(February 16, 2016 at 5:04 am)Alex K Wrote: The first two paragraphs sound reasonable, the following bit about chance and nothingness then seems very ad hoc. The following questions are somewhat loaded, but might be answered by a simple appeal to the anthropic principle - a structureless universe cannot ponder itself, to borrow a phrase by Asimov. The last bit about information and probabilities to assemble a cell just betrays a gross misunderstanding of how both information and evolution work. Standard cdesign proponentsists lies as the likes of Dembski and Behe spread them.
If the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to gravity had varied by as much as one part in 1040, there would be no stars like our sun. It seems doubtful that there is a nontrivial anthropic principle, strictly speaking. Were the physical constants, notably the relative strengths of the four fundamental forces, to be even very slightly different, a long-lived galactic universe containing the heavy elements needed for complex life would not have developed.
According to the interventionist account, causation is a relation between variables. Its fundamental hypothesis is that a variable A causes a variable B if and only if there are circumstances in which it is possible to manipulate B by intervening on A. Whether or not the fine-tuning is taken as evidence for the existence of God, it has important consequences for theology in that some philosophers believe that it argues against an interventionist account of continuing creation and divine action, since the prerequisites for human existence were built into the universe from the very beginning.
