A fined tuned argument.....Heywood style.

[Heywood]

The fine tuning problem is this: There are about couple of dozen physical constants of the universe teetering on a knife edge....which if you changed anyone just a little bit we would not have an emergent universe(or at the very least a much less emergent universe). For instance if gravity were a little stronger the universe would exist as simple black hole. If gravity were a little weaker matter would not clump to form more complex structures.

The observance of this fact of reality cries out for an explanation. There really are just 4 possible explanations that I can see.

A)The Universe is intelligently designed to be emergent.
B)Our Universe is part of a Multiverse of which sheer numbers guarantees the existence of at least one daughter universe that is fine-tuned for emergence.
C)Our Universe is the way it is because of some brute fact of physics about which we don't have any knowledge.
D)It was simply blind luck the Universe turned out to be fine-tuned for emergence.

The extreme fine tuning of the cosmological constant allows me to dismiss D. If it was different by one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion complex structures would not be able to form. It is unreasonable to think we hit a jackpot with those kind of odds. As Leonard Susskind put it, "Its too much of a stretch".

I dimiss C on the grounds as there is no reason to believe this since many coherent models of the universe can be made given our current understanding of physics. Further cutting edge physics...like string theory continue to suggest the possibility the universe could have been different.

That leaves me with A and B as being the only credible explanations. If I assume the principle of indifference applies here, that means I should give A 50% likelihood of being true and B 50% likelihood of being true.

[tor]

Gigantic fail.
Here cosmologist Sean Carroll OBLITERATES argument of fine tuning.

[Heywood]

Gigantic fail.
Here cosmologist Sean Carroll OBLITERATES argument of fine tuning.

Negative Tor.

The debate you posted does not address the argument I have made.

[tor]

Yes it does.

[Heywood]

Yes it does.

Yeah...and Genesis obliterates the Origin of Species.

[tor]

Yes it does.

Yeah...and Genesis obliterates the Origin of Species.

Watch the debate and get educated or keep yourself in the darkness. Up to you.

[Heywood]

Yeah...and Genesis obliterates the Origin of Species.

Watch the debate and get educated or keep yourself in the darkness. Up to you.

I've seen the debate....and you can't put up a 2+ hour debate and say the rebuttal is contained within it. That is like me saying...Go read the Koran...the proof of God is in there.

You're not making reasonable discussion.

[tor]

Ok. We do not have enough information about the universe to say if it was designed or not.
But it's definitely NOT 50/50.
Also when you give us multiple choice exam you must be very careful to prove that they are the only choices available.

[Heywood]

Ok. We do not have enough information about the universe to say if it was designed or not.
But it's definitely NOT 50/50.
Also when you give us multiple choice exam you must be very careful to prove that they are the only choices available.

What you are saying is I misapplied the principle of indifference...but you don't say how......which makes your point impotent.

[Alex K]

I don't do argumentum ad youtubum, so I reply anyways.
Your fine tuning argument is at least more coherent than your argument against naturalistic evolution, which is just... anyways, I digress.

It is true that changing several physical parameters in the Standard Model and Gravity could lead to a universe in which there is very little structure (no chemistry and stars etc.) or which would live only for a very short time.
A few comments:

* You have a philosophical problem to begin with: if you claim that a universe with apparently fine-tuned parameters has a problem that needs explaining, you somehow have to assume that it could have been differently - but from which set of possible universes is ours chosen, and with what mechanism, in absence of proposition A or B. You therefore have to state much more clearly why indeed you think fine-tuning is a problem. Please elaborate on this point, in particular what you mean by poss. D.

* It is not the cosmological constant itself which must be chosen with such precision. If you change the observed cosmological constant by a few percent, nothing radical would change in the universe. The numbers you quote come from a theoretical problem in coupling the Standard Model of Particle Physics to General Relativity: when one does that, the cosmological constant receives very large contributions from virtual particles which raise the energy level of the quantum vacuum. One then has to counterbalance this large quantum contribution with a fine tuned cosmological constant parameter in the opposite direction which cancels this contribution from virtual particles to very high accuracy - in the extreme case to something like the degree you quote above (I haven't counted the trillions and trillions). Your argument is significantly weakened by the fact that this is not a fine tuning in observed parameters, but in theoretical input parameters, which are meaningless if we find a more consistent way to couple quantum theory to gravity - a not very controversial proposition considering that we do not have a definite self-consistent theory of quantum gravity which is tested. This is an important reminder that input parameters in quantum field theory are not observable quantities with direct physical meaning.

* Even if I accept all your premises, we don't get 50% each by a looong shot. This is because for those two propositions, observations very strongly favor B over A: The Universe looks exactly as you would expect an anthropically selected universe to look: if you have a priori probability distributions with strong dependences on the parameters, you expect to have many parameters of your theory pushed towards catastrophic boundaries, but barely on the anthropically favored side. Here's a published paper where this is explained:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.2783.pdf


If the universe were designed for life, we would precisely not be living on the edge in so many ways. You unwittingly killed your proposition A with the fine-tuning argument: if you work that bayesian magic and carry through honestly the expectations vs. observations from possibilities A and B with equal priors, you end up with a tiny posterior for proposition God, and nearly 1 for proposition Multiverse.