Atheists don't need faith

[EdithSimcox]

Atheists don't need faith

Lots of interesting things here including:

• nearly half of us are non-religious but less than a fifth are atheist...
• atheists need "simply more than can be proved by logic and science"

Any thoughts? A view I've often seen expressed on MN is that logic and science are the end of the subject.

theres probably not much point continuing the conversation on the testability of string theory, but I will point out that science is not a monolithic culture, and the view that some string theorists make exaggerated claims for their theories and for the possibility of them ever being experimentally tested is now pretty mainstream.

Bottom line - all things considered - it is clearly, clearly far more likely that we are fine tuned to the universe than the other way round.

I agree we are adapted to this universe and it's local physical conditions.
But many conceivable universes with broadly similar physical laws would not be capable of supporting any kind of complexity at all.

I think it's worth spending some time pondering why this might be. My hope would be that in a more fundamental theory of physics the number of free parameters is far less, and the appearance of fine-tuning goes away.

DS (14 yo) and myself discussed the fine tuning argument over dinner yesterday and I have to say it is pretty ridiculous. The example he used was, imagine an ant on a leaf floating on the Atlantic ocean looking around and saying, "omg, this ocean is so perfect the wise ant in the sky must have designed it specifically for us to live on." Later a wave kills them. Seriously, theists use this to prove god exists?

We live in a Universe that is on the whole inhospitable to human life, in a billion years our planet will be destroyed by the sun and bible bashers claim this is proof of a god?

For 14 billion years humans didn't exist, if anything you would claim earth was made for bacteria or dinosaurs not mammals, that was just a quirk (random asteroid) of fate.

Looking at it from the other side. If god created this universe, why did he do such a crappy job. He had the power to have a cosmological constant of zero but he didn't fancy a nice safe universe. If he just wanted to create life why didn't he create a stable world instead of a massively unstable universe? Why did he wait so long. Why create dinosaurs?

Seriously the fine tuning argument is about as useful as Santa.

But surely in order to be considered scientifically valid a theory just needs to be testable in principle? Which string theory is. As is the multiverse. Just because someone hasn't yet come up with an actual way to do that does not mean no one ever will. That was the issue on here.

And if you agree that we are adapted to the universe - then you are also agreeing that the universe was very likely not fine-tuned for us. They cannot both be true.

And yes, I am sure most conceivable universes could not support life - but again, if there are infinite conceivable universes this becomes irrelevant. We simply don't have enough information currently.

Even if it turned out there was one universe - ours - and no other possible, then I still wouldn't be that impressed because it still wouldn't suggest, even faintly, that we're the reason it's here.

You seem to be operating from the assumption that universes come to be so that life of some description can evolve. I really don't see why.

I love your DS's analogy, Mathsmum. Spot on!

"apparent fine-tuning"

Surely the scientific approach would not be to call it "fine-tuning" to start with, since that suggests the presence of some external consciousness to have done some tuning, fine or otherwise.

"Most of this is well beyond the scope of scientific investigation."

For now. "Can't investigate it now" doesn't mean "Won't be able to investigate it, ever". When Einstein published his Special Relativity paper in 1905 and General Relativity in 1915 not much of it was verifiable at all. Paul Dirac theorised antimatter through a mathematical equation in 1928, but it wasn't observed for years. Peter Higgs talked about bosons in 1964, but the Higgs Boson was not observed until 2012.

String Theory (M-Theory these days, really) makes many predictions. We haven't been able to prove it yet but that says more about the limits of our technology at present than the theory itself. It's also compatible with what we already know about the world and has explanatory power, unifying interactions and solving some consistency problems in existing frameworks.

You cannot possibly compare it to a vague & nonsensical hearsay story about how a benign creator impregnated a peasant woman to be born a human, and orchestrated his own torture on a crucifix because he loves his little creatures. If you do, with all due respect, you really should not be calling yourself a scientist.

"I agree we are adapted to this universe and it's local physical conditions.
But many conceivable universes with broadly similar physical laws would not be capable of supporting any kind of complexity at all. I think it's worth spending some time pondering why this might be."

As worthy as spending time pondering why the die you cast came "2", why you drew the 3 of Spades from a deck?

String theory / m theory doesn't make any predictions that we could possible test. The energies required to directly investigate the relevant scales are completely infeasible, and for any observable question about beyond-standard-model physics, you can get any answer you like out of string theory by choosing the right variation of it.

A very rough analogy for the point of pondering fine tuning is below. Please don't take this analogy too seriously - I know chemistry didn't actually develop this way.

The periodic table of atomic elements (together with rules for how the elements combine) explains lots of disparate materials in a coherent framework. It's a theoretical triumph. But it's also unsatisfactory in that it has many hundreds of degrees of freedom (eg the possible masses of each element), and has no explanation for why the elements fit so neatly together in lots of different ways. Considered as a fundamental theory with 100-odd elementary objects, it seems to be fine-tuned to allow the generation of organic molecules. If oxygen were twice the size it is, water couldn't form, etc.

But from the viewpoint of particle physics, the apparently very numerous degrees of freedom are illusory - there are just protons, neutrons (or quarks), and electrons and the only degrees of freedom in the theory are their couplings.

I hope it's possible that the apparent fine tuning we see in the standard model today can be reduced in an analogous way.

String theory makes predictions about theoretical physics that are testable mathematically. It's also true to say that any theory that involves the physics of the very, very small (including quantum gravity) are basically currently untestable.

There is a difference between currently untestable and permanently untestable. In principle, string theory is not unfalsifiable just because the "energies required to directly test" it are unfeasible.

That's now.

And regarding your second post, I for one won't take your analogy seriously because I have no idea what on earth any of that has to do with what's been said here.

You've already said that you don't believe in the supernatural and that you accept that we've adapted for the universe - so why are you even still talking about fine tuning. As Cote said, that's a very unscientific phrase to use because it instantly suggests a tuner exists.

I think you are the person I've spoken to before, and I didn't believe your claim to be a theoretical physicist thein, either.

Fine tuning is a perfectly good scientific phrase. The people doing the "tuning" are the scientists fitting the theory to observed reality. if this process involves a large number of constants which must take very specific values then the theory is "fine tuned".

The point of my chemistry analogy was that if a theory needs to be fine tuned, one possible resolution is to find a more fundamental theory with fewer (or more natural) degrees of freedom.

The fine tuning we see is survival of the fittest. The organisms that had favourable or neutral mutations got to keep going, the ones that had mutations that hindered survival petered out. Such as a predator having a mutation that made it harder to hide or prey that had one that made them stand out.

I looked up the chances of humans evolving exactly the way they did. Its calculated at 1 followed by 10 to the 40,000 power. That's a 1 with 40,000 zeros after it! Its so improbable that we have to assume life didn't evolve, it was fine tuned by a designer. Or do we?

I looked up the chance that the universe evolved exactly the way it did. Its one followed by 10 to the power of 123! Do I need to spell out the maths?

"Fine tuning is a perfectly good scientific phrase. The people doing the "tuning" are the scientists fitting the theory to observed reality."

That is not at all how the term has been used on this thread. See Fine-tuned Universe.

You haven't used it in that sense, either. See your earlier post below, where it is clear that you don't mean it is the scientists that do the fine-tuning:

contortionist Tue 31-May-16 07:41:21
It has been suggested that the universe is fine-tuned for black hole production.

Cote - you got me, although In my defence I was describing a view I didn't agree with rather than advocating my own position.

Our current physical theories have to be fine tuned, but the record of science over multiple centuries has been that better, more fundamental,
theories require less fine-tuning. I expect an eventual fundamental theory will be the opposite of fine-tuned, with a small number of parameters, taking natural values, in a large feasible region. Sadly, I think this is unlikely to happen in my lifetime.

That's rubbish, Contortionist.

I raised perfectly valid objections to the theistic fine-tuning argument and you objected by going off at a tangent talking about issues that have no association at all?

I would think that a theoretical physicist would be so well aquainted with the fallacies of supernatural fine tuning that this sort of "confusion" would not happen.

Looks to me like you wanted a reason to object so Googled....getting the two issues muddled up.

Apricot - I don't see the distinction you're trying to draw. Fine-tuning suggests that our physical theories are incomplete. One possible completion (a particularly unlikely one I think) is to add a creator. There are other ways our theories could be completed, the most satisfying of which would be a more fundamental theory.

It's the exact same distinction Cote drew and you accepted that readily enough.

You cannot see the difference between the proposition that a supernatural creator fine-tuned the universe so that we could exist in it and the tinkering done by physicists to make their models fit with observation?????

You have no idea what you're talking about & are thus wasting everyone's time.

Your claims to expertise are unconvicing in the extreme, just so you know. I won't respond to you again.

The proposition that a creator exists is a possible explanation for the fact that physicists need to finely-tune their models to give universes like the one we see.

There are other possible explanations.

It's a bizarre explanation in my view. A scientist trying to understand the universe using a model that doesn't quite fit decides that the reason his/her model isn't quite right is 'God'. Surely the appropriate thinking is that more information is required to add to the model? Especially given that this is essentially how science works. We thin we have a working model, learn more and then change the model. The model is not after all the universe.

I also find it very odd to be using chance and probabilities to look backward. We exist, the earth and the universe exists. We don't need to 'roll a dice' and guess at the chances of what has happened happening because it has already happened so there is no uncertainty to predict. So what if there are other alternative things that might have happened. Multiverses are a fun sci-fi idea to play with, but right now there is no way for us to know if we exist alongside a whole range of other possibilities. I don't know why that has anything to do with the god concept anyway. Gods could equally create multiple universes as just this one.

FFS. So string theory & multiverse are useless as explanations for anything because they are untestable....but "God" (undefined, unobserved, untestable and unfalsifiable) is a reasonable explanation, worthy of consideration, for the "problem" of fine-tuning?

What a load of shit.

Apricot - yes, I agree 'God' is not a very satisfactory explanation, for all sorts of reasons.

But denying there's a fine-tuning problem doesn't seem to me to be defensible either.

Yet again, you are wrong. In fact, entire books have been written by emminent physicists challenging the very notion that the universe even appears fine-tuned.

So, yeah, it's a defensible POV.

Other scientists, of course, don't agree. But that's science for you.

Personally, I don't know who is wrong and who is right. But that's because I am not a physicist and am not trying to pretend that I am.

So over the course of our discussion, you've gone from your original statement that I objected to:

it becomes a matter of sheer ridiculous to imagine that it was "fine-tuned"

To:

Personally, I don't know who is wrong and who is right.

I think that's a more reasonable view, and I doubt we'll change each other's minds any further. Thanks for the discussion, which has clarified some of the issues for me.