Strongest argument for god my ass.

It's not even that the logic is faulty, but reality doesn't resemble what it proposes.

The universe is not fine tuned for life. The most you can say about it in this regard is that it is capable of sustaining it. But if this is what an omnipotent being calls fine tuned, then don't let it touch your car.

I mean, look at Earth.

71% of the Earth's surface is water. Great. Not inhabitable, and not even drinkable. Freshwater constitutes a measly 2.5% of total water.....68% of which is frozen. Woohoo. Looking real fine tuned so far.

Now let's look at land: the 30 remaining percent of Earth's surface. Sounds pretty underwhelming. Even more so if you consider that 10 to 11% of the surface is covered in ice. So we're left with a neat ~20% of the Earth being inhabitable. Nice.

But hey, life does exist!.....except for the 99% of species that ever existed which are extinct. Oops.
Oh well, that was only 5 billion species anyway.

And that's just Earth. Look at the big picture. 99.99999....% of the universe is devoid of life. We haven't yet found life on other planets. One would think, since the universe is obviously designed for sentinent beings to exist, there should be a bit more of them, you know? Like, everywhere. But so far, we only know of us. Kind of a flop there, god.

Does this look like fine tuning to you? ._.

It's the typical way of finding 'god' in details and failing to see the big picture. Exactly like when there is a plane crash, one person survives and they call it a miracle, gawd is great! Forget the 140 other dead passengers. That's not important right now.

I'm just soooo tired of seeing this argument come up all the time. Yes, life is awesome, the universe is awesome and the fact that we're a conscious byproduct of it is really awesome. But ascribing that to some dude in the sky with a box of magic fairy dust is taking away from all that jaw-dropping awesomeness.

Ok, I'm done ._.

/rant

My opinion on this subject is different from what you usually hear from atheist speakers.

The majority of space and time may not be hospitable for life, but if you change some of the numerical parameters in the laws of physics just a tiny bit, you get a universe in which complicated structures such as intelligence are unlikely. One could call this fine tuning.

Funnily enough though, the presence of this type of fine tuning can be more easily used as an argument against creationism than in favor. A universe created for life would *not* look fine-tuned! Why would it? You don't build a house on a cliff on purpose. The fine tuning we observe is precisely to be expected in a universe that was selected anthropically, in a Godless world. It is not to be expected in a designed world.

Even if the universe was 100% habitable, the fine tuning argument also egotistically assumes that life is the purpose behind the physical laws being the way they are.

Imagine that, believers thinking they are special!

I'd call it barely tuned.

Why exactly does god have to live within these universal constants? Who set up that framework? They can't decide whether god made the rules or turned up one day constrained by them...

If he set up the framework in the first place, so that the best he could do is that a negligible number of planets could support life for a negligible amount of time, he's a fucking lame ass god.

Let's just say I'm god. I make the whole fucking thing, whatever I make, inhabitable! Wow, that was really hard, right? And I allow people to actually travel easily around in it, I don't glue them to a tiny rock. And... I could go on. Anyone could do a better job than this idiot. They must have a real low opinion of him, if they think this was planned.

(August 7, 2015 at 11:08 am)robvalue Wrote: I'd call it barely tuned.

Why exactly does god have to live within these universal constants? Who set up that framework? They can't decide whether god made the rules or turned up one day constrained by them...

If he set up the framework in the first place, so that the best he could do is that a negligible number of planets could support life for a negligible amount of time, he's a fucking lame ass god.

Let's just say I'm god. I make the whole fucking thing, whatever I make, inhabitable! Wow, that was really hard, right? And I allow people to actually travel easily around in it, I don't glue them to a tiny rock. And... I could go on. Anyone could do a better job than this idiot. They must have a real low opinion of him, if they think this was planned.

I think we mean similar things. God should not be constrained in his creation to a framework where fine tuning is necessary to make a small part of it viabls, that's also your point, right? He would set up a framework where you can easily have a habitable world which doesn't need tweaking just so it doesn't desintegrate in a fiery explosion (which ours would if you e.g raise the up quark mass a bit just to name one catastrophic possibility)

It's simple if the fine tuning argument were true there would be more life in the universe instead of earth.
Not saying were the only people or things out there but there more than likely is some other life being bacteria or
some form of sentient life.

(August 7, 2015 at 12:11 pm)dyresand Wrote: It's simple if the fine tuning argument were true there would be more life in the universe instead of earth.
Not saying were the only people or things out there but there more than likely is some other life being bacteria or
some form of sentient life.

Erm What?

The universe is not adapted for us. We adapted to it at the cost of milions of species. We are here in this pale blue crib, discussing gods. Awesome, better get our hands to work in survival of those that will come, instead of clasping them in prayer...

I think it makes more sense to say that the parameters of our universe are sensitive to variation, rather than that they are fine tuned. There may be vast spaces within the combined space of parameters where the outcome of the parameters doesn't change much from one value to another. We just don't happen to be in one of those stretches where the universe looks the same no matter how you twiddle the knobs. But we had to land somewhere. The question is, why is landing in a space where the parameters are sensitive to variation any more special than landing in a place where the parameters are not sensitive to variation?

Perhaps we just need a tune up?

God?  Zeus?  Thor?  Jehovah?  Anyone, anyone?