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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.
There's just no good reason to look at life that has evolved through iteration under a given set of rules, then turn around and act like the outcome was always set in stone and it's a big mystery how the rules ended up "fine-tuned" toward it. It all just completely fails to launch.
It should be quite obvious that this is the case too…
Our universe is 99.99999% composed of a lethal, radiation-filled vacuum (inhospitable to life), and said percentage of all the material in the universe comprises stars and black holes on which no life of any kind can live, and the same percent of all other material in the universe (planets, moons, clouds, asteroids, etc.) is barren of life. Even what extremely tiny and inconsequential bits of it are at all hospitable are extremely inefficient at producing life at all and in any form, but far more so intelligent life. If the knife edge proves it’s a designer then it’s a pretty dumb ass designer.
If God existed, then we’d have pretty much something like what Aristotle or the Bible imagined; a fully inhabited cosmos, top to bottom, no larger or older than it needed to be, everything in existence and working together right out of the gate, from the very beginning. Genesis would have been confirmed to be literally true by now. Space would be a breathable, habitable area, that’s empty of radiation and other dangerous things. People would already live there, as they will have done, like us down here, since the first instant of creation. The world would work exactly as needed simply by God’s will alone. There’d be no need of gravity. Things would just fall where he wanted. There would be no complex nuclear physics. Substances would just have the properties he wanted. There would be no electromagnetism. Light would just shine where He wanted, matter would just form as He wanted, and if He still wanted magnets, he’d just will them into existence and to work as he pleased. That would be a theologically driven cosmology.
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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.
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. And anyway, there's definitionally no such thing as a universe where life is impossible and anyone is around to notice it.
There's no such thing as a universe where anyone notices that things aren't "tuned right" so your observation that the universe seemingly is "fine-tuned" doesn't mean anything. There are no proposed, hypothetical, or possible realities inconsistent with the observation, so it conveys no meaningful information.
If you're willing to throw out any ability to make any basic Bayesian inferences sure that argument holds water.
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.
If it's possible at all for it to exist, why wouldn't it exist at some point in nonspace-nontime? It is infinitely improbable to choose a random point on an infinite plane and hit the point (0; 0) exactly, yet that point exists.
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.
If we suppose that the universe hadn't existed at some point, what makes us think that only one universe could have ever existed?
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Facts that do not in the slightest contradict anyone's position do not meaningfully move the needle on those positions. They just definitionally do not. You're just incredulous at your own existence in kind of a lottery-brained way, running naked and free across the landscape telling us what alternate universes must or must not be like, all the while preemptively scolding everyone else that they shouldn't engage in any wild speculation.
I say lottery-brained because it's like someone wins the lottery, looks at how low their odds of winning were, and decides god is on their side. If the form of the universe isn't predetermined then of course whatever actually results will be in itself incredibly unlikely in direct proportion to the possibility space. If there are an infinite number of tickets then the odds of any individual slob winning are virtually zero, yet win someone must.
Then there's the fact that we don't even know how many drawings there have been. Since we're talking about the literally unfathomable depths of existence, let me sling a little bullshit too: What happens when the universe reaches its ultimate post heat death state, to the point that time ceases to be a meaningful concept? I kind of have an unjustifiable suspicion that everything just starts over in some form. For basically no reason, because quantum something fluctuation something and the fact that over an infinite amount of time any event with a greater probability than a total existential zero is guaranteed to occur.
Or maybe a magic man does it every time, while pixie dust sparkles and he strokes his beard. 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.
You're at this point arguing against a position I haven't taken.
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.
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 them.
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