RE: Fine tuning argument assessed
March 8, 2014 at 7:02 am
(This post was last modified: March 8, 2014 at 7:10 am by Heywood.)
(February 9, 2014 at 4:57 am)Jacob(smooth) Wrote: Yep. It's called the gunslinger fallacy. One has to state ones hypothesis BEFORE one gathers the data to support it. The pack of cards analogy Is a good one. I use a rubber chicken. I toss it into the audience and get them to throw it about, writing the names of the people who catch it. I then calculate the odds of that order happening by chance and conclude that since it is so high, I must have rigged the experiment. Of course as it's already happened, as you rightly say the odds are one in one.
When you write these names down, I presume you are writing them down in the order in which they were caught. Suppose you take your list of names and give it to Alice who isn't privy to any of the details of how the list was compiled. You then ask Alice to look at the list and give her the task of making a judgment about how it was compiled.
Alice looks at the list, notices there are 100 names on it. She studies it further and notices the names happen to be in a unusual order....they are alphabetized to first letter of each name.
From Alice's perspective, which is more likely?
A)the list was compiled purely by happenstance.
B)Some intellect made a choice about how to compile the list.
If Alice had to make a bet, should she bet on A or B?
(February 9, 2014 at 5:51 am)Esquilax Wrote: A fine tuned thing requires a goal to be fine tuned toward, and without demonstrating that there's a goal for the universe in which life constitutes a success state, then you can't go on to state that the multitude of possible failure states makes directed creation the most probable solution to the success state.
I would not say life is the success state of the universe. Emergent complexity is the success state. From my perspective the universe appears to be fined tuned to be emergent complex. Life is just an artifact of that emergent complexity.
