Indeed. That’s my point too.

I even run that specific comparison in my peer-reviewed chapter on the design argument in TEC, soon to appear again in a new anthology I’ll announce later this year.

Thus the result does not reliably track reality, and gives no indication at all of which universe we are in.

To my simple minded way of thinking this seems like proof that the argument is bad.

I think the FTA is one of the most deceptive arguments for god, not the best one.

Fair.

Though, IMO, I mean those to be the same thing, i.e. as there are no good arguments, the only way to get a “best” one is to get one that is “the most deceptive.”

And kudos for recommending Stenger! Just be aware that book is a bit out of date now (e.g. valid critiques have since deflated some of his arguments such as the Monkey God program). So it’s to be used with caution. The general points remain valid; but how you’d defend them have to be reengineered a bit to deflate the inevitable straw men (which gets us right back to the FTA being “the most deceptive” argument for God: it’s a Gauntlet Monster Generator of fallacious deflections).

But note my article already covers these points (e.g. the gravitational constant doesn’t exist, it’s just a unit converter; sophisticated FTAs have already abandoned the boiling point of water as a fundamental constant; the cosmological constant might not even exist and can vary widely; etc.). Especially your last one: that is in fact the Sober, Ikeda, Jefferys argument I discuss in detail (it’s the Bayesian argument I conclude with).

I think the FTA is one of the most deceptive arguments for god, not the best one. If you do not know about physics, at least on a university grade level, you won’t understand the argument at all.

I have two main objections, one uses physics and is hard to grasp (I studied engineering before I switched to psychology). I’m referring to this book: Stenger, Victor J. The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning : Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us. Prometheus Books, 2011.

In his book, Stenger proves that you can derive most of the “fine-tuned constants” from natural laws. For most of the constants, you simply can show that they could not have any other value. Gerard t’Hooft won in 1999 a Nobel Prize for showing why this is the case: All so-called fine-tuning constants are simply constants that are used to convert from one arbitrarily chosen measurement system into another one. Like, if you convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, you need a constant to do that. Celsius is arbitrarily picked: At sea level, water freezes at 0° Celsius and boils at 100° Celsius. It varies with air pressure. One second is just one heartbeat. One meter is one step for an average man, and so on.

If you use a normalized measurement system, most fine-tuning constants become a value of ONE. That is called the natural value of a constant. For example, take the most well-known formula in all physics:

E = M * c^2 (energy is mass multiplied by the square of light speed)

In a normalized measurement system, the value of c = 1.

So you get:

E = M * c^2 (and c = 1)

E = M * 1^2

E = M * 1

E = M (energy and mass are equivalent)

But you require a lot of knowledge to grasp the core idea of that. It looks a bit like Hocus Pocus.

The cosmological constant is different, though. We even do not know the exact value of that constant, and there is nowadays some doubt that it is constant at all. It might vary in the universe.

The problem with this refutation is that most people won’t understand it.

Here is simpler one, and no, it is not about the multiverse. That is the argument I use when I encounter a believer using that argument:

Imagine, we know that there are two universes: A and B. We know that A was created by god, and B was not. Don’t ask how we know this, this is a thought experiment. Maybe god has told us? What we don’t is: Do we live in A or B? How can we decide?

If we live in B, there is only one possibility: All the fine-tuning constants must allow life, and they have to have a natural value. But in universe A things are a lot different: Yes, god could have chosen the same values as in B. He has a different option, though: He could have chosen values that do not permit life, and created life instead.

In universe B, the probability that all values allow life is 100 %. But not in universe A, because that depends on a decision made by god, and he is in no way restricted to natural values.

We can only know that we live in A when the fine-tuning constants do NOT allow life as we know. The argument is exactly the false way around! Instead of arguing that the constants allow life, you must argue that they don’t permit life to establish an argument for god. Everything else is neutral, it does not show that there is a god or none. So the argument fails.

And that is something that most people can understand. Most arguments against the FTA go simply “over the head” of most people, like my first argument. Notice, I don’t claim that I have invented that argument. If you take a look at what Sean Carroll said in his debate with Craig, you will notice that he has said something similar, and that was my starting point.

You are correct. All bad arguments emotionally persuade because they look like good arguments. But aren’t.

If it were the case that there were only one solar system (ours) and the moon was precisely positioned (it isn’t) then this would be an argument for design (maybe not a winner, but at least it would move the needle). But this isn’t the only system and the moon isn’t even necessary much less precise in any way. It has utility. But conflating useful with necessary, and ballpark with precise, is an equivocation fallacy. Which “sounds” like a good argument. But it’s not.

I haven’t heard back from him from my e-mail (understandably, I may try to find a blog post of his that’s close enough on topic that I can ask for clarification on), but I am just guessing that the gap between the 120 and the 123 is because Carroll is one of the people who agrees that the entropy couldn’t have been as naively low as one gets from basic theory but that there’s a tiny degree of early entropy (which is consistent in that he talks about the boundary condition of a period of low entropy). The only other thing I could think of is that he used the 120 instead of the 123 to make it rhetorically line up better, but I really doubt that’s likely: He’s far too good of a communicator to have made an estimation error like that and it’s also better for his argument for it to be even higher.

Correct.

Which is not 10^10^120 (much less 10^10^123). It’s just 10^120.

Hence the confusion.

It’s also not entropy being measured here, but theory error.

Yeah.

The use of 120 is what throws me. I think he means 123. Hence I think he is garbling together two different things: Penrose’s “zero entropy” calculation (which is obsolete and does not in fact describe the entropic state of the Big Bang) which has the power of 10 with a power of 123; and the cosmological constant which has no powers of ten and only a power of 120.

But one could say, I guess, the 120 is just “rounding” near to 123. It just risks confusing people because of it matching the 120 in lambda. And he needn’t maintain that Penrose’s entropy is correct to argue it doesn’t get the Christian’s conclusion even were it correct.

Ohhh! I hadn’t finished the lecture yet. I didn’t realize that a similar number comes up later in the lecture (though not really similar). Later Dr. Carroll in his video mentions the entropy of the universe is 10^10-120 which is insanely low. This number is wayyyy lower than the cosmological constant. It is so low that it is total over kill to set up for life. You don’t need fine tuning. Just like shaking up oil an water, you have a time of middle entropy where there is plenty of complexity for a time. Life and its complexity would not be unexpected.