In my last post I compared our self-policing of facts that might chip away at our beliefs about environmental religion to lying for God in medieval and ancient times – something the writer of the epistles seems to boast of doing. Lying for God, on matters of science, may still be with us today.
William Lane Craig argues, in a line of thinking he calls reasonable faith (see his video), that the apparent fine tuning of the universe allowing life in it to exist can only be explained as the work a designer. For Craig that designer happens to be the God of evangelical Protestantism.
Fine tuning has two different but related meanings in physics. The first deals mainly with theory, the second mainly with observation – something for Descartes, and something for Bacon.
In theory selection, fine tuning refers to how the details of a theory might need to be tweaked to make them fit observations. For example, in Ptolemaic astronomy, as used prior to Copernicus, the model only matched measurements if the planets’ epicycles stayed put in comparison to the straight line connecting the earth and sun and if the periods of the epicycles were exactly one year. Given those restrictions, the Ptolemaic model made good predictions. But why would those particular quantities have such relations? No reason could be found other than that they needed to be that way for the model to work. In Ptolemy’s defense, he did not believe the model represented reality; it merely gave right predictions. But the church believed it; and they forbade the teaching of the Copernican model. Copernicus’s model gave no better predictions; and it didn’t explain the lack of parallax in star positions or why a rotating earth didn’t suffer from great winds. But, Copernicus didn’t rely on fine tuning of his theory. What criterion is most important in theory selection – absence of fine tuning, predictive success, or explanatory power? That’s a topic for another time I guess. Read Paul Feyerabend on the matter if it grabs you.
In modern physics, fine tuning more commonly refers to our observation that many of the measured values that are, to our knowledge, constant across the universe have values that, were they even slightly different, would prevent life from being possible anywhere. Martin Rees, perhaps the first scientist to delve deep into the matter, identified six dimensionless constants (ratios of things we measure in physics, basically) on which life as we know it depends. These include the ratio of electromagnetic strength to the strength of gravity, the ratio of the mass density of the universe to the density required to halt expansion, and the so-called cosmological constant, the ratio of dark energy density in the universe to the density that would be needed to halt its expansion.
Popular examples of such fine tuning include the claim that if the electromagnetism/gravity ratio differed by an almost infinitesimal amount – say 1 part in 10 to the 40th power (1E-40) – things would be very quiet indeed. With a bit more gravity, stars would be too small and would burn out far too fast. Tweaking the other constants makes things even worse. Adjusting the cosmological constant to a few parts in ten to the 120 in either direction would make the universe either expand too fast for galaxies and stars to form or to collapse upon itself just after the big bang. These are unimaginably large/small numbers. A few scientists argue that our thinking is wrong here – again a topic for later. If interested, see Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us by Victor J. Stenger.
William Lane Craig accepts that fine tuning exists, giving three possible explanations: physical necessity, chance, or design. Craig rules out necessity because a life-prohibiting universe is easily imaginable. He notes that the probabilities for these incredibly fine-tuned values to occur by chance is ridiculously remote, thus leaving design as the only alternative.
Now I can’t know Craig’s motives or his state of mind, but his argument here is consistent with someone who knows more than he’s telling. That is, Craig is clearly highly intelligent; he has command of analytic philosophy, mathematics and at least a decent knowledge of physics. Yet he starts his fine tuning evangel with an egregious example of privileged hypothesis on top of false choice – just to start. Is he sure the given alternatives are the only live options? And can chance be ruled out in a multiverse model? I.e., in a model with 10 to the 500 instances of what we call our universe, you’re pretty much bound to get a few that look like ours with randomized values for the physical constants.
But we need not start with an exotic option. Did Craig rule out combinations of necessity and chance? Did he challenge the problem statement from the beginning? Many other have – questioning the notion that these measure values aren’t environmental constants at all; perhaps we’ve misconceived an underlying relationship that ties the values together in the same way pi is tied to 3.141592. Part of Stenger’s work is along these lines.
Having given his rationale for preferring the designer hypothesis to an artificially restricted set of alternatives, Craig then takes the leap from designer to the God of evangelical Christianity. That is, Krishna, Zeus, Ahura Mazda and the spaghetti monster are off the table. Craig holds that a being with unlimited cosmic power – who could construct any universe of his choosing – used his infinite powers to fine tune that universe to the precise values of constants that would allow that universe to support galaxies, stars and life. It’s hard for me to believe Craig doesn’t see the contradiction in an argument involving a God of ultimate power being bound by laws of physics. That is, Craig’s God is praiseworthy for essentially outwitting – by a tiny margin – physical laws that are nearly out of his control. This seems a better argument for the religion of the Assyrians than for evangelical Christianity; it recalls Marduk’s narrow defeat over Tiamat.
In Reasonable Faith, Craig deals often with the concept of insincere arguments. Do his religious convictions cause him to be blind to elementary fallacies and contradictions in his own doctrine? Or is he simply lying for the cause?
“…unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem.” – William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd edn., p.59
The Multidisciplinarian 