1d ago

About the fine tuning argument

Hi, I come from a very Catholic family but never really believed in God. I slowly took distance from religion and now I'm exploring atheism.

Recently found a video about how the "fine tuning" argument was one of the more difficult for atheists to answer.

But thinking about it the argument is the same theists apply when they don't know the origin of something. Since the origins of humankind, we always filled the gaps of the unexplained with the supernatural, specially when there's an apparent order or improbability in this case.

Science might not know why the universe is like it is, but the improbability of it doesn't prove intelligent design.

Edit: Thanks for all the answers, very good points in the comments, and sorry I'm replying so late and didn't explain what the argument is:

The fine-tuned universe is the hypothesis that, because "life as we know it" could not exist if the constants of nature – such as the electron charge, the gravitational constant and others – had been even slightly different, the universe must be tuned specifically for life.[1][2][3][4] In practice, this hypothesis is formulated in terms of dimensionless physical constants.[5]

Taken from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe

11 comments

I always found the fine tuning argument silly.
It's like saying a hole was designed for the water the happened to settle in it after a rainstorm. "The water fits perfectly in the hole, so therefore the hole was fine tuned for that puddle of water."

You get the whole thing wrong, we (atheists) are not supposed to prove anything to religious people. We just don't think god has an elephant head or gives children cancer and so on. It's the other way around, but religion can never prove anything.
If you want to figure things out, that hasn't been figured out yet, get into science. Here maybe filosophy and physics & biology.
- You're right, atheism doesn't need to prove the argument wrong.

Life (including sentient life) isn't improbable given how infinite the universe is. There's 8 planets surrounding our sun and 2-3 are in the "habitable zone" there's 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy alone and there are countless galaxies in the universe. I only wish that alien life would come here for the sole purpose of eliminating the biggest argument that theists have. The only problem being the absolute vastness of space. Our planet is not interesting in any way given the scope of everything so it makes no logical sense why any other species would be interested in this specific planet. Not for water, not for minerals, no reason to come here. "Fine tuning" is simply "I can't grasp the concept of probability amongst a nearly infinite number of chances."

As others have said, it's on the religious to show that the thing they're attributing to god or gods could have no other possible reason or method or cause than a god. People over time have observed the world, nature and life to come up with some possible causes and mechanisms for how things work, and found plenty of answers that are mundane and banal and notably lacking in gods. Just about anyone who wants to look at the same thing closely can see the same evidence for simple, physical explanations, and make their own conclusions.
Imagine that you find a really big spider web in a high place. The religious are basically saying "that's proof Spiderman exists". They've read about Spiderman and know the traits of Spiderman and specifically look for ways they can make the physical world confirm the existence of Spiderman.
An atheist would look for the spider. Even if they had no luck finding it, they would build a hypothesis that, since every time we've looked in a spiderweb before, we've found a spider, there probably is a spider capable of climbing that high and building a web that big. Even if no one found the spider in the lifetimes of those hypothetical people, it still wouldn't mean that Spiderman made that web. There are just too many hypotheses that are much more likely based on our previous knowledge of the world.
Just about every time we've ever gone looking for reasons something happened or is the way it is, we've found an answer that doesn't involve any need for divine intervention.

Well, the biggest thing is that the universe supports the life we know exists, but if conditions were different then other types of life that aren't possible in our universe could exist.

Improbability of what? I'm not familiar with the fine tuning argument, but I've never come across any religious argument that wasn't easily dismissed as disingenuous or circular tautology.

The biggest problem with the anthropic principle is, we don't know all of the forms life can take, so it's presumptive at best and self-deluded at worst to believe the conjecture says anything factual about reality.
Forgive me for not believing in the BS of a species that to this day insists it is utterly unique while on a planet full of billions of different living, feeling beings just like us.

The fine tuning argument is just the Texas sharpshooter fallacy dressed up in fancy language, requires either grossly misunderstanding or willfully misrepresenting the fact that it's using the conclusion to form the premise. The Earth isn't perfectly "tuned" for life to evolve on it. It's actually the other way around: Life evolved on Earth to fit the conditions here.
And, lots and lots of types of life on Earth died out over the aeons as conditions here changed, with new life having to evolve to fit the subsequent conditions. See, for instance, the oxygenation catastrophe. If god really had a plan for every beast of the land and fish of the sea to fill its niche from the beginning, why have so many of them already gone extinct?
Arguing about the apparent improbability of life developing on this planet is a silly notion coming from the point of view of life that's already developed and evolved on that same planet. People who insist on that should try doing so on one of the billions upon billions of other planets in the universe where life didn't develop instead. It's like trying to explain to someone who's already won the lottery that, acktshully, winning the lottery is totally mathematically impossible so therefore they didn't. The balance of their bank account notwithstanding.

Sounds like the watchmaker argument for God's existence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy fun stuff. Here's some questions, is kids getting cancer part of that design? why can plants do a photosynthesis and animals generally speaking, can't? Seems like there are better ways of getting nutrients to a living body than eating. Why aren't there 2 watchmaker? or 3 or more? Did the watchmaker intentionally make things that don't work or are bad? That doesn't seem very intelligent to me. Another fun one is Anselms argument, or The Ontological Argument for God's Existence. Final piece, I consider myself to be an epiphenominalist rather than atheist.
edit: typos cause autocorrect works everytime. And a missing word

The improbability is irrelevant, since we couldn’t be here to wonder at, if the improbable didn’t happen.

11 comments