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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Do you think the seeming improbability of the origin of life is evidence for theism?

I don’t mean with respect to so-called cosmic "fine tuning." I refer to the fact that even with our potentially finely tuned cosmos it’s still incredibly unlikely that life would emerge. I took an earth science course in college, and our prof said that Abiogenesis is still the main theory: namely, non living matter gave rise to living matter through a combination of exquisitely improbable events. A bunch of chemicals mixed with other chemicals and were struck by lightning or something, creating the first self-replicating molecule. If you protest “but that’s about as likely as a fighter jet being assembled out of chance collisions,” he says “given the law of large numbers, given enough opportunities a fantastically unlikely event will eventually happen. And the observable universe is just so so vast.

I just realized this might imply that, actually, there probably is a fighter jet somewhere in the universe that arose from chance collisions of matter, or at least that this result wasn't any less likely than life arising from nonliving matter. If you say no to the fighter jet thing, but yes to a self-replicating molecular machine finding a stable enough environment in which to proliferate for millions of years, then presumably you would need to explain the asymmetry in your expectations.

Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what? The fact that there are many more optimally arranged parts involved in a fighter jet? Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?

About cosmic "fine tuning":

If you buy any of the typical objections to cosmological fine tuning, there is a concern about whether your view "proves too much" by failing to admit of scenarios that would intuitively serve as compelling evidence for Christianity. For instance, in a universe in which the words "made-by-Jesus-Christ" were written into every square inch of matter as a direct result of the way the initial parameters of the universe were ordered, you would have to conclude that we had absolutely zero evidence in favor of Christianity.

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #1: "But we don't know how to weight the prior probabilities of alternative universes. At best, we can only assume that the life-permitting parameters are unlikely given all of the non-life-permitting alternatives."

This is equally true of the made-by-Jesus world, but do you really want to say that that world would offer no evidence in favor of Christianity? Isn't that just an unreasonably high degree of skepticism?

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #2: "According to the anthropic principle, we wouldn't be in a position to ask about how we appeared in a life-permitting universe if it hadn't been life-permitting to begin with, so fine-tuning requires no explanation/is explained by the fact that it had to happen from our POV."

It's not always clear what is being proposed by the objector making the anthropic principle argument, but on one interpretation the objection is saying something like "any phenomenon which presupposes an explainer requires no explanation/is automatically explained by the fact that it allows for an explainer to exist and wonder about it."

So, for instance, we needn't explain the complexity of life via evolution because had it not occurred, we wouldn't be in a position to wonder about it. Or a falling man who prays for a parachute and is saved when one spontaneously materializes out of thin air needn't explain this miracle because, had it not occurred, he wouldn't be alive to consider candidate explanations.

But notice that the anthropic principle objection can also be posed to the "made-by-Jesus" world, and even still, the "made-by-Jesus" world would be compelling evidence in favor of Christianity.

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #3: God could have any number of purposes. Why assume that he wants life to evolve?

This equally applies to the "Made-by-Jesus" world. I can imagine any number of deities who don't want to create a made-by-Jesus world. So in the "made-by-Jesus" world would we have absolutely zero indication that Christianity is true?

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #4: Maybe the fine-tuning is just necessary and had to be that way. Since God is supposed to be a necessary being, is it any better to suppose that an explanation that proposes a necessary God + a contingent universe is better than simply a necessary universe all on its own?

This equally applies to the "Made-by-Jesus" world. Maybe the initial parameters of the universe just had to be set up so that the words "made-by-Jesus-Christ" were written into every square inch of matter everywhere. So is the "made-by-Jesus" world not strong evidence for Christianity?

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #5: If the multi-verse hypothesis is true, then a finely tuned universe is due to chance. Given enough opportunities, a life permitting arrangement of the parameters will eventually come about, no matter how unlikely one is.

This equally applies to the "Made-by-Jesus" world. So is the "made-by-Jesus" world not strong evidence for Christianity?

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #6: There's no telling whether the other parameters of the universe would be life-permitting.

The typical response to this objection is to point out that the features of the universe on which the parameters depend are extremely broad, so that changes would result in a world where, say, all we would have is a distribution of matter in a pattern of random TV static, or each particle being separated from the other by so much space that complex structures could never form, or a giant undifferentiated lump of matter, etc.

But anyway, why couldn't the same objection be made to the "made-by-Jesus" world? For all we know, most arrangements of the parameters of the universe result in a "made-by-Jesus world." We haven't observed those universes, so who is really to say otherwise?

Typical Objection to Fine-Tuning #7: The fine-tuning argument is just an appeal to our ignorance, or a "god-of-the-gaps"-style inference.

Is this also true of saying that the truth of Christianity is a good explanation for the made-by-Jesus universe?

TL;DR: If you buy any of the typical objections to cosmological fine tuning, there is a concern about whether your view "proves too much" by failing to admit scenarios that would intuitively serve as compelling evidence for Christianity. For instance, in a universe in which the words "made-by-Jesus-Christ" were written into every square inch of matter as a direct result of the way the initial parameters of the universe were ordered, you would have to conclude that we had absolutely zero evidence in favor of Christianity.

Some time during my initial philosophic/theological foray into what I now call Triessentialism, I encountered the idea of the anti-Trinity:

  • Where the Father is ultimate power and causal impetus, the atheist universe can only have endless void and the inexorable flow of all usable energy over time into its maw.

  • Where the Son is ultimate logic and infinite planning, the atheist universe can only have coincidences piling up through combinatorics over uncountable stretches of time to generate the unlikely human thinker.

  • Where the Spirit is ultimate purpose and strong love, the atheist universe can only have cosmic purposelessness and apathy for those who abuse free will for their own reasons.

Were we to find “Copyright 4004 BC Jesus Christ” encoded in English or Hebrew in the DNA of nerve proteins, there would be someone explaining how it’s a total coincidence, an artifact of decoding and combinatorics. Were scientists able to summon a tangible demon (who can throw lightning bolts and use telekinesis) reliably through ritual, there would be someone explaining it as a purely naturalistic phenomenon, citing Arthur C. Clarke.

Baileys abound in cosmological discussions, and mottes are few and far between. Thank you for helping us keep our epistemologies tidy.

So are you a Christian because it would be so much simpler and more desirable, or something? Believe in Aslan even if there is no Narnia?

No, I believe because I’ve experienced God’s love when I was at my most doubtful, because I received His revelations of philosophy at my most confused, and because I received His healing in the most unexpected ways when I was at my lowest. But to you that’s anecdotes, not evidence.

I also believe that there’s a Heaven and a Hell just on the other side of death, that there’s enough forensic historical evidence to show a coherent picture of a young Earth created by the Hebrews’ God, and that Jesus’ forgiveness and baptism in water and the Spirit have a miraculous, transformative effect on the human animal.

Unlike Puddleglum the marshwiggle, I’d rather be right than happy. Like Thomas the skeptic, I trust Him who surprised me with more evidence than I asked for, and joy besides.

While some of the points are good, there are difficulties.

The difficulty of abiogenesis doesn't actually change much, as long as you think that the universe is unbounded. As long as it's much more likely than things like Boltzmann brains, you should be fine, as it'll arise somewhere, and you, the observer, can thus account for your existence. What it does affect is how likely we are to find other life within our solar system or galaxy or light cone, or it starts to provide insight again once we have any reason to think that the universe is not infinite.

Cosmological fine-tuning is much more relevant, because it's much more plausible that we don't get graham's number of chances at it. But that also provides a strong argument in favor of a multiverse, which I don't think you actually gave any reasons why you think that that would be unlikely.

I'm not sure how persuasive your made-by-Jesus world is. It does show ways that people might misuse the anthropic principle, a little, but it doesn't touch a proper use of it.

But let's look at the 7 objections.

1: We don't know how to tell if it's actually unlikely, since we don't have a set way to sample?

This one's interesting. I don't know entirely what to make of it. We should probably have priors of some sort, but I'm not really sure. I don't know if this is similar to 4, in practice, albeit more like "fine-tuning is likely" than necessary.

2: Anthropic principle explains everything

The key thing here is that there be enough chances. If there's only one universe, than the anthropic principle is insufficient to explain life. If there are many, it works much better.

3:Well, why would God want this?

This is a good question. However, for the theism hypothesis to be useful relative to chance, it only requires that we think it's more likely than the chance of generating a good universe randomly, and then you have to take into account your priors on theism.

4: Fine-tuning is necessary

I think the fine-tuned for life vs. the fine-tuned for made-by-Jesus are not the same, since it seems more plausible that kinds of complexity would be likely than that Jesus specifically would be necessary? At least, the existence of entropy makes that seem not totally crazy of a hypothesis to me, which, when we're dealing with things this literally astronomically unlikely, that's probably good enough.

5: multiverse: why not made-by-Jesus

Yeah, the reason here is the anthropic principle. In a multiverse, all observers should see worlds conducive to life. Far fewer of those observers would see "made-by-Jesus." Given a multiverse, we should expect existence. Given a multiverse, we should not expect "made-by-Jesus" to be written into the physics.

6: Maybe other parameters could be life permitting.

It seems much more likely to me that there could be exotic forms of life than exotic forms of "made-by-Jesus."

7: god-of-the-gaps

In this case, I think the comparison might actually a good comparison, showing that there needs to take some care in dismissing based a "God-of the gaps" argument.

Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?

We only worked out how bees fly back in 2017. Why do we sleep? How do bicycles stay upright? Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water? We don't really know.

Let's wait for more information. Our biochemistry skills aren't top-tier yet. Let's wait for superintelligence before we try to analyse billion-year-old history at a molecular level!

Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water? We don't really know.

Yes we do.

  1. As a general rule, hot water doesn't freeze faster than cold water. Hot water turns into cold water before it freezes, after all.

  2. In specific cases, hot water might cause something to happen that doesn't happen if you start out with cold water, such as evaporating (so the remaining water freezes faster) or melting frost so it makes better contact with the freezer. Then hot water does freeze faster. It's unclear how often this matters.

  3. The original belief was probably someone misunderstanding "hot water cools down faster than cold water" and assuming that this means it freezes faster. It doesn't, because it initially cools down faster, but the rate of cooling slows as it gets colder.

Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water?

I'm referencing a specific effect here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect

There's some debate about whether it's real or not and various potential explanations for why this might be the case. Anyway, my point is that if we don't thoroughly grasp how water freezes (!) then we shouldn't be too confident about much more complex matters.

Do you think the seeming improbability of the origin of life is evidence for theism?

Prove it ... I have read some theories that when you have a heat source (sun and geothermal) and heat sink (the ocean) and primordial soup life emergence was not only probable but almost inevitable. And planets in the goldilocks zone are not exactly rare on cosmic scale judging by recent discoveries.

That btw doesn't preclude in any way a being nudging the solar system in such a way that to maximize chances, but that is as godly as me putting just the right quantities of salt to a cabbage to make sauerkraut.

If I want to dig arguments for fine tuning - the best argument is the quantity of water on earth. Now - we have 1.2 % of the earth mass as the moon that is knocked off, filled with just enough water to barely cover 2/3 of the surface. And the moon gives very nice tidal movements.

But it is the dry land that I think is extraordinary. Without it any complex civilization and technology is impossible.

And if we are a petri dish by a mad galactic scientist - I guess Saturn's rings are his signature.

Prove it ... I have read some theories that when you have a heat source (sun and geothermal) and heat sink (the ocean) and primordial soup life emergence was not only probable but almost inevitable. And planets in the goldilocks zone are not exactly rare on cosmic scale judging by recent discoveries.

One potential problem is the emergence of a self-replicating molecule that is just too good. Without mutation you can't have natural selection, so if some planet ends up with a stable nucleic acid that can only make pristine copies of itself, it will simply convert everything else in the primordial ocean and stop. Of course, geothermal and solar energy will keep breaking them apart, but if there's no way to isolate a pool of organic compounds from the ocean of the perfect replicators to try again at a smaller scale, then this situation will be rather stable.

Tides/rains/floods create nice cute biolaboratories that are insulated for a time.

Yes, if there's land. If there's enough water to cover the whole planet...

The most interesting question, the unanswered question, is that we are the only living beings who observe the universe and question its causes and purpose and creator. By evidence, we are the only living beings ever with this consciousness. Only in the past thousands of years have we been determined to name the creator of the universe, the being or ground of being of ontological arguments. Regardless of the “existence” of a personified being, there is certainly being itself, and this is the only eternal thing… so how fascinating is that only within the past 6000 years or so have we been able to behold eternity and immortality? When we name being itself or the Abrahamic “I am that I am”, we are naming that which is eternally eternal. You can imagine I suppose any other possible world, but all of these worlds must be, and so any sentient being when considering existence will also point at existence and maybe cry out “Abba”.

But I think, also, you can lead a man to look at the starry skies but you can’t make him wonder. If there is a God and He has his elect they will be the ones wondering.

and so any sentient being when considering existence will also point at existence and maybe cry out “Abba”.

When looking at prime Agnetha Fältskog, I too often feel that I’m observing some grand truth about what existence is all about.

Relevant clip

There are orders of orders of magnitude difference in probability between a 10-ton fighter jet arising from pure chance, and a microscopic DNA (or RNA-based) protocell with a few dozen to a few hundred nucleotide bonds.

If the latter took all of the universe to create, the former would be outrageously impossible.

"There may be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe,[7][8] although that number was reduced in 2021 to only several hundred billion based on data from New Horizons.". Pop-science estimates of the number of planets in the observable universe were 10^20 - 10^24 from googling. this paper estimates 10^19 - 10^20 total planets, of which 1 in 10 - 1k are habitable. this paper seems less fancy but estimates 10^24 chances at emergence on habitable planets. That can compensate for a very small probability of emergence! Not that there aren't other issues

What other issues might there be?

The anthropic principle simply says that the probability of every "explanation" (particular sequence of events through which life came to be?) we need to consider in determining the most likely one is its probability conditioned on our existence, since our existence is a given. What this does is countering arguments that actually are along the lines of "abiogenesis is unlikely, therefore the existence of a creator must be likely, since probabilities sum to 1", because there is no requirement for the absolute probability to sum to 1. If there is a 10^-8 probability of a creator god and a 10^-6 probability of abiogenesis (whatever even is the sample space; call it "multiverse hypothesis" if you need to reify it by imagining 10^8 different universes of which one has a creator god and about 100 have abiogenesis occurring), the anthropic principle simply states that if you find yourself alive, there is nothing to "explain" about the ~10^-6 probability of this having happened at all. Honestly, maybe I've been brainwashed by probability theory too much, but it's hard for me to even imagine what there is to be confused by - whenever you are dealt a hand in a game of cards, do you feel the need to explain the fantastically unlikely event that just unfolded before you? What exactly do you consider an explanation, anyway?

Or a falling man who prays for a parachute and is saved when one spontaneously materializes out of thin air needn't explain this miracle because, had it not occurred, he wouldn't be alive to consider candidate explanations.

He will still need to explain his memories of existing before he started to skydive (and everyone else's cultural and individual memory of there having been life before it).

Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what? The fact that there are many more optimally arranged parts involved in a fighter jet?

Fighter jets are huge. Even ignoring the far greater fluidity of organic soup compared to fighter jet parts, an agglomeration of raw materials for as many potential fighter jets as there were for potential basic amino acid replicators in the organic soup on Earth's surface they presumably arose on would rapidly collapse into a black hole.

Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?

Because our eyes and hands are far better suited for arranging hunks of metal than they are for arranging molecules. Forget fighter jets - artificial diamonds at least as of a few decades ago still were smaller and less pretty than their natural counterpart, but nature has never wrought a single steel knife of the type we've had for centuries. Do you consider this an argument for divine creation of diamonds?

If we were to turn out to live in the "Made-by-Jesus" world, I would have no problem updating in favour of Christianity, although the question of course would remain somewhat open because I'd have to ask if there was some way the Jesus crowd could have put that string there (or knocked me out cold and locked me up in their Jesus-affirming VRMMO), or if maybe there was some connection between that string being there and the words "made", "by" and "Jesus" coming to mean what they do in modern English to begin with.

To be clear, the anthropic principle says that there's nothing to explain if we're in a multiverse.

That's much less clear for a one-shot.

Re: cards, wouldn't you suspect the dealer, if you got a royal flush in poker, or a full suit in bridge? For an ordinary hand, yes, the event is unlikely, but it's not unlikely in an interesting way such that any other hypotheses are privileged enough to overcome their prior lower probability.

It seems pretty clear to me that our existence raises the probability of the "multiverse" hypothesis and the "God" hypothesis relative to a hypothetical observerless universe.

Even a single universe still contains quintillions of planets, in which potential abiogenesis would take place almost completely independently, so I'm not sure it would be correct to consider a single universe a single chance for the emergence of life.

Right, the abiogenesis isn't a single chance. The relevant part is cosmic fine-tuning, like fine-tuning of the physical constants to exactly what they need to be. That seems to be something where we have to go universe by universe instead of bucket of chemicals by bucket of chemicals.

Are we really arguing about abiogenesis using the fighter jet analogy in 2023? The Blind Watchmaker is almost as old as me.

The scale of Earth history is mind-boggling. Five hundred million years of chemical reactions in the primordial ocean is a whole lot of time to get the first self-replicating mechanism going. You could bomb human civilization back to the stone age, leaving it with just the knowledge of basic agriculture, let it build back to the thermonuclear bomb, bomb it again, and do this forty thousand times. Forty thousand distinct human civilizations, waging wars, building monuments, creating art, living and dying. If that sounds like not enough, bomb it to the dawn of writing. Then you can squeeze a hundred thousand civilizations into the time it took random chemical reactions to come up with the first replicating machine. That's a lot of time for the largest Petri dish on Earth to come up with something randomly. Or semi-randomly, since you only need a nucleic acid that makes other nucleic acids to try again and again until a nucleic acid that makes itself emerges from the soup and quickly takes over.

Those simple replicators then spent the next two and a half billion years as single-celled organisms of increasing complexity, evolving predation, organelles, photosynthesis, until finally getting to multicellularity. Then it's a billion more years of coming up with modern kingdoms of life, and then everything you know from popular fossils, all these mammoths, terror birds, dinosaurs, dimetrodons, gigantic butterflies, tree-like horsetails, terrifying sea scorpions, ammonites, belemnites and trilobites are all squeezed into the last five hundred million years or so.

That's a lot of time for the largest Petri dish on Earth to come up with something randomly.

You don't know that. It's really important for evaluating this to know how complicated something would need to be to self-replicate in a manner such that evolution could work on it (that is, not like the self replication found in quartz or something). We can't just go "that's a lot of time" or "that seems really hard" and say, well, we've got two big numbers. We'd need to actually manage to compare the difficulty and the time. (With of course the understanding that we could be missing simplifying factors in abiogenesis, which I have no idea how to evaluate.)

You're not wrong. I was just showing that "abiogenesis is very, very improbable" isn't a slam-dunk counterargument. There's also "it took 500 megayears of chemical reactions in a literal world-spanning ocean of organic chemicals for abiogenesis to work" and "abiogenesis doesn't mean a living cell spontaneously spawned, it means a relatively simple chemical replicator spontaneously spawned and iterated until it finally found a loop that kickstarted natural selection".

I wasn’t arguing against evolution, which doesn’t address the origin of life. Evolutionary theory explains how life became diverse/descent with modification happened, but it’s not even an attempt to explain life’s origins. Abiogenesis is still the leading explanation.

Yes, abiogenesis is the leading explanation, and there's nothing wrong with it.

You are asking two separate questions - “is the origin of life evidence for theism” and “is the origin of life evidence for Christianity” - but appear to be treating them as the same question. Even if I take seriously the cosmological arguments that abiogenesis should move my priors toward believing in a “prime mover” or theistic/deistic supernatural origin for life - and to be clear, I do take those arguments seriously - it seems to still require a massive logical leap to get from that to “and that’s why I believe that Yeshua Ben Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter and mystic, was the incarnation of God on Earth.” Generally when I have these discussions with Christians, they make these very compelling arguments for a non-naturalistic origin of life, and then expect me not to notice that they’ve failed to provide any additional logical scaffolding to get from there to Christianity specifically.

I didn’t intend this as an argument for Christianity and am not myself religious. Obviously the probability of Christianity is greater given deism, though, and I guess fine tuning suggests a god with an interest in our lives. But it’s indifferent with respect to Christianity vs some other religion like Islam, and I don’t think it’s strong enough evidence that it implies that “one of the world religions must be true.” A Christian would have to use it in a cumulative case for their religion that also invoked some more specifically pro-Christianity evidence. Supposedly they have done so in the form of historical support for the resurrection of Jesus, but I am very skeptical.

Because they’re stuck on step one. When they haven’t ‘won’ the supernaturalism discussion it makes no sense to go further because evidence for Jesus being God depends on God being real.

“Winning” the supernaturalism discussion is one of the philosophically/scientifically unfalsifiable questions on both sides, and to progress beyond strawmen, both sides must grudgingly acknowledge it.

The anti-supernaturalist can point to any time a miracle or magic seems to have occurred, and say it can be attributed to delusion, improbable coincidence, as-yet unexplained natural phenomena, or trickery. Fire, lightning, planetary motion, cellular biology, pulling the Queen of Hearts from a deck of cards on the first try, the hand in His side by Thomas, a narrative vision of the four future world empires beheld by Daniel, and a single yellow rose in a flowerbed comforting a woman who lost her Texan mother in a car accident years ago; nothing is undoubtable. Even being able to reliably summon a visible, tangible demon through ritual could be explained away as completely naturalistic, given a clever enough arguer.

The supernaturalist can look at any miracle of science or coincidence and say how marvelous are His ways, how complex His plans, how infinitely intelligent He must be to set things up so that moment or phenomenon can have occurred just so in order that someone might become more aware of the glory of God, His righteousness, His forgiveness, and so on. The supernaturalist can also always find another example of the unexplained or the absurdly improbable and call it evidence (or, as a bailey, “proof) of the supernatural.

So we find ourselves once more weighing Pascal’s Wager against the Cosmic Ogre, the Pink Unicorn, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and asking not “which is more probable” but “whose explainers do I believe are credible, knowing all that I do about human self-delusion and motivated reasoning”. We will always be able to find evidence for a conclusion we’ve already reached.

What's the likelihood of life on Earth given theism and why?

If life existing in the universe is likely given theism, why is there not more of it? Or less?

These questions reveal that the relevant likelihoods are unclear. Trying to apply Bayesian reasoning without principled likelihoods is not rational. If you don't know the likelihood of life given theism, then you can't apply Bayes' theorem. So your reasoning apparently doesn't get off the ground.

Put formally, let H1 be "there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent God", H2 be "the Christian God exists", E1 be the existence of life on Earth, and E2 be the existence of life anywhere in the universe.

Nothing in H1 seems to require or probabilify the existence of life, so P(E1 | H1) = P(E), supposing these terms to be defined.

H2 requires the existence of life (let's suppose - God wants to test mortals' souls etc.) so let's suppose that P(E2 | H2) > P(E2). However, P(E2) already seems to be extremely high, so this provides extremely weak evidence for H2.

H2 does not require the existence of life on Earth in particular: nothing about the Christian God implies the existence of life on any particular planet. Suppose that P(E1) is low. Since P(E1 | H2) = P(E1), the existence of life on Earth provides no evidence for the existence of the Christian God.

Hence, even making charitable assumptions about priors and likelihoods, the existence of life on Earth provides no evidence for God's existence.

I don’t have a specific number in mind but the reason theism predicts life is that

  1. it’s (by comparison to the multiverse) simple in terms of number of parts involved,

  2. it can explain the order of the universe (as god executing a design plan as opposed to it being a lot of arbitrary detail)

  3. life would be preferred by god because life is necessary for most, if not all, good things to exist, and a rational being would prefer the good. (This part involves value realism, but if you don’t like that then you can just add it into the hypothesis alongside theism and, as long as you don’t think the prior probability of moral realism is prohibitively low, it wouldn’t cancel out the explanatory benefits of theism with respect to fine tuning)

What do you think the probability of life given non-theism is, and why?

life would be preferred by god because life is necessary for most, if not all, good things to exist, and a rational being would prefer the good.

Would a rational being prefer for there not to be evil? Life (organic or artificial) seems required for evil. You can postulate that God would prefer the existence of good to the non-existence of evil, but that's not implied by theism per se, and hence doesn't factor into P(E2 | H1).

And even if it did, E2 is not the evidence that can have a significant confirmation of theism or Christian theism - E1 is. That life exists somewhere in the universe is highly probable given the laws of nature and the size/composition of the universe. However, I would be very surprised if you could provide a rationale that P(E1 | H1) or P(E1 | H2) are different from P(E1). Nothing in Christianity (AFAIK) implies that God would create life on Earth in the time it developed, rather than the trillions of other suitable points in spacetime.

The other two bits seem to be about what you think are comparative merits of a theistic explanation, but I'm not even convinced that theism predicts the existence of life.

What do you think the probability of life given non-theism is, and why?

I have no idea. I don't have the information required to make a sensible probabilistic model of the problem, and I can't determine a series of coherent, evidence-based likelihoods (outside of special cases) without that model.

Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what?

A bacterium has about 10^-12 grams of mass, and a self replicating molecule would have much less.

A F16 has about 10^7 grams of mass.

Assuming they are assembled by random processes, we would absolutely expect thing with more than 10 quintillion times as much mass to be significantly more unlikely to be randomly assembled.

If you say no to the fighter jet thing, but yes to a self-replicating molecular machine finding a stable enough environment in which to proliferate for millions of years, then presumably you would need to explain the asymmetry in your expectations.

Well, if we imagine a fighter jet made of 10,000 different parts, and all these parts just happen to have spontaneously come into existence on some planet, and there's actually a trillion copies of each part on this planet, and this planet has whirlwinds strong enough to constantly clatter these pieces together in different ways, and has plenty of lightning to do the spot welding, and it's not just one planet but an uncountable number throughout the universe, then yeah. I expect you would end up with a fighter jet after a few billion years or so.

why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?

Probably because fighter jets exist in meatspace where I can manipulate things with my hammer and self-replicating molecular organisms exist in nano-world which we have just barely developed the tools to begin to engineer.

If scientists demonstrate abiogenesis in conditions similar to those of the earth 3.5 billion years ago, will you renounce Christianity?

I'm not an atheist, but for me it is enough to know that very unlikely things do, occasionally, happen.

I’m not a Christian, just weakly committed to deism based on the fine tuning argument. (Or at least I think the probability of deism is greater than maybe 30%, maybe greater than 50%)

But anyway, yes, if I think something is evidence in favor of something, then its absence is evidence against it.

I think life probably originated from a relatively simple reaction that managed to continuously propagate. There was a primordial stew, and a bunch of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and probably other elements started reacting in a way that they could pull in more fuel from the surroundings instead of the reaction just dying out. In its early stages it really wasn't anything you would call life. But the parts of the reaction that were best at getting more fuel spread the fastest, and the equilibrium kept shifting, and the chemical reaction kept semi-randomly stumbling onto more and more efficient ways to get more fuel. Eventually the chemical reaction develops a process something like mitosis, where it splits in two and each part goes off in different directions, and those parts keep splitting off themselves when they get sufficiently large, and the ones that are best at getting more fuel stay "alive" and spread the most. And that's the beginning of life.

I don't think that that's necessarily so incredibly unlikely in the right environment with the right chemicals. But it'd probably take a very long time and very precise conditions that don't allow for the initial reaction to just burn through all the fuel itself without splitting to happen.

From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:

“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“

That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages. By “A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?

That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages.

The other way around, the fact that it involves many steps makes the whole a lot easier to accomplish. It's like saying jumping over a building is easier than climbing a staircase because the latter involves many steps that must occur in the right place at the right time.

A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?

A self-propagating reaction which manages to become more efficient, propagate, then split into multiple (identical) reactions in different locations, each of which propagates itself, is for all intents and purposes the metabolism of a self-replicating organism. The molecules and structures involved in that reaction are called an organism. As an example, the simplest organisms we know of (biological viruses) are nothing but molecules which propagate themselves by hijacking the machinery (reactions) of existing cells to do their replication.

There is a section in Dawkins' "The Ancestors Tale" which makes a 'flipped' version of this argument. Perhaps the process starts with a chemical that has this duplication-like property, and then it turns into competition for what spreads/duplicates best:

After that digression on catalysis and enzymes, we now turn from ordinary catalysis to the special case of autocatalysis, some version of which probably played a key role in the origin of life. Think back to our hypothetical example of molecules A and B combining to make Z under the influence of the enzyme abzase. What if Z itself is its own abzase? I mean, what if the Z molecule happens to have just the right shape and chemical properties to seize one A and one B, bring them together in the correct orientation, and combine them to make a new Z, just like itself? In our previous example we could say that the amount of abzase in the solution would influence the amount of Z produced. But now, if Z actually is one and the same molecule as abzase, we need only a single molecule of Z to seed a chain reaction. The first Z grabs As and Bs and combines them to make more Zs. Then these new Zs grab more As and Bs to make still more Zs and so on. This is autocatalysis. Under the right conditions the population of Z molecules will grow exponentially - explosively. This is the kind of thing that sounds promising as an ingredient for the origin of life.

pg 571 of the hardback edition

Dawkins' goes on to discuss a real example of a (relatively) simple 'abzase', an amino adenosine triacid ester (AATE), that has this property. In that case, 'A' is amino adenosine and 'B' is a pentafluorophenyl ester.

edit: this is the same as the middle bullet point from recovering_rationaleist's comment

I have connections to people doing research into the origins of life, and frankly the probabilisty-based arguments against natural biogenesis are very weak.

  • Cosmological fine-tuning isn't an argument against natural (or at least materialistic) origin because it runs into the anthropic paradox. If the universe were fine-tuned to create life, the same arguments must hold to show that it was fine-tuned to create humanity, and to create you. After all, just as a universe supporting life like us is improbable, so is your specific combination of genes and experience fantastically improbable. Any number of chance encounters (even a half-second delay in your father's ejaculation) could have resulted in a different sperm meeting that egg, and you simply not existing. Nonetheless, we also know that no fine-tuning of sperm selection was involved in the process, and God was not necessary: we can choose sperm in the lab and force a baby to happen. We can even tune the genetics of nonhuman individuals for appearance, health, and personality, and it is only ethics that keeps us from doing that to humans.

  • If you look at a specific origin of life it looks fantastically improbable, but there are a lot of demonstrations that the "minimal replicating natural system" is probably a lot smaller than a protein, let alone a full cell. All that would be required is a set of amino-acids that are stable at the temperature and pressure of oceanic vents, and which catalyze the creation of themselves. (The technical term for this is an autocatalytic set.) It has been shown that proteins are unnecessary: RNA can catalyze its own replication (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1371-4), and peptides (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1371-4) and amino acids (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00520) can arise from chemical environments with very simple precursors (HCN and H2O are all you need for amino acids to arise). The search for a minimal amino acid set with the ability for self-replication is ongoing, but if any such set occured even once in the billion-year history of oceanic vents, then it would have become the primary chemical makeup of its environment. Such a set would not even need to be very efficient at first; in an environment without RNAase it only needs to self-catalyze faster than its thermal breakdown, and evolution does the rest. FOOM.

  • There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest this happened. The synthesis of amino acids and sugars is more favorable at 85C in the environment of certain porous and hydrogen-rich rocks, and this environment is preferred by certain extant microorganisms (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JG006436). Most recently, I heard about a manuscript showing that of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents. (Unfortunately, I can't find it. Edit: Maybe ThenElection finds it below.)

Most recently, a friend told me about a manuscript showing that of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents.

Perhaps this? 355 instead of 380.

http://complexityexplorer.s3.amazonaws.com/supplemental_materials/3.6+Early+Metabolisms/Weiss_et_al_Nat_Microbiol_2016.pdf

The concept of a last universal common ancestor of all cells (LUCA, or the progenote) is central to the study of early evolution and life’s origin, yet information about how and where LUCA lived is lacking. We investigated all clusters and phylogenetic trees for 6.1 million protein coding genes from sequenced prokaryotic genomes in order to reconstruct the microbial ecology of LUCA. Among 286,514 protein clusters, we identified 355 protein families (∼0.1%) that trace to LUCA by phylogenetic criteria. Because these proteins are not universally distributed, they can shed light on LUCA’s physiology. Their functions, properties and prosthetic groups depict LUCA as anaerobic, CO2-fixing, H2-dependent with a Wood–Ljungdahl pathway, N2-fixing and thermophilic. LUCA’s biochemistry was replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms. Its cofactors reveal dependence upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, coenzyme A, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins and selenium. Its genetic code required nucleoside modifications and S-adenosyl methionine-dependent methylations. The 355 phylogenies identify clostridia and methanogens, whose modern lifestyles resemble that of LUCA, as basal among their respective domains. LUCA inhabited a geochemically active environment rich in H2, CO2 and iron. The data support the theory of an autotrophic origin of life involving the Wood–Ljungdahl pathway in a hydrothermal setting.

So one also has to wonder why a deity would create life in the place most likely for life to form from a naturalistic abiogenesis event instead of somewhere else.

Turns out there is another paper. Will try to send you a link by the weekend.

Oh thanks! I don't know if that's the paper that they were describing, but it sounds similar. Great find!

I think our priors on "the universe was fine-tuned to create me" should probably be lower than "the universe was fine-tuned to create life"?

Yeah, it's very important for this to know just how hard it is to get a minimal RNA self-replicator. Without a sense of that, it's hard to evaluate the relative probabilities. But, of course, the anthropic principle would just mean that it would happen somewhere in the universe, not even somewhere in the observable universe, so this part is probably less relevant.

I wasn't sure whether to put this as a reply to OP directly or someone like you, but I'll try here since you seem somewhat knowledgeable about these things.

I'm not at all an expert in these things, but my understanding was that natural biogenesis from soup-of-weird-chemicals to moderately complex single-cell life forms was pretty straightforward and plausible to happen naturally. I understand this was believed to have happened within a few million years of it being physically possible, i.e. soon after the Earth formed and cooled down enough to have liquid water. The things that was more of a head-scratcher in the how in the world did this happen without divine intervention was the jump to multi-cellular life.

How does a cell that evolved to be all about itself and it's direct descendants ever decide to team up with several other cells, which all abandon their individuality and dedicate themselves to the survival of a higher-order organism? Now that seems more like a touch of a higher power. While single-celled life originated (spontaneously?) fast, the first multi-celluar organisms took billions of years to appear AIUI, and it's off to the races after that.

Apart from what other users have brought up, there's also the fact that experiments in multicellularity appear very early on in the fossil record. Our oldest evidence for it consists of macrofossils that were discovered in the Franceville basin in current-day Gabon, in what would have been a shallow oxygenated delta at the time, and which have been dubbed the "Francevillian biota" or "Gabonionta". They are dated to 2.1 Ga, in the early Paleoproterozoic.

The emergence of this biota follows the Great Oxidation Event approx 2.4-2.1 Ga, an event where cyanobacteria caused a mass extinction by producing oxygen, something which is toxic to many anaerobes. The interaction of free oxygen with cellular components produces an oxygen radical called a "superoxide anion" which is capable of triggering a chain of destructive reactions in the cell. Aerobes are only capable of withstanding this because they possess enzymes called superoxide dismutase which essentially "neutralise" the superoxide anion (and if exposed to too much oxygen can still experience hyperoxia).

Before then, Earth had a reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen, and the GOE changed the environment into an oxidising atmosphere, with oxygen levels being as high as 10% of their present atmospheric level by the end of the GOE. And it also seems that oxygenation is a factor which is a prerequisite for the development of large multicellular organisms. Only aerobic respiration can produce enough energy for a complex metabolism, and although there are some exceptions, few multicellular life forms are anaerobic.

The Francevillian biota are surprisingly complex considering how early they appear. There are a number of forms the fossils take. Some look like elongated pearl-strings that end in a "flower". Others look like really bulbous nipples. They exhibit patterns of growth determined from the fossil morphologies that are suggestive of intercellular signalling and thus of mutually synchronised responses that are the hallmarks of multicellular organisation, and there's also evidence that they were capable of moving around in search of food resources - there are string-like tracks at the site which might represent mucus trails.

A particularly striking feature of the Francevillian biota is that they are isolated in time. No structures similar to them are known from earlier times and the biota are conspicuously absent from the overlying layer of black shale. It is notable that their disappearance also seems to roughly correlate with an occurrence called the Shunga event. What caused it hasn't been conclusively pinned down, but it involves the creation of one of the oldest known petroleum deposits on Earth, indicating the demise of a massive primitive biomass. The Shunga reserves in the Lake Onega region of Russia alone preserve up to 25 × 10^11 tonnes of organic carbon, and deposits of about the same age and having similar carbon isotope chemistry have been found elsewhere in northwest Russia, as well as North America, Greenland and West Africa, indicating that this was a global event. The organic blooms associated with the Great Oxidation Event abruptly cease, and oxygen levels drop back down to pre-GOE levels.

In short, these fossils seem to represent a first experiment in megascopic multicellularity that arose during a period of oxygenation and subsequently died off when the environment shifted against them. This seems to indicate that multicellularity can start developing relatively quickly, and part of the reason why there was a delay is because the first experiments in multicellularity were abruptly stopped in their tracks.

Which raises the question as to what would've happened had the extinction not occurred. This was a very crucial point in the evolution of life and small changes in the initial state of a system can lead to huge downstream ramifications, so how different would life be today if they had been able to develop?

Unfortunately I don't think theism is required to explain that. The evolution of cooperation, predation, parasitism, communication, etc ("social behavior") is expected in any sufficiently complex resource-contrained environment, just as a result of game theory combined with selection. Once cells land on strategies of cooperation where they are sacrificing their own reproduction to provide resources for their siblings (in the style of the selfish gene), it isn't a big jump to multicellular organisms. According to Wikipedia, multicellularity has evolved independently at least 31 times, and complex multicellularity at least 6 times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism). Since it has happened so many times, two things must be true: (1) it wasn't spectacularly improbable and (2) the genetic lines of each of those mutations has remained competitive enough to survive to this day.

I'll admit that the evolution of sexual reproduction has me stumped, though. I'm sure someone has written papers on it, and there's probably a Wiki on it, but I kind of want to puzzle over it first.

I think your understanding is incorrect. Evolving multicellular organisms once you already have unicellular organisms is probably much easier than abiogenesis; it has in fact happened multiple times independently. Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 25 times in eukaryotes, and also in some prokaryotes, like cyanobacteria, myxobacteria, actinomycetes, Magnetoglobus multicellularis or Methanosarcina.

How does a cell that evolved to be all about itself and it's direct descendants ever decide to team up with several other cells, which all abandon their individuality and dedicate themselves to the survival of a higher-order organism?

The same reason multicellular organisms evolve social behaviors - your relatives share a high proportion of your genes, so it is adaptive for genes to code for traits that improve your relatives' survival and propagation.

Indeed, most unicellular beings reproduce asexually, so they share 100% of genes with their kin, barring new mutations. Most instances of primitive multicellularity derive from cells dividing but remaining physically connected, so all cells in the colony are genetically identical.

Your first two links are to the same place.

From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:

“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“

That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages.

Your first bullet point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.

Should I explain why I find the multiverse hypothesis less plausible than theism as an explanation of fine tuning, or do you already agree with me that it is?

Your second bullet point calls for some subject matter expertise that I obviously don’t have. You mention that RNA can be self-catalyzing. I suppose this raises the question of “just how hard would it be to create RNA by chance circumstances.” How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?

To your third bullet point, I’m not as surprised that organisms which were already created in such environments can now live in them as I am by the suggestion that they were created in the first place. I agree that this is evidence in favor of their possibly being created in them, though, of course, because if it was impossible for an organism to live in such an environment, it would be impossible for them to be created in them. But anyway, I’m not sure this is a strong item of evidence in favor of abiogenesis and don’t weight it very heavily.

I don’t understand this sentence:

“ of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents.”

What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?

I would love to chat with your friend, please consider giving me a point of contact. (If it matters, I’m not a Christian, I’m a weak, almost-reserving-judgement-but-not-quite deist with a sense that there is something to the cosmic fine tuning argument for life.)

Your first bullet point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.

No it doesn't depend on a multiverse at all. (Does all statistical reasoning require multiverses to exist?) It only requires a belief that the universe we see is one example of the set of all possible (imaginable) universes.

It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived.

You don't seem to be understanding the implications of the anthropic principle. For every human that is conceived, there are billions of sperm which are thrown out, and there are even more (billions upon billions upon billions(*A)) of potential genetic combinations which could happen but don't. Had the sperm which became you not fertilized the egg which became you, you would just not exist to have this conversation. Full stop. The probability that you in particular would exist is just too small. The number of possible humans is of similar magnitude to the number of atoms in the universe.

(A) The human genome has 3,054,815,472 base pairs, and two random humans might differ by up to 0.6% of their genome, so we can say that two random humans are separated by about 18M base pairs, whereas the rate of mutation in human DNA is ~2.5×10^(−8) per base per generation, so each human will have about 76 new mutations. To simplify a bit (assuming mutations are evenly distributed, which they are not, but you will see that it doesn't matter), this means the possible range of single mutations that are still considered human is bounded between 4^76 = 5.7 x 10^45 (all mutations between humans occur on the same 76 nucleobases) and 18M choose 764 (any of 76 mutations could occur anywhere in the genome). Either way, the number of possible humans is really big, so if you were not born when you were born, you would never have been, at least not in our light cone.

Your second bullet point calls for some subject matter expertise that I obviously don’t have. You mention that RNA can be self-catalyzing. I suppose this raises the question of “just how hard would it be to create RNA by chance circumstances.” How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?

This was addressed by ResoluteRaven below. The answer appears to be "not very hard", and that was also the gist of the paper I linked above about combining HCN and H2O to make amino acids.

if it was impossible for an organism to live in such an environment, it would be impossible for them to be created in them. But anyway, I’m not sure this is a strong item of evidence in favor of abiogenesis and don’t weight it very heavily.

This is poor logic, because it can be continued ad infinitem to explain anything inconvenient for your position, and makes your position unfalsifiable. (You might say it proves too much. If your position is unfalsifiable, then it is not testable. To put it another way, suppose that 50 years from now scientists were to demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab. You could still argue that they merely discovered the method by which God created life. How convenient, considering it would also the method by which life could have arisen without a God at all.

In the modern day, I've heard creationists arguing on behalf of the position that the earth is only 6,000 years old. When confronted with the fact that fossils can be dated to millions of years ago, they fall back to the argument that if fossils appear to have been buried for millions of years, they must have been placed in the rock formation by an intelligent designer to appear that way, so as to trick modern-day humans. This argument can of course be extended to argue that everything before any arbitrary moment in the past has been retconned, and God just created a world to look convincingly old. If your Designer is all-powerful, I guess that might make sense to you, but it is equally valid to suppose that the Designer didn't do much more than set some parameters on the Big Bang and press a button to see what would happen.

What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?

I hate to be trite, but another commenter below has explained this already. I may suggest that if this topic matters to you (or is truly critical to maintaining your faith), then you try reading the first few chapters of a textbook on molecular biology for the relevant background. You don't have to read very far. I got to chapter 3.

I would love to chat with your friend, please consider giving me a point of contact.

I'm really sorry, but my friend has spent an inordinate amount of their career arguing against intelligent design. Probably about as much time as they have spent doing biological research. Given that the return to humanity is much higher if they spend their time doing research, I really don't want to provide them access to more ideas from intelligent design.

No it doesn't depend on a multiverse at all. (Does all statistical reasoning require multiverses to exist?) It only requires a belief that the universe we see is one example of the set of all possible (imaginable) universes.

It does require it, I think.

One draw from a haystack vs 100000000000000 draws will have different chances of hitting the needle.

If only one universe exists, and most possible universes are very non-conducive to life, it should be surprising to us that we exist, since that seems so unlikely. At that point, we should be looking for explanations that might make it more likely, like multiverses or theism, or it being necessary that the universe be that way, or actually, most universes are conducive to life after all. But we can't just say that in worlds where we woke up it would look like worlds where we might be able to wake up, because the really surprising thing here isn't that but why the hell did we wake up at all, if we are indeed in the only universe, which should by every expectation be very hostile to life. (note, I'm assuming those two things, not asserting them here)

How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?

RNA is composed of one sugar molecule (ribose) and 4 nucleotides in various arrangements. These have all been found in meteorites, indicating that they are likely abundant throughout the universe. I would expect them to come together spontaneously, possibly even within those meteorites themselves shortly after they formed while they still contain pockets of liquid water.

What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?

To a biologist, "highly conserved" means something between "very old" and "nearly unchanged from the earliest times," depending on context. In this case it is closest to the latter. The oldest proteins being stable in hydrothermal vent conditions being evidence that bacteria originated from there is similar to how linguists can determine the homeland of a proto-language by the words for animals and plants that are shared across all its descendants (e.g. if the word for "pine tree" is shared by all of them but not "palm tree" then they probably didn't come from the tropics).

The minimally replicating natural system would need:

  1. Some way of reproducing dynamically in response to mutations. It can’t just be able to reproduce itself perfectly, but otherwise not at all; it needs an information carrier that can vary the assembly instructions in ways that would result in multiple different possible viable offspring. Otherwise, evolution would’ve never happened, because there would only have ever been one organism, or the one organism would have died very early on.

  2. Some machinery for assembly of parts,

  3. a way of reading the instructions,

  4. An outer membrane that holds all of this stuff together,

  5. A way to catalyze it’s own chemical processes

How is RNA sufficient for all of the above?

RNA molecules capable of replicating themselves and other RNA molecules are already known to be possible. The beauty of RNA is that it can both carry information and also catalyze chemical reactions, including the synthesis of other RNA's, and the oldest bit of active chemical machinery within our cells (the ribosomes) use RNA rather than amino acids for their key activity (protein synthesis).

Mutations will occur spontaneously because the replication is inherently imperfect, for RNA more so than for DNA because the molecules are less stable, so it's not something that needs to be accounted for separately. A membrane is not strictly necessary as long as all the components are close enough together. Nearly all of the cellular machinery still works if you take it out of the cell and this is commonly used in the biotechnology industry when we only care about one or two enzymes and not the whole system.

The trick with the anthropic argument is that it doesn’t rely on multiverses or even infinities. Just that A -> B. Given that we are making observations and philosophy instead of choking on vacuum, we must be in conditions that support such activities. It doesn’t explain why you were born to your specific parents, but it does argue that those parents can’t be virgins.

I think it would require multiverses. Yes, it proves rather trivially that you are in the kind of universe in which life exists, but it doesn't provide reasoning for why we should expect that universe to exist. A multiverse should be capable of providing the second, assuming that the multiverse is the sort of multiverse that can do that, I would think?

People mean different things by “the anthropic principle” so let me clarify what you have in mind. Sometimes the idea is supposed to challenge the fine tuning argument by pointing to the multiverse and invoking the law of large numbers. That argument works if you have some reason to think the multiverse exists and is more probable and theoretically virtuous than theism.

But I also hear much more naive and confused sounding appeals to the anthropic principle. For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly. Imagine if I prayed for a parachute while falling from a plane, one spontaneously manifested out of thin air and deployed to save my life, and I reflected afterwards about why that happened. I conclude, “well, I wouldn’t be here to ask the question in the first place if that didn’t happen, so there must be no explanation needed.”

Or imagine saying the theory of evolution is dispensable because “if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here to wonder about it if not, so what is there to explain?”

I’m not trying to use the Anthropic principle as an argument for any process over another. No, it’s a refutation of the fine-tuning premise in general. Good conditions aren’t evidence for or against an intelligent designer.

That means I have to answer “no” to your question, because we’d have to see the “seeming improbability” no matter how it came about.

Suppose you were sentenced to death by firing squad but a thousand marksmen ten feet away missed their shot. Would you say you don’t have to explain how this happened (by design, presumably—a conspiracy not to kill you), because being in a position to ask it requires already existing?

If this is still supposed to be about the unlikeliness of abiogenesis, then this analogy would only make sense if you believed that the conditions necessary for the arising of life happened only once in the entire history of the universe. Then it really would be a miracle.

But it's more like there are a bajillion people about to be executed, each with their own thousand-strong firing squad and we know that at least one of them survived. With so many tries, one of them could have gotten super lucky. (And of course, we don't really know how many marksmen you need to postulate to match the probability of abiogenesis happening in some small volume of the primordial soup at a particular point).

(If it's about the wonder of the fact that our universe can support life at all, then I'm fine with answering "I dunno" while insisting that there's no justification for jumping from "I dunno" to "therefore, God.")

This is correct.

The level of analogy for which he makes sense would be ways the physical laws of the universe itself is fine-tuned for life. As long as there are no varying-laws multiverses, then there's only one, not a bajillion.

I'll also note that the firing squad example makes this more complicated to me. I was reminded of Joe Carlsmith's SIA vs SSA series on anthropics, which I don't remember well enough to be able to give truly informed opinions.

I had the extremely good luck of being born as a middle-class American and therefore enjoy a level of privilege that most people at most places and times could only dream of. I grew up with all my necessities taken care of, I got a higher education and postgraduate degree, I had access to all the fruits of modern technology - antibiotics, air conditioning, the internet. I have daily use of things that many kings of old would have traded half their kingdoms for. That I would have all the privileges I enjoy is exceedingly unlikely, I am among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived on earth.

Not only that, but most members of this very forum are similarly privileged. The majority of users here are middle class or higher, educated, and live in conditions that most human beings could have never even dreamed of. What are the odds that hundreds of people, all from among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged humans in history, would all find themselves here at some random obscure internet forum? We are talking about a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, repeated hundreds of times. We're talking about odds of some miniscule fraction like 0.0000....0001%.

Therefore, I submit that The Motte was created by Jesus Christ himself. The odds that a place like this could arise by the chance congregating of individuals is so astronomically unlikely that we can dismiss such a hypothesis as ludicrous. Only the guiding hand of our Lord and Savior could have created such a rare and perfectly fine-tuned set of conditions.

Your point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.

Your point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true.

No, it doesn't. It works equally well with a one-shot universe. If the parameters had not been properly fined tuned, then we wouldn't be here. Therefore we can only observe a universe in which the parameters are fine tuned. This is true regardless of how many universes exist.

It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived.

Those other billions of acts of conception are irrelevant. You could not possibly have been made by any of those other acts of conception, since those other people had different genes than your parents. Moreover, the statistical likelihood of you being conceived is independent of each prior act of conception in the same way that the outcome of a coin flip is independent of prior flips.

The relevant analogy is to note the large number of eggs and sperm your parents produced over their lifetimes and the extreme unlikelihood that the particular egg and particular sperm that produced you would have combined. This was, indeed, extremely unlikely ex ante, but you can only observe an ex post world in which this highly unlikely event did in fact occur.

People mean different things by “the anthropic principle” so let me clarify what you have in mind. Sometimes the idea is supposed to challenge the fine tuning argument by pointing to the multiverse and invoking the law of large numbers. That argument works if you have some reason to think the multiverse exists and is more probable and theoretically virtuous than theism.

But I also hear much more naive and confused sounding appeals to the anthropic principle. For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly. Imagine if I prayed for a parachute while falling from a plane, one spontaneously manifested out of thin air and deployed to save my life, and I reflected afterwards about why that happened. I conclude, “well, I wouldn’t be here to ask the question in the first place if that didn’t happen, so there must be no explanation needed.”

Or imagine saying the theory of evolution is dispensable because “if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here to wonder about it if not, so what is there to explain?”

For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly.

I am not saying that a phenomenon that involves the creation of observers requires no explanation, I am saying that observing such a phenomenon exists provides no information because such a phenomenon is 100% guaranteed to exist in any universe with observers. So I am saying we cannot draw any useful conclusions from observing such a phenomenon exists.

For example, every person I meet who has ever been skydiving tells me that their parachute has opened every time they've gone skydiving. This fact tells me no information about how likely parachutes are to open (except that the probability is not 0%). It provides no information about parachutes one way or the other.

The surprising part isn't what the phenomenon looks like. It's that there are observers at all in the one-shot universe. It does provide information.

It doesn't provide information, because the only possible one-shot universe we can observe is one with observers. Maybe there was a 0.000...01% chance that the one-shot universe would be fine-tuned for observers, or maybe there was a 99.999...% chance that the one-shot universe would be fine-tuned for observers. Either of these possibilities is consistent with the fact that we, as observers, see a one-shot universe with observers in it.

So imagine we have two hypotheses, to simplify.

Hypothesis 1 is that there's a 95% chance of a rational being coming into existence.

Hypothesis 2 is that there's a 0.001% chance of a rational being coming into existence.

You, the observer, notice, hey, I'm a rational being who came into existence!

I'm saying that it's rational to think that this should update your priors towards hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2. But only if there's a one-shot or few-shot universe.

It's 95000 times more likely for a rational being to come into existence under hypothesis 1 than under hypothesis 2. So this piece of evidence should update our beliefs by 95000 times using the odds form of Bayes' theorem, I believe.

For a comparison (and I'm not certain that this is a perfect analogy, but I think it works), let's say you are told that there's a 50/50 chance a surgery succeeds. Under the 50% chance you survive, you always wake up. Under the 50% where it fails, they freeze your body, and you estimate that there's a 1/50 chance that they manage to revive you in the distant future.

You wake up. Assuming there's not going to be any distinguishing sensation between the two ways you could wake up, which should you think is more likely? I would think you should think that there's a 50:1 chance that it worked.

More comments

What do you think of my example of the “made by God” world? Wouldn’t your argument be equally applicable in such a world, so that it wouldn’t be evidence of theism?

In a world where each subatomic particle is stamped with the words "made by Jesus Christ," we have two apparently unlikely things being true:

  1. The parameters of the universe are fine-tuned to produce human life, and

  2. The parameters of the universe are fine-tuned to reference a particular Hebrew carpenter by name.

Even though point 1 seems extremely unlikely ex ante, it is not actually unlikely given that human observers exist. Point 1 must necessarily be true in any universe in which human observers exist. Therefore, observing that point 1 is true does not tell us any information about how our universe came into existence, because point 1 is 100% guaranteed to be true in any universe we can observe.

Point 2, on the other hand, is actually extremely unlikely. There is no reason why point 2 must be true in every universe where human observers exist, and in fact we know it need not be true in all such universes because it isn't true in our own universe. Therefore point 2, if it were true, would actually be powerful evidence of something (perhaps the truth of Christianity, or perhaps that we're living in a simulation and are being messed with by the simulators).

Therefore, I submit that The Motte was created by Jesus Christ himself.

New Zorba origin story?

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

And so he called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: and he saw that it was Actually A Quality Contribution!

Do you think the seeming improbability of the origin of life is evidence for theism?

No.

Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what?

Based on our understanding of how fighter jets are made? Fighter jets require millions of parts made in very specific ways out of very specific materials and then assembled in very complex ways, that generally do not occur in nature. Like, what is the natural process that results in the probabilistic construction of a jet engine? I'm supposed to believe it's just as likely a jet engine arises from natural processes as a proto-bacteria arising from inorganic matter? What is the evidence these two things are of similar likelihood?

Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?

Because we understand the principles involved in constructing a fighter jet (Newtonian Mechanics, mostly) much better than we understand the principles underlying the jump from inorganic matter to organic matter. The way science doesn't work is that if we understand how to make something that has probability p of arising in nature we necessarily understand how to make everything that has probability greater than p of arising in nature.

Like, what is the natural process that results in the probabilistic construction of a jet engine?

Simple: Some self-replicating biological robots gradually improve through natural selection, eventually forming large multicellular organisms, some of which create jet engines as a by-product of reproductive competition and predatory defense. It's more or less the same natural process that creates ambergris, really, differing in only minor details (like evolutionary pathways) that are meaningless on the scales we're talking about. Jet engines are a thing naturally formed by humans in the same sense that boogers are.

It's worth considering that we do, in fact, live in the universe that natural processes formed a jet engine. Of course people seem to draw a (to me) completely arbitrary distinction between our actions and those of a protocell.

Now if the question is "How would a jet engine be naturally formed without going through the natural processes that form jet engines," well the answer is clearly that it wouldn't, the same as nothing, not life, not an engine, not even a simple rock, will simply wink into existence spontaneously.

The make-it-or-break-it question at hand with abiogenesis isn't "what are the odds of this?" it's "is this the natural process via which life is formed?" The research seems to be gradually moving towards showing that yes, it is, but we also definitely aren't there yet.

clearly it wouldn't

It could through chance quantum fluctuations, for example, that's just astronomically unlikely compared to your previously mentioned route.

Like, what is the natural process that results in the probabilistic construction of a jet engine?

Can I not just as easily ask “what is the natural process that results in the probabilistic construction of a self-replicating molecular organism?”

What is the evidence these two things are of similar likelihood?

You seem to think the jet engine is vastly less likely, so apparently you think there is evidence that bears on this question. What is that evidence?

You seem to think the jet engine is vastly less likely, so apparently you think there is evidence that bears on this question. What is that evidence?

Observation? I can look around me and see life in a variety of forms. Great and small, simple and complex. All of them apparently formed from naturalistic processes. Yet never once have I, or anyone, seen a jet engine formed by anything other than the labor of people to build one.

You don't have independent examples of abiogenesis, I'm pretty sure.

I would be very interested to see your evidence that abiogenesis happened exactly once!

I'm pretty sure it's the scientific consensus that all life that we've seen has a common ancestor? Or are you saying across the universe, in which case that seems comparable to Russell's teapot—we have no evidence in any direction, so we need to resort to estimates of base rates.

I was saying this since you were trying to use the prevalence of life in our surroundings to argue that life is prevalent across the cosmos, but the prevalence of life in our surroundings is clearly influenced by the anthropic principle, and shares a common ancestor.

As another comment points out, the available scientific evidence suggests multicellularity evolved independently multiple times. I would be pretty surprised if this wasn't the case for single cellular life as well.

That aside, I'm happy to say my prior is that inorganic matter becoming organic matter via natural processes is more probable than natural processes spontaneously forming a jet engine.

All life on Earth is remarkably compact when it comes to biochemistry, fundamental pathways of metabolism and biosynthesis, and genetics. In particular, the genetic code (the rule translating sequences of nucleotides into sequences of aminoacids) is almost identical in all living species, despite being, as far as we know, arbitrary.

Multiple abiogeneses might very well have occurred, but in that case it seems the product of one has assimilated or destroyed the products of the others -- or perhaps, the products of multiple events have mixed together so tightly, in a period in which organisms were a lot more porous and promiscuous than even modern bacteria, that the different components cannot be told apart.

Multicellularity seems much more likely to me. Eusociality, which is very similar, also occurred several independent times. But that's taking existing life guided through evolution, not creating new life. We'd need to look at the actual complexity or difficulty of making a self-replicating thing through entirely unguided processes to have a sense of how likely it could be expected to be. If it's fairly easy, why not. If it's very hard, even given the size of the earth, then not likely. The impression I'd been given was that the second was more accurate.

This is question begging. You observed the naturalistic origin of life? You can’t say “I know life originated naturalistically because I observe the existence of organic life but not its initial origin.”

I observe that jet engines are vastly less likely to occur in nature than life is. What is the counter evidence, that they are similarly likely to occur?

ETA:

To be clearer. I have a simple observation that there are vastly more and varied forms of life in existence than jet engines. Consider two explanations for this phenomenon.

(1) Jet engines and life are both equally (or similarly) likely to be produced by naturalistic processes but a supernatural process has intervened to create life but not jet engines.

(2) It is vastly more likely for naturalistic processes to produce life than jet engines.

What is the reason, the evidence, for believing (1) over (2)?

Can I not just as easily ask “what is the natural process that results in the probabilistic construction of a self-replicating molecular organism?”

You could, and you would have gotten a response that it's ordinary organic chemistry swayed by Brownian motion, that happily proceeds on scales in question and no doubt proceeded in the primordial ocean of our world. It is another question just how many trials in an average run it would have taken to produce a self-replicating system; I personally think «more than our Hubble volume is likely to have seen». But the basic physical plausibility is not in question. The entire trajectory from there to here exists and does not involve a single supernaturally improbable step like synchronized quantum teleportation of macroscopic objects; only a great deal of churn.

At which point @Gillitrut would have very reasonably asked you again how a jet gets formed without human labor.

Wait, do you think it’s physically impossible for a fighter jet to arise from natural processes, like random quantum fluctuations and collisions? I thought it was just unlikely. Don’t most physicists agree that with enough chance events this could occur? Sean Carroll has given weirder examples of things he thinks happen due to the multiverse existing, such as that there must be a universe somewhere where unembodied human brains just appear in the middle of a tiny space due to random fluctuations of “something something quantum mechanics”, with a supportive environment that allows them to live.

I am not sure but I think there has not been a single case in the history of our (finite volume) universe where 1g of matter under normal conditions has ended up «teleported» by 1m in a coherent manner, this sole event is less plausible than the emergence of life. My physical knowledge is lacking though.

And if you stipulate infinities then there's no good objection to basic anthropic principle and the whole theological argument falls apart.

A fighter jet did arise from natural processes, because humans evolved and built a fighter jet. This is merely a restatement of the original argument, which is the point.

IMO the fact that the universe exists is a fairly compelling argument for theism generally. Any science undergraduate will understand that zero everywhere is a very satisfactory solution to all of the relevant field equations, but the fact that anything is here at all implies a far more complicated arrangement. I personally find it more compelling than life, even intelligent life, existing within the universe.

But that's just my opinion and it's hardly conclusive ontological proof.

The universe is heading toward a state of maximal entropy; when it reaches that state, known as “thermal equilibrium”, all life processes will be impossible. If you imagine all the possible ways of arranging stuff in the universe, an extremely high proportion of them would put the universe in thermal equilibrium immediately. Life is only possible (for a while – it will eventually run down) because our universe luckily started out very far from thermal equilibrium, with extremely low entropy, 14 billion years ago, for some unknown reason.

So, given that almost all ways of assigning values to the universe’s parameters would be unfriendly to life, why does the universe in fact have life-friendly parameters?

The initial entropy of the universe was ridiculously low. According to the traditional Big Bang theory, the universe originated in a giant explosion about 14 billion years ago. At its beginning, the universe had an incredibly low entropy. According to one estimate, if you randomly picked a possible initial state for a universe, the probability of picking one with such a low entropy is about 1 in ten to the power of ten to the power of 124. The low initial entropy, in turn, is crucial to explaining life and everything else in the universe that we care about.

Eh, the counter to this argument is that in reality there are 10^10^124 (or more) different universes out there and we're just present in the one that's suitable for life.

It reminds me of the old football "oracle" scam where the scammer sends you the outcome of a future football match via post and gets it right. Then he sends you another one and gets it right again. And then again 5 more times. After 7 matches of getting it right in a row he sends a message saying: "Clearly I've demonstrated my football prediction abilities with a less than 1% change of this happening at random, if you want the results of the next match (to bet on etc.) send me $1,000". The poor victim is convinced by this and sends over $1,000 only to get a prediction that's no better than anyone else's.

The trick here is that the scammer sends out the initial message to 128 different people, half getting told Team A is going to win, and half Team B. If Team A actually wins he continues sending messages to the first half of people, otherwise he sticks with the second half (since the ones he sent the wrong prediction to are never going to believe his prediction powers now). He then splits this group into half and tells half of them that Team C are going to win and half that Team D are going to win etc. etc.

After 7 rounds of this he's down to his victim who's the (un)lucky dude who the scammer sent all 7 correct predicitons to. This person then thinks he's dealing with someone who can actually predict football game outcomes with >99% probability and is much more likely to part with his money, only to get a rude surprise afterwards...

The oracle scam has been my favorite scam since I first saw it on a Square One Mathnet episode decades ago.

It was also a case solved by The Bloodhound Gang on 3-2-1 Contact.

Yeah, it's a particularly nasty scam, considering that the biggest portion of the loss to the victim doesn't even come from the scammer, it comes from losing money to the betting shop (clearly if you paid $x to the scammer you're gonna bet enough to make at least that much money back).

And if the scammer gets the prediction right he gets to repeat the whole procedure with you, asking for even more money this time around since now it's even less likely in the eyes of the victim the scammer is making things up, causing him to bet even more money on the next match until it all fails spectacularly and the victim loses a shit ton of money.

Honestly the best case scenario for the victim here is that he loses the very first bet he puts on based on the scammer's advice and get wise to what's going on rather than having a succession of ever larger bets that eventually wipe him out completely.

Why do you think the multiverse exists?

Since we speak plainly here, please clarify whether you believe in evolution, which seems very relevant.

Edit: Also, I suggest you argue with the UFO guy below, who claims that it should be common for life to arise in the universe.

I do believe in evolution, but my understanding is that evolution is only intended as an explanation of the diversity of life but not its initial origins. For that, the abiogenesis story is the only serious naturalistic candidate of which I’m aware, aside from the “panspermia” idea that life evolved somewhere more favorable to life and traveled to the earth in a stable vehicle.

Honestly think fighter jet is a bad analogy. At some point you do get the law of large numbers is too large. There’s a difference between pulling three letters from a hat and getting dog and pulling 500k letters from a hat and getting Shakespeare which would be something like 30^500k.

And some times we do get random “jet fighters” like didn’t Scott visits some underwater diving place that looks like ancient ruins?

I think the argument at question is that abiogenesis is the equivalent of monkey+typewriter=hamlet, not random scrabble tile+random scrabble tile+random scrabble tile=dog.

And I wouldn’t count underwater formations that look like ruins as particularly improbable because they’re basically both big piles of rocks, and we should expect by coincidence that sometimes natural rock piles look like pyramids or walls because those are normal shapes for piles of rocks to assume.

To get evolution started, you need a self-replicating molecular organism and a stable incubation environment in which it can proliferate for a long time. How complex do you think such a thing would be? Why haven’t we been able to recreate this from non living matter with modern technology? I suspect such a self-replicating organism would have to be unbelievably complicated.

Molecular-scale mechanisms sounds exactly like something that can relatively easily arise randomly (less parts) but hard to create on purpose (with no molecular-scale manipulators).

Fighter jets are the opposite - large-scale forces would be disrupting any intermediate stages of genesis, and it needs more diverse environments to assemble its different parts (do you think the alloys for its fuselage, the upholstering of its seats and the transistors in its electronics can all be created under the same circumstances?).

Simple but hard / complex but easy.

The question about how hard it can arise randomly would seem to depend in large part on the amount of information contained in very simple replicators.

If you go with the RNA world hypothesis, we'd have to work out how common replicating strings of RNA are, and so how likely a random string is to come up.

The anthropic principle probably takes care of this, though. (It might not take care of universe level fine tuning without supposing a multiverse, I think.)

From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:

“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“

That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages.

Alright, now look up all the technological processes involved in creating every part of a fighter jet, and consider that the less compact it is, the less effort it takes to scatter one part from another.

large-scale forces would be disrupting any intermediate stages of genesis,

Why wouldn’t forces work to disrupt intermediate stages of the genesis of a microorganism? You don’t think it would happen spontaneously, in one step, do you?

and it needs more diverse environments to assemble its different parts

A self-replicating molecular organism has very different parts assembled in a very specific way. Why wouldn’t it need a diverse range of assembly environments, if a fighter jet would?

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