(August 25, 2013 at 9:35 am)Sword of Christ Wrote: If anything in the laws of physics that lead up to the cosmological formation of the universe and life in the sequence was 0.0000000001% out of it's perfect balance something would still happen but stars, planets, galaxies and life would be the end the result. We can run computer simulations of this now. The level of fine tuning we're talking about here is obscene, if this was put together by coincidence without a purpose in mind this would actually be far more miraculous than God. Do you have any idea how incredible that would be?
If life is only possible under an extremely limited set of factors, then god would be unable to produce life under any other settings. Which implies that someone else designed the universe that god works in. It's possible that the universal constants are just that; they cannot be anything else. It's possible that the constants that govern our universe are one combination of many that would have produced life; perhaps we'll never know, since we lack any pocket universes of our own to experiment with. It's possible that god exists and is constrained by the laws of physics in the very universe that he created, but that seems utterly absurd. It's possible that god exists and could have used any set of constants to build a working universe, but that undermines the fine-tuning argument.
There doesn't seem to be a circumstance under which the fine-tuning argument is viable, to me. At least as a way of implying that a creator exists.
"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