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You're at this point arguing against a position I haven't taken.
If there are an infinite number of tickets then the odds of any individual slob winning are virtually zero, yet win someone must.
We're basically just rehashing another one of the stock arguments yet again. Really, I'd like to see you apply that reasoning consistently across the board. Every stone in the world is idiosyncratic in its shape, so coming across a perfect cube shouldn't give you pause. If you're playing poker with someone and they get royal flushes 10 turns in a row, there's no reason to suspect cheating, since it's about as probable as any other specific configuration. Any set of hands is unlikely, right? I suppose if you detect a radio signal from the heavens that appears to be sending out primes in sequential order, you should just shrug your shoulders and go on with your day, since it could also just be random noise. Right? There's nothing to explain.
Then there's the fact that we don't even know how many drawings there have been.
Sure? Yes, the whole infinite-drawings explanation is indeed a possible solution. I'm atheist and don't think a magic man did it at all. I'm generally against jumping to conclusions on the issue; rather I'm saying there is something there which does appear to be strange, I reject assertions that there is nothing weird about the apparent fine-tuning, and note that there are a bunch of possible explanations virtually all of which can't be supported.
I don’t have nearly as much certainty as you’re imputing onto me. Perhaps model your opponent correctly first before trying to get into an argument with some imaginary creationist.
That doesn't actually help anything though, because even if it were the case, then I'd just want to know where the hell he came from and what was going on before that.
This is certainly a problem with the religious explanation. It would be more convincing as an argument if infinite regress wasn't also a problem that plagued all cosmologies.
By basic twiddling you mean your absolutely wild and seemingly totally unexamined belief that the laws of physics are arbitrary and were determined by RNG at the Big Bang.
If you're willing to throw out any ability to make any basic Bayesian inferences sure that argument holds water.
And anyway, there's definitionally no such thing as a universe where life is impossible and anyone is around to notice it.
Yes, I see you're cycling through all the stock criticisms that have been levelled ad nauseam. I have always thought this usage of anthropic reasoning was completely flawed. Facts that we deduce from our existence do not explain why we exist at all. The conditional statement "if physical observers then an observer-permitting universe" does not answer the question "why observers?" The anthropic argument explains why we don’t observe a life-prohibiting universe, but it doesn’t explain why a life-permitting one exists.
But some basic twiddling with these free parameters results in universes with barely any chemistry at all. Consider the cosmological constant: a seemingly small increase leads to a universe with no structure whatsoever, and a small decrease (to negative values) leads to no universe whatsoever. If you decrease the mass of the down quark by 8 percent you end up with no atoms. The vast majority of these proposed universes are so simple that there is nowhere for alternative life forms to hide.
But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.
Both you and @JustGottaDoot have raised this objection, and sure, we just have a sample of n=1 and as such we don't have any frequency data through which to ground the idea that the free parameters of our universe are determined in an RNG-like way and are as such extremely low probability.
This is just where noninformative priors come in, where absent any available frequency distribution your first assumption should be the simplest one, say, that the probability of every given outcome is 1/n (n being the number of values a parameter can take). Bayesian reasoning about prior probabilities like those are very useful heuristics to build off and show up in a good number of applications, including in theoretical physics. A lot of scientific investigation could simply not work without specifying initial beliefs about an uncertain parameter, there's a reason why the maximum entropy principle is so common.
In other words, I think this objection proves too much, and throws out the core idea backing many useful Bayesian inferences. That doesn't mean I think the explanation is "God" (it is funny that I'm the atheist arguing for fine-tuning and you're the Catholic arguing against it though), but it does appear to me that there is something there worth explaining.
The main difference in my mind isn't about complexity or whether God is personal, the distinction for me is whether the process that created us had sapience involved in it somewhere. An infinite, impersonal multiverse might be very complex, but it doesn't have thoughts or an agenda, it just is. God would be an agent that acts intentionally, whether it makes sense to pray to said God or expect divine intervention on your behalf is another matter entirely.
To be honest if that fine-tuning version of God exists I have some very strong words prepared. Imagine if a mad scientist created a simulation where millions of sapient suffering beings compete with each other to maximise inclusive genetic fitness and then let it run unchecked. What the fuck.
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is.
I'm not sure this is all that compelling; it makes some psychological sense that you would pinpoint consciousness as the strongest argument here, given your prior statement about finding no phenomenon "to be as interesting as other people". But it's unclear why this has to imply the existence of a God, just because something isn't yet understood and possesses weird properties does not mean you have to invoke a deity to explain its existence. As an atheist myself I think the strongest argument in favour of theism is some sort of cosmological fine-tuning argument pointing to aspects of the universe that seem extremely improbable, but without which human life would not be possible (you seem to have mentioned this as a theist argument, but for some reason appear to have deprioritised it relative to the argument from consciousness).
A big example of this is the triple-alpha process, which is how carbon gets formed in stars - it begins when two helium-4 nuclei (alpha particles) fuse to produce beryllium-8, which is highly unstable and decays with a half life of 8.19×10−17 seconds, but sometimes a third alpha particle enters the fray and produces something called the Hoyle state, which is a "resonance state" of carbon-12. This resonance state also almost always decays back into three alpha particles, but sometimes it settles into a stable form of carbon-12 that then eventually gets dispersed into the interstellar medium in the latter half of a stellar lifecycle. There are many apparent coincidences in every step of this process - probably the most mentioned one is that the resonance state has to occur at a very specific range of energies for sufficient carbon to be produced. It occurs at 7.656 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and the triple-alpha process is very sensitive to this value. Vary it by 0.1 MeV and the reaction will slow, producing less carbon, and a change of more than 0.3 MeV will halt carbon production altogether. There are also other constants here where, if they were even slightly different, would mean that most carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
There are also other examples of this, like the strong nuclear force's specific value seeming almost perfectly calibrated for stable atomic nuclei and stellar nucleosynthesis, and where a change of even ~2% in its value pretty much destroys all life. And these aren't rare to find, there are so many fine-tuned elements of the universe you can point to if you want to strengthen the argument. The emergence of life at all seems to have been an exceptionally low-probability (read: downright infinitesimal) event based on a constellation of fundamental physical constants, all of which basically had to be balanced on a knife's edge in order for it to appear. Almost as if it was intelligently designed.
Now you can explain all this through some form of anthropic argument invoking an infinity of hypothetical universes (for example), but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God. You could speculate that hypothetically different sets of physical fundamentals could result in different sets of lifeforms we aren't familiar with, but actually many of the other parameters result in the universe degrading into some high-entropy or low-energy state that doesn't permit the existence of sufficiently complex structures, and in any case that's just guessing again. Cosmological fine-tuning doesn't prove God, but it's at least a clear absurdity that deserves explanation, and this time God is actually a relatively plausible and intuitive explanation for the observed phenomenon since all our possible answers are also just unfalsifiable bad guesses.
It exists in some point in the possibility-space, in the same way that technically you can also arrive at Shakespeare's Macbeth through a random character generator. The question is why our universe happens to have taken on these specific exact properties. Making anthropic arguments to explain this primarily only makes sense to me if you postulate the existence of many other "rolls of the dice": e.g. the existence of other universes with different physical laws, or the idea that physical laws are actually not consistent throughout the universe.
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