Do We Live in a Fine-Tuned Universe?

Kevin Harris: We’ve been watching excerpts from a three-hour debate between Dr. Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute and science journalist Phil Halper on Justin Brierley’s show.^[1] They talked mostly about Big Bang cosmology, but also got into fine-tuning and the fine-tuning argument, which we'll look at today. Here's how Steve defines fine-tuning. First clip.

Dr. Meyer: The idea of fine-tuning is that there are a number of parameters that fall within very narrow ranges, outside of which life and even stable galaxies and even basic chemistry would be impossible. And the existence of those extremely finely tuned parameters and their importance for there being a life-friendly universe provides evidence of a fine-tuner. The idea in the theistic argument is that we have a lot of ordinary experience. Our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, shows that when we see finely tuned systems, invariably they are the product of a mind. Whether we're talking about a French recipe or an internal combustion engine or the way in which a piece of software runs a piece of hardware, that type of fine-tuning, where there's a vast ensemble of possibilities, only very few of which will yield a propitious outcome, those are systems which invariably are the products of mind. And so when we see that feature of a vast ensemble of possibilities, only very few of which will yield a life-friendly universe, it is a natural conclusion based on our ordinary experience of cause and effect to infer that there was a designing intelligence. Thus, for example, Sir Fred Hoyle, who was one of the first scientists to discover some of the fundamental fine-tuning parameters, those related to the formation of carbon in the universe, said that a common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics.

Kevin Harris: Steve later says that there are two aspects to fine-tuning: the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe and the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of the universe. Bill, could you comment on that and also on Steve's definition?

Dr. Craig: Here Meyer tries to place the fine-tuning for life within a broader concept of fine-tuning. This strikes me as unnecessary. The fine-tuning that we're talking about here concerns the extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values for nature's fundamental constants and quantities. And the question is what is the best explanation for why these constants and quantities have values that fall into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range.

Now, fine-tuning is not about the laws of nature. The laws of nature, rather, are assumed to be the same, but then one varies the values of the constants and quantities. It is precisely because the laws of nature are held constant that we can predict the results of varying the constants and the quantities. And what one discovers, as Steve says, is that the slightest variation in these values proves to be disastrous.

Kevin Harris: Next, Justin asked for Phil's impression as an atheist about the fine-tuning argument. Here's what he says.

Justin Brierley: And I have to say, Phil, even among many of the atheist thinkers I've spoken to, Richard Dawkins, Peter Millican, others, they've often said, actually, if there's one argument that has given me pause for thought, the fine-tuning of the universe is pretty remarkable. Now, do you in any way question the fact of fine-tuning, even if you perhaps are going to go in a different direction in terms of explaining that fine-tuning?

Phil Halper: Well, I think it's better for me to reveal not what I think, but what physicists think, because I've done some surveys with physicists about what they think. So, how about we do that?

Justin Brierley: Yeah, let's find out.

Phil Halper: Okay. So, I've done two surveys. One was at a conference in Copenhagen organized by the Niels Bohr Institute. It had leading physicists there, very, very high top names in the field. We've then teamed up with the American Physical Society, and we've done what I think is the largest survey of physicists ever. Roughly 1,700 replies we've got. We gave them various options to explain the fine-tuning, and we're going to go from the bottom up.

Okay, so here are the results from our Copenhagen survey. The least popular option by the scientists was selected as the intelligent design option. It got 3% support. So that got 3%.

The next one was necessity. So this is the idea that the constants just have to be what they are. So there's no point arguing about how improbable they are, that there's some mathematical reason why they have to be what they are. You might not know what it is.

Justin Brierley: How many took that?

Phil Halper: So that got 9%.

The next was Darwinian selection. So that got 10%.

Justin Brierley: Yeah. The idea is that the universe can reproduce itself.

Phil Halper: So one way that, for example, Lee Smolin has come up with a particular mechanism, but you could imagine other mechanisms. The idea in Smolin's model is that a black hole could give birth to a new universe. Life just becomes a sort of happy byproduct. So that's Darwinian selection. So that got 10%.

Okay, so number two. . .

Justin Brierley: Multiverse?

Phil Halper: Yes. Multiverse was number two. So that got 24%.

Justin Brierley: What was the number one then?

Phil Halper: The constants of nature are brute facts that need no further explanation.

Kevin Harris: OK. Phil brings out a survey of prominent scientists in the field, the majority of which place fine-tuning at the bottom of plausible explanations and brute fact at the top. Phil admits later on that one should not merely appeal to authority or consensus. So what is the value of surveys like this?

Dr. Craig: Notice that Halper skirted Justin's question. All of these alternatives presuppose that fine-tuning is a fact and then seek to offer different explanations of that fact. Indeed, to say that fine-tuning is a brute fact is to acknowledge that it is a fact, but then refuse to offer an explanation of it. To say that it's a brute fact is not an explanation, but rather is a denial that there is an explanation.

In fact, that is just the chance hypothesis, that the constants and quantities all fell into the infinitesimal life-permitting range by chance. And the question is whether that is indeed the best explanation.

Now, of course, most of these secular scientists will reject the design explanation because that has obvious theistic implications. I mean, who is the designer if not God? So that's hardly surprising. But the important takeaway here is that these scientists all presupposed the fact of fine-tuning, which is what Justin asked about, and then seek to offer these different explanations of that fact.

Kevin Harris: Here's part of Steve's response to the survey. Next clip.

Dr. Meyer: Nothing in what was said responded to the basic logic of the fine-tuning argument, which is that when we find fine-tuning as a feature of systems and we know how they arose, they invariably arose from the activity of an intelligent mind. So we could identify to see if the consensus view of the scientists, that there's nothing there to be explained, whether they would apply that reasoning to any other fine-tuned system that we might see in, say, our terrestrial environment.

If a section of software had to be very finely tuned to produce a certain programming output, would we say, well, the software is just a brute fact of the system, or would we want instead to attribute it to a programmer?

Similarly, if we saw that there were a whole lot of ways of arranging the parts of an internal combustion engine, but only very few of those configured just right will result in the engine working, would we want to say there's nothing there to explain?

I think if we're going to appeal to the consensus of a community, we also need to be aware of what the assumptions of the community are about how they are to practice their discipline. And this applies to both materialist and theistic scientists. And that is that there's been a long-standing convention in science from about the late 19th century, soon after the Darwinian revolution, that science must limit itself to materialistic explanations only. It has a fancy name. It's called the principle of methodological naturalism. I think it's very much at work in the proliferation of naturalistic pre-Big Bang models, all the things we were talking about.

Justin Brierley: Good scientists don't always make good philosophers of science. Then there may be some extra that needs to be done.

Dr. Meyer: They absolutely do not.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, that's a good point about good scientists not necessarily being good philosophers or philosophers of science. What do we need to know about the principle of methodological naturalism?

Dr. Craig: What Steve shows is that if you apply Phil Halper's reasoning to other fields, it would lead to clearly false conclusions. And that suggests that something else is precluding the inference here, namely methodological naturalism. That is to say, the scientist qua scientist can only infer naturalistic causes, and therefore the scientist cannot infer a cosmic designer.

Now, the fundamental fallacy of this assumption is that the philosopher is under no obligation whatsoever to adopt such a methodological constraint. The scientist may be a methodological naturalist as part of his trade, but the philosopher is free to consider all explanations and not just the naturalistic ones.

Kevin Harris: Next up, Phil explains what he hopes the survey will, in fact, accomplish. Here it is.

Phil Halper: What I'm trying to do is to correct the narrative. People are saying, “This is what physicists think,” and they're misrepresenting what physicists think because they haven't actually done the research, and we have.

Dr. Meyer: Well, I'd push back on that. At the back of Luke Barnes's wonderful book, written with his atheistic supervisor from Cambridge, his PhD at Cambridge in physics, he has a list of all the leading physicists who accept that fine-tuning is something that needs to be explained.

And so that first explanation, that it's just a brute fact, maybe many don't. But the fact of fine-tuning is something that's on the table. It's been established by leading physicists.

Phil Halper: But it hasn't been established. This is something that's been disputed. This is the whole point. That's what we're trying to do here. That this has been disputed.

Justin Brierley: You're questioning the very . . .

Dr. Meyer: Are you questioning the fact of fine-tuning or that there's a need for an explanation of fine-tuning?

Phil Halper: Well, it depends what you mean by the fact of fine-tuning.

Kevin Harris: Phil says physicists and cosmologists mean different things by fine-tuning. So I guess you have to be more specific, but he apparently thinks that theists are misusing the data or overstating the case about what cosmologists think.

Dr. Craig: Here, Meyer hits the nail on the head. He says to Halper, “Are you questioning the fact of fine-tuning or the explanation of fine-tuning?” Halper is fundamentally confused in thinking that his survey undermines belief in the fact of fine-tuning. On the contrary, his survey actually establishes that most physicists believe in the fact of fine-tuning. If you say that fine-tuning is a brute fact, then it is a fact.

So Halper is just hopelessly confused here on the difference between the fact of fine-tuning and the best explanation of fine-tuning.

Kevin Harris: Next, Phil asks if they can at least agree that there is a debate as to whether fine-tuning is a legitimate consideration. Here it is.

Phil Halper: Can we just accept that there's a debate about this? Because it's often presented as if it's a fact. Fine-tuning is the fact of fine-tuning. We often hear this, “the fact of fine-tuning,” right, or “the discovery of fine-tuning.” And what I think we can at least concede there's a debate about whether you can even talk about the probabilities for a universe when if there's only one universe, right? There's at least a debate to be had about this. It is not an established fact.

Dr. Meyer: I don't concede that. I think that there’s been very good work on this normalizability problem that shows that it is possible to render very meaningful probabilistic measures of the fine-tuning parameters.

Kevin Harris: Steve doesn't concede on this. Don't you think fine-tuning is established enough to be considered a fact?

Dr. Craig: Yes. Skydivephil is so confused. Notice how in that clip he tries to switch subjects from the explanation of the fact of fine-tuning to probability considerations. He says there's only one universe and so there's no meaningful probability involved. But Meyer is quite correct in talking about the normalizability problem.

This involves setting a range of assumable values for the constants and quantities and comparing it to the life-permitting range, which is virtually infinitesimal by comparison. We should not think of the probabilities involved in terms of frequency, but rather in terms of evidential support or expectation. Is the fine-tuning more to be expected given theism or given naturalism? That's the question.

Kevin Harris: The multiverse comes up in this next part of the conversation. Here's part of what Steve says about it.

Dr. Meyer: Maybe there is a multiverse. I don't know. But the existence of a multiverse would not refute the design argument. Rather, it would underscore it at a different level. The multiverse advocates can't explain fine-tuning without invoking prior fine-tuning. Even if the multiverse is true, you still need intelligent design.

Kevin Harris: A healthy portion of our listeners know what a multiverse is. They know the definition. It might be helpful for those who don't know to give a brief definition of “multiverse.”

Dr. Craig: Well, the idea of a multiverse is that there are many domains, often called universes, in which the values of the constants and quantities vary randomly. And Meyer seems to be saying that the multiverse itself would require fine-tuning, and so one has only kicked the can down the road. One hasn't solved the problem by appealing to the multiverse.

Now, I think that's a good response. But an even more devastating response is the Boltzmann brain problem. If we are just a random member of a multiverse, then it is far, far more probable that we are freak observers with an illusion of a universe around us rather than ordinary observers. The multiverse hypothesis thus leads to skepticism and is therefore self-defeating.

Kevin Harris: If Boltzmann brains had come up, this would have been a four-hour debate we'd be trying to go through, probably.

Here's the next clip. Phil talks about cost versus benefits when considering theories. Next clip.

Phil Halper: So when we think about what theories are plausible, yes, when we have assumptions, that's a cost against the theory. True. But you have to weigh the cost versus the benefits. And string theory does a lot, right? It gives you finite solutions. It gives you a unified theory of all forces. It gives you quantum gravity. Holography came out of string theory. So you have to try and weigh up the cost versus the benefits.

Now, a very important point. Stephen says that God is a simple hypothesis because it just assumes one thing: God. Right? That is, I think, a totally wrong way to think about the cost of assumptions. You don't measure the cost of assumptions by just how many assumptions you have to make. You have to weigh them by their plausibility.

So let's think of, let’s say, one of my favorite magicians is David Blaine, and he does these fantastic tricks. He made the Statue of Liberty disappear. He walked through the Wall of China. He flew around, like a sports arena. A beautiful illusion.

Now, I could say, all right, well, I think the Statue of Liberty one was done by a rotating platform. I think the flying one was done by invisible wires, and they must have had some other mechanisms, and other illusions were done with mirrors. And I could list all the assumptions I need, and it could be a long list.

Alternatively, I could say, “No, no, no, magic. It's just magic.” That’s one assumption. Now, which do you think is simpler?

Justin Brierley: Yeah, arguably the magic one is a simple explanation.

Phil Halper: No, it's not, because it’s the number . . .

Justin Brierley: That’s what I’m saying. I assumed you were going to say it's not helpful because of plausibility.

Phil Halper: It’s not even simpler because we're not judging simplicity by a number of assumptions. You have to weigh them by how plausible they are. If you have a whole bunch of assumptions, but each one has a higher degree of plausibility, then actually they don't come up to very much, right? So inflationary cosmology, if you ask most cosmologists, is pretty damn plausible, right? Same with string theory in the world of quantum gravity. So whereas God is an immaterial mind that can change the constants of nature. Where's the evidence that there's an immaterial mind that can change the constants of nature?

Kevin Harris: A magician that can actually do magic may be a simpler explanation, but how plausible is that? He's comparing that to an unembodied mind that can change nature. Bill?

Dr. Craig: Halper here confuses plausibility with simplicity. What he's talking about now is the prior probability of the theistic hypothesis before you look at the evidence of fine-tuning. The theistic hypothesis has enormous benefits in that it can explain fine-tuning so well in contrast to naturalism.

But his claim is that theism comes at the cost of implausibility, like the magician. But we need to ask ourselves, is that cost really high? Why think that it's implausible that there is a transcendent mind that designed the universe?

If this is to be more than just a naturalistic prejudice, he needs to give us some argument. In fact, the theist can present a cumulative case where the fine-tuning argument is but one of the reasons to postulate such a transcendent mind.

So, to illustrate from this very dialogue, suppose that the kalam cosmological argument establishes that there is a transcendent creator of the universe who brought the universe into being. That will vastly increase the prior probability of theism so that the postulation of a transcendent designer of the universe is not so improbable after all.

So it's all dependent on what you include in your background information when you assess that prior probability. And I don't see any reason to think that the prior probability of theism is low.

Kevin Harris: Here's the final clip for today. Steve answers several objections to fine-tuning. Here it is.

Dr. Meyer: Fine-tuning is the kind of thing you would expect from the activity of a mind, where it's not the kind of thing that you would expect from brute matter.

Secondly, as to the immateriality of the mind, there's a principle in all historical scientific research called the vera causa principle. It also works in physics as well. It's the idea that we should explain things by reference to causes that we know are in operation or by reference to causes that have relevantly similar properties to those that we know are in operation.

For example, Darwin used natural selection to explain the variation and the generation of new biological form by an analogy to what human breeders could do. So he extended known experience of cause and effect by saying that, “My mechanism – natural selection – is relevantly similar, and so that allows me to extrapolate to explain something that I've never seen produced in nature. But because I've seen something relevantly similar, this is a reasonable postulate.”

It's a completely reasonable postulate to say, if we're talking about the origin of the fine-tuning of the universe itself, and if we know that fine-tuning is always produced by a mind, that a mind was at work. What kind of mind? No, not a terrestrial mind, not a mind that's embodied in a physical substrate, but perhaps a mind that is transcendent in the sense that Judeo-Christian theology affirms of God.

So that is, again, an appropriate extrapolation from a causal power that we know from experience, and that type of move is made in explanation by materialists and theists alike.

Kevin Harris: One of the main things that this clarifies for me, or at least gets me thinking, is that it answers the common objection that the universe is a unique case, and so we don't have adequate background information to make comparisons. Steve says the vera causa principle supplies that. And so, is it a guideline for making reasonable extrapolations like he said Darwin did?

Dr. Craig: What Meyer wants to show here is that the prior probability of a transcendent designer is not demonstrably low. Phil has given no argument to show that that prior probability is indeed low.

And the strength of Meyer's case is that we very often appeal to minds as explanations, personal explanations, for effects that we observe. And so it is not unusual that we might appeal to a transcendent designer to explain the fine-tuning of the universe.

Kevin Harris: As we wrap it up today, Bill, I'd like to get your overall impression on what we've heard today. And I'm also curious about the mix of empirical science and philosophy that we've heard.

One may attempt in dialogues concerning God to stay strictly in empirical science, but philosophy always seems to rear its ugly head. In fact, it's necessary. And maybe I have one-on-one private conversations just perhaps talking to people, people who are really scientistically-minded tend to be resistant to philosophy – “What is the empirical scientific backing for what you're saying?” Perhaps a good tact is to establish ahead of time that one would like to include both arenas in the conversation if that’s what you want to do – “Let's talk about the scientific and the philosophical evidence for God.”

Dr. Craig: Yes. The argument from fine-tuning is a metaphysical or philosophical argument, and therefore it is not bound by the methodological naturalism that scientists presuppose in their work.

My overall impression is that I was honestly surprised by how lame Phil Halper's objections to the fine-tuning argument really are. They're based on confusions and misunderstandings and therefore are very weak.^[2]