Theists: What is the most compelling argument you have heard for Atheism?

[SteveII]

The lottery is not a good analogy for the fine-tuning argument. A better analogy is if there were billions and billions of white ping pong balls and one black ball. If the black ball rolls down the shoot, you can live. A white one, you will be shot. Each individual white ball is equally improbable, but the odds of you getting some white one is overwhelming. Now, to get closer to the actual odds, you would need to see that black ball roll down the shoot 5 times in 5 drawings in a row to live. If you witnessed that happening, you would be certain that the game was rigged. So we are not interested in why you got the particular ball you did (ever ball was equally improbable), but why you got 5 life-permitting balls in a row. 

That, in a nutshell, is the fine-tuning argument. We are not interested in why this universe exists, but why a life-permitting one exists. As in the drawing above, we have very good reasons to think the universe was rigged for life.

If the physical constants were different, life as we know it might not exist. It doesn't follow that life couldn't exist.

Even the assertion that "our universe is life-permitting" is quite misleading. The fact that we haven't observed any life outside of Earth, even with an abundance of Earth-like planets out there, is good evidence that our Universe is barely life-permitting at all (that is to say, almost not life-permitting). Life just managed to precariously evolve on one tiny planet in the Milky Way.

Well, if any of the physical constants were even a little different, the universe would not hold together let along be able to form any sort of building blocks for alternative life. 

Your fragility of life point does more to support the theist who thinks that God created the entire universe for us than it does as an argument against God.

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Knock it off dude. You are not going to pass junk science off as real science. You are not going to convince us, much less Stephen Hawking or Lawrence Krauss or Neil Degrasse Tyson that astrophysics proves your dead man on a stick magic baby God.

You continually write sentences without connecting your thoughts to the conversation.  What do any of these people have to say pertaining to the fine-tuning of the universe?

[Fake Messiah]

Regarding the arguments as a group, they are inductive in nature and give a probabilistic conclusion.  I think very few people become a Christian because of the arguments--rather it is an assurance that a belief in God (at least a god) is not irrational and serves as a check against the barrage of atheists shallow challenges to faith being a reasonable thing to hold.

Well if they are such shallow challenges why do you fail so miserably to answer them? For instance you claim "God is the best explanation why anything at all exists." and yet there is no answer to why dysentery, malaria, AIDS, cancer, earthquakes exists. Or at least you don't know them.
This is just one of many unshakable problems for Theism and you simply ignoring them makes you that much delusional.

[Pat Mustard]

3. The universe's existence and fine tuning being a brute fact is not simplicity. It defies all reasoning with no explanation (or hope of one). That does not sit well with most people.

You're mistaking an effect for a cause. The universe isnt the way it is to accomodate the exisetence of humanity (as evidenced by the fact that 99.9% of the universe is hostile to humanity), but we exist because the universe is the way it is.

[masterofpuppets]

Well, if any of the physical constants were even a little different, the universe would not hold together let along be able to form any sort of building blocks for alternative life. 

Your fragility of life point does more to support the theist who thinks that God created the entire universe for us than it does as an argument against God.

How did you come to know that the universe would "not hold together" if the physical constants were different? Surely a universe with different physical constants would be so different from ours that we are in no position to say that such universes would be void of any complex structure, right?

The problem with the fine-tuning argument is that we only have a sample size of one universe. It involves an awful lot of assumptions to make the claim that the universe couldn't support life (or even have galaxies, stars and planets, or even exist) if the physical constants were different. I will start taking this claim more seriously once someone tells me the conditions under which life can exist.

I would also invite you to elaborate on your point that the fragility of life supports the notion that God created the universe. Why would God want the rest of the universe to be hostile to life?

[Fake Messiah]

Of course if universe was different who is to say there would not be other intelligent beings that are different?

Also, there has been traditionally argued that some prior condition A is necessary and sufficient for (the 'cause' of) event B, but quantum physics shows us, with great predictive accuracy, that no particular prior condition is either necessary or sufficient for some physical events such as radioactive decay, the behavior of electrons and photons, and potentially for the appearance of the physical universe itself out of a background of quantum fluctuations.

Like for instance a physicist Victor Stenger once said:
"In the quantum world ... things can simply happen ... I have shown that directional causality, or causal precedence, is in fact a classical, macroscopic concept that does not apply at the fundamental level of elementary particle interactions, where fundamental interactions make no distinction between cause and effect"

[Harry Nevis]

If the physical constants were different, life as we know it might not exist. It doesn't follow that life couldn't exist.

Even the assertion that "our universe is life-permitting" is quite misleading. The fact that we haven't observed any life outside of Earth, even with an abundance of Earth-like planets out there, is good evidence that our Universe is barely life-permitting at all (that is to say, almost not life-permitting). Life just managed to precariously evolve on one tiny planet in the Milky Way.

Well, if any of the physical constants were even a little different, the universe would not hold together let along be able to form any sort of building blocks for alternative life. 

Your fragility of life point does more to support the theist who thinks that God created the entire universe for us than it does as an argument against God.

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really?!  At what point would the universe break apart? Sources?

The fragility of life points to fear, and, until you realize the ridiculousness of that fear, it points to religion.

[SteveII]

Well, if any of the physical constants were even a little different, the universe would not hold together let along be able to form any sort of building blocks for alternative life. 

Your fragility of life point does more to support the theist who thinks that God created the entire universe for us than it does as an argument against God.

How did you come to know that the universe would "not hold together" if the physical constants were different? Surely a universe with different physical constants would be so different from ours that we are in no position to say that such universes would be void of any complex structure, right?

The problem with the fine-tuning argument is that we only have a sample size of one universe. It involves an awful lot of assumptions to make the claim that the universe couldn't support life (or even have galaxies, stars and planets, or even exist) if the physical constants were different. I will start taking this claim more seriously once someone tells me the conditions under which life can exist.

I would also invite you to elaborate on your point that the fragility of life supports the notion that God created the universe. Why would God want the rest of the universe to be hostile to life?

You can get a brief overview here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned...e#Examples

• N, the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to the strength of gravity for a pair of protons, is approximately 1036. According to Rees, if it were significantly smaller, only a small and short-lived universe could exist.[12]
  
  
• Epsilon (ε), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium, 0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of ε is in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force.[13] If ε were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the big bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant increases by less than about 50%.[10][12]
  
  
• Omega (Ω), commonly known as the density parameter, is the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the Universe. It is the ratio of the mass density of the Universe to the "critical density" and is approximately 1. If gravity were too strong compared with dark energy and the initial metric expansion, the universe would have collapsed before life could have evolved. On the other side, if gravity were too weak, no stars would have formed.[12][14]
  
  
• Lambda (λ), commonly known as the cosmological constant, describes the ratio of the density of dark energy to the critical energy density of the universe, given certain reasonable assumptions such as positing that dark energy density is a constant. In terms of Planck units, and as a natural dimensionless value, the cosmological constant, λ, is on the order of 10−122.[15] This is so small that it has no significant effect on cosmic structures that are smaller than a billion light-years across. If the cosmological constant were not extremely small, stars and other astronomical structures would not be able to form.[12]
  
  
• Q, the ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass, is around 10−5. If it is too small, no stars can form. If it is too large, no stars can survive because the universe is too violent, according to Rees.[12]
  
  
• D, the number of spatial dimensions in spacetime, is 3. Rees claims that life could not exist if there were 2 or 4 dimensions of spacetime nor if any other than 1 time dimension existed in spacetime.[12]
  

Carbon and oxygen[edit]
Further information: Triple-alpha process § Improbability and fine-tuning
An older example is the Hoyle state, the third-lowest energy state of the carbon-12 nucleus, with an energy of 7.656 MeV above the ground level. According to one calculation, if the state's energy were lower than 7.3 or greater than 7.9 MeV, insufficient carbon would exist to support life; furthermore, to explain the universe's abundance of carbon, the Hoyle state must be further tuned to a value between 7.596 and 7.716 MeV. A similar calculation, focusing on the underlying fundamental constants that give rise to various energy levels, concludes that the strong force must be tuned to a precision of at least 0.5%, and the electromagnetic force to a precision of at least 4%, to prevent either carbon production or oxygen production from dropping significantly.[16]

Regarding your question about why so fragile. Life is extremely complex in its requirements. It is not clear why we should expect the right combination of elements, heat, gravity, radiation, and self-contained planetary feedback loops to be a common occurrence.

[The Grand Nudger]

If we're going to go with the fine tuning argument, might as well ask why gods such a shitty fine tuner.  Take the cosmological constant, for example.  If god had fine tuned it for life, it would have been ever so slightly negative.  We don't know exactly what it is..but we know that it's ever so slightly positive...repulsing, thus inhibiting the formation of galaxies.  

Despite your beliefs, Steve, the constants could have been altered to -better- allow for life.  Fundamentally, there are infinite "values" of the constants amenable to life, even if the difference between those values seems minuscule.  Say that some constant x must be between 1 and -1 for life to exist.  Then it could be anything between .999999999999(etc) and -.99999999999999(etc).  

More fundamentally, it's unclear why there would -need- to be constants or natural values to a universe created by god magic in the first place.  Why do we find ourselves on a naturally amenable planet in a naturally amenable solar system (one of few, so far as we can tell)...rather than living and breathing as we are, in the middle of a neutron star?  

Our fragility and our dependencies point to limitations on our supposed "creator".  Were there no other options for god?  Did he have to make us (and all of this) this way or it wouldn't work?  Then there is no need or function -for- god magic.

God, the incompetent fine tuner with limited choices fully encompassed and constrained by natural law.  Good job.

[ukatheist]

I admittedly don't have a huge amount of detailed scientific training, but isn't the fine tuning argument basically

- the universe has property x
- the universe contains life
- life cannot exist without property x
- life exists
- therefore god?

Should it not be
- the universe has property x
- the universe contains life
- life as we know it cannot exist without property x
- therefore if the universe did not have property x, but property y, life that cannot exist without x would not exist, but life that cannot exist without y may or may not exist instead?

Sent from my ALE-L21 using Tapatalk

[SteveII]

Well, if any of the physical constants were even a little different, the universe would not hold together let along be able to form any sort of building blocks for alternative life. 

Your fragility of life point does more to support the theist who thinks that God created the entire universe for us than it does as an argument against God.

---

really?!  At what point would the universe break apart? Sources?

The fragility of life points to fear, and, until you realize the ridiculousness of that fear, it points to religion.

I gave this link earlier in the thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned...e#Examples

The fragility of life is a fact.

---

3. The universe's existence and fine tuning being a brute fact is not simplicity. It defies all reasoning with no explanation (or hope of one). That does not sit well with most people.

You're mistaking an effect for a cause. The universe isnt the way it is to accomodate the exisetence of humanity (as evidenced by the fact that 99.9% of the universe is hostile to humanity), but we exist because the universe is the way it is.

And the question is, why, against all odds is the universe the way it is? In my white/black ball example above, we had to get 5 black balls in a row. If you saw that happen, you would swear that the drawing was rigged. Why am I irrational to assume that about the universe?

---

I admittedly don't have a huge amount of detailed scientific training, but isn't the fine tuning argument basically

- the universe has property x
- the universe contains life
- life cannot exist without property x
- life exists
- therefore god?

Should it not be
- the universe has property x
- the universe contains life
- life as we know it cannot exist without property x
- therefore if the universe did not have property x, but property y, life that cannot exist without x would not exist, but life that cannot exist without y may or may not exist instead?

Sent from my ALE-L21 using Tapatalk

No, more like:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.

2. The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical necessity or chance.

3. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.

Before you jump on any of these, remember that the argument is an inductive argument: in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the truth of the conclusion.

---

If we're going to go with the fine tuning argument, might as well ask why gods such a shitty fine tuner.  Take the cosmological constant, for example.  If god had fine tuned it for life, it would have been ever so slightly negative.  We don't know exactly what it is..but we know that it's ever so slightly positive...repulsing, thus inhibiting the formation of galaxies.  

Despite your beliefs, Steve, the constants could have been altered to -better- allow for life.  Fundamentally, there are infinite "values" of the constants amenable to life, even if the difference between those values seems minuscule.  Say that some constant x must be between 1 and -1 for life to exist.  Then it could be anything between .999999999999(etc) and -.99999999999999(etc).  

More fundamentally, it's unclear why there would -need- to be constants or natural values to a universe created by god magic in the first place.  Why do we find ourselves on a naturally amenable planet in a naturally amenable solar system (one of few, so far as we can tell)...rather than living and breathing as we are, in the middle of a neutron star?  

Our fragility and our dependencies point to limitations on our supposed "creator".  Were there no other options for god?  Did he have to make us (and all of this) this way or it wouldn't work?  Then there is no need or function -for- god magic.

God, the incompetent fine tuner with limited choices fully encompassed and constrained by natural law.  Good job.

In your example, you said between 1 and -1 to permit life. What are all the possible values that would not permit life? Let's get real examples (from the video transcript)

Consider gravity, for example. The force of gravity is determined by the gravitational constant. If this constant varied by just one in 10^60 parts, none of us would exist. To understand how exceedingly narrow this life-permitting range is, imagine a dial divided into 10^60 increments. To get a handle on how many tiny points on the dial this is, compare it to the number of cells in your body (10^14) or the number of seconds that have ticked by since time began (10^20). If the gravitational constant had been out of tune by just one of these infinitesimally small increments, the universe would either have expanded and thinned out so rapidly that no stars could form and life couldn't exist, or it would have collapsed back on itself with the same result: no stars, no planets, no life.

Or consider the expansion rate of the universe. This is driven by the cosmological constant. A change in its value by a mere 1 part in 10^120 parts would cause the universe to expand too rapidly or too slowly. In either case, the universe would, again, be life-prohibiting.

Or, another example of fine-tuning: If the mass and energy of the early universe were not evenly distributed to an incomprehensible precision of 1 part in 10^10^123, the universe would be hostile to life of any kind.

Multiply those very small number by the other probabilities of life permitting ranges given the overall possible ranges of any given constant and you have a number so small that there are so many zeroes in it that there are not enough molecules in the universe to cover the odds.