RE: Isn't the fine tuning argument ad hoc?
August 6, 2013 at 12:29 pm
(This post was last modified: August 6, 2013 at 12:53 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(August 6, 2013 at 9:40 am)little_monkey Wrote: The fine-tuning argument is not falsifiable. As such, it doesn't qualify as science.
In principle, it is falsifiable. You could in theory meet god and he can admit to you he didn't fine tune the universe, The universe could not but do what it did by itself anyway, and he just claimed credit for that to which he did not contribute. I have a feeling that vast majority (say 100.00000%) of what anyone would take to be "god" falls into this catagory, the various miracle working entities of judeo christian mythology all included.

Or in principle, we could wait and see if our progressive enlarging body of knowledge of how universe really works at the most fundamental level would seem to gradually constrains the degree of freedom the universe actual had, at the level of first principle, to be any thing other than what it is. If this constraint is observed, then fine tuning is falsified.
Or we might eventually develop the capacity to empirically create universes of our own, and we can experimentally verify how "tweek" can effect the probability of universe turning out to be similar to ours. If tweeking does not change the probability a great deal, then fine tuning is also falsified.
Or we might detect evidence of the existence of other values for the same fundamental constants somewhere else, either actually in our time and space, or detectable through impacts on our time and space. This would undermine "tuning" by suggesting the values of fundamental constants of the universe was not caused to be what we think it is now, but in reality assume all possible values.
However, the advocates of "fine tuning" have, AFAIK, never, ever advanced any suggestion, however wild, of how fine tuning could be tested or falsified, eventhough in any expansive frame of mind it is not hard to come up with many ways of how that might be done.
The fact they didn't bother to suggest how it should ever be tested, even if only in the very remotest of futures, make it plain "fine tuning" is abosolutely nothing more than religious bullshit, thinly veiled with what they conceive to be contemporary science-ish language.