Fine tuning argument assessed
February 9, 2014 at 4:42 am
(This post was last modified: February 9, 2014 at 4:45 am by max-greece.)
This will be a TL : DR for most of you I guess. Sadly - no real way of shortening it.
"The probability of a universe existing that supports us is 1 in 10^500. The most likely explanation of such an unlikely event happening is God."
Hmmm.....
1. Probability. Dangerous ground. One of the hardest concepts to grasp in terms of assessing whether or not your calculated value actually means anything.
To illustrate:
Forget the universe - far to big and complex. Lets look at something massively more simple, a pack of cards.
Take a pack of cards and shuffle them. Look at the first card. The probability of that card being the first card is 1 in 52. Now look at the second card. The probabiliy of the second card being the second card in 1 in 51 and so on all the way down.
So the probability that the pack of cards in your hand is in the order it is in is 1 in 52! or about 1 in 10^67. A miracle!!!
Except of course, that it isn't. Now were you to repeat that order, intentionally, that would be a miracle.
Lets put it like this:
Take a billion people shuffling a pack of cards each a billion times a year for a billion years on a billion planets in a billion galaxies.
Repeat the above experiment a billion times.
The probability of repeating the original order even in this case is still about one in 10 trillion.
Therefore - God put that pack of cards in that order?
Erm......no.
The thing is that a pack of cards has to have an order. No one order is any more likely than any other. As long as you are not attempting to predict the order its probability is meaningless.
Does this apply to the universe?
Well a universe has to exist for us to ask the question - "Why does the universe exist?"
Further, a universe that supports us has to exist for us to ask that question.
In other words we are looking at the pack of cards once we have already estabished the order and asking what is the liklihood that it is in the order that we have already established. The probability of that is actually one in one.
2. Supports us.
Note the confusion here. The question is badly phrased. It implies that the only universe that can support intelligence is one that can support us. It ignores the possibility that an alternate universe can exist that is radicaly different from our own and yet could support an intelligence.
The only function that intelligence has to be capable of to undermine the assumption is to be able to ask what the probability of their universe existing is.
We do not know how many of those possible 10^500 universes could support intelligence. Our subset of universes we know anything about is 1. When looking at 10^500 possibilities that is not much to go on.
It is therefore fully possibly that a radically different universe from our own, with, say, 5 active dimensions, no mass, completely different rules of physics and so on and so forth, could support an intelligence so radically different from us that we wouldn't even recognise it. That intelligence, however, might well be able to ask the question, effectively burying the fine tuning arguement.
Anyone make it to here?
"The probability of a universe existing that supports us is 1 in 10^500. The most likely explanation of such an unlikely event happening is God."
Hmmm.....
1. Probability. Dangerous ground. One of the hardest concepts to grasp in terms of assessing whether or not your calculated value actually means anything.
To illustrate:
Forget the universe - far to big and complex. Lets look at something massively more simple, a pack of cards.
Take a pack of cards and shuffle them. Look at the first card. The probability of that card being the first card is 1 in 52. Now look at the second card. The probabiliy of the second card being the second card in 1 in 51 and so on all the way down.
So the probability that the pack of cards in your hand is in the order it is in is 1 in 52! or about 1 in 10^67. A miracle!!!
Except of course, that it isn't. Now were you to repeat that order, intentionally, that would be a miracle.
Lets put it like this:
Take a billion people shuffling a pack of cards each a billion times a year for a billion years on a billion planets in a billion galaxies.
Repeat the above experiment a billion times.
The probability of repeating the original order even in this case is still about one in 10 trillion.
Therefore - God put that pack of cards in that order?
Erm......no.
The thing is that a pack of cards has to have an order. No one order is any more likely than any other. As long as you are not attempting to predict the order its probability is meaningless.
Does this apply to the universe?
Well a universe has to exist for us to ask the question - "Why does the universe exist?"
Further, a universe that supports us has to exist for us to ask that question.
In other words we are looking at the pack of cards once we have already estabished the order and asking what is the liklihood that it is in the order that we have already established. The probability of that is actually one in one.
2. Supports us.
Note the confusion here. The question is badly phrased. It implies that the only universe that can support intelligence is one that can support us. It ignores the possibility that an alternate universe can exist that is radicaly different from our own and yet could support an intelligence.
The only function that intelligence has to be capable of to undermine the assumption is to be able to ask what the probability of their universe existing is.
We do not know how many of those possible 10^500 universes could support intelligence. Our subset of universes we know anything about is 1. When looking at 10^500 possibilities that is not much to go on.
It is therefore fully possibly that a radically different universe from our own, with, say, 5 active dimensions, no mass, completely different rules of physics and so on and so forth, could support an intelligence so radically different from us that we wouldn't even recognise it. That intelligence, however, might well be able to ask the question, effectively burying the fine tuning arguement.
Anyone make it to here?
Kuusi palaa, ja on viimeinen kerta kun annan vaimoni laittaa jouluvalot!
