Isn't the fine tuning argument ad hoc?

[Angrboda]

In discussing explanations that involve "goddidit," it's helpful to recognize that explanations have multiple criteria upon which they can be evaluated. Two of the most common dimensions involved are explanatory scope and explanatory power. Explanatory scope is relatively easy to describe and explain. Explanatory scope is the size of the class of things that the explanation covers. Thus, a theory which explained gravity and the behavior of subatomic particles would have greater explanatory scope than one that only explains gravity. The scope of the "goddidit" explanation is effectively unlimited; there is nothing that it cannot explain. The property of explanatory power is a little harder to explain, but basically the explanatory power is a measure of how well the explanation does at explaining the phenomena. When thinking of explanatory power, it's useful to think in terms of how much your understanding is increased as a result of having the explanation. For example, explaining that what makes a car go is that they have an engine inside them doesn't add much to our understanding of how cars go. However, explaining how an internal combustion engine harnesses controlled explosions to channel energy in the form of motion gives you a lot more understanding of how or what is happening. On this score, the "goddidit" explanation fares very poorly, as it basically adds nothing to our understanding of how or why the phenomena occurs. Its explanatory power is essentially zero. In this, it shares its profile with another common explanation, that it was "magic"; magic has unlimited explanatory scope, and basically zero explanatory power. There's another explanation with those properties, "It just happened." All three explanations have essentially the same virtues and vices if you are going by these two measures alone, they are all equally good explanations. Or equally bad. I don't think it a compliment to say that your explanation is offering stiff competition for "It just happened." If that's the best you can say about your explanation, it's time to start shopping for a new one.

(Philosophy of science is not my field. A quick Google search indicates that predictive power, or how well a theory enables us to make predictions is another common criteria, and again, one on which the "goddidit" explanation fares poorly. A brief look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reminds me of complexities I'm glossing over here.)

[MindForgedManacle]

No, "intentional agent" is a meaningless expression that says nothing about the scope, mechansim, and complexity involved, and follows from neither known first principle, nor consist with any known empirical principle. As such it contains nothing, is based on nothing, explains nothing, and is nothing. As nothing, it is certainly not the most parsimonious way to be nothing. Simply shutting up will do the same more honestly and humbly, threrfore more parsimoniously, then invoking "intelligent" or "agent".

The phrase "intelligent agent" wasn't intended to be a thoroughly in-depth description of how some theists think the universe's allowance of life can be explained. All it is a description of the thing in particular that is to be the explanation.
If this objection were actually sound, then it could be used in all sorts of absurd ways such as saying that, I dunno, because an "intelligent agent" supposition as a starting point tells you nothing about the method and mechanism by which person X was killed, they must have died from natural causes.

The parsimony of the multiverse comes from the fact that it assumes nothing about the nature of fundamental constants of the universe, and quantum mechanical concept of randomness, that does not follow from any postulated first principles that we have reason to suspect to be true. i.e. it dispenses with the assumption that fundamental constants has to be what we see even though we haven't the slightest idea why, that what we suspect to be true randomness in fact must only happen in the way it actually observed to happen. If we know of no reason why things can't be different, then do not assume that it can not be, and is not, different. Multiverse is a conjecture about how, if not making these assumptions is correct, reality might actually be on the true macro scale.

I doubt theists even believe that the constants have to be as they are. In fact, people like William Lane Craig specifically - in their usage of the argument - deny that there is any such necessity. Otherwise their God conjecture is entirely pointless. Rather, they point to it being intentionally designed to allow life, and try to support that by pointing out that life prohibiting universes are, apparently, supposed to be far more probable.

Multiverse does not ACCOUNT for fine tuning. It remove the basis for saying there had been tuning. It was not conceived in response to the garbage about tunning. It followed logically and economically from our current understanding of fundamental lws of physics, which says fundmental constants has no reason for being what they are in our observation, and random event has no reason for happening only in the way we observe to eventuate. The economic answer is they can be different where we havn't yet observed.

I see I'll have to repeat myself. I'm *not* saying that the purpose of the multiverse hypothesis - as proposed by scientists - is to specifically account for fine-tuning. What I am saying (for the 3rd time) is that if you're specifically putting forward the (as yet unconfirmed) multiverse for the expressed purpose of it to undermining the case for a fine-tuned universe (and proposing countless other universes) then you are not being parsimonious.

No intentional agent is called for, we are here only because we are possible and all that can ever be possible would eventuate, and therefore we eventuates.

And that is by definition not parsimonious (proposing that all possibilities with eventually actualize), if it is for the expressed purpose of undermining this theistic argument, which some here have seemed to have been doing.

By the way, go back and think about the boiling pot example. The superficial complexity of the multitude of bubbles do not make boiling pot non-parsimonious. The parsiminious laws of phase change and fluid behavior, applied uniformly over a pot of water, makes the multitude of bubbles parsimonious.

I thought the analogy wasn't analogous and kind of irrelevant honestly.

The simple laws that respond to fundamental constants, and the lack of laws constraining fundamental constants, is what makes appearent complexity of multiverse simple at a more fundamental level and a rather parsimonious conjecture of how reality really is.

Well, then you're drawing in an element of randomness and mind-boggling numbers, which could see giving theist more ammunition against that type of response.

The conjecture of "intelligent agent" on the other hand, consists of nothing that allows its parsimony to be evaluated. In fact it consists of nothing at all. .

Well as I pointed out earlier, I don't think that objection will work against theistic proponents of this argument, or against really any other.

[Anomalocaris]

I give no more fuck about what theists would make of it than I would what a monkey or slime mold would make of it.

[MindForgedManacle]

Well then why would you bother objecting to theistic arguments? The reason I'm continuing is because I think we should refine our responses to theistic arguments and our objections to their arguments, if we care about showing people why we think they're wrong and where/why their reasoning went astray.

[little_monkey]

Well then why would you bother objecting to theistic arguments? The reason I'm continuing is because I think we should refine our responses to theistic arguments and our objections to their arguments, if we care about showing people why we think they're wrong and where/why their reasoning went astray.

I don't think we can prove anyone wrong as the fine-tuning is just a hypothesis. From a scientific POV, the question is, does it predict anything that can be used as evidence for its validity? So far, nothing. So it remains in the realm of all possibilities.

[genkaus]

I don't think we can prove anyone wrong as the fine-tuning is just a hypothesis. From a scientific POV, the question is, does it predict anything that can be used as evidence for its validity? So far, nothing. So it remains in the realm of all possibilities.

On the contrary, I think that if not for the constant theistic goal-shifting, the fine-tuning argument could easily become a valid scientific hypothesis and then be relegated to the junk-pile pretty easily.

The idea behind the fine-tuning argument is very old and very primitive - "this creation has been created for us". And since such a statement wouldn't fly within the scientific methodology, the idea had to be reshaped into the hypothesis - "Different aspects of the universe have been tuned to their current values specifically to support the existence of life". Disregarding any theistic goal-shifting, we can easily consider this idea on its own merits. The line of evidence supporting this hypothesis would be:
a) Most of the universe actually being capable of supporting life.
b) Even the parts not capable of supporting life being required for the existence of parts that do.
c) Establishing that parameters outside that range are possible - though very rare and regarded as anomalies.

If this line of evidence turned out to be false, then the fine-tuning hypothesis would stand falsified.

Suppose we were living in the biblical universe - the one where we have lands and seas spanning the whole universe and the sky as the inverted glass-bowl. Basically, a universe equivalent to our current biosphere. The evidence for fine-tuning would be strong over there. Life is possible in almost the entire "universe", the parts where it is not (deep seas) are required to support the rest and things could've been different (everything covered with volcanoes and stormy seas). So, the fine-tuning argument would've been a decent scientific theory there. Here, however, it has been falsified on almost every account. Which is why in the real world, it belongs in a trashcan.

[Anomalocaris]

Well then why would you bother objecting to theistic arguments? The reason I'm continuing is because I think we should refine our responses to theistic arguments and our objections to their arguments, if we care about showing people why we think they're wrong and where/why their reasoning went astray.

I don't think we can prove anyone wrong as the fine-tuning is just a hypothesis. From a scientific POV, the question is, does it predict anything that can be used as evidence for its validity? So far, nothing. So it remains in the realm of all possibilities.

Actually, fine tuning is so crudely formed that it lacks any sort of foundation from which to, even in principle, produce any prediction. Yet even for absolutely the nothing it is based on and the nothing it produces it still requires a vast input of unevidenced, and open ended, extensions to known principles of how all things related to the universe works: it implies existence some higher principle at a level removed from anything shown to be required that simply permits the existence of some high level of complexity that can plan, that has intent, that has the tools to menipulate the fundmantal constants of the universe.

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The idea behind the fine-tuning argument is very old and very primitive - "this creation has been created for us". And since such a statement wouldn't fly within the scientific methodology, the idea had to be reshaped into the hypothesis - "Different aspects of the universe have been tuned to their current values specifically to support the existence of life". Disregarding any theistic goal-shifting, we can easily consider this idea on its own merits. The line of evidence supporting this hypothesis would be:
a) Most of the universe actually being capable of supporting life.
b) Even the parts not capable of supporting life being required for the existence of parts that do.
c) Establishing that parameters outside that range are possible - though very rare and regarded as anomalies.

If this line of evidence turned out to be false, then the fine-tuning hypothesis would stand falsified.

Actually, "fine tuning" does not require the universe to be amenable to life in a lot of different places. It also does not require the parts that doesn't support life to be essential for for the parts that do.

Fine tuning says life as we know it requires such tight tolerances in the values of the fundamental constants of the universe that even just a single isolated occurrence of it in the entire universe would be astronomically improbable unless these constants were tuned to be what it is.

The bullshitness is revealed by the implicit assumption that other values of fundamental constants do not lead to other things, absolutely absent from our universe, that is just as improbable, or that the improbability that is life as we know it is in someways different from those other different improbabilities.

It is no good to throw a dart blindly and wax lyrical about how improbable it is for the dart to hit where it does, and forget a dart has to hit somewhere.

[little_monkey]

The fine-tuning argument is not falsifiable. As such, it doesn't qualify as science.

[Anomalocaris]

The fine-tuning argument is not falsifiable. As such, it doesn't qualify as science.

In principle, it is falsifiable. You could in theory meet god and he can admit to you he didn't fine tune the universe, The universe could not but do what it did by itself anyway, and he just claimed credit for that to which he did not contribute. I have a feeling that vast majority (say 100.00000%) of what anyone would take to be "god" falls into this catagory, the various miracle working entities of judeo christian mythology all included.

Or in principle, we could wait and see if our progressive enlarging body of knowledge of how universe really works at the most fundamental level would seem to gradually constrains the degree of freedom the universe actual had, at the level of first principle, to be any thing other than what it is. If this constraint is observed, then fine tuning is falsified.

Or we might eventually develop the capacity to empirically create universes of our own, and we can experimentally verify how "tweek" can effect the probability of universe turning out to be similar to ours. If tweeking does not change the probability a great deal, then fine tuning is also falsified.

Or we might detect evidence of the existence of other values for the same fundamental constants somewhere else, either actually in our time and space, or detectable through impacts on our time and space. This would undermine "tuning" by suggesting the values of fundamental constants of the universe was not caused to be what we think it is now, but in reality assume all possible values.

However, the advocates of "fine tuning" have, AFAIK, never, ever advanced any suggestion, however wild, of how fine tuning could be tested or falsified, eventhough in any expansive frame of mind it is not hard to come up with many ways of how that might be done.

The fact they didn't bother to suggest how it should ever be tested, even if only in the very remotest of futures, make it plain "fine tuning" is abosolutely nothing more than religious bullshit, thinly veiled with what they conceive to be contemporary science-ish language.