Joe Schmid’s Fine-Tuning Argument Backfires

Typed lovingly by human hands, without AI

Make Lying Wrong Again (Substack) — 11 October 2026.

Note on capture: full article text and the author’s endnotes, retrieved 2026-10-18. The markdown extractor dropped superscripts; every “one part in 10^120” was restored from the page HTML.

Joe Schmid’s 7-hour video on theism is enthusiastic, entertaining and thought provoking [1]. However, I want to focus on a crucial scientific error in his 90-minute section on the fine-tuning of physics. This error seems commonplace in popular discourse. Worse, it torpedoes and even reverses the inference he wants to draw from measured constants in physics.

What Was Claimed

Although the video implies all the constants are fine-tuned, it covers only one of them: the famous Cosmological Constant (CC). Joe claims if this value had been different by more than 1 part in 10^120 – an extremely narrow range – the universe would be lifeless.

Under a life-selecting, goal-directed model (theism) of how the CC obtained in our universe, the probability of observing its value in this tiny range is not very low. Under a non-goal directed model (naturalism), Joe argues, it is very low, since a much wider range of non life-permitting values are possible under this model. Thus theism as a hypothesis makes a narrower, more precise prediction of the measured CC. Its measured value within that life-permitting range is then counted as evidence in favor of theism over naturalism.

The problem is Joe seems to have scrambled up the science in a way that favors this conclusion. Once unscrambled, not only does the inference vanish; the same reasoning favors almost the opposite conclusion.

Joe’s slide about the Cosmological Constant. The cited range of 1 part in 10^120, a tiny number, is mistakenly referring to a fine-tuning of physics models that is unrelated to life, also referred to as a naturalness or hierarchy problem [2].

Why It’s Wrong

Joe appears to be getting the 1 part in 10^120 number from a fine-tuning of physics that is unrelated to life. Here’s where that well-known figure comes from.

Physicists often identify the CC, which appears in classical general relativity, with the energy of the vacuum of space, which ostensibly arises from the Standard Model of elementary particles: a non-classical, quantum theory. These two theories work well, yet they are (1) incomplete descriptions of the universe and (2) in conflict with each other in certain conditions.

The CC further dramatized this conflict: observations of supernovae in the 1990s, further strengthened by data from satellite missions later on, found the CC does not have the ‘natural’ value that was hoped for (namely, zero). Even worse, its measured value differs from what was estimated from quantum considerations by a whopping 120 orders of magnitude (though smaller discrepancies can be derived, depending on the details). This has been called “the worst prediction in the history of physics”.

What does this tell us about life? Nothing, really.

What does this tell us about fine-tuning? It tells us physicists must fine-tune their models to an incredible 1 part in 10^120 in order for the precise cancellations to occur to bring these theories into agreement with observation (ruh roh). That incredible amount of fine-tuning is evidence there may be profound, new physics out there [2].

What is the life-permitting range?

The life-permitting range of the CC is at least multiple orders of magnitude its observed value – not a miniscule one part in 10^120 – even when all other free parameters of physics are fixed. If we allow all the free parameters of physics to vary, then the constraints on the CC can be formulated in terms of a related parameter, the vacuum energy scale λ. This can vary by a factor of at least 10,000,000,000 times, or 10+ orders of magnitude, around its measured value [3].

As far as life is concerned, not only could the CC vary, it could even be zero. It could even be negative. In fact, there would be more life in the universe if the CC was smaller than its measured value.

The subset of fundamental constants of physics that are implicated in habitability and their life-permitting ranges [3]. The vacuum energy scale labeled by the Greek letter λ, which is related to the Cosmological Constant, can vary by at least 10+ orders of magnitude. It is not constrained to 1 part in 10^120, which is a different famous tiny number referring to the fine-tuning of physics models, unrelated to life-permitting ranges.

Why It Matters

“Okay,” you might say, “so that one particular constant was a bad example. Pick another constant and the argument is the same.”

Not so. This business about the CC actually matters. Here’s why.

The Multiverse Prediction

In the 1980s, when it was thought the ‘natural’ and most likely value of the CC was exactly zero, Steven Weinberg derived anthropic upper bounds which eventually predicted a tiny, nonzero and positive value[4]. The work that emerged from this and was later refined was right on all three counts. In fact, this prediction – with subsequent refinements – ended up making predictions within a factor of ~10 of the measured result. Not bad for cosmology.

How did Weinberg motivate this prediction? Essentially, by assuming a multiverse. Depending on the details of the model, given a multiverse with a non-goal directed ‘roulette wheel’ that randomly selects values of the CC in each universe, we expect universes with values closer to zero to harbor more life, and thus more observers per universe. However, most of the life-permitting universes won’t win that multiverse lottery; instead, most will have non-optimal, larger values with sparsely populated observers. Balancing such countervailing anthropic bias effects, Weinberg and others did some math and made predictions.

Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist, predicted a value of the Cosmological Constant based on a multiverse that was more accurate and precise than we would expect from bare theism. Image credit: Tamir Kalifa for the New York Times [5].

The Fine-Tuning Backfire

This is no technical detail that can be ignored. It’s relevant, and catastrophic for an inference to design from the values of constants. In summary, the Cosmological Constant suggests:

1. Unexpected fine-tunings sometimes occur in physics whether or not they are beneficial for life. This is like discovering strange noises sometimes occur in your attic whether or not you happen to be conducting a séance at the time.

2. There is likely new physics: current physics, despite its success and broad applicability, is probably incomplete and not entirely correct.

3. A goal-directed process gives an inaccurate prediction straddling zero: a CC value a million or billion or trillion times smaller, or zero, or even negative, could produce life. Such values could even produce more life than we find in our particular, emptier universe. Why is the value in our universe positive? Why not 1,000 times smaller? Why not zero? Why not negative? The bare theism-for-life hypothesis answers none of these questions.

4. A goal-directed process gives an imprecise prediction even if we allow it to be imperfect and ‘just good enough’: the life-permitting range of λ still spans 10,000,000,000+ times its measured value, not one part in 10^120. Ironically, we would need to further fine-tune this model to explain the observed value.

5. A multiverse can give a more precise prediction within a factor of ~10 times the measured results. In other words, a multiverse gives a prediction of an even tighter range that is 0.00000001% the width of the life-permitting, bare theism prediction.

6. Thus on the reasoning that was offered, the value of the CC in a narrow range around a small, nonzero, positive value is evidence in favor of a multiverse over bare theism.

7. Given a multiverse, this opens the door to explaining life-permitting ranges of the other constants without goal-directed fine-tuning, too.

Thus, we can’t simply switch our attention to some different constant of physics, hoping that will rescue the inference or the conclusion we started with.

Conclusions and Caveats

If we aren’t paying special attention to life, the Cosmological Constant is perhaps the most surprising and finely-tuned value in all of physics. Yet, when properly understood, the evidence does not suggest it is fine-tuned in a way that is goal-directed for life. The reasoning we started with vanishes at best, backfires at worst.

Does this imply theism is false? Not necessarily. As ever, even if the skeptic can show natural explanations can account for what we observe in a haunted house, they can never prove the house isn’t haunted. Maybe the wind did cause a tree branch to make that scratching sound on the window … but that can never rule out a ghost that makes wind which sometimes scratches windows, and sometimes doesn’t. The point is the availability of natural explanations means we no longer have a justifiable inference to design from fine-tuning.

I also haven’t addressed objections raised in the video to the multiverse. I think those fall short too, but I’ll address them another day.

Does this mean we live in a multiverse? No. All of this is speculative, as far as the physics is concerned. However, if we are indulging in metaphysical speculation about divine fine-tuners from physics, then we are also free to speculate about new physics from physics.

Any way you slice it, the fine-tuning of the Cosmological Constant does not give us the wildly probable evidence that was originally presented. Instead, it backfires.

Notes

1. Joe Schmid, The BEST EVER Cumulative Case for God, August 26, 2026. The value of physical constants discussion starts at 1:39:00.

2. The physics fine-tuning of the cosmological constant is also referred to as a ‘hierarchy’ or ‘naturalness’ problem in physics. This is distinct from fine-tuning for life.

3. Fred Adams, The degree of fine-tuning in our universe – and others, Physics Reports 807 (2019), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0370157319300511?via%3Dihub

4. Steven Weinberg, Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant, Physical Review Letters 59 (1987), https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.2607

5. Photo credit: Tamir Kalifa for the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/science/steven-weinberg-groundbreaking-nobelist-in-physics-dies-at-88.html