the relevant data. So it doesn't kind of COVID the waterfront, as the saying goes.
But also, this is a speculative hypothesis, really just moves the improbability that we're dealing with of the fine tuning up a level, as it were, from the universe to this hypothetical postulated law itself. It's a bit like trying to get rid of a wrinkle in a carpet by stamping on the wrinkle in the carpet.
Well, that will just move the wrinkle along somewhere else. It doesn't really deal with the issue.
And indeed, I would say it's implausible to think that a single law could contain all of the information needed to specify the complexity of our universe's physical processes and initial and so on and so forth. Because in our experience, scientific laws are kind of simple algorithms.
They don't contain huge amounts of information.
This objection is to give a kind of concrete illustration. It's a bit like suggesting that the law of gravity might be the explanation of why a rock fall arranged itself into a paragraph of comprehensible text.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: All we know about laws, we know that they don't start universes, they describe them, you know, and so even if you do bump up to some fundamental law we don't know about, chances are, as you say, it's not going to be able to explain it all. Well, next, the dynamic parameters objection. It goes something like this. Maybe some constants that appear fine tuned for life could actually be dynamical parameters that would naturally reach life permitting value ranges at some point in their existence.
Wow, that's a creative one for sure. But how realistic is it?
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well, there has been some discussion recently, for example, about so called dark energy and whether that is a parameter, that is the strength of it at least is changing over time.
That's a kind of indirect observation or indirect theoretical kind of postulate. There's some discussion about whether that changes over time. And that might motivate you to think there may be other parameters might be ones that kind of shift over their existence, such that it might kind of inevitably hit upon a life permitting range of values for some period of time during its existence. Right.
But again, like last time, note that this has limited explanatory scope.
It doesn't address the fine tuned nature of the laws or the initial conditions on which the laws and the parameters operate.
So it's only covering part of the waterfront.
And absent evidence of dynamism in these parameters, it's also ad hoc. So Occam's razor would favor postulating that the simpler hypothesis of consistent constants of constant parameters rather than dynamic ones. But even if like. Okay, let's bend over backwards here.
Even if we hypothesize multiple cosmical constants as being dynamic, the coordination of those dynamic parameters so that they would jointly hit on a requisite life permitting set of values for a long enough period of time altogether, that is an outcome that's going to exhibit at least as much fine tuning as the fine tuning of the original constants in the theory that they've been substituted for.
So again, like the kind of wrinkle in the carpet objection, this is only going to shift the locus of the data that needs explaining. It's not going to eliminate that data needing explaining.
Indeed, some people might argue that such a coordination of dynamic parameters so that they will altogether hit upon a life committing range of values for a long enough period of time to be interesting and useful, allow evolution and so on.
That might even require more fine tuning than having a set of static values that are fine tuned that way from the get go.
But it's certainly not going to improve the situation. It might arguably even make it worse.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Interesting.
Well, we couldn't talk about fine tuning without mentioning the multiverse. So let's review a few objections related to various multiverse proposals. What about Lee Smolin's finely tuned multiverse of cosmological natural selection involving black holes? Sounds especially exotic. Walk us through how you respond to that one.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Yeah, exotic, very creative.
Smolin stipulates that new Universes are created within black holes, each with slightly different physical constants.
So universes with constants that are favorable to forming black holes will of course then produce more offspring, if that is the case, leading to a multiverse that's populated predominantly by universes that are fine tuned to maximize black hole formation and that would indirectly support life. Because stars, of course, which are necessary for life, are a prerequisite for the formation of the black holes.
They just also happen to be a prerequisite for life. So you kind of get this kind of piggyback effect, as it were.
But remember, this all comes from this stipulation that black holes are what create new universes.
And Smolin's theory has faced multiple theoretical and indeed empirical falsifications.
So Smolin made the recently, fairly recently falsified prediction that neutron stars won't exist above a certain mass limit of about 1.2, 1.6 to 2 solar masses, but in 2022. So fairly recently, a massive neutron star was discovered with a mass around 2.23, 2.35 times as much as the Sun.
So that's, that's pushing back on that prediction.
Atheist cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin says that the rate of black hole formation can be increased by increasing the value of the cosmological constant. And that falsifies Smolin's conjecture that the value of all constants of nature are adjusted to maximize black hole production. Actually, they don't seem to be maximizing black hole production. Indeed, Smolin assumes that a universe producing lots of black holes will produce lots of stars.
But actually we now think that the opposite is true.
The universe most proficient at making black holes is one that produces primordial black holes, meaning that life permitting universes would actually be weeded out by Smolin's evolutionary scenario.
So it actually has the opposite effect to the one that he was postulizing that postulating that it might have.
Also, contra Smolin, the scientific consensus now is that black holes don't lose information and so don't spawn new universes. I think there was an interesting bet on this matter had cosmologist Stephen Hawking and a colleague on this, Leonard Susskind, says that Smolin's ideas tied to Hawking's old claim that information can fall into a black hole and get trapped behind the horizon. But the last decade of black hole physics and string theory has told us that no information can be transferred in this way. Okay, so there are a number of kind of empirical problems with the theory even before you get into some of the kind of implausible and ad hoc assumptions that Smolin had to make in order to get the theory to work in the first place, such as wormholes are generally thought to be unstable and to collapse faster than anything could pass through them. So the idea that a black hole kind of functions as a sort of portal hole through which things can pass in a new universe with a different kind of configuration of constants can get birthed and so on.
And the whole theory, of course, relies upon prior fine tuning. For this cosmological natural selection to work, there has to be this kind of conjectured meta law, again, as we were talking about, that governed how the universe is spawn.
And that meta law has to be fine tuned in the right way. And so he assumes a prior fine tuning. Even if the scenario were to work, it would depend upon fine tuning that would again need explanation.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Pushing that wrinkle further down the carpet.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Yeah, wrinkle is a carpet. It's a recurring theme with these multiverse explanations.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Well, is it the same with Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology? It's called Give us an idea why that's problematic.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Yeah, again, there's an issue of explanatory scope here because, well, any bouncing cosmology where you've got one universe bouncing into another universe only addresses the.
In this case, it addresses the universe's highly ordered initial conditions.
But it's not addressing the rest of the waterfront here.
But Penrose's particular version of a kind of bouncing cosmology lacks evidence. He has pointed to certain parts of the cosmic microwave background radiation and tried to argue that there are various anomalies in that radiation map that are best explained on his model.
But several independent research groups have reanalyzed the cosmic microwave background radiation maps and have generally found that those features that, that Penrose would point to are consistent with statistical fluctuations or artifacts of data processing. So there really isn't any verification of his theory.
But then there are theoretical problems with the theory in that it requires, for example, that all matter, including even electrons, will decay into massless photons in the far future.
And that violates standard physics.
And as we said before, physics is provisional and could be overturned by sufficient evidence to the contrary. And we reformulate our theories and so on. But you do have to kind of go with what our best theories are at the moment and provide enough evidence to overturn a prevailing theory. It requires that black holes will evaporate again. And so there are a number of kind of theoretical issues that point against the theory.
The Data he points to to try and give evidence for the theory is generally disputed by other research groups analyzing the same data.
And anyway, it only covers, again, some of the relevant data that needs explaining.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Well, and then there's some researchers that lean heavily on the mathematics. How about Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis? Does he really think abstract math gets us to physical reality?
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's an interesting question of how one would think that that would happen.
Right. How do you go from a kind of Platonic abstract realm? The philosophical definition of abstract is like not causally connected with things.
Tagmark assumes that mathematical existence and physical existence basically end up being equivalent. So all mathematical structures have the same ontological status.
Well, wow, that seems to be like a maximal contravention of Occam's razor right there to make that assumption.
And even as I say, even if you were some kind of Platonist about mathematical structures, how does abstract math get.
The technical term here would be kind of reified, turned into physical reality.
Indeed, people have argued that Tegmark's hypothesis is disconfirmed because a typical universe in the mathematical multiverse would be expected to have really complex laws, not simple laws in the sense that our laws are simple. They're simply mathematically simple, shortly writable out laws, rather than really, really kind of labyrinthine mathematical structures to them. Atheist physicist Alexander Vilenkin, again in his 2006 books Many Worlds in One, argued that the number of mathematical structures increases with increasing complexity, suggesting that typical structures should be horrendously large and cumbersome. This seems to be in conflict with the beauty and simplicity of the theories describing our world.
And this is a theme that also comes up with quite a few of these multiverse proposals. That our universe actually is overly special, if you want to explain it away, as a kind of random member of a large swath of existing structures.
So that we're just in a random member of the things that exist that happen to be life permitting, because there are lots of things that exist that happen to be life permitting.
While you would expect our kind of tuning and the specialness of those tunings to be kind of average rather than too special, the fine tuning of our universe is so extraordinary that it's more special than it needs to be. And we might re encounter again that kind of objection to multiverses as we go through.
So, yeah, it just doesn't seem to.
To fit observation. And it seems like a massive contravention of Occam's razor. And it seems philosophically quite kind of difficult on that kind of reification issue like that, that really, like every mathematical structure is real.
You might even get into kind of philosophical discussions here about the legitimacy of the idea of actual infinities, of things being concrete realities.
Right. The same sort of arguments that are at the foundation of some forms of the collab cosmological argument that pull on not just empirical arguments that the universe has a finite past, but kind of mathematical philosophical arguments about the legitimacy of an actually infinite set of things existing in concrete reality.
And so those arguments would be germane to this Tegmark proposal as well.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds like if you're relying on mathematics to explain the universe, or at least the fine tuning of it, you're going to end up sort of getting beat at your own game, if you will, you know, just with the convolutedness of the mathematics and what would be required to even set such universes up. Whereas a lot of smart mathematicians are going to acknowledge the simplicity is king when it comes to equations that work and some of the math that governs the universe. It is the simplicity that needs to be explained. And you don't want to go too far in the mathematical direction or you'll end up in a nightmare of convolutedness.
Well, there are other multiverse related objections to the fine tuning. There's one called the random multiverse objection, which you can correct me if I'm wrong, but is that the standard multiverse, the one that we all know about? And then there's one called the ever changing multiverse hypothesis, in a nutshell. Can you just explain what those are about?
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that the random multiverse objection is what most people will think of when you talk about the multiverse objection. And a lot of these consistent themes that we've already been talking about will apply. There's an interesting kind of. Again, bending over backwards to meet this argument at kind of. Even if the philosopher Michael Rota argues that even if you think you postulate that there is a kind of random multiverse of differently tuned and so on universes out there, our evidence still supports a design hypothesis, whether or not we're in a multiverse, because of course, a designed multiverse is a possibility as well, and a designed multiverse you might think is more likely to contain a higher proportion of life permitting universes than an undesigned multiverse would.
So seeing life permitting conditions, the relevant evidence is still more to be expected on a designed multiverse hypothesis than an undesigned one.
But that's kind of, you know, so even if we bend over backwards to meet this objection, it doesn't seem to work. But just meeting it head on, the physics is ad hoc. You get this wrinkle in the carpet problem that the multiverse, the scientific multiverse theories assume some kind of mechanism for producing these differently tuned universes. I mean, the question is, okay, you postulate that there are lots of lots of universes, but why are they all different?
Why aren't they just photocopies of the same sterile, lifeless universe? What makes them all different, right? And as soon as you have some kind of mechanism for churning out different universes, why is a life permitting universe within the range of of universes that this mechanism is capable of producing?
And does this mechanism itself display fine tuning? You know, an irreducibly complex set of, of laws and things? Again, it's not going to be like a simple law is capable of doing these things. You're probably going to need a whole set of, of things, theoretical entities involved in that production of universe's process.
And then that thing itself is going to exhibit fine tuning.
Indeed, folks like Stephen Meyer have argued that on inflationary cosmology, the prior fine tuning of the mechanism that it invokes actually requires more fine tuning than the fine tuning that that system is proposed to explain.
So you can explain the data with this kind of mechanism, but you end up postulating a mechanism that's even more finely tuned than the thing that you've explained. Not only do you push the rockle in the carpet, but the rockle gets bigger as you try and push it away.
And again, lack of independent evidence. Given a lack of independent evidence that there are many universes, it's ad hoc. It's a bit like saying, okay, how would you respond to someone who claimed that a book might not have an author because if there existed enough monkeys with enough typewriters and enough time, then they could in theory, produce that book.
Nobody looks at a book and says, aha, there must be lots of monkeys with typewriters somewhere, right?
In the absence of independent evidence for enough monkeys and typewriters beavering away for long enough to produce a book at random, the one author explanation is eminently preferable. And the same argument, I think applies in the case of these kind of multiverse attempts to explain away the data, it also arguably undermines science. Because if you postulate enough different universes to erode the improbability of our universe and to say, well, you know, it's not surprising because there are lots and lots of chances of getting a life permitting Universe, you might end up postulating a scenario in which there are so many kind of resources for things happening out there that it undercuts the whole scientific enterprise. Because any data that you look at and you say, oh, that's interesting, I wonder what explains that.
You might end up just saying, well, you know, it's a multiverse.
Really weird, interesting, unlikely things happen.
There's nothing to be explained here. If the fine tuning of our universe doesn't need explaining, then a whole lot of other stuff doesn't need explaining. And, you know, that's what science is all about, looking at things that are kind of interesting and surprising and saying, what explains this?
But you would undercut the process. You just end up saying, well, you know, stuff happens.
Right? Yeah, so that's kind of interesting objection as well. And again, you get this kind of disconfirmation from actually, our universe is too special.
People might have heard of this kind of whole Boltzmann's brain problem.
Like, you know, it's very unlikely that out of the random quantum foam of the universe, a thinking brain would pop into existence.
But that's much more likely than the fine tuning of our universe is.
So if we happen to be in a random member of a huge multiverse of universes, the probability is on a naturalistic hypothesis that we would be Boltmann brains.
And the problem with that is not so much the problem that maybe we're Boltman brains and we're not who we think we are and we're being deluded, but that actually the sensible thing to think, of course, is that we are not Boltzmann brains.
We're actually fully embodied beings with a history and so on.
And so that this is observational evidence that counts against the multiverse hypothesis. Because again, what we observe here and now is too special to be just explained away as a random member of a multiverse.
So yeah, that's those kind of similar themes you see cropping up again and again. And if you try and say that, well, you know, these traditional multiverse theories have this kind of fixed, algorithmic, kind of some sort of structure that governs the creation of universes, well, maybe that mechanism changes over time so you don't have to fine tune because that just changes.
Well, again, you end up appealing to like, well, for how long? The infinite amounts of time, there's difficulties with infinity there.
What accounts for the meta rules by which this meta universe producing system works?
Right, you keep kicking up this.
Any law in science might just be a temporary local algorithm subject to change as the meta rules of the multiverse shift randomly or in ways that we don't understand. So again, it would undermine the practice of science and so on. So I think the lower price tag to pay is to stick with this observation of the unlikely but specified pattern that produces this functional complexity and life permitting values of our universe and say what best explains that?
And we have to think through these different options.
But when we apply these kind of standard rules for best explanation of explanatory scope has come up time and time again.
Like are we just explaining away and shifting the ruckle in the carpet but not really explaining the data?
We're just moving where the explanation has to start from. That doesn't really get us as far as we want to go in explaining things.
So yeah, I don't think the multiverse is ultimately a good response, a good alternative to a design inference from this data.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, start with the data we have and the universe we can currently observe and if we ever do get observable evidence from another universe, we'll revisit.
Science is provisional, but you got to start where you are and with what you have and not get too exotic and push the can too far down the road. Well, with our remaining time, let's just spend a few minutes considering why inferring design is justified. And we'll do that by looking at just a few more objections. Let's start with our favorite Darwinian materialist, Richard Dawkins. What is your response to his anti designer objection? Who designed the designer?
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Yeah, and this is, this is kind of the objective to the fine tuning design argument saying, but isn't postulating design kicking the can too far down the road? Isn't that too exotic? And Dawkins is saying it is because if you postulate a designer well then you immediately have to ask, well, who designed the designer? Wouldn't the designer be something that would itself require explanation? Right.
Well again, here's a couple of points.
Does inferring the existence of an author of one of Richard Dawkins books, does that represent an explanatory advance over the no author hypothesis when faced with one of Dawkins books? I suggest that postulating an author in this case Dawkins does help explain is actually the best explanation for the existence of his books.
But Richard Dawkins is something, he's much more complicated than the book that he explains. And he's obviously something that we can point to and say, yes, but what explains the existence of Richard Dawkins?
But those questions are not an objection to thinking that Dawkins is the best explanation of his book.
So, as the American philosopher William Craig says, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don't need to have an explanation of the explanation necessarily. You can say this is the best explanation, but then ask what explains that?
Ultimately, we want to push our explanations to a satisfying end point, of course, but because inferring design is not the same thing as inferring to God, there is a discussion here about the nature of the designer and what is the best understanding, the best explanation and understanding of the designer.
And here I think Dawkins doesn't give a sufficient reason for thinking that all candidate designers, all candidates for the source of that fine tuning we observe, must be complex in the relevant sense. That would itself require explanation, which is exhibiting, I would say exhibiting specified complexity rather than mere complexity. But for that to be the case, to exhibit specified complexity is to require something to be a contingent arrangement of things.
But one of the explanatory benefits of postulating God as the designer is that it makes sense to say God exists necessarily. God is not a contingent arrangement of parts or a contingent arrangement of things, or could have been different kind of a thing. Whereas, as we said argued earlier, the universe does seem to be the kind of thing that could have been different, is contingent.
And Dawkins doesn't really give a good argument for thinking that any designer must exhibit specified complexity.
He gives arguments showing that designers are in some sense complex. But all of the arguments he gives indicate that they have a complexity of function rather than of structure.
This was something pointed out by the agnostic philosopher Anthony Kenny, who used the example of the difference between a cutthroat razor and an electric shaver. An electric razor.
And he said, you know, the electric razor is much more complex than the cutthroat razor, but actually the cut throat razor has more complexity of function. It can do more things than the very complicated electric razor.
Indeed, the electric razor is so complicated that it's dedicated to this one job and it's useful for shaving.
Maybe you can use it as a paperweight, you know, but the cutthroat razor, you can, you can shave with, you can chop vegetables with it. You could use it as a letter opener, you could use the end of it as a screwdriver, you could whittle with it, you could say it's got more things that it can do, but that doesn't show that it has complexity of structure. And Dawkins says if the designer were God, he can listen to all sorts of prayers and he can do this and that.
But none of those arguments that God must have a complexity of structure in the sense of having a specified complexity.
None of those arguments saying that God would have to be a contingent reality rather than existing and having his essential nature necessarily in contrast to something like the universe. So Dawkins arguments are kind of category errors in philosophical terms when you apply them to God as the candidate for that designer. So one of the reasons why I think God is the best candidate for the designer is it does give you a satisfying explanation to end point to explanation to that kind of problem of infinite regress of. Well, okay, maybe you could say our universe was designed by other aliens in a parallel universe who've created some kind of universe production machine. Right?
But, but there Dawkins's question would seem to apply. Wouldn't those aliens in another physical universe be things that exhibit specified complexity?
Design might still be the best explanation, but there's still then an open question that needs further explanation. And you know, in one sense, as we said, that that's okay. That doesn't mean design's not the best explanation.
But then you do need to go further in your explanations for things. And ultimately we want to have an explanation that is the most satisfying kind of end point to that regress of explanations to, to explain as deeply as possible, as it were. And that's something that the, the theistic hypothesis of some kind will give you that a, you know, aliens in a parallel universe or we're all in the matrix, or won't ultimately give you.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's a great take on some of the arguments Richard Dawkins has made. Well, finally for today, there's Sean Carroll, who tries a Bayesian reversal, arguing that fine tuning actually supports naturalism because God could have created an immaterial reality, but naturalism requires a physical reality compatible with embodied life. Help us wrap our heads around this one.
[00:42:29] Speaker A: Yes. Well, again the primary question is whether fine tuning supports design as such over non design.
The whole discussion about theism is then a secondary discussion. I would say that's the second step in the argument.
Now you can say that naturalism requires a physical reality, by definition requirements, right? But it doesn't require a physical reality that's compatible with functional complexity and organic life.
Naturalism makes such a universe so extremely unlikely that our hypothesis, any hypothesis on which it's only unlikely, is vastly superior in Bayesian terms.
So even if the existence of a physical reality per se is less surprising on naturalism than on the hypothesis of divine design, a physical Reality fine tuned for life is less surprising on the hypothesis of design. And it's also arguably less surprising on the hypothesis of divine design than it is on naturalism.
Because even though, yes, you know, God could have created persons without creating anything physical, he could create angels. Right. You know, Christians think that he has created angels, but God didn't have to create a universe of embodied persons. Whereas, you know, if naturalism is true, there has to be a physical universe. That's kind of the motivating thoughts behind this. Right.
But still on naturalistic hypothesis, a universe that's finely tuned to allow complex physical life is so ridiculously unlikely that even if it's somewhat unlikely on a theistic design hypothesis that God would create a universe so that he can have physically embodied persons.
Well, so the disparate nature of these is such that it's so hugely unlikely that the physical fine tuning would on a naturalistic hypothesis be the case that it doesn't matter if it's somewhat unlikely or quite unlikely or a lot unlikely that a God would bother to create a physical universe.
The key thing in the Bayesian analysis is that on the naturalistic hypothesis, it's hugely unlikely that any a physical universe, a single physical universe would happen to be fine tuned for life.
And when you run through the kind of Bayesian analysis of this, it's that distinction. You don't have to think that it's true that if there were a God, it's likely that he would create a physical universe fine tuned for life.
You can think that that's unlikely, but it still, so long as it's more likely than a single naturalistic universe happening to be fine tuned for life, then the theistic hypothesis would overwhelm that naturalistic hypothesis. And that's why you then get into, well, you know what, if there's a multiverse or whatever, that's where that would then come in. But it's a mistake to think that the Bayesian way of formulating the argument has to make the assumption that if God were to create, it's likely that he would create a physical universe with physically embodied persons in it or compatible with physically embodied persons. That's not the premise that the the argument needs.
Wow.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Yeah. That's a very interesting response to what Sean Carroll has come up there trying to flip the Bayesian script, as it were.
Well, in two episodes we've covered answers to almost 20 different objections to the fine tuning argument for intelligent design. I didn't even know that there were so many out there. So this is introducing me to some that I haven't heard from. It's great training and it brings clarity to our understanding of the debate. Last question for you. For those watching and listening who want to revisit some of this or dive deeper or just remember some of these, can you suggest a few good resources?
[00:47:15] Speaker A: I sure can, and I'll send these to you so you can, you can put them in the description below the videos on YouTube and so on. Talking of YouTube, let's start with a there's a YouTube playlist on the fine tuning design argument that I've curated.
If you just do a search on YouTube for Peter S. Williams Cosmic Fine Tuning, that should come up as the first playlist there. Or you can find it find it through my YouTube site.
Then we recommend two books and a paper as well. So for books at a somewhat more kind of introductory level perhaps, although not real introductory, but more introductory than the other book I'll mention would be Stephen C. Meier's recent book on Return of the God Hypothesis 3 Scientific discoveries revealing the Mind behind the universe. And one of those is the Cosmic Fine Tuning, which he discusses. That's published by Harper One in 2023.
And then I've mentioned it in at least one of our episodes, the book by Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes, A Fortunate Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos from Cambridge University Press in 2016.
And then a paper which I mentioned in our first episode, the paper by Roberto Fumigale, the paper's called the Universe's Fine Tuning Does Call for Explanation, and that was published in the Journal for General Philosophy of science in 2025.
And we'll put the link online. The paper's freely available online.
And he's not taking sides, he's not taking sides on what the best explanation is, but he is taking side on the issue of is the fine tuning data that needs to be explained at all. And he's saying, yes, it really is data that really does need to be explained.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: So if you do want to dive audience into these in any more detail or just be reminded of them, we will post these resources that Peter has mentioned so that you have access to that. Well, Peter, thank you so much for sharing the notes and research that you've done on this. I know that we've covered a lot, but you did a great job of sort of unpacking it one step at a time and helping us to have some good responses to these objections. So thank you for joining us today.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: Well, so if you didn't, did miss part one of the conversation, be sure to go back and check that out. The full conversation is just a great opportunity to brush up on our understanding of this.
You can learn more about Peter's work. He's written books, articles. He's even got music that you can enjoy. That's all at his website, peterswilliams.com that's peterswilliams.com. well, for idea the Future, I'm Angeline Dermot. Thanks for joining us.
[00:50:11] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
