Jeff Lowder fine tuning bait and switch

Jeff Lowder at Secular Outpost, argues against William Lane Craig's fine tuning argument. His objective is to show that even if the argument is valid it doesn't establish probability for God.

Lowdwer's syllogism of the argument:

1. The life-permitting nature of the universe’s initial conditions is either the result of chance, necessity or design. (Premise)
2. It is not the result of chance or necessity. (Premise)
3. Therefore, it is the result of design. (From 1 and 2)

This argument is clearly valid, i.e., the conclusion follows from the premises. We want to know the probability of (3). The probability of (3) will depend upon the probability of (2). If we have a very weak degree of belief that (2) is true, say we think Pr(2)=0.25, then, by itself, this argument only warrants the belief Pr(3)=0.25. N.B. I’m not claiming that (2) has an exact numerical probability equal to 0.25; that value is simply an example to illustrate the point.

Excluding it as a result of chance means showing the improbability of a given variable. For example hitting the target levels necessary for large open bodies of water on a planet. If that is extremely improbable then it's less likely that it "just happened" as the result of chance. The very fact of target levels and the extreme improbability of hitting them all argues against necessity. The universe did not have to turn out as it did. as Paul Davies Tells us:

Paul Davies:

"You might be tempted to suppose that any old rag-bag of laws would produce a complex universe of some sort, with attendant inhabitants convinced of their own specialness. Not so. It turns out that randomly selected laws lead almost inevitably either to unrelieved chaos or boring and uneventful simplicity. Our own universe is poised exquisitely between these unpalatable alternatives, offering a potent mix of freedom and discipline, a sort of restrained creativity. The laws do not tie down physical systems so rigidly that they can accomplish little, but neither are they a recipe for cosmic anarchy. Instead, they encourage matter and energy to develop along pathways of evolution that lead to novel variety-what Freeman Dyson has called the principle of maximum diversity: that in some sense we live in the most interesting possible universe."

"Some scientists have tried to argue that if only we knew enough about the laws of physics, if we were to discover a final theory that united all the fundamental forces and particles of nature into a single mathematical scheme, then we would find that this superlaw, or theory of everything, would describe the only logically consistent world. In other words, the nature of the physical world would be entirely a consequence of logical and mathematical necessity. There would be no choice about it. I think this is demonstrably wrong. There is not a shred of evidence that the universe is logically necessary. Indeed, as a theoretical physicist I find it rather easy to imagine alternative universes that are logically consistent, and therefore equal contenders for reality." [2]

We can eliminate necessity and even Andre Linde himself tells us the probabilities are overwhelmingly against life, meaning it is most unlikely that the universe's life bearing aspect would come about randomly.[3] That means premise two checks out and thus the argument is valid. But I think Lowder is attacking the soundness by brining arguing that the fine turning argument doesn't include all relevant material, that will change the probability factors.

At this point he's going to pull an interesting bait and switch. He's going to transpose fine tuning into design argument so he can argue the counter design argument. But first he brings up the idea that FT dies not reflect all the data:

Second, such arguments fail to embody all of the relevant, available evidence. .... It may well be the case that, by itself, the life-permitting nature of the universe’s initial conditions does make it more probable than not that the universe is designed. But that doesn’t entail that, all things considered, the total available, relevant evidence makes it more probable than not that the universe is designed. In order to defend that claim, you have to look at all of the evidence, including the evidence of evolution, biological role of pain and pleasure, nonresistant nonbelief, etc. And once you do that, it’s far from obvious that the total evidence favors theism, much less Christian theism.

What he's calling "relevant data is anti-design data, FT is a from of design but does it have the same implications such that anti-design evidence would  count against it? Most of us know that evolution is not counter evidence to God. God can use evolution so how is that counter? There is the extinction aspect. The cruelty of nature. He fleshes some of it out thusly:

We also know that so much of our universe is hostile to life due to things such as containing vast amounts of empty space, temperatures near absolute zero, cosmic radiation, and so forth. Given that our universe is life-permitting, the fact that so much of it is hostile to life is much more probable on no-design than on design. So once all of the evidence about cosmic life-permitting conditions has been fully stated, however, it’s far from obvious that facts about cosmic “fine-tuning” favor design over non-design.

That only matters because he's brining in the conventional design arguments or bait and witch. In the conventional design argument the argument turns u[on things looking designed fitting together and seeming like the result of a plan. That's why empty space life threatening aspects are taken as counter design evidence they don't paper life so they are not part of a plan. All he's really doing there is to turn the conditions that make life improbable (counts for FT) into evidence for unplanned universe. That's because he switched arguments. In FT the only appearance of planning is so many totally improbable things working out. All that empty space bad water and so on is actually pro design if the deign is FT. In other words with FT the only aspects of design are where the target levels are hit and how overwhelming  the odds against hitting them. None of his counter design stuff really matters.

 

 

 

Lowder also said:

on the basis of Purdue University philosopher Paul Draper’s work, Craig’s appeal to cosmic fine-tuning is a textbook example of the fallacy of understated evidence. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the life-permitting conditions of our universe are more likely on design than on no-design. That fact–if it is a fact–hardly exhausts what we know about the habitability of our universe. [4]

 

That's just a fancy way of reiterating that one must include all the material so I've already dealt with it.

 

 

 

 

 see my FT argument on Religious a priori 




[1] Jeffery Jay Lowder, "WLC Denies That Anyone Has Ever Died a Sincere Seeker Without Finding God" Secular Out Post, January 2, 2016 (blog URL)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/01/02/wlc-denies-that-anyone-has-ever-died-a-sincere-seeker-without-finding-god/  Accessed 1/10/16
all quotations from Lowder will be from this source.

[2] Paul Davies  "Physics and The Mind of G: The Tempelton Prize Address,"First Things, August 5 (1995) On line URL:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/08/003-physics-and-the-mind-of-god-the-templeton-prize-address-24  accessed 1/20/16

[3] Andre Linde,"The Self  Reproducing Inflationary Universe, Scientifi9c American Nov 19994, 48-55

Now Linde is confident that the new inflationary theires will explain all of this, and indeed states that their purpose is to revolve the ambiguity with which cosmologists are forced to cope. His co-author in inflationary theory. Physicist Paul Steinhardt, had doubts about it as early as his first paper on the subject (1982). He admits that the point of the theory was to eliminate fine tuning (a major God argument), but the theory only works if one fine tunes the constants that control the inflationary period.

John Horgan, “Physicist slams Cosmic Theory he Helped Conceive,” Scientific American Blogs, December 1, 2014. on line, URL http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-slams-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/ accessed 10/5/15. Horgan interviews Steinhardt.

“The whole point of inflation was to get rid of fine-tuning – to explain features of the original big bang model that must be fine-tuned to match observations. The fact that we had to introduce one fine-tuning to remove another was worrisome. This problem has never been resolved."

[4] Fallacy of understated evidence

(Taken from Secular Outpost):

INTRODUCTION: "Paul Draper has usefully identified a fallacy of inductive reasoning he calls the 'fallacy of understated evidence.' According to Draper, in the context of arguments for theism and against naturalism, proponents of a theistic argument are guilty of this fallacy if they 'successfully identify some general fact F about a topic X that is antecedently more likely on theism than on naturalism, but ignore other more specific facts about X, facts that, given F, are more likely on naturalism than on theism.'[1]

 

My forgotten Existential Theology

Paul Tillich 1886-1965

Existentialism was huge 60 years ago, it's totally forgotten today, being out of sink with the zeitgeist of scientism. I don't care I am an existnetial9sit, it give meaningto my life ant existentialism with his self authentication must beprepered to disregard popilarity. How do I define the term? Existentialism, is an intellectual movement, essentially a philosophy but it's themes developed beyond philosophy and sppread over all hummanties.It centers upon the notion that humans are compeslled to be free, It seeks to find one's meaning in the realization of what to do with freedom. It tends to be highly individualistic and not systematic those are reflections of the consequences of freedom which culentates in individuality. It is often associated with niotion of life as meaningless or absurd. Exitentialissm has aso been associated with atheism and it is from the rootless notion of the abyss in place of God that existentialists such as Sartre and Neitzshe base their notions of life as meaningless and absurd.

As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness. Although the most popular voices of this movement were French, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as compatriots such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the conceptual groundwork of the movement was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century by pioneers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century German philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers as well as prominent Spanish intellectuals José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. The core ideas have also been illuminated in key literary works. Beyond the plays, short stories, and novels by French luminaries like Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there were Parisian writers such as Jean Genet and André Gide, the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the work of Norwegian authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, and the German-language iconoclasts Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. The movement even found expression across the pond in the work of the “lost generation” of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, mid-century “beat” authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs, and the self-proclaimed “American existentialist,” Norman Mailer (Cotkin 2003, 185).[1]

I was strongly drawn to existentialism when I was an atheist, when I became a Christian I was naturally interested in findig out about Christian existetialism.I had heard of it, it seemed silly to me from an atheist point of view. Wth religious experience it suddenly made a lot of sense I began to define myself as a christian existntaist.To me this means an empnasis upon personal relationship with God,meakomga leap of faith, placing above systematic theology and chruch authority, although it's not an excuse to ignore either. It also means an awareness of God as the source of meaning and rationality in life.

Free Will and The Leap Of Faith: The Christian Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers: (1883-1969) argued that the concept of Free Will makes all Faith essentially (pun intended) Existential:  that one is ultimately free to choose or not choose faith, or, for that matter, which or what faith to choose from:  you must choose whether to be a Catholic, or a Baptist, or a Hindu, or a Muslim, or an atheist. Ultimately, you and you alone are responsible for this choice.[2]

Soren Kierkegaard(1813-1855). SK is super nuanced and provides the reader witha rich world one could spend one's life in his writtings,I aca only toucj the surface SK lived in a society where everyone was a christian,what that meant in his setting was that everyone went to chruch follow teachings by wrote and never had to think about it the ret 0f the week, For Kierkegaard this was abhorrent,for his faith was an individual choice based upon a leap of faith.[3]

In 1846, Kierkegaard wrote, "The leap becomes easier in the degree to which some distance intervenes between the initial position and the place where the leap takes off. And so it is also with respect to a decisive movement in the realm of the spirit.[4]

Twp Other major christian existentialists are Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Reinhold Neibhur. Tillich was a major thinker of the 20th century and led the way in Christian eistential thought. He was German and came to America in the 30s to escape the Nazis.His popularizing work on Christian existentialism is The Courage to Be.[5] But one of my favorite books from which on can learn a great deal about theology, including the existential, is Tillilch's History of Christian Doctrine.[6]Tilluch jas been ny favrite theologian for a long time,I am especially drawn to his notions about God as tye object of humanities ultimate concern. Out of this notion that God is being itself. He also put that as God is the ground of being.

Niebuhr (1892=1971) was German American. He is best known for his great great book Moral Man, and immoral Society.[7] One doesn't hear much of Neibuhr now days but he was a major figure in the 20th cetntury.He was oneof the firt acadmics to oppose the war in Vietnam.Two things I like about his thought: (2) People can be moral but in group and as society they have a harder time, it's much easier to be carried away by class interests in the group. (2) He translated the literal view of doctrines like the Genesis creation myth in terms of Anxiety broughto y sekf transcedence is what leads to sin. One finds this in his major work, The Nature and Destiny of Man, in two volumes.[8]



NOTES

[1] Kevin Aho, "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = .

[2] "Christian And Theological Existentialism," University of Idaho, no date https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/lecture%20notes/christian_existentialism.htm

[3]Ibid.

[4] Soren Keirkegaard,"concludig unscientific post script to Philosophical fragments....," Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, pp. 326–327.

[5] Paul Tillich, The courage to be,New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

[6]______________, the history of christian thought, New York City:Touchstone books, 1972.

[7]Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society two volumes,Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013, originally published by Scribner in 1932

. [8]_______________, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol I, and II, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press; 1996/ first published 1943 taken from his Gilford lectures.