Demons?

[Angrboda]

Everything we know about the universe through science backs these point up. For instance matter only exists because there was a slight imbalance between matter and anti-matter at the moment the universe came into existence. Had the balance been exactly even both matter and ant-matter would have annihilated each other and no physical matter would exist. You also need matter that forms itself into a stable form and structure, mess around with the speed of the universes expansion or the law of gravity and this wouldn't happen. These aren't assertions this just what we know, this is how the universe is. Certainly had it been different and life not exist we wouldn't be here to notice it that is a small point, this is therefore the only universe living beings will ever notice they exist within. But that doesn't mean the natural balance required for life isn't a very precise knife edge balance. You have life one way and no other.

In 2011, I published a popular-level book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us. It investigated a common claim found in contemporary religious literature that the parameters of physics and cosmology are so delicately balanced, so “fine-tuned,” that any slight change and life in the universe would have been impossible. I concluded that while the precise form of life we find on Earth would not exist with slight changes in these parameters, some form of life could have evolved over a parameter range that is not infinitesimal, as often claimed.

The simplest solution to the fine-tuning problem, and the favorite among scientific experts, is that our universe is just one in a multitude of universes and we just happen to live in the one suited for us. While I fully respect this possibility, I have limited my investigation to a single universe. Postdoctoral fellow Luke Barnes has written a lengthy, highly technical review of the scientific literature concerning the fine-tuning problem titled “The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life”

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning did not address the scientific literature. Barnes’ paper is written for experts in the field, who were not my intended audience and with whom I have no significant scientific disagreements. Barnes does not challenge my basic conclusions. Nor, to my knowledge, has anyone on the long list of reputable physicists and cosmologists who Barnes insists believe in fine-tuning. In fact, several were consulted in writing the book.

Fallacy was concerned with the widespread argument found in theological and religious apologetic writings that the putative fine-tuning of the parameters of physics and cosmology cannot be the product of purely natural forces.

I agree that life, as we know it on Earth, would not exist with a slight change in these parameters. However, there is no reason to limit ourselves to earthly life but consider the possibility of other forms of life, carbon-based or otherwise. Depending on what you count, about thirty parameters are generally suggested as being fine-tuned. Of these, some theists have claimed that five parameters exist that are so exquisitely fine-tuned that changing any single one by one part in 10^40 or more would mean that no life of any kind was possible.

These crucial parameters are:
1. The ratio of electrons to protons in the universe
2. The expansion rate of the universe
3. The mass density of the universe
4. The ratio of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces
5. The cosmological constant

In Fallacy, I give plausible reasons for the values of each within existing, well-established physics and cosmology.

The remaining parameters are also supposed to be fine-tuned to many ordersof magnitude. I show that they are at best fine-tuned, if you want to call it that, to 10-20 percent. Barnes seems to want me to reduce this to maybe 1-5 percent. But nowhere does he show that they should be 10E-40. My essential point is, when all parameters are taken together the region of parameter space that should allow some form of life to evolve is not the infinitesimal point that the theist literature would want us to believe.

— Defending "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning", Victor Stenger, Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu (retired)

(Emphasis added to original quotation of 'Sword of Christ'.)