[00:18:40] Hmm.
So, you know, well, I know you know about the,
fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. And I don’t want to just do the boring thing of just
asking you exactly what you think about that. But specifically, when people talk about this,
[00:19:07] the problem that we’re confronted with is that the universe abides by a certain number of constants,
which seem very, very finely balanced, to the degree that if you were to increase gravity or its
strength by like the most unfathomably tiny amount, the universe would all collapse in on itself
and the reverse is true as well.
And so we’re kind of typically given three options here to explain why it is that the universe is finely balanced to allow atoms to form and planets and stars and stuff.
One is it’s just by chance, which seems incredibly unlikely.
One is that God did it, you know, which seems maybe a bit too easy.
And the third is necessity, that there’s some kind of reason why it had to be that way, or maybe not a reason why it had to be that way, but it just had to be that way.
[00:19:53] is the version of the sort of description of the laws of physics that you’re describing here
a version of this necessity route of saying without sort of any reason why they kind of just had to be the way they are
or is it more like a chance direction where you say it’s kind of just by chance but the fact that it did happen this way
despite the odds requires no no explanation like which of those sort of categories do you
sort of fit into. I know it’s not the God one. Well, I think that two things. One is you left off a very
promising explanation, which is the multiverse, where different parts of the universe have apparently
different values for the constants, and therefore we’re going tautologically to find ourselves
in a part of the universe, which has conditions accessible to life, right? I mean, there was never
[00:20:45] any chance that we would be having this conversation in a part of the universe which did not allow
for the existence of life. So really the only question,
question is, is the universe big and diverse enough to allow for life anywhere? Or did we just get
lucky, like you said? I don’t think that there’s much sensible to be said about the option that
you painted as some necessity for things to be one way versus another. I don’t think that makes
any sense. Like I said, I think that things could very easily have been otherwise. I think that the
most likely explanation for the apparent fine tuning of constants of nature is some kind of diversity
within the environments that exist within our universe.
[00:21:26] It might be literally the cosmological multiverse,
where you have regions very far away where conditions are different.
It might be something more subtle in the space of quantum worlds,
in a many-worlds version of quantum mechanics or something like that.
But that seems to be a very simple way out of the apparent fine-tuning questions.
And it wouldn’t be at all associated with some necessity for it to have been that way.
It’s literally the opposite.
It’s saying elsewhere, it’s not that way at all.
[00:21:51] Well, the reason I leave that out of the three options is because I see any kind of multiverse explanation as a version of the chance thing.
Like, yes, it is exceedingly unlikely that the constants would be as they are.
But there are exceedingly many incarnations of this universe.
And so, of course, one of them is going to be finally tuned.
And that’s the one that we’re going to find ourselves.
And so I kind of see it as a version of the chance argument.
But theists will hear you say that.
And in the way that we might look to a theist and say, well, you’re just kind of trying to explain away a difficult scientific problem by saying God did it.
[00:22:31] Are we here just trying to sort of explain away a difficult problem by saying that there’s a multiverse or are there other independent reasons to already suppose that there might be such a thing?
So I think a couple things.
One is I would vastly prefer to separate the two possibilities, one of which is there’s a multiverse and the different constants of nature.
appear different locally in different regions,
and therefore, by a selection effect,
we find ourselves in a region that is hospitable to life,
versus a thing that says,
there’s just one universe and we just got lucky
[00:23:03] that the parameters of that universe
allow for the existence of life.
Those are two very different scenarios,
and I wouldn’t want to conflate them together.
I certainly don’t think,
and then the question,
are we just sort of doing just the same thing
that the theists do by invoked
[00:23:21] some mechanism to explain these apparent fine tunings. I think that there’s two things going
wrong with that. One is there’s nothing wrong with invoking mechanisms to explain things you see
about the universe. That’s what science does. That’s how you invent scientific theories. You try to fit the
data by proposing a hypothesis or a model that accounts for that data. And if the data include the
fact that the energy density of empty space or something like that could have been very different,
but is just right, allowing for the existence of complex structures
that physically transmit and process information
in a way that we recognize as being characteristic of intelligent life,
[00:24:02] those are data that we should use in constructing our theories.
And the other is that, as you hinted at the end there,
indeed, we have reasons that have nothing to do with explaining fine-tuning
for expecting that there is some kind of multiverse out there.
The reasons are not airtight. We really don’t know for sure, but both from cosmology,
inflation, string theory, all these speculative cutting-edge ideas, and from quantum mechanics,
like we said, the many worlds formulation of quantum theory, we get a multiverse out of theories
that were invented for completely different reasons. They were not invented to get you a multiverse,
[00:24:40] but you try to follow and take seriously their implications and you find that there is one out there.
very, very different than the story with Theism. Let’s just put it that way.
Yeah, I think that’s probably true. But then how much stock do you place in the theistic
explanation for fine-tuning here? In other words, is it sort of like, that’s nonsense because
we have this other explanation? Or is it like, no, this fine-tuning problem does increase my
credence in the existence of God. It is a sort of viable option for me. It’s just like it doesn’t
compare to the scientific explanation? Like, where do you sort of place it on that level of convincingness?
My usual line is that I think that the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God is the best
[00:25:24] argument that people have for the existence of God. But it’s a terrible argument. It’s really,
it’s really not very good at all. And for various reasons, I’ll just mention two of them very quickly.
One is that the fact that the physical constants of nature are fine-tuned really means,
the following thing. It means that they take on values that allow for the existence of physical configurations of matter that behave like living creatures, right? We metabolize, we reproduce, we process information, like we said, all of while obeying the laws of physics in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if the various constants of nature were very different than they are right now. That is exactly what you would expect if God didn’t exist.
That’s what you expect under naturalism, that if you want to have life in a naturalistic cosmology, you better have some complex information processing systems and the constants of nature better allow for those.
If God exists, you don’t need that.
God can make anything alive because God is God.
I think a lot of theists really undersell God’s ability to do things.
[00:26:36] I mean, generally they believe that many of them believe that there is life after death that doesn’t involve physical stuff or find too.
at all. So, if anything, the observation that the constants of nature are fine-tuned to allow for the existence of physical configurations of complex adaptive matter is evidence that should increase your credence in naturalism, not theism. And the other objection is that exactly because the fine-tuning argument is the best possible argument, why is that? It’s because it plays by the rules of scientific investigation. It says, here’s a data point. I’m going to try to invent a theory.
that explains this data point, I am going to judge my theories using Bayesian reasoning.
I’m going to calculate a likelihood. I’m going to say, what would the likelihood of the universe
looking like this be under this particular theory, and then we’ll compare it to the data.
And you can do that for, I’m certainly happy to agree that the likelihood that the parameters
of nature would allow for life would be large under theism. I think that’s okay.
But there’s a whole bunch of other things you can ask. Should we expect the
[00:27:43] universe to look this way if theism were true. There’s a whole bunch of other features of the
universe that we would not expect, like just the fact that it’s big, the fact that there’s a hundred
billion or a trillion galaxies in our observable universe. That’s not what you would expect under
theism, and especially the idea that human beings are somehow special in God’s eyes. Now, you can say,
well, maybe the whole universe is special in God’s eyes, and maybe we can accommodate and expect that
exactly this kind of universe is what God would have made. But too late, because you had the chance
for a very, very long time, cosmologically, we had no knowledge of the fact that there were
extra galaxies out there, that the universe was big, that there was a big bang, or any of those
[00:28:29] things, you could easily have used your theory of theism to predict that that would probably
be what the universe is like, and nobody did. So you can’t claim now that’s exactly what you
have expected under theism.
That’s a great point is that it does seem a bit sort of, shall we say, post hoc.
It’s not strictly speaking, you know, like irrational.
If you’re a seist and you’re confronted with this problem of a big universe, you know, it’s not enough to make you into an atheist, but to say, no, no, no, this is, you know, this is how God would have done it.
It’s like easy to say now.
My friend Phil Halper likes to point out that the early Christian Gnostics who believed in like the evil demi-a-oh.
[00:29:13] urge creator of the material universe, that the fine-tuning argument kind of fits better with
that because you’ve got these like meta-conditions which make it really, really difficult
to bring about a material world. And yet it comes about, implying that sort of the true creator
of everything, the source of all being, really doesn’t want the material world to exist.
But this sort of evil, you know, trickster comes in and just sets things up just right, that
the fine-tching argument kind of points a lot more strongly to something like that than it does to
the god of traditional traditional theism.
Yeah, and I think the way, I’m sorry, go ahead.
[00:29:49] No, please.
I was just going to say the theists in the modern world are pushed to invent a version of God
who wants to be completely invisible, right?
Who wants the world just to act according to the laws of physics.
And then you have to invent a reason why, oh, no, God would have wanted to do it that way
so that we would have no idea that God actually existed.
it would be very, very trivially easy for God to let us know that God existed.
Again, he’s God, he can do anything he wants.
[00:30:20] There’s many different versions of the universe that would fit really well into a theistic explanation
and not so much into a naturalistic explanation to be forced into the corner where,
yeah, it looks like our universe always obeys the laws of physics and is governed by purely materialistic rules,
but God would have wanted that way is a little bit of a post-talk copy.
about. Okay, so I’ve got two philosophical questions for you since this is a philosophy show,
although you struggle to believe it, the number of scientists I’ve been speaking to recently.
The first is that you said earlier that you don’t believe in the principle of sufficient
reason. That is, you think that there are things that can occur without any explanation or
[00:31:01] justification, and that satisfies you to think maybe the universe’s existence and the nature of the
laws are just a brute fact. If somebody’s listening and they do believe in the
a sufficient reason. And they do think that everything requires an explanation or some justification.
Again, not to say that we would need to know what it is, but just that there is some reason why
everything that happens happens. For someone who does believe in the PSR, do you think they have
good reason to believe in some kind of theistic picture that there must be a sort of unmoved mover
holding everything in place? Or would you still, if you woke up tomorrow like Bertrand Russell,
by Jove, the principle of sufficient reason is sound, would you still be satisfied in your atheism?
[00:31:44] Well, I think that the principle of sufficient reason relates to theism in a very well-known
traditional way that is pretty obviously a cop-out like we were just talking about.
The whole argument for the existence of God based on PSR types of reasoning says, you know,
for everything, everything is a true fact about the universe,
There must be a reason, but there’s this large number of things that is true about the universe. Therefore, we don’t want to get into an infinity of explanations. The reason for X is Y and the reason for Y is Z and just go down in an infinite regress. Somehow that bothers us. Maybe you could just accept that. I don’t know, but somehow that bothers us. Therefore, there must be a single thing, an entity that is necessary, that is the grounding the explanation for all these other things. But of course,
course, what you just did is contradict the very first assumption you made. You just said that
for everything that has to exist, there has to be a reason why it exists, except for this special
thing that I know about. And it’s only reason for existing is it had to necessarily exist.
[00:32:51] And that’s a very hard argument to counter, not because it’s good, but because the only counter
is, no, it didn’t. I can imagine universes where God doesn’t exist. There’s no necessary
thing there. You invented a reason to make him exist. I don’t need to accept your
reason. Okay. So