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Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Does the Queen of Diamonds Refute the Fine-Tuning Argument? (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post featured a response by Casey Luskin to astrophysicist Paul Sutter's rebuttal to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God.

Luskin wrote that Sutter's argument would, if generalized, destroy science since it could be employed to defeat any scientific theory, and he's right about that, but there's another problem with Sutter's argument. Before I state it, it'd be helpful to repeat what Sutter says about cosmic fine-tuning:
To that line of thinking [cosmic fine-tuning] I [Sutter] have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.

We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.
Sutter is asserting that in order to say whether the fine-tuning of our universe is improbable we have to be able to compare our universe to other universes, but since there are no other universes (that we know of) such a comparison can't be done. His objection is not quite correct, however.

What we can do is ask how much different this existing universe could possibly have been. How much different, for example, could the strength of the gravitational force have been? Or the strong nuclear force?

Given a range of possible force strengths, we can conclude that there must be far more ways that any possible universe would be life-prohibiting than that it be life-permitting, and it's thus far more probable that a life-prohibiting universe exist than that a life-permitting universe exist.

Our universe must be very improbable, and no other universe needs to actually exist in order to draw this conclusion.

Sutter's objection would only work in the case that our universe with its particular set of properties is the only universe that could possibly exist, but why think that? What reason do we have for thinking that any universe other than the one we inhabit is not possible?

Maybe Sutter has an answer to that, but if not, his Queen of Diamonds analogy just doesn't work.