RE: The not-so-fine tuning argument.
March 10, 2016 at 1:57 am
(This post was last modified: March 10, 2016 at 1:58 am by Alex K.)
(March 8, 2016 at 9:09 pm)Jehanne Wrote:(March 8, 2016 at 2:27 am)Alex K Wrote: @Jehanne
But isn't the point of those advancing the fine tuning argument precisely that they can say a priori that (simply speaking) only one of those outcomes is compatible with life, e.g. that life = 100 times heads? Then it is irrelevant that all possibilities add up to a probability of 1. I'm not saying I buy the ft argument, just that the lotto fallacy alone doesn't appear to be sufficient to refute it unless you also argue that all outcomes are compatible with some form of observer
Has been pointed out, physicists do not know that the constants of nature are free to vary. Just because one can construct a mathematical model does not mean that Nature confirms itself to such a model; alternative models of gravitation exist to General Relativity that do not predict the anomalous precession of Mercury's orbit. And, of course, Newtonian mechanics is mathematically complete yet fundamental flawed. Ultimately, GR will likely give way to something more deeper, as a "singularity" (infinite curvature) just does not make sense, physically.
And, even if the constants can vary, we still do not know the sample space that we are dealing with, and so, cannot possibly compute any objective probabilities. As Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and then there's statistics." Christian theism was wrong about the orbits of the planets ("perfect circles") and it took Kepler nearly a decade and hundreds of pages of manuscripts to overcome that bias.
What you say is all true. Still, the alternative to having the possibility that the constants might in principle vary would be that they can only be one way exactly, and that this one and only way the universe can be happens to support life. Is that any less astonishing, nay, wouldn't that be even more astonishing than having different possibilities and being able to say - of course we live in one where life can exist - how it came about, who knows!
The first ones to think the orbits should be neat geometrical shapes were the old Greek philosophers, can't blame the Christians for inventing that one, they just stole the idea.
