Showing posts with label Fine Tuning Arguement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fine Tuning Arguement. Show all posts

Friday, March 1, 2013

The Fine Tuning Argument


On my blog here I've written several times responding to the Cosmological Argument for god's existence and the various moral arguments, but I've only once written about the Fine Tuning Argument head on. I want to take some time expounding on some of its implications and the problems I think it has in a bit more detail than I previously did.

The Fine Tuning Argument, another staple of my favorite punching bag Dr. Craig, generally states like this:

1. The fine tuning of the universe is either due to physical necessity, chance or design.
2. Fine tuning is not due to either physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

The Fine Tuning Argument poses what seems to be another tough obstacle for the atheist. The probability that all the elements in the universe would be as meticulously fine tuned to unfathomable levels that would allow life as we know it, are incomprehensibly small. But as scientists tell us, events that are extremely improbable happen all the time.

1. First I always like to use the probability of me being born as an example of chance. What is the probability that I would've been born? Well first my father and mother had to meet, that took some chance. I then had to have been conceived from one particular sperm cell and egg. The chances of that are extremely rare when considering that every time a man ejaculates, as much as 100 million sperm cells are thrust outward and only one will fertilize the woman's egg - and that's if fertilization even happens at all. The chances of me being conceived just considering that one specific time when my parents tried to conceive a child, and not even considering all their other attempts, is about 1 in 100 million. When you factor in all the other attempts at conceiving a child, combined with the probability of the circumstances that lead up to their decision and attempt to conceive a child, already the mathematical odds are stupendous. 

Then you have to multiply this to the chances of each of my parents being conceived and the circumstances that lead up to that event, and then do the same to their parents, and their parents, all the way back literally to the very first form of life some 4 billion years ago. The odds of this happening are unfathomable. Everyone alive today is the product of an unbroken chain of births, billions of generations in the making. The chances that any one of my distant relatives would have had a different offspring that wouldn't have been one of my ancestors, would have always been much more probable. And yet of course if this had happened, I wouldn't have ever been born, and yet I exist and I'm real. What are the chances of that?

So events that are extremely odd can happen all the time even when the odds against them are much more probable. But even this answer doesn't satisfy all the critics, so let me give a few others.

Monday, February 22, 2010

The fine tuning argument from creationists..destoyed

Creationists have the fine tuning argument that states that the fine tuning of the universe, the creation of the elements and compounds such as hydrogen and helium into the heavier elements and the distance of our Earth from the Sun all happened just the right way, so there must be a God who fine tuned it that way.

Now I say to that, first of all of coarse it's all just right or else we wouldn't be here to notice it. Second, why would an all-powerful God need to fine tune a universe anyway? Is God bound by the laws of physics? God can create complex intelligent life on the Sun if he wanted to, right? He is all powerful.

If the universe wasn't fine tuned for life and yet still produced it then I would say creationists would have a much stronger argument for there being a supernatural God with powers beyond any mortal belief who uses his powers to create and sustain that life in spite of there not existing the right conditions for it.

This is why I think that the fine tuning argument falls apart. Of course it alone doesn't disprove the existence of God, but it cuts a hole in the creationist's position on the order that which our universe appears to have. Take away one element from the early universe, or change the expansion of the universe by a minute fraction and it would not have produced the universe we know with stars and planets and of coarse...life. I can't believe a God would have to expand the universe at a precise rate, couldn't he just do whatever he wanted?

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