Gonzalez & Richards back-to-front in Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God

"Designed for Discovery" by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards is the nineteenth chapter of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God. It appears to be a book-promotion disguised as a litany of fine-tunerisms. Gonzalez and Richards have written a book titled The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, and if this chapter is representative of it then they've got a problem. The whole thing is upside down and backwards. Let's face it, the idea that the universe is specifically designed so that the human race can "discover" things about it is ludicrous.

Here's what's wrong with the fine-tuning argument. Suppose you invent a teleportation machine, but there are a few snags with it, such that the first time you use it, it transports you to a completely random location in the entire universe. What do you think the chances are of finding yourself in a part of the universe where you can survive for more than a few seconds? A location, for instance, where you can breathe, where you're not immediately frozen solid, fossilised or incinerated, or subjected to lethal radiation. Pretty slim, I'd suggest. In fact your chances of survival would be infinitesimal. The universe is not fine-tuned for life.

As for being "designed for discovery", Gonzalez and Richards go through a list of recipes that their "cosmic chef" would need to compile in order to produce an environment suitable for inquiring human minds to explore, but they do it as if the human race is here first — as if everything has to be adjusted to meet the needs of pre-existing humanity (or at least a humanity whose characteristics have been predetermined). That, in case they haven't noticed, is not how it happened. This is such an obvious flaw in their argument I'll belabour it no more. I'll simply quote the late, great Douglas Adams and his famous sentient puddle:

"...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."

(From Biota)

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AfF #6: Fine-tuning Argument

(Click here for Arguments for Fred #5)

The fine-tuning argument is actually part of the teleological argument.

The way the universe is arranged, from the micro to the macro, is just so. It turns out that everything is just right for intelligent life on Earth. This is so amazingly improbable it must have been done on purpose.

Actually no. Look at the size of the universe (in particular, look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image). Compared to the size of the universe, life on Earth is an invisible dot on an invisible dot on an invisible dot on an invisible dot. What kind of intelligent creator would make something so mind-bogglingly vast, just so that an infinitesimal part of it could develop intelligent life, while the rest of creation remains – to an almost universal degree – dispassionately deadly? Only an incompetently wasteful one.

The reason why the universe appears fine-tuned to us is that we are a product of it. If the universe were "tuned" differently, we would be different (probably utterly and incomprehensibly different).

Some people invoke the idea of the multiverse – a possibly infinite number of universes, all slightly different, existing in parallel, and unable to communicate with each other in any way. This hypothesis may be useful as a thought-experiment, but it's unfalsifiable, so of little practical utility. The idea is that there are so many of these parallel universes that all combinations of the values of physical constants will exist, somewhere, however improbable. We just happen to be living in one that contains at least one planet suitable for the evolution of intelligent life.

Here's Douglas Adams on what has become known as the Anthropic Principle:

"...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."

(From Biota)

UPDATE 2009-09-10: Click here for AfF #7