One of the most popular and persuasive arguments for theism is the so-called Fine-Tuning Argument. But there is a singular fallacy in it that I think usually gets overlooked. There are of course actually many fallacies in it, but those have been well-explored (hence I’ve written on this subject often enough and there is a recent video of actual cosmologists explaining it). What I will get to today is a crucial error right at the very heart of the argument, which though I have touched on it in other articles, I have not made as explicit as I will here today.
Of course, if you weren’t already aware, the Fine-Tuning Argument goes something like this:
- We observe that the fundamental constants of the universe require an absurdly perfect balance to allow the possibility of living organisms naturally arising (those most commonly appealed to are the strength of the gravitational force and the strength of the electromagnetic force).
- This perfect balance either arose by random accident, some inevitable natural law, or intelligent design.
- If selected at random, such a perfect set of measures is extraordinarily unlikely; and even if some inevitable natural law would make no other outcome likely, that would still be extraordinarily unlikely; whereas such a perfect set of measures would be highly likely if selected intelligently.
- Therefore this perfect balance is extraordinarily more likely to have been selected intelligently.
Yes, that doesn’t get you all the way to Jesus, or Christianity, or anything the like. But that’s not the point of the argument. Most religions can be dismissed as depending on the extraordinarily improbable thesis of invisible superghosts, because most arguments for any specific religion depend on the presumption of there being a god of such means in the first place. Something like the fine-tuning argument can therefore set the stage by turning that presumption into an established premise, from which further arguments can then proceed. Though that requires it be a sound argument. So it matters whether its premises are even true, or whether the conclusion actually follows from them.
First: All Those Other Fallacies
Even Christopher Hitchens acknowledged that the Fine-Tuning Argument was the best argument theists have, although he still found it unconvincing. His reason for finding it their best argument is that it at least pointed to a real thing that needed to be explained, and did have a superficial appeal as long as you didn’t look at it too closely; whereas most of their arguments appeal to false facts or overt fallacies that can be exposed as fraudulent in a minute’s time. His reasons for still not finding it persuasive were twofold: (1) it has never passed peer review in cosmological science, which is a bloody big red flag (for if real cosmologists aren’t persuaded, neither should amateurs be); and (2) there is far more chaos, destruction, failure, and uninhabitability in the universe to actually conclude it is finely tuned. Hitchens is right on both points, but especially the latter.
I have put that point into simple Bayesian terms, following multiple corroborated peer reviewed formalizations doing the same. In short, “if chance produced this universe, we should expect it to be only barely conducive to life, indeed almost entirely lethal to it,” and that is exactly what we observe—just as Hitchens notes, both in time and space: by an absolutely extraordinary proportion of both, the universe is hostile, not amenable, to life. In fact, it is pretty much as hostile to life as any universe could be and still be able to produce any minuscule quantities of life clinging to the barest fleeting motes of survival. Which is the most probable universe that accidental life will ever observe: because a universe so hostile it never produces life will never be observed, while by far most of the random universes that could produce life will resemble ours in precisely this respect.
Hence, what we actually observe (as Hitchens relates) is predicted on the “fine-tuning was caused by accident” hypothesis; and yet it is counter-predicted on the “fine-tuning was caused by a life-seeking engineer” hypothesis. Fine-tuning, plus the evidence of the universe as actually observed, is therefore evidence against theism, not the other way around. But this requires putting back in all the evidence the theist leaves out. They only mention fine-tuning and the tiny motes of habitability for life; they conveniently leave out the vast proportions of space and time that are no such thing. Most apologetics works that way.
There are very, very much more hospitable universes to choose from among all logically possible universes available to an omnipotent builder. In fact we will ourselves soon be building them: within a timescale of mere centuries (a trivial delay in a universe billions of years old) it’s likely we will all be living in utopian simverses that are entirely hospitable to life—and a far happier life too, provided we can overcome our own fallibilities, but gods are supposed to be infallible, so that can’t have gotten in their way. Popular theisms already entail the same conclusion. Their gods, after all, knew how to build an eternal Heaven that everyone insists will be a much better place—indeed these days that’s (almost) the entire emotional point of believing in gods in the first place. So theists admit there are vastly better designed, vastly more hospitable, vastly more suitable worlds to build. So they are facing a serious problem explaining why God didn’t make ours one of those (I made this point already in Sense and Goodness without God decades ago, in IV.4, pp. 275-77). So they leave all that out, stripping away all the actual pertinent evidence, and leave only the “Earth is hospitable to life” datum, and ask us to be “amazed” that the fundamental forces were just precisely arranged so as to produce an occasionally rare Earth in a vast deadly void of lethal garbage.
Whereas, as I’ve put it before, we can prove it the case that “all godless universes ever observed will be finely tuned,” for it is not possible then to be alive in any other, whereas “most universes a God would be likely to make wouldn’t even have physical constants” much less any “need to tune them.” It’s like Captain Kirk said about god requesting a starship: what need does a god have of that? The request itself disproves he’s god. In like fashion, fine-tuning is what we expect to see if there is not a god; and it is not what we expect to see if there is one. The argument’s own premise thus disproves its own conclusion.
That alone dispatches the argument. Since Premise 3 in the argument makes assertions about the likelihood—how likely it is we would observe the evidence we do observe, on each of the three competing hypotheses—leaving out evidence that affects those relative probabilities is fatal to the argument’s required logic. When we include all the data, we get a reversal of probabilities: intelligent engineering flips from the most likely to in fact the least likely explanation of all the data taken together. However unlikely a random selection would be, or however remarkable a natural inevitability would be, the evidence simply supports the conclusion that one or the other most likely happened, and not the other way around.
And that’s that.
But even if you are dissatisfied with “we don’t know what the explanation is, but all evidence points to it not being God,” you can still point out that we do have perfectly viable explanations for fine-tuning, which have far more scientific backing than “God did it.” Insofar as the evidence already points to a natural rather than an intelligent cause of fine-tuning (as I just noted it does), then if the only two logically possible explanations were “our universe is part of a quasi-infinite multiverse” and “a god exists,” then fine-tuning is evidence for the multiverse hypothesis.
One cannot object to this by saying a multiverse violates Ockham’s Razor “because it poses infinitely many epicycles to explain one,” not only because we can say the same thing about your god solution as well (a point I shall be getting to), but more importantly because no peer-reviewed multiverse theory in the science of cosmology today just “poses infinitely many epicycles to explain one.” To the contrary, all current multiverse theories demonstrate the inevitable appearance of endless universes from a very simple set of physical starting conditions; a much simpler “brute fact” proposal than any god theory, involving fewer assertions, and all of them (unlike anything about god) backed by scientific knowledge and precedent. Even William Lane Craig’s beloved Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (and every single one of those cosmologists individually) asserts a multiverse is an inevitable causal (not just epistemic) consequence of observed facts (see Alex Vilenkin in “Before the Big Bang 9: A Multiverse from Nothing?” esp. starting at 8:21 and then 15:04; Alan Guth in “Before the Big Bang 4: Eternal Inflation & The Multiverse,” esp. starting at 34:28; and Leonard Susskind, “Was There a Beginning?” in the MIT Technology Review). Thus in any competition between explanations, “there is a multiverse” enormously prevails, by every epistemic measure and standard, over “an invisible superghost did it” (see Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God). Hence fine-tuning is evidence for multiverse theory, not for any god theory.
That’s all one need say. You can just drop mic and walk away at that point. But of course one could still challenge other components of the argument. I’ll digress only briefly on those because I think most of them are less effective points to make, although one of them is really important. And then I’ll close by hitting head-on the usual rebuttal you’ll hear to what we just demonstrated, and why it actually contains yet more seeds of the argument’s own destruction.
Those Other Minor Challenges
It has already been pointed out (by the likes of Victor Stenger and others) that naive formulations of the Fine-Tuning Argument use invalid mathematics. For example, they will hold one constant as fixed (like, gravity) and ask how many values for another constant (like, electromagnetism) would produce stars, and then planets, and thus life. But if we are selecting values at random, both values can vary. And obviously, for any doubling of the alpha constant, for example, there can be a doubling of the gravitational constant, producing exactly the same balance between those constants all over again, and thereby observationally the same outcome: stars, planets, life. It is thus easy to show that there are infinitely many pairings of G and alpha that will produce life—and infinitely many that won’t (and even if you need groups of three or more constants to be aligned, the same follows). So we know there are infinitely many possible universes that can bear life, and infinitely many that can’t. How do you calculate which is more likely, then, when both sides of the frequency equal “infinity”?
One might try to solve this problem by finitely sampling the probability space, but that isn’t what naive Fine-Tuning Arguments usually do (or even know how to do). And it’s not clear that that would even work, as has been pointed out even by Christian apologists: in McGrew, McGrew and Vestrup, “Probabilities and the Fine-Tuning Argument: A Sceptical View,” Mind 110 (2001), it’s explained that our assumptions about what you’d get by “randomly” selecting a universe from a finite range of possibilities don’t actually hold for infinite ranges. So we actually can’t even do the math. A finite sampling of the space doesn’t in fact solve this problem, because we don’t get to do that when something actually gets selected. If you roll an infinitely-sided die, it actually does not follow that a side that appears ten times as often as another will come up ten times as often when rolled, precisely because the rules of finite arithmetic that would entail that conclusion don’t apply to infinite quantities.
However, I am assuming here that this has “been solved” somehow, and thus I am steelmanning the argument by assuming that even after we do the correct math (whatever that is), we still get Premise 1. But even then one could still challenge Premise 1 on the grounds that it is not as well established as is typically claimed. We actually have never explored (even by randomly sampling) the entire “possibility space” of comparably-outcomed collections of physical constants so as to determine they are rare. We do not have even the means to know every possible physical force that could manifest to change the equation. Published studies only assume the forces we have in this universe, not all logically possible combinations of forces, and therefore no published study actually addresses the question we need to answer in order to establish anything like Premise 1. Nor do we know every possible value each possible force could take, which is an even more important problem: we don’t even know how these constants take any value, so we cannot claim to know the range available is infinite, or that every value is equally likely. Nor do we know which combinations lead inevitably to a universe’s collapse or other event resetting the values and thus recalibrating the probabilities.
This last point is also often overlooked. For example, if 90% of “force-constant” combinations result inevitably in universe-collapse followed by a re-randomization of the values, we can only ascertain the probability of a life-bearing universe from the remaining 10% of combinations. Likewise if 90% of that 10% of those combinations result in runaway inflation that produces the exact opposite, a Big Rip outcome, and that once again re-randomizes the values (which cosmologists admit is possible), then we can only use 1% of the original combinations possible—because all other combinations will inevitably produce one of those. Think of a six-sided die-roll whereby you have to re-roll the die every time it rolls lower than 2 or higher than 5 (hence “any extreme value results in a re-roll”): a result of a 1 or a 6 will then never occur. Because they won’t last; inevitably they will be replaced with another roll. So the final result will always be between 2 and 5, only four possibilities rather than six; and the probability of ending up with any one of those results will always be 1 in 4, not 1 in 6. And this remains true no matter how many sides the die has. A hundred-sided die that does this, will still only ever end up between 2 and 5, and the odds of rolling a 2 on such a die will still be 1 in 4, not 1 in 100. And this will be true even of an infinitely sided die: it will always only ever end up rolling 2, 3, 4, or 5, and the odds of it rolling any one of those will again be just 1 in 4, not infinity to one against.
And because we don’t know this is or isn’t what will happen with any random combinations of any randomly possible forces of any random measure, nor do we know whether some measures are more likely outcomes than others or whether they are all equally likely, nor do we know whether there is a limit to how many forces can randomly arise in combination or no such limit at all, we simply cannot calculate the probability of any one outcome. At all. Much less such as would support Premise 1.
Nevertheless, I think steelmanning requires granting Premise 1 even in the face of this objection, since disproving Premise 1 is also impossible on present knowledge, so attacking the argument this way is harder to articulate the merit of. You would essentially have to argue, “we actually don’t know whether this is true or false; and when we don’t know something, prior odds favor the explanation is natural, not supernatural; therefore, prior odds favor the explanation of apparent fine-tuning is natural, not supernatural.” But though that is entirely true, it’s a psychologically weak rebuttal. It grants too much to the theist, making it seem they are just an inch away from proving their point, and throws you into the weeds of explaining why this isn’t just a presumption of naturalism. And though you can indeed show it’s not, by that point this all looks like you are trying to avoid an inexplicable fact rather than explaining it.
So I don’t recommend relying on that approach (and I myself have done so only occasionally, and always in a context emphasizing the other, stronger rebuttals). Likewise, while Premise 2 as I worded it is unassailable (those three options do exhaust all logical possibilities), some presenters misformulate it, inviting easy attack. My intention here was again to steelman the argument, since a theist could just as well do so, too, and thus evade or dispatch any such rebuttal. Likewise, as I wrote it, one could also say the conclusion does not formally follow from Premise 3, as a crucial step has been omitted: a reckoning of the relative prior probabilities of the three hypotheses. To arrive at line 4 from line 3 requires assuming these priors are equal or already favor the conclusion, and that is an assumption not established in any premise I presented. One might say I’m in that case strawmanning the argument by leaving that premise out. But I left it out on purpose: because it is indeed typically overlooked by advocates of this argument; and when not overlooked, is not validly accounted. This in fact brings us to my concluding point of today.
That Most Hidden Fallacy
Even if we assume there is no multiverse that we are a small part of (even though all evidence and logic to date supports that conclusion), but instead assume that the cosmic dice were rolled only once, and just by chance they rolled one of those rare universes that would produce life rather than one of the many more possible universes that wouldn’t, it still follows that “there is a God” is no more likely a remarkable bit of luck than that random universe would be. And this is the hidden fallacy in every Fine-Tuning Argument. The theist will want to insist the prior odds on any “we just got lucky” starting point obviously favor gods over random fine-tuning, but that actually isn’t the case. A lucky God is just as improbable on no prior assumptions as a lucky universe.
In other words, what someone might resort to in defending the Fine-Tuning Argument from the points so far made is to say that the “random one-off universe” requires a remarkably lucky accident, whereas if the God they are talking about already existed, then that same fine-tuning would be 100% certain to exist, and thus not unlikely at all. I’ve already shown you what’s wrong with that second premise. Fine-tuning isn’t even a likely way a real god would make a universe, much less “100% certain” to be the way, and all the other evidence is in accord with it being in our observed case a chance accident rather than an expected outcome of an intelligent plan. But there is another hidden premise here, underlying even that: that we can just assume there would be exactly such a god.
In fact, that entails an even more incredible amount of luck. So you can say we got lucky on a random roll of a universe; or just as lucky (or even more so, honestly) on a random roll of a god. Even at best it’s a wash; and at worst, God is much less likely. Both are positing that we are incredibly lucky. And arguably, the theist is positing an even more incredible bit of luck than even the “one universe” atheist is. Because there are infinitely many combinations of force-constants that would give us some universe that would produce some kind of people somewhere. But there are very few specific gods who would explain all known facts, and those gods all have the highest specified complexity imaginable (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism).
These aren’t just some randomly selected deities from among all logically possible deities (much less all logically possible things), the vast majority of whom will have no interest in creating people or even life (an interest that is hyper-specific within the infinite set of all logically possible interests). And even of those who do, the vast majority of them will be limited, fallible, and morally ambiguous (because there are more logically possible ways to be like that than to be perfect). And by far most randomly selectable gods will be far more empirically obvious—since you also need extraordinarily convoluted reasons for a god not to be. To the contrary, the God the theist needs in order to be a viable explanation for fine-tuning and every other observation is a very specific deity with infinitely convenient knowledge, abilities, and virtues, with an extraordinarily convenient nature even beyond that—they just exist for no reason, yet are still perfectly ordered and capable; and they require no body to remain so perfectly ordered and capable—as well as possessed of a very specific and convoluted set of motivations so bizarre theists will insist they are incomprehensible (see Is a Good God Logically Impossible?).
You might say, “But no one is saying God arose from a roll of cosmic dice.” But that’s not relevant to the point. It’s like a singular past-eternal universe: it could just luckily have been fine-tuned without there ever being an event of rolling cosmic dice either. A theist would say that’s just as lucky. Hence we aren’t talking about some event where some random selection was made, or what we might call “contingent luck.” There could have been such an event; it’s just not relevant to what I am saying here whether there was. We are instead talking about the “existential luck” of there just being such a thing, out of all the logically possible things there could have been instead (including nothing ever being at all, although that works out to be the least likely thing there would ever continue to be: see The Problem with Nothing). There is no way to say that “we just got lucky with this god thing” is any more likely than “we just got lucky with this universe thing.” Since even at best both probabilities are inscrutably small, they are therefore epistemically commensurate. Which means, even in the “best case” for the theist, as far as we honestly know, one is no more likely to have happened than the other.
So even if we assume fine-tuning is just a product of pure brute luck, both proposals as to how it came about entail commensurately improbable luck: lucky universe; or lucky god. Theists are thus trying to explain the fine-tuning of the universe by insisting upon an unexplained fine-tuning of the requisite God. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. So we cannot argue for one against the other by saying it was more likely. We simply have no knowledge of that being the case. By contrast, the kind of luck we would need to get one of the current multiverse theories now deemed plausible in cosmological science is demonstrably far less, as they require vastly simpler sets of brute facts than either a “single randomly fine-tuned universe” or a “randomly selected perfectly convenient god.” All their premises are rendered probable by abundant scientific evidence (unlike any attribute of the required god), and are far simpler in theoretical components, and hence in what chance accidents would be required to manifest them over alternatives (again exactly unlike the required god).
The only way to make us not wildly existentially lucky to even have such a god is if the required god is logically necessary. Of course all attempts to prove that have failed. But the important point here is that this means the Fine-Tuning Argument is really just a fig leaf for trying to pass off an Ontological Argument without ever actually defending it. If the Ontological Argument fails, so does every Fine-Tuning Argument. Because in terms of “brute luck” there is no way to distinguish the extraordinary luck of having such a god, and the extraordinary luck of having such a universe—and that’s even on a single-universe, random-constants model. So it is not actually possible to say that Fine-Tuning is more likely the product of a god as of chance accident. And remember, when we look at the actual evidence, it all favors the chance accident explanation. Which leaves us with no other conclusion to logically make.
This follows even for other “fig-leafed” Ontological Arguments like the Arguments from First Mover or Principle of Sufficient Reason. Those are just more sideways attempts to “prove” God is a logically necessary being; and they also fail (see The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit and Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God; and compare Why A Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism Is Probably True). No one has ever presented a valid and sound argument to the conclusion that, really, anything must logically necessarily have always eternally existed, much less something as bizarrely hyper-specific as the requisitely convenient God; if anything has eternally existed, so far as we know, it could have been something else, and thus existential (and not contingent) luck is just “a thing we have to accept” at some level of analysis. And if that’s the case, then the only question is, which possible thing then requires the least amount of luck to be presumed? And the answer so far looks like any of the currently contending multiverse cosmologies. They require far fewer assumptions as to what “just” has to have been true by mere brute fact, than any other competing alternative, especially theism.
Even if you are uncomfortable with existential luck and feel sure in your heart that there “must” be something at the base of everything whose existence is a logically necessary fact—even though you can’t really prove that to be so, so this is really an emotional and not a logical position to insist upon—we have ample evidence that the most credible contenders are mindless natural facts, like spacetime itself, or the initial quantum chaoses or rudimentary tunneling loops of various inflationary cosmologies and the like. As those are actually necessary (the universe we observe right now literally could never exist without them), and are vastly simpler posits (with far fewer elements, and all of them already in evidence as things that exist) than any bizarre and convoluted god concept.
Conclusion
The irony is if there were a successful Ontological Argument, no one would need the Fine-Tuning Argument. If you already could prove the needed God’s existence logically necessary (by any of the routes mentioned earlier), you wouldn’t need to appeal further to any evidence he existed at all, much less that of Fine-Tuning. Thus the only reason we have the Fine-Tuning Argument is that the Ontological Argument fails, and theists want to try and sneak it in anyway, like a magician’s trick. And they usually don’t even know they’re doing this. Like someone who thinks disembodied minds can exist because they “can imagine one” have fooled themselves—because they can only ever thus simulate one, so as to “imagine” it, with an embodied mind, thus refuting their entire conclusion as to what’s possible—so have Fine-Tuning proponents fooled themselves into thinking they can get the conclusion of the Fine-Tuning Argument on its own—when in fact they need the Ontological Argument to go through first, otherwise their conclusion collapses back into improbability again. Thus they think they have made a profound argument; and don’t realize it’s just a convoluted trick to avoid having to prove the Ontological Argument, which is the only actual way to make the Fine-Tuning Argument work.
To be honest, mindless spacetime looks like the only thing that has a good chance of being a logically necessary being (see The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit). Which is entirely consistent with the observation that Fine-Tuning is more likely a product of nature than of a god. And this all follows even if a single-universe, random-constants model is a true account of all we see, and already science has proved otherwise. Multiverse models are far more empirically supported, and require far less luck to get started from nothing. In fact, quite possibly, almost no luck at all. And like “just the right amazingly perfect and convenient god,” every multiverse theory today entails observed Fine-Tuning will be effectively 100% expected, only without anything having to be “just the right amazingly perfect and convenient.” So if both theories predict the same observation to the same probability, it falls to their relative prior probabilities to decide which is the more likely. And among all suitable things that are supposed to “just exist” for no reason, contemporary multiverse theories require vastly less existential luck than God.
Contemporary multiverse theories therefore not only outweigh God in respect to all scientific evidence, but even more so in respect to prior probability. The God theory is thus doomed. And it was ironically the observation of fine-tuning itself that killed it.
I find the fine-tuning argument to be useless as soon as a theist tries to claim a “fall”. So, which is the evidence for the fine-tuning, before or after?
That’s also a good point, and one they tend to avoid with this argument. They definitely don’t want to get into the weeds over why God not only made a horribly imperfect universe at the Big Bang, but then decided to actively make it even worse with the whole Garden of Eden cascade of design failures he set up (a point that holds even if that’s a metaphor for something and not an actual singular historical event).
Of course it’s even worse with a Young Earth Creationist Literalist, because if they use the Fine-Tuning Argument, they are contradicting themselves, because they don’t believe in the Big Bang or that physical processes created stars and then planets and then life. So Fine-Tuning has no function in their worldview and cannot even be established as relevant. They just get stuck in the weeds of defending YEC instead.
Thanks, Richard. It means a lot coming from you. And yep, YEC totally face plants when it tries to incorporate fine tuning.
You claim that “mindless spacetime looks like the only thing that has a good chance of being a logically necessary being.” I disagree with that. If mindless spacetime is logically necessary, then everything that corresponds to an information entity must also be logically necessary. Indeed, imagine that there would be nothing physical, nor anything mental, then information entities would still exist. There are four abstract categories of things that map to each other and to information entities: sets, ordinals, and (transfinite extensions of) strings of symbols and computer programs. All of these are information entities, and they exist necessarily. The ordinal 13 does not stop to be a prime number if there is nothing physical nor mental. Likewise, all information entities are necessary. Now, physical reality also contains information, which is to say that it maps to information entities, and that every possible physical entity also exists necessarily. Given that every possible brain and every possible CPU exists, also every possible mental entity exists. This in turn can lead to a successful ontological argument for the existence of God.
You are a lunatic, Ward. As I’ve already documented. And here you are just talking more crazy.
I don’t know what you mean by “everything that corresponds to an information entity.” If you mean “all potential facts potentially exist” is a necessary fact, then indeed that’s true: once you have spacetime, every logically possible thing potentially exists there (although only if they can be formed from or exist in spacetime). But “potentially exists” does not mean “actually exists.” Whereas if you mean something else by that nonsensical phrase, you are talking nonsense. Which you tend to do. So it’s hard to tell.
As to whether an infinite number of actualizations (an infinite multiverse), which is not the same thing as infinitely many potentialities, would entail that somewhere in the infinite multiverse there are gods, yes, that is the case—if by “gods” you mean natural superbeings and not supernatural ones (and admit that all evidence establishes we are not in one of those universes). See, again, The God Impossible. Which you have been directed to many times now. But since you are a lunatic, you never acknowledge the existence of that article or its content. So I can’t help you.
Good to see that you believe that every natural, arbitrarily godlike being exists. I do believe that God is ontologically natural. But God is methodologically supernatural, according to my EMAAN argument. And EMAAN is an a priori argument. So it has priority over any a posteriori “evidence”.
I don’t believe there is more than one reality/universe/world/actualization/potentiality. Any fair randomization in selecting a possible world would have to favor large worlds over small worlds. As a result of that, the actual world has to be so large that it includes every possibility. And God.
This isn’t news. I already told you this. Multiple times. But you are insane and thus never remember anything I tell you.
That there is another universe with a Bolzmann god does not mean there is any such being here or who could ever get here or do anything here. Because that’s physically impossible. Which means it has a probability OF ZERO. As I have already explained to you. All evidence shows no such being is here. So we aren’t in such a universe. As is expected: such universes are vastly rarer than universes with life in them, by countless orders of magnitude. So the prior probability of our being in such a universe is VIRTUALLY ZERO.
And no. A Bolzmann god cannot be supernatural. As has already been explained to you. Multiple times. No, seriously, multiple fucking times.
And no. There is no such thing as an “a priori” argument to any point of fact that can “have priority” over “a posteriori” evidence. Logic can only show you what follows from what is already in evidence, or what would follow from something had it been in evidence. It cannot “invent evidence.” This, too, has been explained to you. Multiple times. Which is how I know you are clinically insane.
And no. Random selection will not produce a singular contiguous world. Nor a single Bolzmann god. Nor any god capable of traveling to or even accessing every other pocketverse. The probability of that is infinity to one against, due to Cantor’s principle. As has also been explained to you.
You’ve been told all this. Multiple times now. That you don’t remember, that you never remember, being told all this, multiple times, means you are insane. Literally insane. You are a lunatic, Ward. Get help. Please.
Ward, who cares what Richard believes? What you should care about is what anyone can show. Can you show that every logically-possible natural being can exist? Do you even know what that means (that is, what the parameters of “natural” are)? No.
A multiverse is plausible. But not established. Boltzmann observers are fairly likely, but if the universe isn’t past-finite, then just like it’s wholly likely that nowhere in the universe has an amount of hot liquid the volume of a cup of coffee has spontaneously formed into some solid and some hotter water, even though quantum mechanics allows it, it’s even vastly more likely that there never has been even a random superbrain.
The reason why they call it a Boltzmann brain is because the observer has to be physically possible. The random brain with fictive memories is a literal brain. So to argue that you could have a random God, you need to prove… that a God is possible. Wow! So just give me the structure of a possible God, a diagram like an anatomical diagram of a brain, and we’re set!
Wait a minute, you can’t. And we know you can’t because if you could, you would have.
And how do natural things do methodologically supernatural things, Ward? It sounds like you’re saying that magic exists. That a natural form can find a way of doing non-natural things. So…. show that. That’s the actual theory, right? The idea that there could be some unexpectedly complex (though not infinite) mind is not that controversial. The idea that it can do magic is. Right after I just got done talking about the kind of dirty pool people like you get up to, you did it here! Even if you didn’t realize it, the actual difficult thing you need to show is that magic is real. Specifically (and conveniently) this kind of magic that does what you want in a God, but nothing else, and has no observable consequences you’d have to hold yourself to (unless you want to make a falsifiable prediction right now), and that no lesser intellect can possibly access. Hey, what’s that thing Richard keeps saying about super unlikely gerrymandered theories with no evidence for them?
But, of course, you’re cheating. You’re hiding that your theory requires magic by shifting where the magic occurs. This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy, and you’re all in on it, and come off as obnoxious when doing it.
And, of course, if we imagine some weird natural God, then we at least know we’re not in it, because… it didn’t appear where stuff already was. Unless you want to make the argument that this “God” absorbed our galaxy into a pseudopod of it that allows it to, using this magic you can’t prove exists, do magic things.
You say that your EMAAN argument is a priori. Ummm, bullshit, dude. Whether we exist in the kind of multiverse you live in is identifiable. This is literally what Carroll called Craig out for: actual multiverse theories make falsifiable predictions. You say yours is logically possible, so therefore it can’t be disproven, which is the same thing as saying that it’s logically proven, which you self-admittedly haven’t done. I can see why Richard has lost patience with you: This is slippery-ass bullshit, and explaining it fully requires paragraphs whereas you can just puke out the nonsense.
And you say that you don’t think that multiple actualizations are real. Well, damn, Ward, then you just lost the basis for your idea, didn’t you? Because without an infinite universe, you don’t have a mega-Boltzmann brain. This is classic apologetic cheating. You’re no better than a creationist who uses the Big Bang’s admission that there may be a discrete starting point for the universe (which they transmute into a certainty despite being told that that’s not what’s being said) and then uses that to deny the Big Bang. You don’t get to kick the ladder out you’re standing on, Ward.
But, of course, once again, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Can you show that there’s only one actualization? Can you show that we live in a universe where one God and only one God can exist? Because if you can do so, hoss, saddle up and publish it in cosmological peer review! But… you can’t. All you have is a hypothesis. “Just a theory” actually does apply to you.
I’ll at least give you this, Ward: The idea of a finitely-powerful supermind that decided to make itself ever more powerful and then retroactively made itself bound with the cosmos is sort of cool. Shades of The Ellimist from the Animorphs. (Of course, the Ellimist also had an evil equivalent god out there. Hey, why doesn’t Thanos exist, Ward? Or any other powerful and evil thing that actively wants to do anything to our planet?) But fun sci-fi isn’t necessarily real. And actually thinking about the consequences, and making predictions, would show why it’s garbage.
By that reasoning, Ward, 4 is not a sum of 2 and 2 because it’s logically the case that you can get to 4 from 2.
Richard’s argument is that it’s possible that, once you get a spacetime, spacetime can be bent or curved or looped or manipulated through geometry to get everything we see. Notice how this approach already has the nice benefit of not only being parsimonious (we’re not adding stuff beyond what you literally need to have to talk about anything, a place to put stuff and events in vis-a-vis each other – seriously, try making a fictional setting without a spacetime) but also explaining the kind of stuff we see: everything we see all comes from the manipulation of matter and energy, and we see nothing else beyond it (and, as Sean Carroll pointed out to Craig, the invocation of the fine tuning principle is in fact a concession of this fact, because if we saw more stuff than that, that stuff would not be tuned by the same principles as everything else is). You can ask what gets us from spacetime sitting there to it not sitting there, and there’s answers there too (from “on a long enough timescale everything will happen” to “that’s how quantum fields behave, uncertainty literally guarantees it”, etc.), but notice how now we’re asking a different question, a Prime Mover question rather than an ontological substrate question. The ontological substrate is geometry.
That’s why Richard makes points like how any field effect that behaves by an inverse square or cube and is directionally agnostic is actually totally predictable with no rules (put anything into a space with no rules for how it emanates and, if it does emanate at all, it’ll tend to do so by those very kind of totally blind geometric principles). So we don’t just have a theory that works as a logical alternative, it actually matches a lot of the evidence.
So mental entities within that universe are not default, Ward. Even if you’re a panpsychist, and I actually don’t really think you are, that’s still a claim you have to make from evidence, running against not only a total lack of that evidence but also the fact that we can tell the goddamn difference between a rock and a bird. Your approach immediately runs against this very odd property of the universe: everything that can act as an informational entity in that it can run simulations or respond to stimuli or make models or do anything we think of even as the most primitive thought… has to have an incredibly complicated, specific biological machinery to do that, and we observe that when that biological machinery breaks down, those functions rapidly decline and then evaporate. A rotting corpse occupies spacetime, but it no longer thinks.
All that is actually weird for your approach. But you then go on to say, “Indeed, imagine that there would be nothing physical, nor anything mental, then information entities would still exist. There are four abstract categories of things that map to each other and to information entities: sets, ordinals, and (transfinite extensions of) strings of symbols and computer programs. All of these are information entities, and they exist necessarily. The ordinal 13 does not stop to be a prime number if there is nothing physical nor mental”.
Now, notice how that doesn’t get us to God. It gets us to a computer program. See why simulational theories of the cosmos deserve actual attention whereas God theories thus far don’t (and I say this as a pantheist)?
But… it actually doesn’t get us to there. For the same reason that imagining Yoda doesn’t mean Yoda exists.
My brain can imagine Yoda. But that doesn’t make Yoda exist. My matter can perform a calculation.
It is absolutely true that, in any possible universe, you can imagine a model where the number 13 is useful to describe it. In fact, you can do so even when there’s only one object in that universe to even count.
But that’s conflating what you can run a model on a set of facts for with the model. Sean Carroll’s example of a universe that is a particle isn’t doing any information processing. It can’t even count to binary because there’s only one thing. You are conflating epistemology with ontology.
You could make the case that that distinction is illusory. But… that requires actually saying it, Ward.
Moreover, notice that while you can talk about the number 13, it is dreadfully inert until you have 13 things you can do stuff with. I can run a simulation of a bank account that actually contains billions of dollars or a ledger with a lot of cars, but I can’t drive any of them. Information on its own is actually useless. That’s clear ontological brute fact.
But spacetime isn’t. You can do stuff with spacetime.
Richard answers this in what he calls a neo-Aristotelian way: just like you could make a spherical ball of clay into a prism or a cube or a variety of other geometric shapes (but you can’t make it into a hypercube; you and the clay both lack that extensionality), you could also, say, put thirteen divots into the clay. Heck, you could put 13 and 12, and then count them and get 25. You can do calculations in the clay! But the clay isn’t doing that. It’s potential, not actual.
And, wow, notice something that everyone who knows anything about information science concludes: calculations aren’t free. Another problem with your kind of approach is that it assumes that information and representational entities are this base thing in the universe, acting by default. But if that were true, we’d live in a universe where everything was a supercomputer, and not in the trivial sense that everything is a computer running a model of the thing it is in real time. We don’t. You have to actually go out of your way to make stuff calculate, and perform functions. That’s actually a principle of information entropy. And notice how there’s a strong case that that kind of information entropy holds in all possible universes.
So if you want to make your case, you need to prove that you’re not just conflating potential with actual and epistemology with ontology. With evidence. Because not only is it ludicrous to imagine that a math textbook is a universe (precisely because you need to put stuff places and do things, what spacetime is), but it certainly isn’t clearly a good explanation for what we see.
This is what I find so frustrating about apologists. You are so committed to getting to having a white picket fence in the sky that you’ll reason backwards to that conclusion, and not accurately. If we were to start with your suggestion, we’d immediately lock in on a representational or computational model of the universe: everything is calculations and actions in spacetime. We would not posit a God.
Of course, if every possible mental entity can exist, then we can imagine a plurality of omnipotences. Ooops. A Roko’s basilisk scenario immediately accrues, or a Hawking time traveler: if there was an omnipotent entity that had emerged from random churn, then it would have made it so no others would ever have, even if just to save the headache, and then would have shown itself. Maybe a God would exist on an infinite timeline, but that’d require assuming an infinite timeline, now wouldn’t it?
Which takes us to what frustrates Richard about people like you: this is scientifically illiterate. Again, to invoke Carroll: the multiverse existing doesn’t mean everything imaginable exists. Logically possible and physically possible aren’t the same thing. It’s trivial to prove this, but apologists never do because it’s so grossly destructive to their armchair approach. It’s logically possible that we are being invaded right now by an extradimensional army named the Borgions. But we’re not. I made that up in my head. I can’t prove it’s physically impossible we will be ever, but I can definitely show it’s not happening right now.
It could be that the universe is not past-eternal. it could be that Gods never form because you never get enough stuff in one space to get a near-infinite or infinite mind out of raw stuff. There’s lots of ways that one can have a big infinite spacetime but no God. So, again, you need evidence for a God. Find some! Until you do, it looks to everyone like you have an excuse for why you don;t have any.
Fred, you reminded me just now of another equivocation fallacy Ward is trading on: Boltzmann gods won’t be infinitely anything. Omni traits are physically impossible in all spacetime-founded universes (the only kind that can produce Boltzmann gods so far as we really know). All Boltzmann gods will be limited and fallible in some respect; in fact, most by far will be quite terrible (because there are countless more ways to have a lunatic god with few admirable inclinations and desires or abilities, than one who lines up to any maximally admirable state that is actually achievable). Ward really should be careful what he is wishing for here. Odds are, he will be very unhappy with, indeed outright horrified by, the vast majority of such gods there even could be in the multiverse.
Notice how the problem comes down to a fractal misunderstanding of multiverse models. If one recognized that any valid multiverse model is not the claim “Everything can happen” but “An array of things can happen at different total frequencies, and you can actually find out what kind of multiverse you’re in by looking at variables (preferably ones you didn’t know ahead of time)”, then one wouldn’t
1) Wouldn’t assume that because something can exist it exists somewhere out there, right now
2) Wouldn’t assume that because everything can exist therefore
3) Wouldn’t assume everything imaginable can exist
Now, to be fair to Ward, this is based off of areas of cosmology and science that are extremely theoretical and speculative. But that still means one can do it more or less competently, and it also means exactly that: the apologist needs to proceed as if this is a very poorly established piece of argumentation, very tentative.
The cheat that apologists always use (I was just watching Folding Ideas’ analysis of The Principle and they do it there too to defend geocentrism) is to say “Okay, sure, this particular piece isn’t really strong evidence [even though if you hadn’t called me out on it I wouldn’t have been honest with my audience about that]. But it does mean that science is starting to move closer toward us! They said God is dead back in the 60s [I won’t be honest about the fact that, no, ‘they’ didn’t, not even TIME] but now the cutting edge of the field is coming our direction!” And if the cutting edge moves back away, and even undermines a claim of theirs? Well, now it’s tentative and it’s all biased anyways, who cares. Einstein was a verificationist so who cares that special relativity is really, really obviously true? They never have to make a bet they can lose. And even playing gives the false impression that they ever cared about the science.
This is to cover up the deeper cheat, the one you expose a lot: Even if they accurately surveyed the points, and they virtually never do (I’ve certainly never seen an honest presentation), one would never even make a $5000 investment off of something that theoretical cosmology said was more likely than not. The epistemic value is not high enough to justify confident (let alone faithful) belief in something as relevant as even a neutral nice God let alone a God that asks us to be homophobes or spend time being miserable every Sunday.
Another wonderful analysis of how popular apologetics fail. It is enlightening and fun to explore in depth how these nonsensical arguments fall apart. I do have a favor to ask… when debating something like the Fine Tuning Argument, it would be helpful to have a condensed version of the basic argument above. If not a formal syllogism, perhaps something that could be condensed into a paragraph or two. Richard, do you have something like this or have a link to a good one you know of? Thanks!
You have to decide on each occasion which argument to make. There are half a dozen things wrong with the Fine-Tuning argument (as just here surveyed), and you can’t do half a dozen things in a paragraph. So you have to pick one. And you have to choose your own criteria: like, what you deem the strongest, or the most emotionally salient in the conversation you are having at the moment, or the one you best understand and can thus best defend against pushback, or whatever criterion. Once you have picked one, notice there is a single paragraph somewhere already in this article that summarizes the point. Use that. Or simplify it even more into your own words.
One particularly good criterion when talking to a lot of people one-on-one or in a lot of contexts would be comprehensibility. This is something Carroll pointed out about how dishonest Craig is: Craig kept on talking about “Boltzmann brains” knowing damn well that he was utterly failing as an educator and a communicator (but acting like the worst kind of high school debater) by trying to score technical points, while Carroll had to be honest and convert Craig’s jargon into something closer to something the audience can understand. A lot of people will be snowed by the rhetoric. Forcing your opponent to either keep sounding like a crank who isn’t talking to you or to display their ignorance by dropping the jargon and making a claim as laconically as possible is a good thing. You might even technically lose the debate in terms of flow but win in terms of rhetoric because most people who aren’t judging debate as a flow sheet will remember you kept on making a really simple point and it never seemed to get addressed.
I concur.
As I was reading, I had a “Eureka!” moment that I stumbled onto even as you were getting to it.
I’ve mentioned Carroll a few times above because I think he utterly decimated this entire approach. It’s crappy, dishonest science. It plays the two-step I always see apologists do: They say “X rule set can’t explain phenomenon A, so I’m going to propose something from Y rule set instead and not justify why it can’t be Y1 or Y2 or Y3”. As an example, “You can’t explain why something came from nothing. The Big Bang doesn’t explain that. Therefore I will evoke something that came from nothing”. They invoke an apparently unbreakable rule then immediately break it, and get annoyed when everyone else points out how obvious this is.
The annoying thing is that it is a very specific and dishonest God of the gaps. Why is a given variable finely tuned? It may seem odd to us now, but there may be a scientific reason for it. The fact that the universe is quantized seems weird until you realize that it’s pretty hard to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe otherwise. It’s perfectly likely that the reason that a particular variable is finely tuned has to do with some logically inescapable consequence. We don’t know yet.
Now, Richard points out that saying this has the unfortunate side effect of opening the door for the apologist. That’s true, of course, because while honesty would require admitting that there’s a lot of things we don’t know and may not know in our lifetimes, “It’s possible that you’re right” is interpreted by the believer who needs it to be true as a guarantee. But the issue is the dishonesty of even having made the claim.
What I do increasingly often is to say, “Okay, sure. You want me to pay attention to this claim. What happens if you’re wrong? If in five years the consensus is that this finetuning disappears, will you deconvert from Christianity [or Islam or whatever]?”
Of course not. They didn’t become believers because they thought that the best answer to ongoing questions in cosmology was a God theory. So why should I put more weight on their theory than they do?
Because this kind of argument is a memetic parasite on rationality. For those people who would take a scientific claim seriously, or at least a nod to it seriously, this argument has appeal. It doesn’t matter that the form of the argument isn’t actually scientific, it doesn’t matter if no believer anywhere (yes, not even the weirdos who claim they became creationists after believing in evolution) thought that way. They want us to do as we say we do, not as they do.
Sorry, but that’s dirty pool. Tell me why you believe what you do. Not someone else. You. That doesn’t have to be walking me through all the ways you arrived at your current position over time, but at least the current ideas you find convincing.
Apologists don’t do this because those of them capable of the introspection and honesty to admit why they believe aren’t going to find something that sounds compelling to say out loud. So everything else is ritualized rhetorical pattycake. And we should stop playing.
That’s all very well put. And an excellent addition of perspective well worth reading here. I concur entirely.
Fred wrote:
“As an example, “You can’t explain why something came from nothing. The Big Bang doesn’t explain that. Therefore I will evoke something that came from nothing”. They invoke an apparently unbreakable rule then immediately break it, and get annoyed when everyone else points out how obvious this is.”
To try and get around that problem they state the following:
“Anything that came to exist must have a cause.
Since the universe came to exist it must have a cause.”
So in their minds they are not breaking any rules because as they see it the scientific Big Bang theory establishes that the Universe had a beginning.
Furthermore something that has always existed must be the catalyst/agent that started all of this.
They propose that thing to be an eternal God.
I think you missed Fred’s point. Solving the problem by positing a God is just violating their own rule against things existing for no reason. It doesn’t help to say “well it just always existed,” because Big Bang Cosmologists can just say the same about any starting point they posit (like an initial quantum singularity). And they’ll have the advantage then, because we actually have evidence those kinds of things exist; not so for eternal superghosts.
This is why the Fine Tuning and Cosmological Arguments never actually work unless one presumes as a hidden premise the Ontological Argument: they need God to necessarily exist (not merely possibly exist); without that, they can’t get to any of the conclusions they want in either the Fine Tuning or the Cosmological arguments. But if you could prove God necessarily existed, you would never need the Fine Tuning or Cosmological arguments; whereas if you can’t prove that, you can’t ever use the Fine Tuning or Cosmological arguments.
That’s the Catch-22 I’m pointing out, and that Fred is expanding on.
It becomes clearer when you realize “God always existed” doesn’t mean anything when you’ve just argued time had a beginning. For then God has not existed any longer than anything else has. So he becomes explanatorily superfluous. Insisting God just “started existing one day” without a cause is really exactly the same thing as saying a quantum singularity did. No amount of semantics about “always existing” can get you around that problem. There was nothing. And then suddenly there is a God, and a time and space for him to exist—for no reason. The theistic model is self-contradictory if it does not acknowledge that. Yet it is self-refuting if it does acknowledge that.
Catch-22 again.
They really can’t win here.
Yeah, that is literally exactly the two-step I was talking about, and a particularly frustrating one.
Carroll pointed out to Craig that “cause” in some Aristotelian sense is just not how scientists think anymore, such that answering “But what’s the cause?” in response to some materially complete description of the universe is like asking of a cell phone camera “But where does the film go?” Martymer has made this same point, that causes are ways systems evolve given prior states. Asking “But what caused before the first prior state?” is asking what the point is that’s north of the North Pole. So the entire question is mistaken in the first place. Aristotle characterized different causes, but he didn’t seem particularly attentive to multiple causes of the same kind all being necessary because he lived before modern science (and particularly social science) narrowed in on the statistical tools necessary to model a multi-causal world with things like risk factors and necessary but not sufficient conditions. I am reminded of Lewontin pointing out that the discovery of tuberculosis as a bacillus didn’t have any major impact on its decline, but social factors did, such that one can say that “the cause” of TB is the social factors that reduce immunity and not the bacillus because for the vast majority of people they will not catch TB if they are not, say, being burnt by the hearth all the time.
So the apologist first makes up a rule that isn’t even in science by importing some pre-medieval nonsense that even Aristotle would have been firmly embarrassed of… then immediately negates their own premise by introducing something that has no cause and we are not even supposed to ask about there needing to be one. That’s fallacious reasoning top to bottom. You can’t introduce a premise in one syllogism that you then contradict in another.
At best, the apologist has shown that there needs to be some kind of answer for why the universe in and of itself can be uncaused, or that there needs to be some kind of causal principle (which is still not actually best supplied by a god). Heck, the apologist may even have just shown that we will never have an answer for the cause of a complete universe. But they can’t get God from that. They have to just assume an array of rules to get there (“You need a personal cause because we always see personal causes need other personal causes”, which is actually false and irrelevant because it is a hasty generalization). I find it hilarious how Craig just rattles off the list of every property he wants God to have once he’s gotten the idea that a God exists, and how utterly specious and non-systemic the reasons he has are for why we need it to be his God (“God is trinitarian because it has to love itself”, which not only ignores that people love themselves just fine and pretends to put some limit on God’s love based on supposed human limits which is deeply silly but also ignores that the trinity is a logical contradiction and that even if it needed to be a God with multiple parts that still doesn’t have to mean three instead of two or four or a hundred). What they haven’t shown is that the universe needs a cause. They know it doesn’t, because they of all people know that not everything needs a cause. (And arguing that it does is a straightforward fallacy of composition, a point that Craig could only respond to Carroll on with an argument from incredulity).
Look at what the apologist is doing.
Apologist: “Everything needs a cause”.
Non-Apologist: “Does it? What makes you say that? Inductive reasoning, right?”
Apologist: “Oh, come on, bicycles don’t appear from nowhere!”
Non-Apologist: “How do you know? You only ever see bicycles not appear from somewhere, because you are always looking at a somewhere”.
Apologist: “Anyways, when we are being serious, therefore the universe needs a cause”.
Non-Apologist: “I guess?”
Apologist: “And therefore God!”
Non-Apologist: “Does God need a cause?”
Apologist: “Nope. By fiat I get to declare that God is uncaused”.
Non-Apologist: “Then by fiat I declare that the universe is uncaused”.
Apologist: “But everything needs a cause!”
See the problem? The apologist has concluded, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that they get to make a logical move (“God needs no cause”) that cannot apply to the universe. If they can prove cosmologically that the universe needs a cause, then great, that’s a start. But that would be a conclusion from actual evidence… and they never have any.
They also cheat by conflating the kind of causes. They talk about how everything needs a kind of cause within the universe, which is the only evidence we have of anything. (One common consequence of this is conflating creation ex materia with creation ex nihilo). But then they invoke a cause outside of the universe, a supernatural cause and more importantly a metaphysical one. They use the fact that this metaphysical principle they just invoked has a face and a beard to disguise the fact that that’s what they did. It may be that there’s some metaphysical principle (something like Richard’s “Nothings always produce something because nothing by definition prevents them from doing so”) that produces universes and guarantees their consistent function.
All of which is an excuse to turn off their brain, defend their dogma and stop acting as a scientist does. Because “God did it” is a useless answer. We would need to know how.
So, yeah, this is literally exactly what I’m talking about.
“But the important point here is that this means the Fine-Tuning Argument is really just a fig leaf for trying to pass off an Ontological Argument without ever actually defending it. If the Ontological Argument fails, so does every Fine-Tuning Argument.”
I think it was Kant who made a point that every argument for the existence of god presupposes OA. That would another addition to the collection.
Boy that is a lot of words.
I think that more simply stated:
The aggregate of the fundamental constants of the universe that require an absurdly perfect balance to allow the possibility of living organisms naturally arising indicate that the observable universe contains insufficient information to conclusively determine the origin of the universe.
That’s a non sequitur. And isn’t a thesis in my article.
Which could maybe be true if we had 100% knowledge of the universe now. We don’t. So we don’t know if the finetuning is actually suspicious. So it’s a God (or origin) of the gaps.
Richard Carrier,
In the comment section of your article “Could Be a 38% Chance We Are the Only Civilization in the Known Universe” [https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14402], you said:
“Of course, the actual universe is vastly larger than the observable part of it. In fact the universe might be infinitely large; but observations fix its minimum size at 250 times larger than the observable part by volume (several times the observed radius). And that’s just the minimum. The currently most credible cosmological theory—the inflationary Big Bang model—entails the actual cosmos has a radius 10^23 times greater than observed. That’s a 10 followed by 23 zeroes. An absurdly vast size. ”
an infinite universe…I’m no expert, but it just seems a bit too extraordinary to be true. I also wasn’t aware that the universe being “10^23 times greater” that what is already observed was the “most credible”, or most likely estimate to be true, instead of the often cited estimate of “250 times larger” that what is observed. Are you sure you got that one right?
These differing possibilities would have a considerable impact on certain fine tuning arguments about the probability of abiogenesis.
I am perplexed. That is in the text of that article, not its “comment section.” And as you already quote, the answer to your question is given right there, in the very text you are quoting: “observations fix its minimum size at 250 times larger than the observable part by volume (several times the observed radius). And that’s just the minimum. The currently most credible cosmological theory—the inflationary Big Bang model—entails the actual cosmos has a radius 10^23 times greater than observed.” And that then gives a link over that number explaining it (“if the universe expanded at the speed of light during inflation, then it ought to be 10^23 times bigger than the visible universe), which is where you must direct your question: the actual scientists who calculated that number; I’m just the messenger, dude.
And as the article you somehow don’t know you are quoting explains, this very definitely affects biogenesis arguments; but it won’t affect fine-tuning arguments. Fine-tuning is the argument that the fundamental constants were so arranged as to ensure a biogenesis event; that is not the same argument as that biogenesis itself is too improbable to have happened in this univese without a miracle. Those two arguments actually contradict each other (the latter presumes this universe has not been adequately designed to produce life on its own; the former presumes that it must have been).