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The fine-tuning argument is one of the best counter-apologetical arguments against God’s existence because a God has no need of anything of the things you’ve described.
The first problem is that it begs the question by assuming the ‘luck’ of a finely tuned universe is somehow worse than the luck of a God lurking in the background. There’s also no data by which we can establish these premises. We don’t even know what “can be” finely tuned. In fact even Christian philosophers like Lydia McGrew don’t think fine-tuning is a good argument because as far as we know, the range of life permitting universes is infinite. 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.
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.
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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