(January 2, 2015 at 3:10 pm)Chad32 Wrote: They don't understand that it doesn't matter how unlikely something is.They know that if you can make something seem unlikely enough, people will dismiss even the possibility of it happening. Hence the disingenuous odds-making that they throw around.
The fine-tuning argument depends on two things that have not been (and perhaps cannot be) determined: that certain variables are required for a life-supporting universe, and that those variables must fall within a very small range or be 'balanced' within a small range. Metaxas inflates the first to "over 200 known parameters" and implies the second when he says that "every single one [...] must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart."
"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
