Fine-Tuning is Everybody's Problem (Part One)

The first in a series on the fine-tuning argument

Pictured: The image of deep space you’re legally required to use as a header any time you write a Substack post about fine-tuning

In Neil Sinhababu’s wonderful paper “Divine Fine-Tuning Vs. Electrons In Love,” he identifies these two premises as the basic elements of a fine-tuning argument:

1. For intelligent life to exist (as is the case), the fundamental physical constants must have values within very narrow life-permitting ranges.

2. If fine-tuning is true, it’s more probable that God set the values of the constants than that they took those values without God’s intervention.

In this piece, I want to explain why I think both of these premises are false, or at least would be false if theism were true. My argument has nothing to do with any alternative, non-theistic explanation that can solve the fine-tuning problem on its own. I’m happy to grant, for sake of argument, that naturalists like me don’t have an easy explanation for why the constants are the way they are.

Instead, in this piece, I want to argue for three more modest claims: First, that no one has an easy explanation for why the constants are the way they are; second, that the problem is even worse for theism in at least one important respect; and third, that a common strategy theists use to avoid admitting so is demonstrably misguided.

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Let’s start by recalling the bad news for naturalists: The best physical theories we currently have really do seem to suggest that our existence is wildly improbable. I won’t waste time going over all of the technical details, but suffice to say, almost any combination of physical constants other than the ones we actually see would have quickly resulted in a universe totally inhospitable to biological life. Despite this, we do exist, and that means it would be nice to have an explanation for why it is that our constants have landed so perfectly inside these unimaginably narrow (and unimaginably lucky) ranges.

Unfortunately, it’s not obvious what sort of explanation for this cosmological data there could even possibly be given naturalism. Whatever process was responsible for fixing the value of our universe’s constants, it was presumably uninterested in whether or not biological life would one day emerge. Yet chalking these values up to either chance or brute necessity is radically unsatisfying on its own. Of course, most naturalists (myself included) will argue that these aren’t the only options for explaining the data. Nevertheless, the fact that we don’t yet have a fully developed and empirically testable explanation on hand is still a serious embarrassment.

This is what you might call the first half of the fine-tuning argument, and I would imagine we’re all familiar enough with it by now. The bad news for theism, on the other hand, comes in the second half: It’s also not at all obvious that the existence of God can explain these finely-tuned constants any better than naturalism can. Of course, it’s easy to tell a nice little story about God being good and conscious creatures being valuable, and then leave it up to everyone else to work out all the details — but the devil, as they say, is in those details, and making the argument fit with theism’s other metaphysical commitments is harder than you’d think.

Most notably, on theism, the first premise of the fine-tuning argument is simply false: It just isn’t the case that the existence of intelligent life requires constants to be finely tuned towards any particular value. Finely-tuned constants are very likely necessary for biological life to develop, of course. Without stars, planets, or certain essential elements, there would be no opportunity for complex physical organisms to evolve over time. However, if theism is true, then complex physical organisms aren’t needed for intelligent minds to exist. In fact, if theism is true, then nothing physical is is needed for intelligent minds to exist.

This might sound like a radical claim to some theists, but it’s really nothing more than a straightforward implication of the idea that God himself is a non-physical, disembodied mind. If one such disembodied mind exists, then it should obviously be within any omnipotent God’s power to create as many similarly disembodied minds as he’d like. In light of this, it’s easy to see that any finely-tuned constants are already dispensable, since God could always bring about an unlimited number of arbitrarily complex conscious minds without establishing any physical reality at all.

Moreover, if these disembodied minds are metaphysically possible, then whatever physical correlations exist between mental states and physical states in our world must be necessarily contingent; since minds don’t have to interact with anything, what they do interact with is a matter of God’s free choice. For us, God happened to decide that our minds would interact with brains — and that, in turn, required tuning the constants in such a way as to allow for brains to arise. However, God could just as easily have established psychophysical laws that allow for the same interactions to take place between minds and gallbladders, or toenails, or piles of rocks, or diffuse clouds of helium gas.

For this reason, no theist can coherently claim that the values of the constants we observe are in any sense required for intelligent life to emerge. Since the laws that control psychophysical interactions can themselves be “finely tuned” to allow for consciousness to arise from whatever the physical constants end up producing, no values for the physical constants, by themselves, are any more or less amenable to the emergence of conscious minds.

This is a significant problem for theists, since it undercuts their explanation for the values of the constants that we see. If only biological creatures could develop conscious minds, then there would be a clear and non-arbitrary reason for God to ensure that our constants fell within the narrow ranges that permit biological life to emerge. If conscious minds are equally compatible with any physical constants, however, then God’s desire to bring about conscious minds gives us no reason, by itself, to see any particular set of values as more or less likely. Therefore, without some further argument for the value of biological life in particular, the theist has no better answer for our specific cosmological data than the naturalist.

In response to this point, theists will often argue that embodied biological life is uniquely valuable, and that God has additional reasons for preferring physically embodied conscious minds. This position is hard to defend, however, for at least three reasons. The most obvious issue is that God himself is a disembodied mind that necessarily contains every possible perfection. We should, therefore, be very skeptical of the claim that physical embodiment could be required for obtaining any important goods, given that theists are already committed to the position that every possible good can be (and has been) maximally realized by a non-physical mind.

Secondly, as the author of the psychophysical laws, God has the power to ensure that any valuable mental state will be available to his creation. Consider a few of the examples Sinhababu gives in his original paper on this subject:

Protons and electrons could yearn to be together, feeling delight at the presence of the other as their opposite charges drew them closer. When they formed a hydrogen atom, they could fall in love. Whenever two electrons were a prime number of centimeters apart, they could have the mental states involved in heartfelt communication about their histories. Every subsequent time they were a whole number of meters apart, they could fondly remember each other. The remaining strong nuclear force between protons, despite being too weak to bring them into one atomic nucleus, could at its moments of greatest intensity realize a tantalizing but forbidden attraction. When any six particles formed a regular hexagon, they could share awe at the grandeur of the universe.

To reject this reasoning, theists would need to argue that certain morally valuable conscious experiences are necessarily impossible to experience apart from a very particular sort of embodied, biological existence. This is difficult to defend, given God’s omnipotence and (as we just discussed) his own ability to realize all value in his own disembodied state.

The final issue is that, even if some essential good did truly require the existence of physical bodies, God isn’t required to bring those bodies about through lawlike physical processes. Rather, he could simply sustain them miraculously. Although opinions on this question differ, I would imagine most theists who accept a post-mortem state don’t believe that state will be governed by laws or regularities that could be neutrally described in non-theistic terms. If this sort of world is possible after death, then it would also be possible for God to create a similarly miraculous world for his creation from the start. Therefore, we have no reason to believe that finely-tuned constants are necessary even if physical bodies are required to realize certain essential goods (which is already difficult to defend).

In summary: It’s very likely that, given God’s perfect goodness, he would desire to create morally valuable conscious minds. On this, theists are correct. Their error, however, is the assumption that creating morally valuable conscious minds would require finely-tuned constants that allow for embodied biological life to develop. Once we reject this assumption, the finely-tuned constants we do observe become just as inexplicable on theism as they are on naturalism.

You might start to notice an ironic symmetry here. For naturalists, the question to answer is why we exist at all — and yet, given that we do exist, our existence as biological creatures is essentially guaranteed. Meanwhile, theists find themselves stuck in the opposite position. To them, existence itself is essentially guaranteed, while the unanswered question is why we exist as biological creatures specifically. What’s crucial to note is that the probability of the overall conjunction will be the same for both sides; the only difference will be which half is considered extremely likely and which half is considered extremely unlikely.

A simple analogy might help to drive this point home. Imagine, for a moment, an unfathomably massive hotel with trillions upon trillions of equally comfortable rooms. Under normal circumstances, guests will have their room assigned by the manager, who has no reason to put them in any one room over another. However, there’s also one single room in the entire hotel that has a door with a broken lock, and it would be possible for someone to enter this one single room without being assigned there by the manager. Now, imagine that you wake up with amnesia in that exact unlocked room. What would be more likely: That you were assigned to it by the manager, or that you entered on your own?

In my mind, the most obvious conclusion to draw would be that you had checked each door individually, and eventually opened whichever one had a broken lock. (Arguably, this is comparable to a naturalistic multiverse explanation.) However, stipulating that you only have one chance to check a door, then it should be clear that the probability of you randomly choosing the door with the broken lock and the probability of you being randomly assigned to the door with the broken lock are the same. All that changes is whether the extremely low chance in either case comes from your choice or the manager’s.

Similarly, when it comes to our existence in a universe finely tuned for biological life, all that differs between naturalism and theism is why, exactly, that existence is so unlikely. For the naturalist, what’s hard to explain is how we “got a room,” so to speak, at all; for the theist, what’s hard to explain is why we got this room and not any of the others that God could have chosen. These two situations might feel very different, since we’d exist no matter what in one case but be almost certain to not exist in the other. Still, when we consider only the probability of each specific outcome obtaining, both theism and naturalism fail to explain our incredible luck — and this means the fine-tuning argument simply cannot be the sort of evidence for theism that its proponents present it as being.

That’s all for now — in Part 2 of this piece, I’ll give my reasons for thinking that theism is actually in a worse spot than naturalism when it comes to explaining the cosmological data. Stay (finely) tuned!