Joe and Miles talk about the reply to the electrons in love objection that I invented in this video (Joe likes it, Miles is skeptical - they also talk about the reply that they both endorse first); egoistically, I’d be curious to hear what you make of it - linking here in case you’re curious! https://youtu.be/wrwWLz6Duww?t=4087&si=xjCWtAgXZv-QWJIV
Hmm, I think this is an interesting objection but I think I'd agree with Miles that all the aesthetic goods in question could be realized phenomenally rather than physically. Plus, even if they do need to be physically insantiated to have their full value, that instantiation doesn't require finely-tuned physical laws. I imagine the New Earth after Christ's return would have a bunch of really beautiful stuff on it, but not because God fixed the new constants to bring them about naturalistically. Instead, he just makes the beautiful stuff directly and sustains it as needed.
There's also another objection I have on this point that I think you'd be sympathetic to, but I can't really lay it out in detail until the second piece is out. In short though: We should probably think God has reason to *not* create beautiful things in ways that make their non-divine origin maximally plausible, which our finely-tuned constants do.
I’m surprised that a more popular response by theists wouldn’t be that, yes, while God is a disembodied mind, God is metaphysically distinct in that He is uncreated. In contrast, we are created minds. Perhaps, created minds must be embodied. I’m not sure if any further struggles would come from that or not (besides needing to explain why creatures necessarily need embodiment).
Edit: my point is that the metaphysical distinction provides a reason for why our minds are embodied, but God is not embodied, but this does leave room for explanation.
Most theistic philosophers are Christians who are religiously committed to the existence of created unembodied minds (angels, demons, deceased humans), so this isn’t a live option for them.
Yes! So we must grant the premise that "God in Heaven" so to speak is disembodied -- and there is no way to demonstrate anything else. But, to your point, we also intuit that "God on earth" must be embodied. From there we can extrapolate that we are (Each of us, human and non-human alike) worldly manifestations of God.
I am wondering about "It’s very likely that, given God’s perfect goodness, he would desire to create morally valuable conscious minds. On this, theists are correct." - I get that you're not trying to nitpick every theistic claim here, but: how do we establish that theists are correct here?
For example, I remember reading arguments that a reality where only God exists is a best possible world (if it's not then you get weird tensions like creation ex nihilo implying that reality was not-best for eternity), meaning that creating additional minds doesn't improve the world. And therefore it cannot be expected under theism. I dunno if those necessarily succeed, but I do think they show that it's not obvious that a theistic world would contain anything other than God. Unless we explicitly build such desires into the theistic model. So the derivation from perfect goodness to creating imperfect conscious minds might be a tad too fast.
Yeah, I’m trying to be maximally charitable here since I think a lot of theists immediately shut down if you don’t at least grant that God would desire to create at all, but I agree with you that it’s actually harder than you might think to explain exactly why he would (especially, ironically, if you believe in a Trinity).
I actually think this is the linchpin of a theist response to the article. If God is perfect in himself and perfectly happy, creating adds nothing to him whether what is created is embodied or not. Given that, it seems perfectly plausible that he should "desire" to create embodied minds of our sort in addition to non-embodied ones. He would do so for the same reason that he willed to create dinosaurs as well as tardigrades.
Objections to FT can be taken in all sorts of directions, this is a nicely creative one. If you squint a bit, it shows that the theist proposal is badly undetermined. There's no end to arguments as to what the famed triple-O God would do - from fine-tuning this world to creating astronomical numbers of disembodied minds.
> Nevertheless, the fact that we don’t yet have a fully developed and empirically testable explanation on hand is still a serious embarrassment.
I have to disagree with this line though. In the long-term flow of science, surprising evidence first needs to accumulate, before theories can be formulated, and some of them be successful. The relationship between the constants of the Standard Model and the universe's evolution from the Big Bang to the present are just recently in the process of being understood. We've known about the CMB's fluctuations only for a few decades. What we call FT is just part of the shape of the current knowledge frontier. There's nothing about it that suggests that we should throw away the methodology of science that has got us that far, and go back to talk of teleology.
On the front of theist explanations for FT, I have to say I don't think the hypothesis fits the evidence very well at all. The laws of physics are incredibly simple for all they generate. On the other hand, designed goods, as we know them from human manufacture, are full of arbitrary, engineered measurements and features. There's probably more information content (in raw bits) in the manufacturer's sheet for a toothbrush, or in the source code of a mobile game, than in the entire mathematical expression of the Standard Model. That's not what "Intelligent Design" would lead you to expect.
If God was a programmer, he'd be playing the world's weirdest game of code golf.
Yeah, I’m probably being too charitable there haha. It does seem perfectly reasonable to say we just aren’t sure what’s going on with these constants right now, and shouldn’t be expected to have an account at this stage in the investigation.
For the reasons I lay out in the piece - because it has an insanely low prior and there's no reason to think God would desire it over any other set of laws and constants.
I get that but it seems the claim here is that the simplicity of the SM in particular is unexpected. I get that any given model/set of laws and constants would be subject to the concerns you highlight. My reading is that Skaladom was suggesting that on "intelligent design" we should be surprised to find simple laws in particular. I could totally be misreading them or missing the logic though.
Designed objects have the typical signature of being put together specifically for the goal of the design. If you want a carpet, you put together lots of fibers and some dyes. If you want wheat, you till and sow a field. If you want a house, you put together bricks and cement and all the rest. You engineer for the purpose, and that leaves a clear signature; the result looks deliberately put together, not just the environment randomly doing its thing out of some initial conditions.
Hey again Skaladom, this line of argument seems really shaky to me. Firstly, we are assuming that human design and divine "design" would be exactly analogous. Why would we expect that something 'engineered' by God would have the same tell tale signs as something made by us?
Also, doesn't it depend on what is being engineered? Perhaps this simplicity is a function of the way that universes (or the initial states, laws and constants thereof) work at a logical level? Also, fine tuning arguments kind of depend on humans being able to 'design' alternative universes with alternative initial states, laws and constants. The 'standard model' for some of these could be expressed mathematically in a manner extremely similar to ours and yet we know that they were 'designed' by a human.
Secondly, wouldn't being able to create an entire universe via extremely simple laws etc. just mean God is an extremely good designer?
Thirdly, there might be a problem here in the gap between our description of the laws and constants and their reality. It seems to me that this argument assumes a really strong correspondence between the two.
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute creation theory altogether here - "an intelligent agent did it" is a very broad idea, and even in this world intelligent agents have been known to do all sorts of things. If you're already inclined to theism, then your maybes and hedges make sense enough. I'm actually friendly to spiritual views, I just think that the current leading edge of particle physics is a pretty bad reason for holding or shaping them.
The FT argument is the theist claiming to have a *better explanatory model* than the skeptic, which means having a better ratio of how much it explains vs what it assumes. This is the narrow claim I disagree with.
Note that FT is at its heart an argument about what God would do. This makes it an analogy at best, with the only kinds of intelligent agents we know, ie ourselves. Comparison with what we would do in God's place is not presumptuous overreach, it's the core of the argument itself.
In this context, the strength of the analogy *is* the strength of the argument. If the analogy is strong, "any of us, in the shoes of a triple omni God, would obviously create a world that looks a lot like this one", then the argument is strong. OTOH, if it's more like God does something vaguely like what we know as "creating" (but it has none of the character of our engineered creations, and doesn't even happen within linear time), and does something vaguely like caring or optimizing, for something vaguely like what we know as 'value'... to come up with a universe like ours, a vast unforgiving, mostly empty cosmos with life precariously hanging off a planet, with humans whose bodies and psyches are haphazardly shaped by evolution, and who can barely hold it together without going into stupid wars or messing up their planet. You can see how the skeptic might find it less than compelling.
TBH, I've never understood why so many internet theists keep insisting on God-of-the-gaps arguments. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, they are generally unconvincing to anyone who is not already convinced. AFAIK they also don't match people's actual reasons for practising a religion - I don't think any actual religious person would want to drop their religion if somebody happened to publish a theory that derives the constants of physics from some simple math!
Its not brute because the thing grounding Gods body is.. God himself. In most cases, the parts are prior to the whole, but God is such an ontologically superior being from us that he has his parts depend on him, the composite object. I also reject Composition as Identity theories (that composite objects are a mere collection of their parts arranged a certain way, I think that a chair for e.g is distinct from its parts).
I am a theist, but I reject your "disembodied mind" characterization of God. God made the universe, which set the constants. God then manifested Himself, wholly and completely, into the integral building blocks of life on earth. And thus there are innumerable iterations of God actively "fine-tuning" organic life in real-time, albeit necessarily mediated by a corporeal body that is bound by and adheres to the constants.
Do you think the sort of intervention or guidance you're talking about is agential, or are you just calling biology God in a symbolic sense? Because if it's the latter, that's fine, but then it doesn't help with fine-tuning.
I notice you are going for the God with all the omnis, technically you should run it for a more limited Deistic scenario.
My take would be that the problem is that if God is omnipotent he, as you say, has too many options (he could guarantee life whatever the parameters, so the parameters don't provide evidence of God), if he is not (the God of limited powers) then he can't explain much. What are the chances the parameters would be in this narrow range becomes what are the chances there would be a Deistic God who can tune them a little, but not too much. You end up iterating the demand for explanation.
I suppose one not completely bonkers explanation is that God wanted us to be really good at particle physics and cosmology so he made the universe a complicated exercise in them, not sure that is particularly compelling.
'what makes a *good* set of cosmological constants? If it were a *bad* set o' cosmological constants, I'd no be sittin' here talkin' to ye, would I!?' - demoman TF2
Excellent, paradigm-breaking commentary on the Fine Tuning Problem, building on the "electron in love" critique of the Fine Tuning Argument for theism.
I disagree on this NOT being a major problem for naturalism though.
I also disagree on your presumption of an Omni-theism as the alternative.
Fine Tuning is data. It is a significant feature of our universe. We have known about it for about half a century, and despite a lot of efforts to wiggle out of it because it has anti-naturalist implications, that observation has withstood a LOT of efforts to dismiss its reality. Within cosmology, a fact that stands up to hostile efforts to dismiss it for half a century, is something that cosmology theories REALLY need to explain.
ASIDE -- science is in the business of providing us explanations for why the world is the way it is -- and all the naturalists who want to avoid providing an explanation, are abandoning science when it points in a direction they do not want to accept. This is one of the major accusations that anti-theists lob at the religious -- and the quick abandonment of science facts and method when it might support theism is -- should be more than an embarrassment for the self-image of the naturalists who partake of that evasion.
What tuning like this can be explained by, is either a naturalist selection process, or design.
Notable features of our universe are that a) while it appears to be Fine Tuned, it is FAR from optimized for life. While complexity is rare, it only showed up in our universe after the first several billion years. The first generations of stars had only hydrogen and helium, and the only planets possible therefore were gas giants. Only ~5% of our universe is even matter at all, and matter that can support complexity is a vanishingly small fraction of that small fraction. Also, our universe has a LOT of built in natural evil. Life was likely to have been wiped out several times in early Earth's history, during the accumulation bombardment. And we have gotten close with several mass extinctions since.
The multiverse, or deep time successive universe models to explain fine tuning, are a credible naturalist response. These are not completely unfalsifiable, but they do tend to be remarkably complex, have very little testability, and include infinites and a LOT of untestable assumptions. Multiverse type explanations do a moderately good job of explaining why our universe is poorly optimized for life. Most life supporting universes under a multiverse theory will not be optimized. The natural evil is also expected.
Design hypotheses also can be difficult to test. What you have pointed out with the electrons in love point, is that one of the most testable designer hypotheses, an Omni-God would be unlikely to create our universe. Any designer, will have to be more complex, and less powerful to explain THIS sort of universe.
Design hypotheses are all about postulating properties of a designer, and their motivations then determining if these can explain whatever it is one is trying to understand. There are three basic categories: Aliens doing physics, aliens doing simulations, or lesser deities doing world-building.
Aliens doing physics -- the moral assumptions that led to the inference that it is GOOD to create life -- is equally applicable to aliens. We consider living things to be unique moral agents, so the postulation that might also value living things, and those aliens might create a universe that could sustain life -- is at least surface plausible. One can also postulate a story by which these aliens are in a universe that is running down, and leaned enough physics to be able to do universe creation, and felt the need to create a new one to sustain some life anywhere, even if not in their universe. These aliens would then serve as a weak/fallible Deist Creator, and much of the peculiar non-optimized aspects of our universe could at least make some sense in this narrative. However, despite the narrative consistency, I struggle with any way to test this complex hypothesis. I offer it as a possible exercise for any readers to help flesh out.
Aliens Running Simulations -- Note I put "descendants running simulations" in this bucket too. The unpredictability of Sol, Terra, and mammalian great apes becoming us -- tends to push me towards "aliens" as more consistent with our universe's history, unless there are some hidden variables that we have not detected in the "physics" behind the simulation that drove the first 14 billion years of apparently random history to a specific state. Simulating our entire universe, down to the quarks or strings, is such a massive data and processing hog, that simulation hypotheses strike me as intrinsically implausible. The actual simulations WE run, tend to have data compression in areas of little interest, and take shortcuts on micro physics so long as they support the macro-scale phenomena of interest. If we are in a simulation, it seems to have none of the features of our own simulations, further reducing this credibility. Finally, there is no evidence for, and a fair amount of evidence against algorithmic identity theory, and this theory of consciousness would have to be true for any simulation hypothesis to be possible. These tests tend to make a simulation hypothesis more implausible. Could one build a narrative where a simulated world is a coherent idea? Yes. The options are pretty much limitless, though, and the testability of simulation hypotheses, beyond the few I noted seem very limited. I don't see simulation hypotheses as particularly fruitful, or likely.
Limited theism. Theistic hypotheses are a bit more constrained than simulation hypotheses, because simulation hypotheses have effectively omni-creators, with limited knowledge/intellect, and that combo of power plus indeterminate motives is very difficult to test. Lesser God don't have omni-power. One of the more common thoughts that shows up in speculative fiction is that our universe was a design project in an immature-God training class -- and the design flaws are just characteristic of a D grade flawed class project. Another extrapolation from human experiences is to think of this universe having been designed by a dysfunctional committee of lesser Gods, and its flaws are the result of failed committee negotiations. Like with the other two options, the range of possible "what if" speculations is extremely large, and could encompass so many options, this is a difficult collection of options to evaluate fruitfully.
There IS an exception for limited theism though that makes it more tractable than the other two options. Interactive dualism is part of this hypothesis, and it is testable in principle. I am an interactive spiritual dualist because I consider this theory of consciousness to be the best match to what we know about consciousness. Additionally, parapsychic phenomena are repeatable and confirmed in 6 different categories of interaction, providing additional support. Interactive dualism allows for the possibility of practical mysticism, which could be used to test various theism hypotheses. Pursuit of interactive dualism as a research programme, therefore give the opportunity to meld theist speculation under this "weak Gods" category into scientific instigation.
Weak Gods theism, and Many Worlds naturalism, are therefore the most fruitful research programmes to pursue to try to understand Fine Tuning.
You'd have to ask God. All I know is that God created the universe in the first instance. The universe is purely rational (i.e. your constants).
God then saw fit to create something else, i.e. life on earth. And the only way for God to create a self-sustaining lifeform with the requisite faculties to navigate and relate to the world was to manifest himself into the world as an integral building block of organic life.
Thus each individual"self" in the universe to the extent we consider it "alive" contains ALL of God. But each iteration of God is confined to act by and through that corporeal self.
This is an interesting and original line of approach!
Another way to question what the FT argument yields for theism is to entertain the counterfactual to the driving first premise:
Suppose that instead of it seeming highly unlikely that life could emerge if you assume parameter independence for the varying of the constants, it turned out that they cannot be varied independently (changing one necessitates changes to another), and the upshot seemed to suggest that on most of the possible setting variations some kind of complex life seemed likely.
Now ask: what scenario fits better with theism? Is it the FT scenario that requires theistic intervention to get the lottery numbers right for life, or is it the scenario where the physics seems to yield life however you might mess with them? If God dictated the physics, wouldn’t He preferentially dictate the latter scenario if He could so choose?
Any theist (eg Goff) who attributes their faith to the power of FT would be forced to give up their faith if the primary FT premise was overturned, but would they? Or, would they pivot to saying, “oh, well it turns out God was smarter than I thought in setting up how the physics works, so theism just wins even more now!”
(Note that it is in fact far more plausible that the values of the constants are not independent than FT advocates ever admit. There are a number of papers exploring this in mathematical physics/cosmology. It’s still very much an open possibility.)
Yeah, I had this thought too while writing — what, exactly, wouldn’t be evidence for God? I guess if we found out the constants were only sorta good at creating life, haha.
> 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.
Most Christians are committed to the position that God is Jesus, who spent a few decades being embodied in the traditional sense, and is supposed to come back at some point to rule the earth forever, which presumably involves remaining embodied forever. Couldn't that be how God realizes that particular uniquely valuable good?
You could counter that God needs to be perfect at all times, including the times when Jesus is not embodied; therefore nothing that Jesus did could have been a uniquely valuable good for God. But that doesn’t really pass the sniff test. Most of Jesus’s actions are described as benefitting or glorifying God in some way, which seems like a good. Or for another example, Genesis suggests that God obtained a distinct satisfaction from the act of creation (“God saw that it was good”). Satisfaction seems like a good. But creation only happened once, after which God had to move from creation to maintenance mode (at least as far as our universe is concerned).
Overall, in cases where God needs to interact with the physical universe to obtain some good, it seems like God is patient enough to wait for appropriate times rather than literally obtaining every good at every moment. Possibly this can be described as God transcending time. Or it could be characterized as God getting the maximum good possible under the constraints of the physical world, constraints self-imposed by God because they lead to a more elegant result. (Compare to the many art forms with self-imposed constraints, ranging from poetry to pixel art.)
>] "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."
100% true. Where a theist might interject is that the appeal to anything "physical" at all is itself already misleading. Strictly speaking what one's talking about here is a particular content of the world, itself part and parcel of the divine reality that pervades all of creation and thus doesn't invite any unnecessary dualist complications (IOW begging the question as to how an immaterial mind interacts with a material body, etc, etc.)
The body, just as one's individual mind is, is itself part of God and so it comes as expected that there should be psychophysical harmony between one and the other. It's all ultimately part of the same thing.
Regardless the essential point is absolutely true in that a content(s) of the world does not precede the mind that engages with it and is not necessary for its existence.
>] "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."
Hmm... I would object to this interpretation in the sense that I don't think God creates anything, at least not in any traditional sense. As the eternal and absolute reality that underlies everything else there's literally nothing outside of God for it to appeal to - therefore in a very meaningful way, everything that exists has *always* existed because God has always existed. To say 1 is true is to say the other is true as well.
One could also come at this from a different angle and argue that nothing has ever really been destroyed either. When we talk about a particular content's 'destruction' what we actually mean is that a certain formation or collection of parts have been broken down into more fundamental elements - but the relevant issue is whether anything truly fundamental has gone from a state of existence to that of non-existence, to which I would say absolutely not. No such thing, not in any meaningful way whatsoever, has ever been observed to happen a single time in all of recorded history.
>] "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."
I would appeal to my first comment above to address this concern.
>] "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)."
We've had this discussion before, but I will reiterate that the answer here, IMHO, is one of suffering and meaning.
That an infinite ground of Being could 'create' a world so magnificently precise and allow for the development of biology that we can utilize for this purpose isn't particularly controversial in my eyes. In fact I would dare to say that before God's infinity to even call it a question of difficulty isn't even relevant. Whether it's a few billion years or hundreds of trillions or however many universes might exist out there (perhaps an infinite number) is ultimately irrelevant. Before the divine any concept of scale, no matter how overwhelming in our sight, is *always* the equivalent of like a single drop in an endess ocean.
Back to the point at hand though, we are here in this world both to suffer and to learn precisely because the "miraculous world" you describe does indeed exist. The world that goes by many names (Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Elysium, etc.), but which countless near-death experiencers simply call "home" and which C.S. Lewis has argued is the ultimate source of our desire. That which we have always been chasing after and wish to return to.
But as any good parent knows, children can't always stay in the comfort and care of home if they're to develop and be the splendid adults they know they can be. They have to go out into the world and, yes, suffer and endure hardship precisely because they love them and believe in them more than anyone.
Joe and Miles talk about the reply to the electrons in love objection that I invented in this video (Joe likes it, Miles is skeptical - they also talk about the reply that they both endorse first); egoistically, I’d be curious to hear what you make of it - linking here in case you’re curious! https://youtu.be/wrwWLz6Duww?t=4087&si=xjCWtAgXZv-QWJIV
Hmm, I think this is an interesting objection but I think I'd agree with Miles that all the aesthetic goods in question could be realized phenomenally rather than physically. Plus, even if they do need to be physically insantiated to have their full value, that instantiation doesn't require finely-tuned physical laws. I imagine the New Earth after Christ's return would have a bunch of really beautiful stuff on it, but not because God fixed the new constants to bring them about naturalistically. Instead, he just makes the beautiful stuff directly and sustains it as needed.
There's also another objection I have on this point that I think you'd be sympathetic to, but I can't really lay it out in detail until the second piece is out. In short though: We should probably think God has reason to *not* create beautiful things in ways that make their non-divine origin maximally plausible, which our finely-tuned constants do.
My response to response #1 is obviously going to be this old chestnut (https://substack.com/@bothsidesbrigade/note/c-264627699?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action), but I think I’ll have to wait for parts two and three to see your responses play out.
I’m surprised that a more popular response by theists wouldn’t be that, yes, while God is a disembodied mind, God is metaphysically distinct in that He is uncreated. In contrast, we are created minds. Perhaps, created minds must be embodied. I’m not sure if any further struggles would come from that or not (besides needing to explain why creatures necessarily need embodiment).
Edit: my point is that the metaphysical distinction provides a reason for why our minds are embodied, but God is not embodied, but this does leave room for explanation.
Most theistic philosophers are Christians who are religiously committed to the existence of created unembodied minds (angels, demons, deceased humans), so this isn’t a live option for them.
Most, but not all 😉
Yes! So we must grant the premise that "God in Heaven" so to speak is disembodied -- and there is no way to demonstrate anything else. But, to your point, we also intuit that "God on earth" must be embodied. From there we can extrapolate that we are (Each of us, human and non-human alike) worldly manifestations of God.
I am wondering about "It’s very likely that, given God’s perfect goodness, he would desire to create morally valuable conscious minds. On this, theists are correct." - I get that you're not trying to nitpick every theistic claim here, but: how do we establish that theists are correct here?
For example, I remember reading arguments that a reality where only God exists is a best possible world (if it's not then you get weird tensions like creation ex nihilo implying that reality was not-best for eternity), meaning that creating additional minds doesn't improve the world. And therefore it cannot be expected under theism. I dunno if those necessarily succeed, but I do think they show that it's not obvious that a theistic world would contain anything other than God. Unless we explicitly build such desires into the theistic model. So the derivation from perfect goodness to creating imperfect conscious minds might be a tad too fast.
Yeah, I’m trying to be maximally charitable here since I think a lot of theists immediately shut down if you don’t at least grant that God would desire to create at all, but I agree with you that it’s actually harder than you might think to explain exactly why he would (especially, ironically, if you believe in a Trinity).
I actually think this is the linchpin of a theist response to the article. If God is perfect in himself and perfectly happy, creating adds nothing to him whether what is created is embodied or not. Given that, it seems perfectly plausible that he should "desire" to create embodied minds of our sort in addition to non-embodied ones. He would do so for the same reason that he willed to create dinosaurs as well as tardigrades.
Objections to FT can be taken in all sorts of directions, this is a nicely creative one. If you squint a bit, it shows that the theist proposal is badly undetermined. There's no end to arguments as to what the famed triple-O God would do - from fine-tuning this world to creating astronomical numbers of disembodied minds.
> Nevertheless, the fact that we don’t yet have a fully developed and empirically testable explanation on hand is still a serious embarrassment.
I have to disagree with this line though. In the long-term flow of science, surprising evidence first needs to accumulate, before theories can be formulated, and some of them be successful. The relationship between the constants of the Standard Model and the universe's evolution from the Big Bang to the present are just recently in the process of being understood. We've known about the CMB's fluctuations only for a few decades. What we call FT is just part of the shape of the current knowledge frontier. There's nothing about it that suggests that we should throw away the methodology of science that has got us that far, and go back to talk of teleology.
On the front of theist explanations for FT, I have to say I don't think the hypothesis fits the evidence very well at all. The laws of physics are incredibly simple for all they generate. On the other hand, designed goods, as we know them from human manufacture, are full of arbitrary, engineered measurements and features. There's probably more information content (in raw bits) in the manufacturer's sheet for a toothbrush, or in the source code of a mobile game, than in the entire mathematical expression of the Standard Model. That's not what "Intelligent Design" would lead you to expect.
If God was a programmer, he'd be playing the world's weirdest game of code golf.
Yeah, I’m probably being too charitable there haha. It does seem perfectly reasonable to say we just aren’t sure what’s going on with these constants right now, and shouldn’t be expected to have an account at this stage in the investigation.
Why would a theist proposing fine tuning not expect something like a simple Standard Model?
For the reasons I lay out in the piece - because it has an insanely low prior and there's no reason to think God would desire it over any other set of laws and constants.
I get that but it seems the claim here is that the simplicity of the SM in particular is unexpected. I get that any given model/set of laws and constants would be subject to the concerns you highlight. My reading is that Skaladom was suggesting that on "intelligent design" we should be surprised to find simple laws in particular. I could totally be misreading them or missing the logic though.
Oh sorry, I didn't realize this comment was a reply to someone else's comment and not just to the piece!
No worries, easy mix-up!
Designed objects have the typical signature of being put together specifically for the goal of the design. If you want a carpet, you put together lots of fibers and some dyes. If you want wheat, you till and sow a field. If you want a house, you put together bricks and cement and all the rest. You engineer for the purpose, and that leaves a clear signature; the result looks deliberately put together, not just the environment randomly doing its thing out of some initial conditions.
Hey again Skaladom, this line of argument seems really shaky to me. Firstly, we are assuming that human design and divine "design" would be exactly analogous. Why would we expect that something 'engineered' by God would have the same tell tale signs as something made by us?
Also, doesn't it depend on what is being engineered? Perhaps this simplicity is a function of the way that universes (or the initial states, laws and constants thereof) work at a logical level? Also, fine tuning arguments kind of depend on humans being able to 'design' alternative universes with alternative initial states, laws and constants. The 'standard model' for some of these could be expressed mathematically in a manner extremely similar to ours and yet we know that they were 'designed' by a human.
Secondly, wouldn't being able to create an entire universe via extremely simple laws etc. just mean God is an extremely good designer?
Thirdly, there might be a problem here in the gap between our description of the laws and constants and their reality. It seems to me that this argument assumes a really strong correspondence between the two.
Hi Llywellyn, thanks for your answer!
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute creation theory altogether here - "an intelligent agent did it" is a very broad idea, and even in this world intelligent agents have been known to do all sorts of things. If you're already inclined to theism, then your maybes and hedges make sense enough. I'm actually friendly to spiritual views, I just think that the current leading edge of particle physics is a pretty bad reason for holding or shaping them.
The FT argument is the theist claiming to have a *better explanatory model* than the skeptic, which means having a better ratio of how much it explains vs what it assumes. This is the narrow claim I disagree with.
Note that FT is at its heart an argument about what God would do. This makes it an analogy at best, with the only kinds of intelligent agents we know, ie ourselves. Comparison with what we would do in God's place is not presumptuous overreach, it's the core of the argument itself.
In this context, the strength of the analogy *is* the strength of the argument. If the analogy is strong, "any of us, in the shoes of a triple omni God, would obviously create a world that looks a lot like this one", then the argument is strong. OTOH, if it's more like God does something vaguely like what we know as "creating" (but it has none of the character of our engineered creations, and doesn't even happen within linear time), and does something vaguely like caring or optimizing, for something vaguely like what we know as 'value'... to come up with a universe like ours, a vast unforgiving, mostly empty cosmos with life precariously hanging off a planet, with humans whose bodies and psyches are haphazardly shaped by evolution, and who can barely hold it together without going into stupid wars or messing up their planet. You can see how the skeptic might find it less than compelling.
TBH, I've never understood why so many internet theists keep insisting on God-of-the-gaps arguments. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, they are generally unconvincing to anyone who is not already convinced. AFAIK they also don't match people's actual reasons for practising a religion - I don't think any actual religious person would want to drop their religion if somebody happened to publish a theory that derives the constants of physics from some simple math!
I simply deny that God is a disembodied mind. He is an embodied mind.
Can we say anything about what this “body” might be?
Its probably made up of matter
So in theory this God has at least several “parts” and this composite form is simply an eternal brute fact?
Its not brute because the thing grounding Gods body is.. God himself. In most cases, the parts are prior to the whole, but God is such an ontologically superior being from us that he has his parts depend on him, the composite object. I also reject Composition as Identity theories (that composite objects are a mere collection of their parts arranged a certain way, I think that a chair for e.g is distinct from its parts).
I am a theist, but I reject your "disembodied mind" characterization of God. God made the universe, which set the constants. God then manifested Himself, wholly and completely, into the integral building blocks of life on earth. And thus there are innumerable iterations of God actively "fine-tuning" organic life in real-time, albeit necessarily mediated by a corporeal body that is bound by and adheres to the constants.
Interesting — so are you saying that, if God just “let the biology run by itself,” human beings and other creatures wouldn’t survive?
No, I'm saying God is biology.
Do you think the sort of intervention or guidance you're talking about is agential, or are you just calling biology God in a symbolic sense? Because if it's the latter, that's fine, but then it doesn't help with fine-tuning.
In particular, the last link is a comment thread with Matt Dorn, and I think we found some catharsis there!
https://substack.com/@bradylain/note/c-258213856?r=8c4fea
https://substack.com/@bradylain/note/c-261933604?r=8c4fea
https://substack.com/@bradylain/note/c-255936697?r=8c4fea
That's not a charitable view of the God I'm talking about. I've written at length about this elsewhere. Hold on...
Did God exist before making the universe? If so, was he embodied then?
I notice you are going for the God with all the omnis, technically you should run it for a more limited Deistic scenario.
My take would be that the problem is that if God is omnipotent he, as you say, has too many options (he could guarantee life whatever the parameters, so the parameters don't provide evidence of God), if he is not (the God of limited powers) then he can't explain much. What are the chances the parameters would be in this narrow range becomes what are the chances there would be a Deistic God who can tune them a little, but not too much. You end up iterating the demand for explanation.
I suppose one not completely bonkers explanation is that God wanted us to be really good at particle physics and cosmology so he made the universe a complicated exercise in them, not sure that is particularly compelling.
'what makes a *good* set of cosmological constants? If it were a *bad* set o' cosmological constants, I'd no be sittin' here talkin' to ye, would I!?' - demoman TF2
Excellent, paradigm-breaking commentary on the Fine Tuning Problem, building on the "electron in love" critique of the Fine Tuning Argument for theism.
I disagree on this NOT being a major problem for naturalism though.
I also disagree on your presumption of an Omni-theism as the alternative.
Fine Tuning is data. It is a significant feature of our universe. We have known about it for about half a century, and despite a lot of efforts to wiggle out of it because it has anti-naturalist implications, that observation has withstood a LOT of efforts to dismiss its reality. Within cosmology, a fact that stands up to hostile efforts to dismiss it for half a century, is something that cosmology theories REALLY need to explain.
ASIDE -- science is in the business of providing us explanations for why the world is the way it is -- and all the naturalists who want to avoid providing an explanation, are abandoning science when it points in a direction they do not want to accept. This is one of the major accusations that anti-theists lob at the religious -- and the quick abandonment of science facts and method when it might support theism is -- should be more than an embarrassment for the self-image of the naturalists who partake of that evasion.
What tuning like this can be explained by, is either a naturalist selection process, or design.
Notable features of our universe are that a) while it appears to be Fine Tuned, it is FAR from optimized for life. While complexity is rare, it only showed up in our universe after the first several billion years. The first generations of stars had only hydrogen and helium, and the only planets possible therefore were gas giants. Only ~5% of our universe is even matter at all, and matter that can support complexity is a vanishingly small fraction of that small fraction. Also, our universe has a LOT of built in natural evil. Life was likely to have been wiped out several times in early Earth's history, during the accumulation bombardment. And we have gotten close with several mass extinctions since.
The multiverse, or deep time successive universe models to explain fine tuning, are a credible naturalist response. These are not completely unfalsifiable, but they do tend to be remarkably complex, have very little testability, and include infinites and a LOT of untestable assumptions. Multiverse type explanations do a moderately good job of explaining why our universe is poorly optimized for life. Most life supporting universes under a multiverse theory will not be optimized. The natural evil is also expected.
Design hypotheses also can be difficult to test. What you have pointed out with the electrons in love point, is that one of the most testable designer hypotheses, an Omni-God would be unlikely to create our universe. Any designer, will have to be more complex, and less powerful to explain THIS sort of universe.
Design hypotheses are all about postulating properties of a designer, and their motivations then determining if these can explain whatever it is one is trying to understand. There are three basic categories: Aliens doing physics, aliens doing simulations, or lesser deities doing world-building.
Aliens doing physics -- the moral assumptions that led to the inference that it is GOOD to create life -- is equally applicable to aliens. We consider living things to be unique moral agents, so the postulation that might also value living things, and those aliens might create a universe that could sustain life -- is at least surface plausible. One can also postulate a story by which these aliens are in a universe that is running down, and leaned enough physics to be able to do universe creation, and felt the need to create a new one to sustain some life anywhere, even if not in their universe. These aliens would then serve as a weak/fallible Deist Creator, and much of the peculiar non-optimized aspects of our universe could at least make some sense in this narrative. However, despite the narrative consistency, I struggle with any way to test this complex hypothesis. I offer it as a possible exercise for any readers to help flesh out.
Aliens Running Simulations -- Note I put "descendants running simulations" in this bucket too. The unpredictability of Sol, Terra, and mammalian great apes becoming us -- tends to push me towards "aliens" as more consistent with our universe's history, unless there are some hidden variables that we have not detected in the "physics" behind the simulation that drove the first 14 billion years of apparently random history to a specific state. Simulating our entire universe, down to the quarks or strings, is such a massive data and processing hog, that simulation hypotheses strike me as intrinsically implausible. The actual simulations WE run, tend to have data compression in areas of little interest, and take shortcuts on micro physics so long as they support the macro-scale phenomena of interest. If we are in a simulation, it seems to have none of the features of our own simulations, further reducing this credibility. Finally, there is no evidence for, and a fair amount of evidence against algorithmic identity theory, and this theory of consciousness would have to be true for any simulation hypothesis to be possible. These tests tend to make a simulation hypothesis more implausible. Could one build a narrative where a simulated world is a coherent idea? Yes. The options are pretty much limitless, though, and the testability of simulation hypotheses, beyond the few I noted seem very limited. I don't see simulation hypotheses as particularly fruitful, or likely.
Limited theism. Theistic hypotheses are a bit more constrained than simulation hypotheses, because simulation hypotheses have effectively omni-creators, with limited knowledge/intellect, and that combo of power plus indeterminate motives is very difficult to test. Lesser God don't have omni-power. One of the more common thoughts that shows up in speculative fiction is that our universe was a design project in an immature-God training class -- and the design flaws are just characteristic of a D grade flawed class project. Another extrapolation from human experiences is to think of this universe having been designed by a dysfunctional committee of lesser Gods, and its flaws are the result of failed committee negotiations. Like with the other two options, the range of possible "what if" speculations is extremely large, and could encompass so many options, this is a difficult collection of options to evaluate fruitfully.
There IS an exception for limited theism though that makes it more tractable than the other two options. Interactive dualism is part of this hypothesis, and it is testable in principle. I am an interactive spiritual dualist because I consider this theory of consciousness to be the best match to what we know about consciousness. Additionally, parapsychic phenomena are repeatable and confirmed in 6 different categories of interaction, providing additional support. Interactive dualism allows for the possibility of practical mysticism, which could be used to test various theism hypotheses. Pursuit of interactive dualism as a research programme, therefore give the opportunity to meld theist speculation under this "weak Gods" category into scientific instigation.
Weak Gods theism, and Many Worlds naturalism, are therefore the most fruitful research programmes to pursue to try to understand Fine Tuning.
You'd have to ask God. All I know is that God created the universe in the first instance. The universe is purely rational (i.e. your constants).
God then saw fit to create something else, i.e. life on earth. And the only way for God to create a self-sustaining lifeform with the requisite faculties to navigate and relate to the world was to manifest himself into the world as an integral building block of organic life.
Thus each individual"self" in the universe to the extent we consider it "alive" contains ALL of God. But each iteration of God is confined to act by and through that corporeal self.
Nice post! Looking forward to part 2.
This is an interesting and original line of approach!
Another way to question what the FT argument yields for theism is to entertain the counterfactual to the driving first premise:
Suppose that instead of it seeming highly unlikely that life could emerge if you assume parameter independence for the varying of the constants, it turned out that they cannot be varied independently (changing one necessitates changes to another), and the upshot seemed to suggest that on most of the possible setting variations some kind of complex life seemed likely.
Now ask: what scenario fits better with theism? Is it the FT scenario that requires theistic intervention to get the lottery numbers right for life, or is it the scenario where the physics seems to yield life however you might mess with them? If God dictated the physics, wouldn’t He preferentially dictate the latter scenario if He could so choose?
Any theist (eg Goff) who attributes their faith to the power of FT would be forced to give up their faith if the primary FT premise was overturned, but would they? Or, would they pivot to saying, “oh, well it turns out God was smarter than I thought in setting up how the physics works, so theism just wins even more now!”
(Note that it is in fact far more plausible that the values of the constants are not independent than FT advocates ever admit. There are a number of papers exploring this in mathematical physics/cosmology. It’s still very much an open possibility.)
Yeah, I had this thought too while writing — what, exactly, wouldn’t be evidence for God? I guess if we found out the constants were only sorta good at creating life, haha.
(Disclaimer: I am an atheist.)
> 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.
Most Christians are committed to the position that God is Jesus, who spent a few decades being embodied in the traditional sense, and is supposed to come back at some point to rule the earth forever, which presumably involves remaining embodied forever. Couldn't that be how God realizes that particular uniquely valuable good?
You could counter that God needs to be perfect at all times, including the times when Jesus is not embodied; therefore nothing that Jesus did could have been a uniquely valuable good for God. But that doesn’t really pass the sniff test. Most of Jesus’s actions are described as benefitting or glorifying God in some way, which seems like a good. Or for another example, Genesis suggests that God obtained a distinct satisfaction from the act of creation (“God saw that it was good”). Satisfaction seems like a good. But creation only happened once, after which God had to move from creation to maintenance mode (at least as far as our universe is concerned).
Overall, in cases where God needs to interact with the physical universe to obtain some good, it seems like God is patient enough to wait for appropriate times rather than literally obtaining every good at every moment. Possibly this can be described as God transcending time. Or it could be characterized as God getting the maximum good possible under the constraints of the physical world, constraints self-imposed by God because they lead to a more elegant result. (Compare to the many art forms with self-imposed constraints, ranging from poetry to pixel art.)
>] "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."
100% true. Where a theist might interject is that the appeal to anything "physical" at all is itself already misleading. Strictly speaking what one's talking about here is a particular content of the world, itself part and parcel of the divine reality that pervades all of creation and thus doesn't invite any unnecessary dualist complications (IOW begging the question as to how an immaterial mind interacts with a material body, etc, etc.)
The body, just as one's individual mind is, is itself part of God and so it comes as expected that there should be psychophysical harmony between one and the other. It's all ultimately part of the same thing.
Regardless the essential point is absolutely true in that a content(s) of the world does not precede the mind that engages with it and is not necessary for its existence.
>] "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."
Hmm... I would object to this interpretation in the sense that I don't think God creates anything, at least not in any traditional sense. As the eternal and absolute reality that underlies everything else there's literally nothing outside of God for it to appeal to - therefore in a very meaningful way, everything that exists has *always* existed because God has always existed. To say 1 is true is to say the other is true as well.
One could also come at this from a different angle and argue that nothing has ever really been destroyed either. When we talk about a particular content's 'destruction' what we actually mean is that a certain formation or collection of parts have been broken down into more fundamental elements - but the relevant issue is whether anything truly fundamental has gone from a state of existence to that of non-existence, to which I would say absolutely not. No such thing, not in any meaningful way whatsoever, has ever been observed to happen a single time in all of recorded history.
>] "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."
I would appeal to my first comment above to address this concern.
>] "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)."
We've had this discussion before, but I will reiterate that the answer here, IMHO, is one of suffering and meaning.
That an infinite ground of Being could 'create' a world so magnificently precise and allow for the development of biology that we can utilize for this purpose isn't particularly controversial in my eyes. In fact I would dare to say that before God's infinity to even call it a question of difficulty isn't even relevant. Whether it's a few billion years or hundreds of trillions or however many universes might exist out there (perhaps an infinite number) is ultimately irrelevant. Before the divine any concept of scale, no matter how overwhelming in our sight, is *always* the equivalent of like a single drop in an endess ocean.
Back to the point at hand though, we are here in this world both to suffer and to learn precisely because the "miraculous world" you describe does indeed exist. The world that goes by many names (Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Elysium, etc.), but which countless near-death experiencers simply call "home" and which C.S. Lewis has argued is the ultimate source of our desire. That which we have always been chasing after and wish to return to.
But as any good parent knows, children can't always stay in the comfort and care of home if they're to develop and be the splendid adults they know they can be. They have to go out into the world and, yes, suffer and endure hardship precisely because they love them and believe in them more than anyone.