Answers to Fine Tuning
The argument is that none of these forces and examples really prove design because given infinite chances there will eventually be a universe that gets it right, we just happen to be it. Now scientists theorize that there are billions or even an infinite set of alternate universes arising all the time. That gives us the infinite chances.
Answer I. Have to know hit rate for life bearing universes.
Unless we know the rate at which life bearing is produced, just having a bunch of universes proves nothing.
This applies both to parallel universes and to planets of our own universe.
The new research puts the estimate at 22% of stars that have earth-like planets.[1] That certainly seems like a disproof of the FT since it makes life bearing planets common. The problem is as has been hinted at we can't say these are life bearing. Earth like Just means size and temperature....Size can vary and fool us. Temperature is very important to know too.
The temperature of the planet is important, of course, and depends on how much light the planets gets from its star. As a range, they looked for planets that received no more than four times the light the Earth receives from the Sun, and no less than 0.25 times as much. That should bracket the warm and cool edges of the “habitable zone”, where water can exist. This range may in fact be much broader; a planet can be much farther from its star and still have liquid water (see Enceladus as an example), but they wanted to be conservative.[2]
Dr. Batalha said, “We don’t yet have any planet candidates that are exact analogues of the Earth in terms of size, orbit or star type.”[3]
souirces on answer I.)
1 Dennis Overbye, "Far Off Planets Like Earth Dot the Galaxy," space and Cosmos, NY Times. Nov 4, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html?_r=02 Phil Plait "The sky may be filled with Earth like Planets,"Slate, nov 4 2013 on line copy:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/11/04/earth_like_exoplanets_planets_like_ours_may_be_very_common.html
Answer II.We can never know if other universes exist or not.
One might be tempted to think that doesn't matter because the statistics indicate there must be lots of life bearing planets out there. Yet the important point is the atheists are the one's saying don't believe without empirical proof. They will challenge the believer to show "just one" fact supporting God. Yet they believe this with no empirical proof!
Sten Odenwald, (Raytheon STX) for the NASA IMAGE/POETRY Education and Public Outreach program
http://sirius-c.ncat.edu/space/Space-Weather/poetry/ask/a11215.html
"yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became...even infinitly old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them." (astronomy café)
Robert Koon's, philosopher Univ. Texas said,"Note how the situation has changed. Originally, atheists prided themselves on being no-nonsense empiricists, who limited their beliefs to what could be seen and measured. Now, we find ourselves in a situation in which the only alternative to belief in God is belief in an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes! You've come along way, baby!"
III. Multiverse Requires Fine Tunning
Futhermore, the best mechanism for multiverses that last, actually requires fine-tuning itself. The chaotic inflationary model - which seeks to avoid fine-tuning by positing that the initial conditions vary at random over the superspace of the Higgs fields - also fine-tunes its parameters, as Earman has pointed out: "The inflationary model can succeed only by fine-tuning its parameters, and even then, relative to some natural measures on initial conditions, it may also have to fine-tune its initial conditions for inflation to work."[1]
co-author in inflationary theoryPhysicist Paul Steinhardt agrees:
“The whole point of inflation was to get rid of fine-tuning – to explain features of the original big bang model that must be fine-tuned to match observations. The fact that we had to introduce one fine-tuning to remove another was worrisome. This problem has never been resolved."[2]
Sources on III.
1 John Earman. Bangs, Crunches, Wimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995., p. 156) So rather than avoid fine-tuning, the multiverse pushes it up a level.
2 John Horgan, “Physicist slams Cosmic Theory he Helped Conceive,” Scientific American Blogs, December 1, 2014. on line, URL http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-slams-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/ accessed 10/5/15. Horgan interviews Steinhardt.
IV. Multivrese is Inverse of Gambler's fallacy
The whole issue of the objection to the multiverse is nothing but an inverse of the gambler's fallacy: " Some people think that if you roll the dice repeatedly and don't get double sixes, then you are more likely to get double sixes on the next roll. They are victims of the notorious gambler's fallacy. In a 1987 article in Mind, the philosopher Ian Hacking sees a kindred bit of illogic behind the Many Universes Hypothesis. Suppose you enter a room and see a guy roll a pair of dice. They come up double sixes. You think, "Aha, that is very unlikely on a single roll, so he must have rolled the dice many times before I walked into the room." You have committed what Hacking labels the inverse gambler's fallacy."[Jim Holt, "War of the Worlds: Do you believe in God? Or in multiple universes?" Lingua Franca, December 2000/January 2001]
V Incredulous logic of Multiverse begs question
Plantinga puts it as follows: "Well, perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? "Waal, shore, Tex, I know it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet yore yap, ya dumb galoot."[Alvin Plantinga, "Darwin, Mind, and Meaning", May/June 1996 issue of Books and Culture]
VI. Violation of Occam's Razor
The multiverse is a desperate catch-all explanation that could explain away any evidence for anything by simply inflating the probabilistic resources to infinity, and it is also the most flagrant violation of Occam's razor ever. Occam really said "do not multiply entities beyond necessity," yet the Multiversers are doing just that merely for the purpose of answering this argument.
I wrote a whole blog peicevon this one, Metacrock's Blog: Occam's Razor shaves multi-verse.
:what this really means is that FT should have presumption as long as no empirical evidence for MV.
VII. Multiverse is Arbitrary necessity See argument one. Arbitrary necessities are illogical. That is one a contingency is put over as a necessity. That is what is being done with the multiverse, they are pretending that this whole mutliverse needs no explanation, it's just bound to happen, it's necessary. But it's really just magnifying a string of endless contingencies into a giant arbitrary necessity.
This argument can't disprove the nultiverse because there are reasons to consider it, but it does there's a good reason to disbelieve it as long as there's no empirical evidence for it.
As philosopher of science Quentin R. Smith admits, "A disadvantage of . . . theories that postulate a background space from which the universe fluctuates, is that they explain the existence of the universe but only at the price of introducing another unexplained given, viz., the background space"[Quentin R. Smith (1988), "The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe," Philosophy of Science 55:54] s)Leslie's "Further Evidence" VIII loses explanatory power
The basic idea is that inflationary theory (the mechanism to explain MV under current conditions necessitates alternate universes with different rules, rules wee can't know. If we can't know the rules we can't make predictions, we can't explain things. Science loses explanatory power, which necessitated the assumption of uniform rules.This is coming from the guy who helped invent the theory.
Steinhardt:
But my concerns really grew when I discovered that, due to quantum fluctuation effects, inflation is generically eternal and (as others soon emphasized) this would lead to a multiverse. Inflation was introduced to produce a universe that looks smooth and flat everywhere and that has features everywhere that agree with what we observe. Instead, it turns out that, due to quantum effects, inflation produces a multitude of patches (universes) that span every physically conceivable outcome (flat and curved, smooth and not smooth, isotropic and not isotropic, scale-invariant spectra and not, etc.). Our observable universe would be just one possibility out of a continuous spectrum of outcomes. So, we have not explained any feature of the universe by introducing inflation after all. We have just shifted the problem of the original big bang model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities that could emerge from the big bang?) to the inflationary model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities could emerge in a multiverse?).
To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation….Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.[Steinhardt interviewed by John Horgan, op cit--see above]
IX. Multiverse proves existence of God!
At this point we can bring in Platinga's Possible words argument. Is it possible that in one of those other universes there would be a God like the one Anselm speaks of? The answer as to be "yes." If not the atheist must show why not. After all they want to push the dictum that the mutliverses must exist because there are infinite chances for them to exist and it's Soooooo illogical to think that they would not. But the same logic applies, there must be a God in one of those infinite universes. And yet it is absurd to think that a necessary being would be limited to just one reality. God has to be God in all reality.
Concluson: All Design arguments are like the glass of water half empty or half full. The believer thinks he/she sees it half full, the skeptic sees it half empty. But the anthropic argument is different, it offers a comparison between designed and undersigned features because we can understand the range of probabilities which might have been to form a non-life bearing universe. We know that the universe did not have to be as it is, and we know that it is extremely improbable. While this may not be absolute proof, it is good probabilistic proof.
Fine Tuning Part 3 Earth-like Planets
