Truth Unites - The Fine-Tuning Argument is STRONG

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Gavin Ortlund introduces the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God and responds to 5 common objections. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Of the different arguments for God, the fine-tuning argument is often acknowledged even by critics of theism. Sometimes you'll find these concessions that this is a pretty strong argument. It has some force to it. And some people see this as the strongest argument for God. My friend Cameron Bertuzi did a discussion on this where he noted that even some atheists will sometimes concede the force of this argument. In my personal opinion, the best argument on the basis of empirics in favor of the existence of God, comes from the fine tuning of physical parameters in our universe. At some point certainly we all asked, well, which is the best argument you've yet come up against on the other side?

I think every one of us picks the fine-tuning one. It's the most intriguing. The Golding Locks. Yeah. Fine-toin the fine-tuning that one degree, well, one hair different to nothing. But even though it doesn't prove design, doesn't prove a designer, could all have happened without it you have to spend time thinking about it working on it it's not a trivial when when you come on later to the um origin of the physical constants now that's getting on getting

warm that getting close to a good argument unlike the unlike the morality one well is that is that mainly because it is a essentially a scientific argument no no no it's obviously It's more difficult than that. It's that the physical constants, things like the speed of light, gravitational constant and strong and weak force and things, physicists agree, most physicists agree, that if you change any of those constants by even a very, very small amount, then we don't come into existence. The universe doesn't come into existence. They have to be like that in order for galaxies to form, for stars to form, for chemistry to form, actually. And then for the prerequisite for life to evolve need that as well.

So that's the nearest approach to a good argument. And if you spend any time in these discussions, you're sure to come across this quote from Fred Hoyle. He was an astronomer. And he gets at it very well with this. I like this statement. and a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics.

I like that. It's a pithy way of getting right at the issue we're going to get into in this video. He was not a religious person. Neither is Paul Davies, who wrote this fascinating book. Got to check this book out if you've never read it and you're interested in these topics. It's not that hard to read.

1992, The Mind of God, amazing book. Davies is a physicist and an agnostic, but he argues that the universe looks as if it is unfolding according to some plan or blueprint. He talks about the universe unfolding from pre-existing rules, and he states these rules look as if they are the product of intelligent design. Now, he leaves it open, whether it is actually intelligently designed, but he's honest about the appearance of things.

The very last sentence of this book is, We are truly meant to be here. In his other writings, he says there is powerful evidence for me that there is something going on behind it all. the impression of design is overwhelming. Now that preposition behind, something going on behind at all. This is, to me, this is so helpful. I'll just say this. I think there's a popular idea out there that when you get into science, the more you get into science, the more you understand physical reality, the more this pulls you away from mysticism and openness to spirituality, I think it's

just the opposite. The farther you go into science, the farther you go into knowledge of physical reality, the more you bump into this feeling that there's something behind it. There's something more. This sort of feeling of transcendence comes up. And I'm going to put out a video on Albert Einstein talking about those things. But here we're going to talk about the fine-tuning argument as one manifestation of this sort of feeling that comes up. And the goal here is just to give a brief sort of drive-by introduction, especially for newcomers who might be wondering, you know, why would Fred Hoyle, who's not a religious person, say that this is a common sense interpretation? Or why would Davies, who's not a religious person, say this is overwhelming the appearance of design. And we'll just

work through the argument, and then we'll respond to five objections. Again, this is an introductory video. It's not going to cover every objection and all of the most cutting-edge discussions in academic philosophy journals. I am interested in those. I'm reading some of those right now, and I hope to do a subsequent video working through some of those. Let me know that you're interested in that. But first, let's just get an orientation to this argument. I like to put it as an abductive argument, meaning an inference to the best explanation. And basically, I just put it like this. The universe appears fine-tuned for life. The best explanation of that is theism. Therefore, fine-tuning provides some evidential support for theism. Now, how much support exactly will depend

upon different factors? But even if you think it provides a lot of support, this particular way of putting the argument doesn't amount to a proof of theism, because you could always just say, and I think this is the best way to go if you're a skeptic, to say, yeah, it provides some level of support, but ultimately there are countervailing considerations in the other direction that outweigh it in the final analysis. I think that's the best way to go, because this argument, it's hard to get around, I think. I would say this is a really compelling testimony to the reality of theism. So first, let's just lay out what we mean when we say the universe appears, fine-tuned for life. The fine-tuning argument is kind of a species of a design argument or

teleological argument. You'll find these called. These arguments have a long history. They go way back in human history. They're found in different religions. One of the famous metaphors for this comes from William Paley's watchmaker analogy. He's saying if you walk along the woods and you find a watch, it's reasonable to infer it had a designer, and this basic inference here from something appearing designed to the existence of a designer is the common thread between all these different kinds of arguments. My favorite metaphor, though, is not the watch, but a metaphor from the fourth century theologian Gregory of Nazianzianzian who uses the image of a liar or a musical instrument. And I like this more for two reasons. One, it's sort of less mechanical,

and second, it's less autonomous, because the idea is somebody's actually playing the instrument. It's not just something that's constructed and then left alone. So this is more clearly departing from like a deist view where God creates the world and then steps back. And actually the metaphor of a musical instrument for the universe, so that is a metaphor for what this world is, a musical instrument. That's kind of a cool metaphor for a Christian way of looking at things. But what a lot of people say about design arguments generally is, hasn't these basically been destroyed by David Hume and then Charles Darwin, and especially Darwin's theory of natural selection,

didn't that sort of end the discussion about these? And there you get into, that's disputed. But we're going to leave all of that aside for the sake of this video, because when we talk about the fine-tuning argument, this particular kind of design argument, we're not talking about biological fine-tuning. We're not even talking about the fine-tuning of particular local objects or features of the universe, like how far is the Earth from the Sun or something like that. Rather, we're talking about the shocking precision of the initial conditions of the universe, the laws of nature, and physical constants, like the speed of light and the gravitational

constant. And all three of these, initial conditions, laws, constants, are, they just have happen to fall into an exceedingly narrow range that's required for our universe to be permitting of conscious life. Okay. You've probably heard some of this before. I know some people really don't like when we get into statistics and how improbable something is and so forth. But, and I'm actually like that. I've never actually been a huge proponent of this argument, but I've got into it because I realize there's value in this argument. So it's not my favorite argument, though, but we'll go through it here and give an overview. The question, so, but the point for now is just to say the question here has nothing to do with evolution. It has to do with a universe in which evolution could even

happen in the first place. And basically, to lay it out, I'll just show this tiny little clip from this video by William Lane Craig's ministry, which I think does a great job, especially the graphics kind of showing the argument here. The very structure of our universe is determined by these numbers. These are the fundamental constants and quantities of the universe. Scientists have come to the shocking realization, that each of these numbers has been carefully dialed to an astonishingly precise value, a value that falls within an exceedingly narrow, life-permitting range. If any one of these numbers were altered by even a hair's breadth,

no physical, interactive life of any kind could exist anywhere. There'd be no stars, no life, no planets, no chemistry. Now, Robin Collins has written an article in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology that's talked about a lot. Collins has done a lot of great work on this argument. He at pages 211 and following, if you want to get more specifics of what are these laws, constants, and initial conditions, you can work through there. He talks about constants like the strength of gravity, the cosmological constant. That's probably the most frequently discussed one we'll come back to. He talks about laws like electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force.

And then he talks about the initial conditions of the universe, like the mass density of the early universe, the strength of the explosion of the Big Bang, and much more. Now those of us, boy, I probably lost some people in the last five seconds, those of us who are not scientists like myself, but are interested in the philosophy of science. and the areas where science and philosophy kind of come together converge and then slightly overlap, which is a fascinating area. We can get lost in all the technical terms here, but I think we can still appreciate the basic point, that the universe itself looks a little bit like Paley's Watch or Gregory's Lyer. And by the way, what we're observing is not gaps in our knowledge, where we're talking about positive data here. Sometimes people write this argument off by calling it a God of the Gaps argument where basically when we don't know what causes something, we just attribute it to God, but that's not what's going on here.

That phrase gets put out too often, God of the Gaps. When you call something a gap, that assumes you have some kind of perception of the whole. Otherwise, you wouldn't call it a gap, per se. And Thomas Nagel has written a great book called Mind and Cosmos. It's a short read, easy read, check it out, really great book. and he faults many of his fellow atheists. Nagel is an atheist, but he faults many of his fellow atheists for basically assuming what he calls a materialism of the gaps or a Darwinism of the gaps, which are no less dogmatic.

And I think the point he's trying to make is something I would agree with, and that's, when you don't know the whole yet, don't call it a gap, just deal with the data as it comes. So here we ask, okay, we've got these exquisitely precise laws. That leads to a question. What's the best way to understand that? And here we're reasoning abductively. We're looking at different possibilities. We're saying, what's the best way to make sense of fine-tuning?

And there does seem to be a finite number of options. One is chance. You could say it's just a coincidence. This is not the best response, though. And most people who reject the argument don't go this route. Let's just explain why really quickly. And what you have to appreciate here is just how exquisitely precise the fine-tuning of the law's constants and initial conditions of the universe is.

Elsewhere Collins discusses the cosmological constant in particular, and he knows that if it were not within an estimated one part in 10 to the 120th power of its theoretical possible range of values, either the universe would expand or collapse too quickly for galaxies and stars to form. And of course, if there's no stars, then there's no conscious life. Now that number there, 10 to the power of 120. So you see the number and then the smaller number to the top right. that's an exponent. These are the kinds of numbers you have to use when you get way into really big numbers,

you know, beyond billions and trillions and so forth. My kids love to talk about zillions and billions. But when you use big numbers like this, you use these exponents. And so that's basically 10 to the power of 120 means a one followed by 120 zeros. That's a big number. And that's just for the cosmological constant. When you combine that with all these other constants and laws and initial conditions, then the degree of improbability becomes really hard to fathom. It's like when you try to picture in your

mind and conceptualize how big the universe is and you just have no scale for it. For example, Collins uses this number I'll put up on the screen. This is a fun one to describe the initial distribution of mass energy in the universe. That is a 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. And if you want to know how big that number is, just Google it and good luck trying to fathom that. know how to make sense of that is to watch this scene from the great philosophical masterpiece, Dumb and Dumber, where Mary Swanson tells Lloyd Christmas that his odds are even worse than he thinks. And basically, what we can just observe is for our universe to be life permitting, we're not talking about a one in a million chance. We're talking about something way more improbable.

So just saying it's a coincidence is not the best way. There's better responses than that. Now, another option is to say that it's necessary that the laws be the way they are. It's either physically necessary or you could say metaphysically necessary. The laws, the constants, the initial conditions have to be that way. But since there's no known reason or law that determines the constants, laws, and initial conditions, it's hard to see why they would be necessary. This doesn't seem very intuitive. It sure seems like, theoretically, the dials could be adjusted a little bit. So the more common response here is to say, not that they couldn't be adjusted, but that we have no basis to assess the degree of probability, whether they would be as they are now,

because we have no antecedent conditions. Here's how Keith Parsons puts this. If atheism is correct, that the universe and its laws are all that is or ever has been, how can it be said that the universe with all its finely tuned features is in any relevant sense, probable or improbable? And X hypothesis, that means, according to this hypothesis, there are no antecedent conditions that could determine such a probability. Hence, if the universe is the ultimate brute fact, it is neither likely nor unlikely probable nor improbable it simply is. But this is problematic. It seems to assume that the only kind of probability we can work with is a kind of statistical probability where you have antecedent conditions. But in the history of probability theory, philosophers speak

about all other kinds of probability. Sometimes, for example, you'll find reference to inductive probability or more commonly epistemic probability that's working apart from any kind of statistical background. And this is widely used in the natural sciences. Collins has a good discussion of this, for example, he talks about. He gives examples of how this kind of probability is used in scientific confirmation, like for continental drift theory, for example. Most of us, if you just stop and think about this. A lot of these objections, actually, they feel kind of fishy, but you can't articulate why at first, and then you have to think it through. It's like, you know, it doesn't, it seems like it is kind of improbable that the universe is the way it is. Why? Why are the numbers just the way they are,

you know? And most of us can recognize, you can have a singular, non-repeatable state of affairs and still recognize it's enormously improbable for it to be the way it is. Even if the universe is all that there ever is, and it's a brute fact, we can still wonder, well, why is it? Why is it? it this way. Why are the dials set so exactly such that we can be here? So then you ask this. You say, okay, if the constant laws and initial conditions don't have to be the way they are, so it's not a necessity, and if they're not simply blind luck, so it's not chance, or if that's very low probability, for reasoning abductively, we're thinking those are not the best options, what are the other options? Now, there's a few other options that you sometimes see people put forward,

but usually they tend to boil down to some other kind of chance or necessity. And ultimately, if the laws, constants, and initial conditions of the universe don't have to be the way they are, and if it's unlikely that they just chanced to be the way they are, the biggest remaining hypothesis would be that somebody or something made them that way, which is to say they are designed. That seems to be the most obvious next option, just as in any other sphere of life, if something isn't accidental or necessary, the alternative that you next consider is maybe it's designed, like the watch or the liar.

But design, of course, implies some kind of designer or designers, and that goes a long way toward putting you into the ballpark of theism, if you define theism as just belief in some kind of supernatural, personal agent or agents. And because it would be a pretty eccentric use of language if you have an entity that's capable of designing the universe, but you don't call it a god. of some kind. Now, of course, there's lots of responses to this, and the biggest one is the multiverse hypothesis, which will go through at the end, but let's go through some others as well. First, the first one I'll call the too much math response. I am not, this is the one I appreciate

the most. I'm not making fun of any of these, by the way, and calling it too much math is not deriding. I hope that doesn't seem that way. But this is a more practical line of resistance where people just feel like this is an oddly mathematical and sort of mechanical way to find God. If a personal God exists, he wants personal relationship with us. Isn't it odd that he would reveal himself to us in these highly technical advances and discoveries of 20th century science? Here's how Alex O'Connor addresses this concern, or I hope I'm summarizing him accurately, something like this. You know, I think there's a great deal of good evidence in terms of what is argumentatively sound. You know, the fine-tuning argument, you can make responses to it, but yeah, it's a powerful consideration.

Why are the content so finely tuned? But of course, I'm an atheist, right? Like I think that this is sort of interesting from a philosophical perspective. But if I were a Christian, I would think that this is not where I would expect to find the focal point of the Christian faith. This is supposed to be about a relationship. I think, look, if God has not revealed himself through prayer or reflection or through religious experience, it'd be very bizarre indeed for me to kind of put my eye down a microscope, look at like a particular way that it's, an atom wriggles or something and go,

oh, there he is. You know, it would be a very strange place for him to reveal himself. And so I wouldn't expect, so when I say that sort of the natural theological arguments that they're argumentatively sound, I think they are, but they don't move me.

And I don't think they move a lot of people. And I think if you ask people why they convert to Christianity or to Theism from atheism, very rarely do they report that it's because they sat down and read a particular argument in the Blackwell companion to natural theology.

Sometimes that is part of a wider picture. Obviously, questions that got answered. And I get this because when you get into the literature on this, it's very technical, it's very mathematical. God forbid, you read some of these articles, even God bless Robin Collins, but it's not, it's a slog, especially when the symbolic logic starts getting used. It's not easy to get through. But so you can wonder, you know, is this really how God would reveal himself to us? However, I think that's basically just a function of how the argument is stated. So the argument can be put in more technical ways, but it can also be broken down in

framed in more colloquial and relatable ways. Again, the fine-tuning argument is really just one species of design arguments, and it's kind of honing in on this particular arena, physics, basically, in cosmology, but it also relates to this broader background intuition that I think every human being can understand and can appreciate. I actually think the general inference from design to designer is very visceral and very natural in our heart. I think of Gregory's liar imagery when you know you don't have to be good at decoding symbolic logic you just walk out at night and look at the stars and listen to the owls and the insects and smell the fresh air and ask this question of how likely is it that this all came about by accident in this book

which is a super cool book i just call it the plantinca book but two dozen or so arguments for god if you read through this you'll find there's robin collins has an essay in there that's the fifth argument, the argument from physical constants, and that's pretty technical, especially if his other work on this is very technical. But if you read the next argument, the sixth argument by C. Stephen Evans, it's called the naive teleological argument. I love that title. I want to give you a naive argument. I like that. He calls this, an argument from design for ordinary people, and he says, this is an argument whose force does not depend on scientific findings in which, therefore, does not require sophisticated scientific knowledge, such as is

required for the fine-tuning argument in order to be convincing. Take a read of that chapter. It's pretty good, but the point is for now, this is a both-hand. You can state the power of this argument in looking through a microscope at an atom or in fine shades of mathematical probability about very abstract thinking, but you can also do it just from pondering the way that mushrooms grow, or the way that the human ear works, or how do the cicadas know to come out every 17 years exactly. And I think of that just because we just had that here in Tennessee. But the point is, everywhere you look, at both the technical and the non-technical level, you have this powerful feeling of a liar is being played or a watch is ticking. It looks purposeful and designed.

It's a very powerful intuition. So the fact that it can be stated in more technical ways shouldn't be a strike against the argument if you can also state it in non-technical ways. Okay, a second objection I'll address here is, and this, This is the one that comes up so much of the... Again, this video is an introduction. I'm not going through it the most sophisticated, but this one comes up so much. We have to deal with it, and that's who designed the designer.

Richard Dawkins brings this up in the God Delusion. I'll put up a passage where that, and read the whole book, especially pages 157 to 158 of the God delusion to get his full case. There's two replies here. Number one, someone would need to posit a reason why the designer needs to be designed. The need for a designer of the laws, constants, and initial conditions of the universe comes up because they are multiple, highly specific, contingent features of our world that sure seem like they could have been different. It's not clear that the potential designer or designers would function like that.

Someone would need to make that case. So like in some species of theism, probably the ones we're most familiar with. In the Abrahamic faiths, classically, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the concept of the concept of of God is that he is a metaphysically necessary and ontologically simple entity. And that's a relevant difference with, you know, multiple super specific contingent laws. So that's where you need to go in that discussion. You need to make the case that a designer needs to be designed. But even if you had a designer that did need to be designed that wouldn't actually disrupt this argument. We'd have more questions to answer, but in the meantime, we're still left with theism.

of some kind or another. The debate then would just be about the nature of the designer, not whether there is a designer, right? So, you know, for example, maybe you'd end up with like a chain of causation going back from one designer to the other, but that wouldn't remove the need for an immediate proximate designer. Just as no one would say, well, my parents existed because of my grandparents, therefore I don't need to posit my parents' existence to explain my existence. that if there's a chain of causation, fine, that doesn't take away this domino that's closest to us, right? So even if the designer is designed, it's still a designer. Now, someone might say, you can't posit a designer unless you know what designed them.

But I think that's false, and I think William Lane Craig has given a good response to this. He basically says, to accept one explanation as the best explanation, you don't have to know everything about that explanation. And he uses the analogy of suppose astronauts found machinery on the backside of the moon, and it wasn't left by human beings. The best explanation would be some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence had put it there, and you wouldn't need to know what were these extraterrestrial beings to make that basic supposition. So that's, you know, it's just getting at the simple fact. If you don't need to know everything about the designer to know this one thing that it did the designing. Okay, so the argument still goes through even if you ask this question. Here's how Jay Richards puts this similar response.

Probably the most popular argument in question I ever get is who designed the designer. The assumption is that this is a real stumper for the design theorist, but it really just clouds several confusions. First of all, you can tell if something's designed without knowing anything about who designed it, when it was designed, how it was designed. If you dropped into South Dakota and saw, Mount Rushmore, for instance. You might know nothing about its origins about the engineers and the sculptors that created it, but you could tell it was designed by its effects, by the specific patterns and complexity that it exhibits. This is how we always detect design. We don't see design by peering into intelligent agents directly. We see the activities of intelligent agency by its effects, and then we infer to an intelligent cause. That's a secondary question. We can detect the activities of an intelligence,

whether we have any answer for the secondary question of the origin of the designer. So I think the Who Designed the designer objection really falls flat despite being very popular. It's kind of similar to when people say in response to the cosmological arguments, if everything needs a cause, what caused God? I'll address that objection when I get to that. All right. Third objection I hear, because I'm putting out a video one week from when this one releases on cosmological arguments.

Third objection I hear is what I'm going to call unnecessary complexity. This is where people say, look, adding in a, designer of some kind only creates further complexity because now you have more things to explain. Here's how JJC. Smart put it, if we postulate God in order, in addition to the created universe, we increase the complexity of our hypothesis. We have all the complexity of the universe itself, and we have, in addition, the at least equal complexity of God. The designer of an artifact must be at least as complex as the designed artifact. Now, I think actually we can challenge that that claim that the complexity of the artifact must be at least equal or must be the complexity

of the designer must be at least equal or greater than the artifact. You could question that. But leaving that aside, the more basic point here is quite simple to make, I think. The explanation for a phenomenon does not increase, but it rather decreases the total amount of epistemic complexity that is on the table. So if you get home, to your house and you have a friend, let's say you have a neighbor, and they have a teenage son who loves to play soccer in the backyard. He's always kicking the soccer ball. And you come into your house and you see that there's a window that is smashed and a soccer ball on the floor. And you recognize the soccer ball. It looks like your neighbor's soccer ball. At this point,

you're going to think abductively. You don't have a logical proof, but you're going to abduce. It was probably my neighbor kicking the ball. Now, if you, if you're going to think, you're going to abduce, it was said that, if you made that abduction, no one would say to you, well, you've just added more complexity. Now you have to explain the window, the ball, and a person kicking the ball. Because the person kicking the ball explains the state of the ball in the window, right? And therefore it decreases rather than increases the epistemic gap. Similarly, positing a designer helps explain fine-tuning and explanations rediscovering. the epistemic tension rather than increase it. A fourth response is what I call

anthropic bias, and I'm getting that from this really interesting book I'll put up a picture of by Nick Bostrum. What he basically draws our attention to is the problem of selection bias. So this refers to the fact just in general that in any set of circumstances what actually happens will seem improbable in relation to what could have happened. So for example, if you spin a wheel that has 100,000 notches on it, whatever it lands on, you can always look back and say, wow, there was only a one in 100,000 chance that this would actually happen. And in the context of design arguments, this concern comes up in relation to what's called the Anthropic principle, which says that whatever we observe about the physical

universe is necessarily filtered by the fact that it's compatible with our existence as observers. Did that sentence make any sense? I'm drawing this from my book. Hopefully it did. I'll explain. Basically, while the apparent fine-tuning of our universe seems improbable, how do we know that doesn't just reflect the biases and limitations of our point of reference? And he uses, and this is not a response to be dismissed right away. I know it can seem like that. But think about his analogy here, the fishing analogy, he says, how big is the smallest fish in the pond?

You catch 100 fishes, all of which are greater than six inches. Does this evidence support the hypothesis that no fish in the pond is much less than six inches long, not if your net can't catch smaller fish. See, he's very clever. So in other words, perhaps we see a universe that looks like it was furnished perfectly to house us because it's the only thing we could see from the angle at which we were, we are looking at it. And Bostrom notes the possibility, for example, maybe there's huge regions of spacetime that have different fundamental constants and values, and we simply don't observe them. They're too far away or whatever. ever. But there's a problem here, and that is that unless you can join the anthropic principle

with a multiverse hypothesis, which we'll get to next, there's a real basic problem here, and that is we have not spun a wheel that has 100,000 notches and then just happened on any old number. We've hit the exact number needed for life to occur. And in this book, Richard Swinburne talks about this using this illustration that I think he gets this slightly, he varies it slightly from John Leslie, but imagine a man standing before a firing squad of 12 expert marksmen, and each of them fire 12 shots. Everyone fires, and yet somehow all 144 bullets miss, and the man survives. Now, you're not going to satisfy this man by explaining to him, well, of course you're surprised to be alive if you were shot, you wouldn't be around to be surprised.

And because the fact that surprise would occur in other circumstances doesn't mean it needs no explanation in this circumstance. And a lot of people concede this point. Richard Dawkins admits this. He says the man in the firing squad could forgivably wonder why they all missed and toy with the hypothesis that they were bribed or drunk. The atheist J. L. Mackey in his older book, The Miracle of Theism. Really interesting book, worth reading still, notes that this was a flaw in David Hume's critique, and he says, basically, fine-tuning is surprising, and this is not made less surprising by the fact that if it had not been so, no one would have been here to be surprised. You can see the same point made in Paul Davies. I'll put this quote up on the screen from him. This seems to be quite sensible,

and a lot of critics of the fine-tuning argument will concede this. You can't sort of reverse cause and effect like this. That's not a good way to reason. But final part, if you're still with me, what if a weaker version of the anthropic principle can be maintained by appealing to a multiverse? Okay? The multiverse hypothesis is this idea that there's countless parallel universes. And if there's enough of them and they vary one to another, then surely some, or at least one of them would be friendly to life. And so maybe we're struck by the improbability of our existence because we just happen to be in the one that's calibrated to be friendly to life. Now, there's a lot of responses to this I'm not going to get into here. The multiverse, the literature on this gets

pretty vast. But as an introduction, for the sake of an introduction here, I'll mention that there's lots of challenges that people bring up with multiverse hypotheses. People say basically this creates a lot of new questions and challenges. One fun rabbit trail you can go down if you want to is Google the phrase, I'll put it up, Boltzman Brain or Boltzman Brain Thought Experiment. Google that and look into that if you want to. People bring this up as a potential challenge to the multiverse hypothesis. We're not going to get into that here. It gets pretty out there, pretty abstract. This video is already nerdy enough, I suspect, for the sake of an introduction. But go down that rabbit trail if you want. But another issue, so I'm not really bringing that up for any

evidential value here, just flagging it for your attention. But another issue is that not every form of a fine-tuning argument is susceptible to the multiverse response. In this book, did I already hold this one up? I think I did. The Planica book. Collins has an essay where, yeah, I already mentioned that. Collins' essay in this book basically gives a version of the fine-tuning argument that isn't susceptible to the multiverse hypothesis, because he's basically arguing that the universe is not merely fine-tuned for life, but it's fine-tuned for discoverability. And the laws, constants, and initial conditions can be discovered. And they're in this very specific range such that it'd be highly surprising that observers

would be in a position to discover them. And he basically, I'll put up an example where he argues this. He basically gives an argument that even if the multiverse could explain why observers are in a finely-tuned world, it doesn't explain why they are in a discoverable world. So read that if you want that, if you want to get into his argument there. Again, I sort of just wanted to observe that. Let me give my main response to the multiverse theory that I think, for a lot of reasonable people, they're kind of be able to say, yeah, that feels a little desperate.

And that is how hard it rubs against Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor holds that all other things being equal, explanations that posit fewer entities or fewer kinds of entities are to be preferred to explanations that offer more. And you might have heard this put more colloquially as the simplest explanation tends to be the best one. Basically, if you have a hypothesis where you're having to add more and more and more and more and make more ad hoc moves just to make sense of the data, this is usually not seen as a good

thing. And the multiverse hypothesis is, from one angle, you could almost say this is like the pinnacle expression of violating Occam's razor. There's a philosopher, a really good philosopher named Bud Zezuski, I think, I'm pronouncing his name right. He teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. And he says this use, this way of employing the multiverse turns Occam's razor into Occam's beard. It multiplies entities almost endlessly. And this seems right because it seems like, you know, just the epitome of a luxurious proposal to posit unknown

countless worlds just to explain the one known world. There's a distinction in the literature between an unrestricted multiverse versus a restricted multiverse, but either way you have to posit not just a couple of extra universes, but an enormous array of different universes. To get to explain all three, the laws, the constants, and the initial conditions, you have to have an enormous amount of you. That's a lot of universes you need. And you're not posited. entities that are just, you know, endless in variety, you're positing entities for which we don't actually have any empirical data. Sometimes people will claim that quantum mechanics implies other universes, but the fact is we don't have any access to alternate universes. This is a

speculative hypothesis, and it's sort of controversial among scientists whether the multiverse hypothesis is even a scientific proposal as such. So the point is it's a real weakness when you have deposit lots of unknown entities just to account for the singular known entity. Now, in the God delusion, Richard Dawkins anticipates this objection. He's using the multiverse hypothesis to counter fine-tuning argument, and he recognizes some people are going to call this what he calls a profligate luxury. But he says the multiverse is still okay because it's simpler than God. And although, yeah, it has a vast number of universes, they all share the same basic laws, whereas God, by contrast, or any intelligent designer, is going to be the most complex answer

possible and is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right. And this is how a lot of people respond. They say, okay, well, yeah, maybe the multiverse hypothesis is kind of out there. But then again, so is theism. So it's either a tie or it might even be in favor of the multiverse, or it's really close. But first of all, this question of trying to figure out, which is the thing? the more elegant and simple ultimate explanation? An infinite person we call God or an infinite number of worlds. That is not a scientific question. That's my first criticism of Dawkins. That's a philosophical

question, but he's treating it as if it's a scientific question. By the way, whatever else you say about that, I think we can all admit when you get to this point in the conversation, and this is actually a helpful point that sort of reduces the contempt put on theism, I think, is that there is no worldview on the market that is entirely rational and explicable in terms of observable physical causes. The simple fact is our world is not explained by what we can see and by what we can measure, and that's just good to know going in. But the basic point I'll make here to finish off this video is the multiverse hypothesis doesn't solve the problem of fine-tuning.

So even if you try to make the case, which I think is a tough case to make that this is simpler than theism, I don't think so. And I don't think Dawkins is right about that. But that's, you know, I've done other stuff on divine simplicity. That needs to be vetted more. Granted, I won't go into that too much here. But I'll just make this simple point. The problem, the multiverse hypothesis doesn't take fine-tuning off the table.

It's still on the table. For example, one of the most common versions of the multiverse is, comes from inflation theory. I talk a lot about this in my book. And in particular, Alan Gooth's model. The problem is that inflation theories themselves require extremely precise parameters. And something similar to that is true in many of these popular models for a multiverse. You know, a lot of times you'll have this idea that there's some kind of mechanism that can generate these different universes. And people talk about cosmological Darwinism, where you have the principles of natural selection applied to the creation of these new universes.

But any such universe generator itself needs to be exquisitely fine-tuned. And, you know, there's different ways that people try to cash out the multiverse hypothesis to canvas all of them would take a long video. But I think it's fair to say that in all the major models, having a multiverse doesn't explain fine-tuning. They just push the question back one level. Because you go from the need for a designer of the universe to the need for a designer of the universe.

And remember, theism and a multiverse are not competitive. You can be a theist. And in fact, some people argue that a multiverse is more probable if theism is true. God is more likely to create multiple worlds. So that's the main problem, I think, that undercuts the multiverse hypothesis. It just does, it's not only profligate and going against Occam's razor, but it actually doesn't meet the basic needed hand of explaining fine-tuning. You know, it's like you spend a bunch of money and still don't get what you need to get.

So the multiverse hypothesis doesn't work. All right, I'll stop there. I'm going to do a follow-up video on fine-tuning arguments and some of the deeper level objections in the literature. This is more introductory. I'll also have a video on the cosmological arguments, probably like Thomas Aquinas' argument coming out a week from today. And then I'm going to do more stuff in this whole space of science and religion over the rest of 2024. That's one of my projects, along with the Apostles' Creed, and a few other things I'm going to focus on. I always, about halfway through the year, set my goals. And so look out for videos. especially on Einstein's view of religion and on the Galileo controversy. I'm going to cover those two things as well. Let me know what you think in the comments, and especially not only about

fine-tuning arguments, do you find them helpful, do you find them successful, do you like this abductive way of putting it, but also do you want more videos in this region, in this area, in this terrain, or do you want me to just go back to talking about Sola Scriptura and stuff like that? I'm interested in this stuff, and I want to do it, but I want to make sure that people aren't saying, hey, I followed you to get theology and you're going into this stuff. I think this stuff is actually helpful. One of my convictions is philosophy, theology, we all need each other. We all need to learn. I want to be a better philosopher. I want to grow in that area. I've even been thinking about maybe I should go back and take some classes or something like that philosophy. Anyway, that's another thing. All right,

let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.