RE: The Case for Theism
March 21, 2013 at 3:31 pm
(This post was last modified: March 21, 2013 at 3:33 pm by Tonus.)
(March 21, 2013 at 2:45 pm)Drew_2013 Wrote: How does it imply that? If I engineered a new car wouldn't I have free reign on how to do things?
As I understand it, the "fine tuning" argument holds that there are certain 'settings' for the universe that had to be tuned to a very very narrow range in order to support life. Change any of them even a small amount, and the universe doesn't work. The idea is that the best explanation for a universe that is so carefully tuned that it could support life is that there was a deity who created it that way.
But if the universe requires such fine tuning and could not support life under any other circumstance, it implies that god could not have changed the settings without breaking everything. Otherwise, the universe wouldn't need fine-tuning; life could emerge under any of the settings. If the latter is the case, then god isn't constrained. But that also undercuts the argument that such a carefully calibrated universe is the sign of a creator.
In other words, your comment I quoted above is correct. If you engineered a car, you would have free rein on how things worked. And if you engineered a universe, you would be in full control as well.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
