Fine Tuning: Are We Just Lucky?
Some versions of the Fine Tuning Argument for God's existence remark that our existence is too improbable to be the product of chance - that it's absurd to attribute it to luck. Is it? Consider how these two cases differ:
1. Mary is lucky to be alive! She was on a flight to Detroit, and the plane crashed killing 98 of the 100 people on board.
2. John is lucky to be alive! Had his parents not had sex on that particular day, uniting that specific sperm and ovum - he wouldn't be here. The same is true of each of his parents, as well as every pair of ancestors throughout biological history. Consider the odds that JOHN would come to be!
[b]*edit*
IIntuitively, Mary's luck needs to be explained, but John's luck doesn't. Can we make sense of this intuition? I'd like to propose what the relevant difference is.
In Mary's case, there were two possibilities: either she would live (be lucky) or die (be unlucky). We need to explain why she fell on the side of the dichotomy that she did. We would expect her to die, so why did she survive?
In John's case, there is no such dichotomy. A non-existent John isn't unlucky, because luck (whether good or bad) applies only to things that exist. Why? Because there can be no prior expectation that was not met. There can be no prior expectations about things that don't exist.
The relevant difference is this dichotomy. A person 's good luck only needs to be explained if he could have had bad luck; i.e..there is some prior expectation that was not met and there can be none for a non-existent.
Thoughts?[/b]
1. Mary is lucky to be alive! She was on a flight to Detroit, and the plane crashed killing 98 of the 100 people on board.
2. John is lucky to be alive! Had his parents not had sex on that particular day, uniting that specific sperm and ovum - he wouldn't be here. The same is true of each of his parents, as well as every pair of ancestors throughout biological history. Consider the odds that JOHN would come to be!
[b]*edit*
IIntuitively, Mary's luck needs to be explained, but John's luck doesn't. Can we make sense of this intuition? I'd like to propose what the relevant difference is.
In Mary's case, there were two possibilities: either she would live (be lucky) or die (be unlucky). We need to explain why she fell on the side of the dichotomy that she did. We would expect her to die, so why did she survive?
In John's case, there is no such dichotomy. A non-existent John isn't unlucky, because luck (whether good or bad) applies only to things that exist. Why? Because there can be no prior expectation that was not met. There can be no prior expectations about things that don't exist.
The relevant difference is this dichotomy. A person 's good luck only needs to be explained if he could have had bad luck; i.e..there is some prior expectation that was not met and there can be none for a non-existent.
Thoughts?[/b]
Comments (110)
The way Stephen Hawking put it in "A brief history of time" if over X time you roll a trillion sided die a trillion times you'll eventually roll an 18 if you desired to roll an 18.
I don't think probability is the best way to argue for religion.
The "probability" of John being born as a result of chance circumstances is a rather iffy concept: you have to make a pretty arbitrary choice of random variables and their distributions in order to estimate it. But at a stretch one can perhaps make some sense of it.
With the fundamental physical laws the situation is much worse: what probabilities could possibly mean in this case is anyone's guess. We only know about this one universe; there is no statistics, no generative model. What probabilities could we be talking about?
Sure, the denominator of the probability is still finite - but it's so large that it makes it surprising that any actual person is alive. On the other hand, it's imminently reasonable that SOME people exist. This is the tension. It's erroneous to apply this to individuals to "prove" they shouldn't be expected to exist, because we should expect SOME people to exist.
In terms of the FTA, life (or intelligent life) is one sort of existent, but there infinitely many sorts of existent. So IMO the analogy holds.
I'm wondering if this can be described mathematically.
Lots of people think the FTA is the very best way to prove God. I don't think so, and that's why I'm pondering this issue.
Hawking's right, but for the sake of discussion, I'm assuming there is exactly one roll of the dice - where each die represents a fundamental constant, whose many sides are the possible values it can take. My take on it is that there are no preexisting players who "win". Each roll is as likely as any other, and the consequences of a roll are irrelevant. The consequences are the sorts of thing that exist in the universe. These consequent existents weren't players, any more than were WE players in the procreation lottery.
WE DO NOT KNOW WHICH OF THESE IS THE REALITY.
Nothing wrong with speculating for the fun of speculating...but any calculations or "probability estimates" are not any better than flipping a coin with "heads" being the former and "tails" the latter.
There also is nothing wrong with making a blind guess...although I feel the coin toss has more dignity.
Having said that...I acknowledge that some people guess one way and some the other.
No big deal.
thats fair.
Yes - that's one way to address it, but it depends on the assumption that there is some sort of infinity of possibilities (infinite past, infinite space, infinite universes). That can be debated, and I'm tired of theists claiming I'm using the multiverse as a means to "escape" the obvious conclusion ("god").
My issue seems more straightforward - cutting the FTA off at the knees. Assume one universe: the "luck" of our existence is meaningless - no conclusions can be drawn from it.
CONTRADICTIONS would still be impossible - they're supposed to have zero probability of happening.
Well, I brought up one difficulty with any such mathematical description: in order to be able to talk about probabilities at all, we need to have random variables and their probability distributions. And there had better be good reasons behind the choice of both the variables and the distributions.
Already in the case of the "lottery" of being born we can see many difficulties in this regard. Depending on what we consider to be the chance circumstances and how we treat those chances, we can get wildly different results. For example, we could, like in so many romantic comedies, consider the first time the two future parents met due to some happenstance. What were the chances of them being in the same compartment on the train on that day? We could go on and estimate those chances using some simple probabilistic model of ticket sales, which might give us a small probability, but not inconceivably so. But we could take a completely different route - like, for instance, in your OP, and get a result that differs by many orders of magnitude.
There is an endlessly variety of such probabilistic models at our disposal, each giving a different result, and there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to prefer one over another, if all we want is to estimate the chance of being born in some very general sense. This uncertainty exposes the meaninglessness of such probability talk even in this intuitively suggestive example: there is no "general sense" of the probability of being born. There can only be a sense relative to some chosen model. Generally speaking, the choice of the model is dictated by our interest in the matter: what is under our control, what isn't, what we know, what we don't know, and what we wish to know.
In the case of the universe's fitness for life the situation is that much worse. Nothing is under our control. We know nothing about the reasons for the universe being the way it is, nor whether such reasons even exist. (And if they did exist, that would only push the question further, forcing us to ask about the reasons of the reasons, and so on.) We can't infer distributions from observed frequencies, because we only have this singular instance. If in the previous example we could at least idly pick among many possible probabilistic models, here there aren't even any models to pick. What are the random variables? How are they distributed? It's impossible to answer. So what could the probability of the universe being fit for life even mean?
Quoting Relativist
There has been a lot of discussion along these lines. John Leslie offered a now well-known firing squad analogy: You face a firing squad of trained marksmen. Shots are fired, but to your immense surprise, you find that they all missed. Are you justified in inferring that the marksmen intended to miss? Leslie argues that a similar scenario in the case of the universe's fundamental constants suggests two alternative explanations: God or multiple universes. Objections have been put forward in terms of gambler's fallacy and observation selection effect, among others. You can find many such debates under the heading of anthropic reasoning (see also SEP entry on fine-tuning). Although I believe that the considerations that I gave above preempt any such debates with respect to the universe as a whole, I still think that they are instructive.
One of my hobbies (or obsessions) is to debate theists on their Fine Tuning Argument for God (here's my current one - I'm called, "Fred"). I've read a number of papers, including the SEP article, and I've read debates and seen videos where its defended. I have observed that the most common rebuttal to it is the multiverse hypothesis. I don't think that's the best approach because it concedes too much - in particular, it concedes that life needs to be explained.
Awhile back, someone on this forum posted a link to this paper: The Fine Tuning Argument. The author (Klaas Landsman) argues that the existence of life is not a good reason to infer either a designer OR a multiverse. My reasoning is based on that paper, so have a look if you're interested.
Consider the firing squad you mention. The shooters have a target. Why should we treat life as a target? Here's an outline of my reasoning:
1. There are many possible universes with a different set of values for the fundamental constants
2. Each possible universe has the same low probability of existing
3. Therefore there’s nothing remarkable about any specific universe existing (i.e. the universe is a lottery winner: someone was going to win despite every ticket holder having a low probability of winning - all had the same chance).
4. The winning universe happens to support life, but every universe begets consequences that would not obtain in the others so that has no relevant implications.
As I just mentioned to Sophisticat, this assumes life was a target - a design objective.
I understand, but here's their perspective: the textbook laws of physics are our best guess at the actual laws of nature, so they are a reasonable basis for analysis.
Why the obsession with life? So what if life is only possible in this universe? How is that a problem?
There is no reason to assume that life as we know it was the specific target. The creative process itself is open-ended, and not so much an application of power and influence from ‘above’ towards a specific design objective, but rather an interaction aimed at whatever increases awareness, connection and collaboration overall. It’s initially an unselfish and undirected process, exploring possibility and potential within material limitations.
Well, it seems the FTA has a flaw. It claims that the universe is fine tuned for life as a whole but that would mean the universe was fine tuned for microbial pathogens as well as humans but these two examples of life are counterexamples of the universe being fine tuned for either. I mean microbial pathogens shouldn't exist if the universe were fine tuned for humans and humans shouldn't exist, with their antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals and all, if the universe were fine tuned for microbes.
Since all life maybe reduced to such mutually harmful relationships, I would think twice before suggesting any fine tuning for life. Perhaps it has an evilish entertainment value as a paradox: the universe is fine tuned for life but not fine tuned for the living.
We know that a universe with life in it exists (otherwise nothing would be known anyways). It may be that that means that there is a high probability in this type of universe that life will inevitably take shape based on the conditions. I think the real hidden value that should be questioned here is why life is considered so different than other physical processes. One can say that any other physical thing "may" not have happened if certain other events before that didn't take place. We are quite amused at our own place in the universe, probably unwarranted, but inevitable being we are a self-aware species, and awe at our own being would seem common for such a species.
You seem to be claiming there was an objective to "increase awareness, connection, and collaberation." Why think that?
The claim is not that the universe is tuned for each specific type of life - that entails a complex set of objectives. It's just the broad claim that it seems "tuned" for life - because no kinds of life would be possible had the constants had different values.
Yes, and that's related to my Op. Consider the enormous (infinite?) number of possible things that would exist if other universes had existed instead of ours. Each type of thing had the same, infinitesmal chance of coming into being. Consider the odds against YOU coming to be, vs the enormous number of possible people that weren't so "lucky".
That's the problem in my opinion. Suppose the fine-tuned physical parameters for life are like a set of conditions imposed on a group of people. If these conditions didn't favor any one member of the group wouldn't it be the heights of foolishness to say the conditions favored the group as a whole. The exact logic applies the the fine tuning argument.
I don't follow. One can favor Croations without favoring individual Croations.
How?
Life is "fine-tuned" in the sense that
Quoting RAW Bradford, The inevitability of fine tuning in a complex universe, 2011
But here is the rub: as the paper above argues, this parameter sensitivity of complex structures is a mathematical inevitability. It will be true in any parametric system that is at all capable of producing complex structures (and most systems would not produce complex structures, no matter how you tune them).
To say Croatia isn't the same as Croatians is a distinction without a difference.
I've been "guilty" of this in my younger years, but eventually I lost the appetite for arguing just for the sake of arguing. Apologists are often too quick to accept the desired conclusion, and lacking the motivation they fail to put up a strong argument.
Quoting Relativist
Yes, I've come across this paper before. It continues a long series of debates (as can be seen from its references), of which I think the more interesting ones aren't even about God/designer (that one seems to be pretty hopeless). Selection bias, on the other hand, poses challenging epistemological problems in the same line as Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, etc.
Though debates about these frequently seem just as intractable as those around theism. Answers to these problems rely so heavily on your basic epistemological stance that it's hard to make a convincing case to someone who doesn't have the same background.
But this is not a theists came up with FT and then non-theists took up the fight. The cognitive dissonance was within physics and with the scientific community first.
But the problem is that science assumes that there’s a lawful regularity in the cosmos. But it doesn’t, and probably can’t, explain why there’s such an order. It’s simply given. And Big Bang theory, the current model, is as much like a scientific account of ‘creation from nothing’ as you’re likely to see, as was noted by many of its opponents when it first began to circulate in the 1930’s. (It was actually seized upon by the Pope in the 1950’s which embarrassed LeMaitre, who had devised the theory.) And the counter-argument that there are countless ‘other universes’ that don’t exhibit natural order of the kind science observes seems to me one of the most inane ideas in current culture.
My point is that science itself doesn’t (and probably never will) explain the order of nature. And it doesn’t have to do that. The thought that it can do so is a product of historical circumstance as much as science - it is an aspect of the Enlightenment rationalism which sought to supplant religion with science. There’s an immense amount of work to be done, without even getting into the argument.
I’ve been following the debates over string theory/multiverse in the blogosphere - principally Sabine Hossenfelder, Peter Woit, and Lee Smolin’s attacks on the vacuity of string theory. I don’t believe it will ever be resolved. Glad I’m not in physics.
Quoting Echarmion
I don't actually take a strong position on these puzzles. I suspect that there may not be a good answer to them, or what's worse, there may not be a good question...
These two need not be conflated.
Physics has made great advances through contemplation and thought experiments. I don't see any reason to worry about this. Of course like anything it can go too far or if the hypothesis itself cannot produce, ever, observable results, as far as they know, they perhaps other lines are better followed. It is unclear whether one might be able to find evidence of a multiverse. Some say yes. But trying to resolve inconsistancies and anomolies in current models is a good thing to do, hence the idea of the multiverse to maintain determinism.
I'd need to see evidence and not just deductive arguments, that having the current levels of speculation in physics is a problem. IOW if we accept deduction, rather than empirically based criticisms of the amount of speculation, the complaints themselves start to fall into the very category they are complaining about. Demonstate (through God knows what kind of experiments with control groups) that if we shift to punishing speculative physics more, physics and we will be better off.
Before we have that experiment carried out a few times, then the criticism is just speculation based on what seems to be true on paper.
Not so much an objective as an impetus, but why not think that? There is a tendency to misconstrue creativity as motivation to design or produce something purposeful. But that’s only an external justification for the creative process itself, because without this justification it looks just like random trial-and-error, or luck. Any creative worth his salt would attest that it isn’t randomness, regardless of whether or not anything ‘purposeful’ comes from the process at the time.
Because there can only be an objective if an intelligence is behind it. I'm open to this possibility, but the case mist be made. The FTA purports to make such a case, but obviously if it depends on the assumption of an intelligence the argument is circular.
You're assuming too much. The FTA, if it were successful, would only entail a creator who wanted life. It does not entail a creator who gives a damn what they do to each other.
It might not even entail a creator, just some kind of universal desire for life. Like entropy is something you observe in microsystems and perhaps in the whole thing. But here instead of entropy would be a strong built in tendency to make life. Life being built in, rather than the randomly created perhaps it might not have been of how science is somehow taken to indicate.
I mean, I think we are significant, but not on the basis of rarity or some cosmic teleology.
I agree that an objective may imply a prior intelligence, but an underlying creative impetus does not - and neither does it imply ‘luck’, despite the unlikely arrangement of conditions. This is the point I’d like to make.
But what're the chances of a human flipping the coin and coming out heads? Tiny! Almost impossible!
Therefore, there has to be some explanation for why it came out heads. What appears almost impossible only seems that way under inappropriate assumptions or lack of knowledge regarding its cause.
Universes where God made it come out heads make the coin coming out heads more probable. So they explain it.
Therefore God exists.
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There are at least 7 catastrophic errors in that argument. I'll give a brownie point to anyone who can point one out.
Please explain what you mean by a "creative impetus." What are it's identifiable characteristics?
Intuitively, Mary's luck needs to be explained, but John's luck doesn't. Can we make sense of this intuition? I'd like to propose what the relevant difference is.
In Mary's case, there were two possibilities: either she would live (be lucky) or die (be unlucky). We need to explain why she fell on the side of the dichotomy that she did. Similarly for the unlucky who died.
In John's case, there is no such dichotomy. A non-existent John isn't unlucky, because luck (whether good or bad) applies only to things that exist.
So I propose the relevant difference is this dichotomy. A person 's good luck only needs to be explained if he could have had bad luck.
That's a minimal definition of a creator: having a desire, and the ability to act on that desire. This is the sort of deism Antony Flew ultimately embraced.
It doesn’t really have any - it’s a formula for existential possibility.
We can be certain only that ‘something’ exists, and that ‘something’ is aware of existence. All other information or intelligence attempts to build on this basic certainty, as what matters. Now consider ‘increase awareness, connection and collaboration’ as a basic, open-ended formula for existence. Beginning with ‘nothing’ but this relation of existential possibility to a formula - no space or time, no information, no intelligence and no external ‘creator’ - this is all that is required for the eventual existence and awareness of our universe as it is.
I'm certain I exist, and I'm aware of my existence. However, I'm also certain the universe was around before me to be aware of it. What makes you think there was awareness 5 seconds after the big bang?
What is it that you refer to as ‘I’? What information are you basing that ‘certainty’ on? And how are you certain of that information?
Quoting Relativist
Because we can trace evidence of informing interaction back as far as the Big Bang. This is not conscious awareness, but it is a basic (one-dimensional) level of awareness, nonetheless.
Is there no contradiction? We're more or less opposed in our views; let's suppose we contradict each other. Does it make sense then there could be someone who supports both of us?
Not only that, but scientists generally assume that the laws of nature as we observe them operating today have always operated that way; or at least, that they have operated that way ever since very soon after the alleged Big Bang. What justifies this assumption? Why not consider the alternative that the laws of nature have evolved over time, and perhaps are still (very slowly) evolving? What would count as evidence either way?
True. But I think that the significance of "rare" is itself connected to teleology. Rare things are significant because of their use for us, either in terms of productive use or as status symbols.
As for special and unique, it seems to me humans are special and unique, individually as well as as a species. We imbue everything with our own personal meanings.
https://physicsworld.com/a/changes-spotted-in-fundamental-constant/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html
http://news.discovery.com/space/is-the-sun-emitting-a-mystery-particle.html
https://www.livescience.com/29111-speed-of-light-not-constant.html
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/is-the-speed-of-light-slowing-down
Sorry, not finding more or better ones. I actually wrote to Rupert Sheldrake if I found anything that supported his view. Sometimes he'd always seen them, but not always, which was fun for me. There were a number of signs that laws may change and also constants, some of the evidence strong.
I believe the Aristotelian deity entails a first cause, so it wouldn't be outside the chain of being. This at least was Flew's interpretation, and I believe this is what is entailed by the FTA if it is true.
I'm glad to have a theist respond to this thread. Tell me if you embrace the claim that the improbability of our existence entails an explanatory gap. Some versions of the FTA depend on there being such an explanatory gap. My Op was intended to falsify this claim.
That's a reasonable description, but I submit the source of the problem was the perceived explanatory gap that I rebutted in my Op: the premise that life should be "expected". That premise is not derived from Physics. The false premise has been characterized and rebutted in a variety of ways, but I haven't seen it rebutted in terms of an epistemological principle as I did in my (revised) op.
That's of course possible, but what's the motivation to propose that? It seems to me the motivation is the premise that our improbable existence entails an explanatory gap that must be filled. The purpose of my Op was to dispute that, and I revised it yesterday to identify a principle that distinguishes between cases where explanations are required, and where they are not.
So, although I agree with you about this, I revised my Op to remove that escape hatch. I provide a general basis for rejecting the premise that there is an explanatory gap for either heavy metals OR life.
Quoting Relativist
The motivation is simply to challenge the widespread and usually uncritical assumption that the laws of nature have remained essentially unchanged for billions of years. It seems to me that the only motivation for that is to enable us to extrapolate our present observations into the very distant past, which I find highly dubious.
Quoting Relativist
I was not commenting on the OP, only the specific post to which I replied. As a theist, I happen think that fine-tuning arguments are interesting, but by no means demonstrative. On what rational basis could we assign a prior (im)probability for the boundary conditions of the only existing universe to which we have access?
Quoting Relativist
That is presumably the intent of every author of an OP, but side issues inevitably come up as the thread develops.
And still be rational? Not if the contradiction is truly present.
I regard it as an innate, incorrigible believe that is unanalyzable in terms of a priori principles. In short: it a basic belief, a foundation for every other belief. The "certainty" is nothing more than the incorrigibility.
Quoting Possibility
No one was being informed at the time of the bog bang. There is no ontological connection to our epistemic inferences about the big bang.
Humans are likewise rare for the same reason. But one could make a fine tuning argument that the fundamental constants must have been finely tuned so that X would be produced, because X is otherwise very improbable. (for X=heavy metals or humans).
Nevertheless, this is different than the case of Mary. There must be some explanation why she would live rather than die.
I agree.
Parsimony, obviously. If an explanation works well enough, why complicate it without reason? More importantly, if a law is changing over time, then as long the change is itself regular, it simply becomes a dynamic component of the same law.
They are being considered. At various times changes in fundamental constants have been hypothesized. For example, Dirac, in an attempt to explain the enormous disparity in coupling strengths in the present-day universe, proposed as part of his Large Number Hypothesis that the gravitational constant has changed dramatically over time. But such changes (and even much subtler changes) leave their marks in the universe, which is why Dirac's hypothesis was quickly falsified with data. But other such hypotheses are considered even today, so it's not true that this is some kind of taboo.
By the way, I brought up Dirac for a reason, because, unlike the theistic argument, scientific discussion of fine-tuning is framed not so much in terms of "gee, how lucky we are to live in such a special universe," but in terms of the so-called naturalness of physical laws - which is what bothered Dirac so much. Already back then the seeds of the problem of fine tuning were planted, well before Carter et al.
I recognise that at some point we feel compelled to draw a line to protect the integrity of the system. Something must be incorrigible, but that something is not necessarily ‘I’. There is enough potential information available to doubt one’s own incorrigibility, and yet we tend to exclude this information in a Cartesian-style retreat from the uncertainty of subjective experience. Descartes misunderstood: we don’t increase certainty by excluding doubtful information.
That ‘I’ exist is not a certainty, but is relative to an event of limited duration and fragile relational structures.
Quoting Relativist
I didn’t say anyone was. But our epistemic inferences about this event can only be made as a relational structure of potential information relative to actual observations and measurements. Something was actually ‘informed’ for a potential event five seconds after the Big Bang to exist. Prior to the Big Bang, however, is another story.
Interesting question - Rupert Sheldrake gets into trouble for saying the speed of light has fluctuated over time, and he also says that the laws are like habits, as does C S Pierce.
But in respect of the ‘six numbers’ that Lord Martin Rees writes of in his book of that name, as I understand it, there’s no scope for variability. There are relationships of very precise values, and ‘non-natural’ values, which as I understand it is also a philosophical anomaly, without which nature would not have been able to start to form any habits whatever.
Again, it’s not to say that ‘God did it’, but just to again draw attention to the limits of the notion of ‘chance’ in this context. I mean, anywhere else in science, the assertion that something happened due to chance would simply regarded as the absence of an hypothesis!
Your last sentence contradicts what comes before it. If we can have evidence that constants and laws have changed, then we can have evidence for the contrary. And the balance of evidence for the known laws and constants is so far on the latter, although as I said, every once in a while someone proposes that some constant is actually non-constant (e.g. the cosmological constant). Such proposals are settled by evidence, because as Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
But my first sentence is talking about the idea that if there is a pattern or constant then it is either eternal or does not change in whatever finite time we have.
THAT is the assumption. There can be, then evidence to support this, sure. But the very concept of a natural law, rather than not weighing in that patterns that get called laws must be eternal, is an assumption.
No contradiction. I think using the idea of natural laws as a heuristic has been helpful, but it may be confused and we can be aware of just as, say, Newton's conception of space and time and rules he developed within that model were extremely useful, but it turns out his concept of absolut space and time were wrong.
It's a paradigmatic assumption. I am not blaming scientists for having gone with it. We work from local to more distant time and place. But that assumption that these things do not change is not parsimonious since one need not make that assumption and one can still use all the, for example, mathematical models that work now and seem to have been in place for a while. It's not less parsimonious NOT to make that assumption. Less assumptions cannot be less parsimonious.
"Incorrigible= not able to be corrected or reformed. That applies here. This is not an arbitrary assumption we pull out of thin air. No one has to be talked into it. Perhaps you've talked yourself out of it, but the only basis seems to be that it's possibly wrong. Possibility is not a defeater of belief. If you treat it as such, then you can have no beliefs other than analytic trurhs.
The issue with the constants straddles the line between physics and metaphysics.
Perhaps the values of the constants are set by natural law. If not, their values are brute fact. The FTA treats them as brute facts that could have differed.
Parsimony entails explaining the available facts with the fewest assumptions, not with entertaing the possibility we are missing some facts.
That said, it is reasonable to seek scientific explanation for why the constants have their values. Scientists should not accept brute facts.
The spirit of scientific inquiry should preclude us from ever simply accepting something as a brute fact. Like anything else that we observe in the universe, the particular values of the constants call for an explanation, and the FTA poses the hypothesis of divine creation.
Right, it would be an assumption that laws hold for all time and in all places, rather than holding where and when we know they hold.
By that reasoning, we shouldn't consider there to be laws of nature at all. That makes no sense. Physics develops theories about laws based on empirical evidence - the laws explain observed regularities.
So we infer a law based on observed regularities, then you say we should assume these aren't really regularities. See the problem?
That is appropriate for scientific inquiry, but metaphysical naturalism entails some sort of brute fact foundation for what exists. Otherwise there's an infinite regress.
Scientific inquiry employs methodological naturalism, but it is a mistake to convert this to metaphysical naturalism.
Quoting Relativist
On the contrary, divine creation is an example of an explanatory hypothesis that avoids an infinite regress.
Well, I already explained why "changing laws" are an oxymoron. Laws are revised or retied if evidence calls for it, and not otherwise. Anyway, I won't pursue this further, since this has little to do with the OP.
Quoting aletheist
You have it exactly backwards. Leaving something unexplained (which is what "brute fact" means) leaves the matter open for further inquiry. Contriving a pseudo-explanation such as "divine creation" prematurely forecloses the inquiry.
On the contrary, a brute fact is something that is deemed to be inexplicable in principle, thus closing off further inquiry as allegedly pointless.
Quoting SophistiCat
On the contrary, modern science largely has its roots in cultures that affirmed divine creation and were motivated by this belief to study nature more carefully.
Divine creation is not consistent with methodological naturalism. That hypothesis can only be entertained with a metaphysical scope.
I did not state or imply otherwise. Methodological naturalism can only go so far, which is one reason why it is a mistake to convert it to metaphysical naturalism.
Quoting SophistiCatRight, though that's generally been conceived of as 'now we realize that the law is actually X.' I was talking about when we realize that what has been called a law - in the modern conception of the term as eternal and universal - may be a more local, in time or space or both - pattern. Obviously evidence should be the criterion for new conceptions, including at the level where one realizes and assumption was made about the concept of these patterns.
Quoting SophistiCat
OK.
I am not ruling out it is the case, or true in many cases. I am simply saying that it not more parsimonious to have one less assumption.
Quoting RelativistNo, I am not saying that. In fact several times in this discussion, though perhaps not in posts to you I have made it quite clear that of course one does. But one need not, at the level of cosmology or thinking of science in general, assume that just because we notice regularities that this necessarily entails that these are laws - as the idea has been conceived in science - as something that holds true everywhere and always. That tendency - which is more or less an ontological position - need not be assumed. That's all. And since there has been some evidence that this is in fact not the case, that laws and constants may have been different earlier in time even in our local (though huge) home area, it's good to consider this ontological position and note that it is there. I have also been pointing out in response to one person who thought the law of parsimony meant that laws are eternal that it is in fact an assumption one need not have, when one notes regularities, to assume that we now know an eternal univerals rule. I actually think, as I have said, that it is a great heuristic and has been very useful. But that doesn't mean it is necessarily true nor does it make it more parsimonius.
No, not a defeater of belief, just of certainty. I’m okay with that, fwiw. Possibility leaves the door open for correction and reformation. Just because it’s comforting or easy to swallow, doesn’t make it absolute. I recognise existence as a dynamic state of inequilibrium - that I lean towards change and you towards stability, is just part of the dance...
I'm fine with that.
No, this is just completely divorced from reality. In every scientific theory there are brute facts: they are the assumptions and postulates of the theory, be they laws, constants or whatever. That doesn't mean that scientists, the scientific community are committed to treating them as eternal, unchanging truths. For one thing, there are many theories, and their postulates are not entirely compatible with each other, or else a postulate in one theory may actually be obtainable as a result in another theory (e.g. the 2nd law of continuum thermodynamics is more-or-less reducible to statistical mechanics).
Besides, it would be absurd to deny that theories have evolved and continue to evolve in response to new findings and new thinking, and that certainly goes for fundamental physics. The so-called fine tuned constants of the standard particle physics and Big Bang cosmology, which are seen as unsatisfactory by some theoretical physicists, have prompted a search for better accounts that would replace these constants with something more 'natural'. Of course, whatever theories come next will have their own unexplained postulates - it is only a question of which postulates are more epistemologically or metaphysically satisfactory.
Quoting aletheist
That is a questionable interpretation of the history. One could instead make a case that natural philosophy has always had to struggle against religious dogma and conservatism. In any case, this is irrelevant. The fact is that, as I explained above, scientific postulates are not on the whole treated as dogmas. The entire process of scientific research is set up expressly in order to promote change. One can hardly publish a paper or obtain a grant without the promise of finding something new or at variance with what is already known. But a religious dogma is, well, a dogma. If a thing is postulated to be a divine creation as a matter of faith, that isn't going to change in a hurry.
We evidently have different definitions of "brute fact." For what it might be worth, Wikipedia states, "In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that has no explanation. More narrowly, brute facts may instead be defined as those facts which cannot be explained (as opposed to simply having no explanation)." The whole point of formulating scientific and metaphysical hypotheses is to explain the facts.
Quoting aletheist
Quoting SophistiCat
I suggest that both of these statements are true.
I don't think that we have different definitions of "brute fact." It is just that by its nature, science is pluralistic and dynamic. There isn't a single coherent and unchanging scientific picture of the world; instead, there is a patchwork of theories that are only partly compatible with each other, and those theories keep evolving. What that means for brute facts is that they exist within the context of a particular theory, and that they are not carved in stone. Philosophy is not any different in that regard.
In any case, whether we are talking about science or philosophy, it is a truism that nothing of any substance can be explained away without residue. Any explanation takes some things as given, the explanation essentially consisting in reducing everything else to those things.
In religious explanations the brute facts are the dogmas of theology and sacred history. That God made the universe just so is a brute fact.
Apologists claim that God's metaphysical necessity subsumes the residue. Of course, this doesn't explain his contingent choices.
You brought up supernaturalism when you said divine creation avoids an infinite regress. That enlarged the scope of analysis to metaphysics. If we're entertaing metaphysical solutions to an infinite regress, then we can also consider solutions consistent with metaphysical naturalism. Right?
As long as we acknowledge that metaphysical naturalism is no more "scientific" than theism.