Transcript

Of all the different arguments for the existence of God, only one gets mentioned again and again by modern atheists as being a powerful proof for God's existence.

And I won't leave you in suspense any longer.

That argument is the fine-tuning argument for God's existence, and it goes like this.

According to the fine-tuning argument, the odds the universe's laws of physics would be life-permitting are almost zero.

They're like the odds of winning 10 games of poker in a row, all with royal flushes.

If you suspect design in the case of that winning streak, then you should suspect a similar design in the far more improbable laws that govern our universe.

But first, let's take a look at what atheists say about the fine-tuning argument and why so many people find it compelling.

And then I'll address a relatively new objection to the argument that I haven't covered before in previous episodes.

First, here's Richard Dawkins.

When you come on later to the, um, origin of the physical constants, now that's getting o- getting warm, that getting close to a good argument.

And here's the late atheist, Christopher Hitchens.

Essentially it says why are conditions so optimal for life?

In this terrestrial orb.

Fine-tuning.

Fine-tuning.

And I was surprised to find that Richard was impressed by that too.

I mean, we know what the arguments against it are.

And I can tell them to you if you like, and I consider them to be pretty conclusive arguments.

But there is something that has to impress you.

I mean the, the likelihood that there could be nothing is so strong.

But not to be impressed by the fact that we are here rather than not, i- is to be, well, um, too easily unimpressed.

At some point certainly we all asked, Well, which is the best argument you've yet come up against from the other side?

And I think every one of us picks the fine-tuning one as the m- as the most intriguing.

The Goldilocks-

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Here's Rationality Rules admitting that many people find the argument persuasive.

Overall, based exclusively on my own conviction, I'd place fine-tuning arguments in either B or C tier.

But since so many others find them persuasive, especially intuitively persuasive, I'm happy to bump them to A tier.

They are, I freely admit, compelling arguments.

An atheist YouTuber named Genetically Modified Skeptic says

Finally, we're up to S tier where only the most effective arguments belong.

At this tier I'm going to place the teleological argument, specifically the argument from fine-tuning.

Given its high intuitiveness, its ability to turn its fallacy into a cheap victory to some, its incredible communicability, and its refutation-resisting ability of turning any challenge into an attack on its users' existential security, the teleological argument belongs in S tier.

Alex O'Connor and Joe Schmidt rank the fine-tuning argument as an A, or top-level argument, because the alternative explanations for the universe's fine-tuning often don't seem very plausible.

It just seems a bit less plausible.

I mean, it, it almost, it tells us something's I don't know, something's up.

Mm-hmm.

Something's going on, something strange about our universe maybe.

Something, something about the universe is, is, is in a way that it could very easily have not been- At least epistemic- That seems difficult to explain.

Yeah.

Then, okay, sure.

You know what?

Fine.

A tier it is.

Fine.

We'll stay with it.

A tier.

A tier it is.

Fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, tier A.

Also, fun fact.

This was filmed at Cameron Bertuzzi's house and Cameron and I were downstairs during this interview until we crashed a small part of it.

Finally, the philosopher Philip Goff was once an atheist, but the fine-tuning of the laws of nature and the universe was one of the pieces of evidence that led him to believe in panpsychism instead of atheism, or the view that consciousness is a fundamental part of reality.

And from there he eventually came to accept a very liberal form of Christianity that, in part, denies God's omnipotence because of the problem of evil.

However, the fine-tuning of the universe is something that kept Goff from fully embracing an atheistic purposeless universe as he describes in his 2023 book, Why: The Purpose of the Universe.

I think many people consider the fine-tuning argument persuasive because when people seek evidence for the existence of God, they want something that seems like it cannot have any natural explanation.

One time when I was debating Dan Barker on the existence of God, he told me he would believe God exists if I could guess what Dan had written inside of an envelope.

So, what would convince me to change my mind would be for you to ask God to tell this audience what's written on this sheet of paper here.

Does God know it?

That sounds like you would think that David Blaine is God.

Does God know it?

Does God know what is written on that paper?

Yes.

I can't see what's on there, but did you write-

I know but, you know, inside of here.

Inside this envelope.

Oh, inside of it.

Does he know what's written there?

Yes, he does.

Okay.

Does God answer prayers?

Yes, but sometimes he says no.

So will you ask Well, you're asking me-

Whoo!

Yeah!

So, you are asking me what it would take.

Yeah.

And so if God answers prayer as the Bible says, and if you believe that, and if he knows everything and he knows what's on this, I would like you to pray and ask God to tell you what is written-

So let me understand.

We have 15 seconds left.

If Jesus appeared and performed a miracle for you, you would ask God to apologize.

But if I could do a magic trick you would become a-

It's not a magic trick.

You would become a Christian?

It's not a magic trick.

Now suppose I correctly guessed what Barker had written.

Why would that be impressive?

Because the odds of getting that correct by chance alone are so small that chance is not a plausible explanation.

Instead, there must be some kind of design.

But if an atheist reaches that conclusion with the envelope example, why not reach it with the even more highly improbable case of fine-tuned constants in a life-permitting universe?

Now keep in mind that fine-tune does not mean optimally designed.

If it did, the argument would beg the question because the universe's laws of physics were optimally designed, it follows the universe was optimally designed.

Well, that's not a good proof of the existence of God.

This opens up the objection that nearly all of the universe is hostile to life.

It doesn't seem- optimally designed for life.

But the fine-tuning argument does not say the universe is maximally or optimally designed for life.

Fine-tuning is a neutral term.

It just means that of all the possible values of the constants in the laws of physics, the range that are life permitting are really, really small.

The fact that the constants fall within this incredibly narrow range is wildly surprising if atheism is true and the universe has no ultimate purpose.

But it's not surprising if theism is true and God created the universe for life like us.

Now, I personally was not a big fan of the fine-tuning argument in the past, because I prefer that evidence for God be directly accessible, like seeing contingent objects, or changing things around us, or directly accessing our moral intuitions.

But while the rare life-permitting values of the constants in the laws of physics were discovered just a few decades ago, people had an understanding of an argument like this long before that discovery.

For example, the 18th century Anglican scholar, William Paley, wrote a defense of God's existence that many people remember for its so-called watchmaker argument.

It goes like this.

Just as the complexity of a watch in the sand points to a watchmaker, the complexity of the world around us points to a universe maker.

Now, many atheists reply to Paley by saying that the theory of evolution allows living creatures to naturally become more complex over time, which is something machines like watches cannot do.

But Paley believed his argument also applied to the laws of nature themselves, which govern how living organisms grow and develop.

He wrote the following.

The planets could not have kept their orbits, and if the law of gravitational attraction had not been what it is, or at least if the prevailing law had transgressed the limits above assigned, every deviation would have been fatal.

The fine-tuning argument impresses many atheists because it presents an easily understandable phenomenon that naturally points to God, i.e.

fine-tuning for laws that produce intelligent embodied life, something that cries out for an explanation.

In contrast to other arguments, many people don't intuitively see the need to explain the existence of contingent objects or changing things.

And when it comes to morality, people often retreat to subjectivism to remove a phenomena, namely objective morality or moral facts, that needs to be explained.

But the fact of fine-tuning cannot be so easily dismissed.

Luke Barnes and Drait Lewis argue for the fact of fine-tuning in their book, A Fortunate Universe.

And they agree on this fact about the universe, even though Barnes is a theist and Lewis is an atheist.

People just naturally marvel at the idea of our universe beating such fantastic odds against it having life, and that it's easy for them to see a larger plan explaining all of that.

And as I noted earlier, the alternatives to design don't seem very compelling.

An infinite multiverse creates its own issues and makes any kind of explanation absurd.

Consider the poker example I raised earlier.

You could explain away 10 royal flushes in a row as something that is bound to happen, or even bound to happen an infinite number of times if we live in an infinite multiverse.

But in order to explain away the improbability of fine-tuning, you've also explained away the ability to spot design in anything that is highly improbable.

The cost is very high to pay.

Now, in saying that atheists consider the fine-tuning argument a top-tier argument, that doesn't mean they find it convincing, because otherwise they wouldn't be atheists.

There are a fair number of objections to the argument that I've covered in a previous episode that I'll link in the description below, so I won't go into detail here.

However, there is one objection I have not covered before.

In his paper, Divine Fine-Tuning Versus Electrons In Love, Neil Cinnabaru reframes the fine-tuning argument and says that it's not life forms like you and I that motivate the fine-tuning argument, but the existence of conscious embodied agents, regardless of what they're made out of, whether they're fleshy creatures like us or some other kind of life form.

He says that the probability of a universe having these kinds of conscious agents may not be that low.

Because if so-called psychophysical laws of the universe were different, then even universes that only have hydrogen atoms, because they have different constants in the laws of physics, even if it only had hydrogen atoms, it might still have conscious agents if there were different psychophysical laws that govern how consciousness comes to be.

He writes, Under more mind-friendly psychophysical laws, protons and electrons themselves could have minds like ours.

These laws could dictate that these particles have sensory experiences of all the forces other particles exert on them, with the forces most strongly affecting them giving rise to the psychology of belief, and then intentional action.

Protons and electrons could yearn to be together, feeling delight at the presence of the other as their opposite charges drew them closer.

When they formed a hydrogen atom, they could fall in love.

Now, one response is to say that this is just impossible.

Just because you can form an image of something in your mind, that doesn't mean the image you form could really happen, or that it's metaphysically possible.

We can imagine going back in time and changing the past of our own timeline, but that creates impossible contradictions.

Likewise, imagining conscious electrons in a universe without fine-tuned physical laws doesn't mean that this state of affairs could actually happen, or it doesn't mean it would make our improbable existence no longer need an explanation beyond mere chance.

Cinnabaru, however, claims that theists cannot say that electrons in love is metaphysically impossible because they believe in non-physical minds like God, or we might also add to his argument, angels.

He writes the following.

Theistic commitments to a non-physical God are incompatible with the view that even though psychophysical laws could have been somewhat different, love between subatomic particles is so bizarre as to be metaphysically impossible.

But just because minds can exist apart from physical bodies, it doesn't follow that they can exist within any particular physical body.

For example, light can travel apart from any physical medium, like in the vacuum of space.

But that doesn't mean light can travel within any- physical medium because light can't travel through lead, for example, even though it can travel through other physical mediums like water.

And the same is true of the medium through which consciousness can exist.

The fact that consciousness can exist without a physical body, like in the case of angels, or in some bodies like human beings, doesn't mean consciousness could exist in any physical body.

Besides, God and angels are conscious because of God's unique ability to sustain that state of affairs, not some natural psychophysical law.

But for the sake of his argument, let's imagine that other universes with conscious electrons and love could exist.

That does not change the fact that our universe with its conscious, complex biological life is still absurdly rare when you look at the laws of physics, and thus it requires an explanation for why the constants are within a narrow range to allow for conscious biological life like ours.

The philosopher John Leslie gives the following thought experiment to help understand this.

Imagine there is a large blank white wall with a single fly buzzing in front of it.

Surrounding this white wall is a larger red wall with many flies buzzing in front of it.

Now imagine a bullet strikes the single fly in front of the white wall.

We can plausibly attribute this rare event to a marksman's design and not just chance, even though the odds of any fly getting hit is high if we include the flies in front of the red wall.

In this analogy, the red wall represents different psychophysical laws, where you have universes that can have electrons and love, and the flies in front of the red wall are those universes with the conscious electrons.

The white area however represents our current psychophysical laws, and the single fly in front of that white wall represents our solitary universe or the incredibly small number of universes that are life-permitting given the current laws of physics and psychophysical laws that we're aware of.

So if we conclude that design is behind the single fly being shot in front of the white wall instead of just empty space being hit, we can conclude design is responsible for our universe existing instead of a lifeless one regardless of possible other universes with different physical or psychophysical laws.

Now in response to this, Sinababu writes the following.

It's plausible to attribute the striking of the fly to a marksman's aim because striking isolated targets is an intention that can plausibly be attributed to marksmen.

That's the sort of thing marksmen like to do.

But we have no reason to attribute an analogous intention to God.

It's hard to see why God would need or want to create mind specifically in a universe where the psychophysical laws were mind-unfriendly.

There's no reason to think an omnipotent being would be constrained by psychophysical laws that lack metaphysical necessity, or that an omnibenevolent being would be dissatisfied with the prayers of devout neutrons who ask him to bless the happy protons and electrons around them.

In other words, Sinababu's point is that we can attribute design to the shot fly in front of the white wall because marksmen like to hit difficult targets, but we cannot attribute God's design to our particular universe because there's no reason to think God would prefer to create our universe with embodied biological life instead of one with a bunch of electrons and love.

However, many people would disagree with that assumption.

They'd see that it's better to have a world where love, real love involves sacrifice, hardship, and free choice, all of which require self-locomotion, the ability to move and choose through biology.

It's better to have that than a world with trillions of lovesick electrons that just aimlessly float around the universe and don't live morally meaningful lives.

A world with higher quality of moral goods, in this case like ours, is better than one with a higher quantity of extremely minimally valuable goods.

And in a world with electrons and love, trillions of electrons would spend billions of years wandering and floating aimlessly through the universe never finding another particle.

So there's good reason to think God wouldn't make a universe like that.

Even if God could make the lives of sentient electrons more meaningful by just having constant miracles happening, it would be better to have a world like ours with morally meaningful lives where God does not act like a divine puppeteer always intervening with miracles, but he instead allows his creatures to freely love each other in accord with the laws of nature he created.

Finally, as evidence that great minds think alike, the Christian apologist Erik Manning recently picked fine-tuning as a top-tier argument himself, and he made a nice video defending it that I'll link below.

So that's my take on the power of the fine-tuning argument, and be sure to check out the links to other resources in the description below.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.