Iain's reply: March 3rd, 2009
Iain's Comments in Blue.
With respect - your reasoning is faulty. Yes - any sequence of the cards is equally unlikely. But if I asked for a specific sequence and you shuffled them well and dealt them out - the chances of getting THAT SPECIFIC SEQUENCE are infinitesimal. This is the situation with the fine tuning - it is not just any of the unlikely conditions that have to be met - only one set of conditions will do - and lo and behold they occur. The chances of them occurring being less than 1 in trillions time trillions (at least).
The point I am making is that we are looking at what we see from the
position of knowing that it has happened. If it were any other way we
wouldn't be in a position to remark "isn't this incredible?" because we wouldn't
be conscious beings and so not in a position to work out the probability.
Another example - imagine dropping a whole set of scrabble pieces on the floor. Any sequence that you get is equally unlikely. However - if you later come into the room and see the sentence: "iain likes to discuss the fine tuning of the universe arguments" - then you would rightly infer design (someone put them in sequence even if that sequence is no more likely than others) - this is because it is a specified sequence. The universe fine tuning argument is much stronger because of the much greater odds against it.
The difference here is that the viewer of the unlikely scrabble piece
combination is in a position of assessing all the other scrabble piece
combinations that could have been, knows the time scale and reason, knows that it
is an unlikely event in this time scale. We sitting here looking at our
universe see that it fits with our existence. But we are not able to
assess all the universes that could have come into existence. On a human
time scale 14.5 billion years seems immense; on other time scales it could be
miniscule. Time is a dimension and it is calculated that before the big
bang it didn't exist. At the same time (time is probably the wrong term
but whatever it's called) as this universe came into existence an infinite
number of universes could also have been trying to come into existence and all
of them failing (like the wrong combination of cards) because they had some
combination that wouldn't work. Before this universe came into existence
there could have been an infinite number of previous universes very different
from ours that could have or may not have had intelligent life.
We just don’t know about what came before the universe (we also don’t know
what might come after) and while we can speculate about multiverses, time on a
different scale before this universe, multi-dimensions all with their own
attempts at universes that fail, infinite attempts at universes before this
one, infinite attempts at universes coming into existence within this
universe. We just don’t know. When we don’t know something but there
could be many possibilities it is not reasonable to claim that God must have
done it, We just don’t know.
You claimed in your book that the multiverse idea was invented for the
prime reason to remove your claim that God must have fine-tuned this universe.
We all speculate about what we don’t know all the time: any idea without
evidence is just a speculation but neither can you claim that it isn’t possible
because it removes your fine-tuning proposal.
We are getting snow tonight, it’s not lying on the roads here but I can see
trouble in the morning across central Scotland.
Hope all is well up there.
Iain
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