In my last post, I discussed why I was not convinced by Matthew Adelstein’s formulation of the design argument. In this post, I’m going to outline why I don’t find the design argument convincing generally.
The Physical Universe Seems Inefficient to Achieve the Goods Theists Claim God Desires
Why does God need atoms and quarks and beings with physical properties? It’s not that the physical components of the universe falsify or defeat the existence of the God of traditional theism, but it’s still a little weird.
Proponents of theism and the design arguments assert that the flawed universe we observe is compatible with the God of traditional theism, and indeed can bring about various goods. Here’s a video of Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne doing just that at various points.
To be clear: Swinburne isn’t making any arguments about design, just giving common counter-arguments to atheist assertions about the flaws of religious models of the universe. In essence he’s saying:
The existence of evil gives humans the opportunity to do good;
God is hidden to allow us to practice moral autonomy and goodness that we otherwise wouldn’t with God’s constant presence;
Nature’s wastefulness (countless empty planets and celestial bodies) and non-sentient violence (astronomical events like comets crashing into vacant planets) is something beautiful and good, like a painting is beautiful is good.
The universe is good in itself
It’s good for anyone to be aware of things, even for half a second.
It’s good to think and rationalize, and to know an omnipotent God and to progressively understand the wonders of an infinite universe
It’s good to have the choice to know God or not to bother
Given these explanations, we can infer that the Christian model of the universe (or at least Swinburne’s) wants to secure (at least) these goods in a hypothetical universe:
The opportunity to do good, in a morally autonomous way
To experience beauty and goodness
To be aware of the universe, even for half a second
To have the ability to think and rationalize,
To know an omnipotent God
To progressively understand the wonders of an infinite universe
To have the choice to know God…or not.
For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume he’s correct. The problem is that one can conceivably obtain these goods in a universe that is much simpler, less physically complex, and looking much differently than our own.
We can imagine a spiritual world where each spirit has the opportunity to do good in a morally autonomous ways, that experiences beauty and goodness, is aware of itself in its universe, has the ability to think and rationalize, has the choice to know God, does so, and to progressively understand the wonders of an infinite universe. We don’t need theoretical physics to conceive of such a universe. In fact, before the advent of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, this was somewhat the world humans thought they lived in.
Put a more succinct way: If life, the creation of conscious moral creatures practicing goodness, and autonomy were the points of this universe, why are the building blocks of life so complicated to create and maintain? If God is all powerful, he didn’t need to use atoms. If life in itself was good, why did God need to create a universe where 99 percent of it was not-life?
Inefficiency Lowers The Probability For Me
I don’t assert this argument as a falsification of theism; as Graham Oppy points out, these supposed knock-down arguments (like the Euthyphro dilemma/Problem of Evil) can usually be reconciled by theists with some tinkering. Having said that, for me:
That we can imagine a possible universe that is at least marginally more efficient at creating the purported goods of theism,
That the traditional theistic God, being all-powerful, could create at least that universe, if not an even better one,
And that is not the universe we live in,
Has me lowering my (already low) probability of God’s existence.
Does Fine-Tuning Really Support God’s existence?
Maybe there’s no inherent good of efficiency, and so my assumption of efficiency (or simplicity in an explanation) is arbitrary. Maybe there are aspects of this universe’s complexity that are essential to secure the goodness I’ve outlined here, and I haven’t dived deep enough on the subject to see it.1 All of these are possible.
At the same time, we have to remember that a key aspect of the design argument is that God loves life and creates the probabilities for it to arise. If God truly loves life and sets its probabilities of arising, those probabilities should be high.
In this way, when formulating your design argument, you must make two arguments: first, that the probabilities match our expectations of God, and second, that the inefficiencies that we may observe are necessary and exclusive to the hypothetical universes that secure the goods purported by theism. So, it’s not just that the universe should support life, but it should support the kind of good life that the Christian or Swinburne would support.
But even then, these two arguments collapses into one again. An infinitely powerful God should be able to render inefficiencies efficient in his designing of the universe. So, even if it’s hypothetically difficult for the universe to support maximal complex or good life, it nevertheless should actually support maximal complex/good life.
That’s not the universe we observe! In fact, the fine-tuning argument is the opposite, the claim that the probabilities of life forming are extremely low.
Falsification Criteria For Quasi-Scientific Theories Is Useful
In this way, fine-tuning argument makes excellent sense if you pre-suppose that God is all-loving and has necessarily benevolent intentions. But if you remove those assumptions, the data seems much less compelling.2
Take this thought experiment from theist Hans Halvorson:
Suppose that you’re captured by an alien race whose intentions are unclear, and they make you play Russian roulette. Then suppose that you win, and survive the game. If you are convinced by the fine-tuning argument, then you might be tempted to conclude that your captors wanted you to live. But imagine that you discover the revolver had five of six chambers loaded, and you just happened to pull the trigger on the one empty chamber. The discovery of this second fact doesn’t confirm the benevolence of your captors. It disconfirms it. The most rational conclusion is that your captors were hostile, but you got lucky. Similarly, the fine-tuning argument rests on an interesting discovery of physical cosmology that the odds were strongly stacked against life. But if God exists, then the odds didn’t have to be stacked this way. These bad odds could themselves be taken as evidence against the existence of God.
For this reason, proponents and opponents of fine-tuning should be maximally clear about how the universe would look like if God existed or did not exist. On the non-theist side, the fact that life is so improbable and that it is rare are data points against the probability of God. On the theist side, the fact that life is so improbable and that it is rare are data points in favor of the probability of God.
This seems like a genuine case of two different groups looking at the same data points and coming to wildly different conclusions. Typically, this is evidence of an intractable problem, but is it really? There are problems with the use of falsifiability in philosophy, but it’s a great litmus test for scientific theories, which the fine tuning argument presents itself to be, as an interpretation of empirical data.
Non-theistic philosophers and scientists are up front that a universe with more life would lower the probability (or even falsify) non-theism.3
Meanwhile, I have not heard any theist outline what the universe would look like if God didn’t exist.4 If the universe was more conducive to life, would that falsify the fine-tuning argument for the theist? I don’t think so. In fact, I think theists would just say that it’s further evidence that God values life and wants to create more of it.
What about if it supported even less life? I don’t think fine-tuning proponents would say they were wrong if the cosmological constants were even more precise or more allegedly improbable.
All that to say: Fine-tuning advocates aren’t clear about the falsification criteria of their theory: More life or less life? More probable or improbable?
Again, I’m not saying that this is a conclusive defeater for theism. But because we live in a universe that has life, if we’re going to use that as evidence for a convincing argument about God or model of physics where God is a causal agent, we have to be clear about how this theory matches up with the data we observe, and how the argument better matches the data relative to alternative naturalistic explanations.
By not being clear about the falsification criteria for theistic fine-tuning, it allows theists to play “heads I win, tails you lose.” We’re entranced by the improbability of life under the non-theistic model, and as theists won’t tell us how they could be wrong, one feels nudged to theism. But if we reframe the problem using the criteria of falsification, we realize that the theist has rigged the game to where theism can’t lose.
All to say, if you’re open in your assumption that God favors life and sets the probabilities of life, and that life is both scarce and improbable, fine tuning is clearly an argument against theism.
Why Would God Communicate His Existence/Probability In This Way?
The last general reason I don’t find the cosmological design argument convincing is that it seems like a silly way of communicating that God exists.
In a way, the argument from biological design is a more persuasive argument for God. More people have a direct experience of nature and feel it was designed. Though they may believe the universe was designed, they don’t have the language of or understanding of theoretical physics to explain it outside of Copypasta Apologetics.5
So, a theist appealing to biological design can at least say that most humans have both this innate sense of the design and abundant, easily-available evidence for a conclusion. But for cosmological design, they lack easily-available evidence that they can easily understand!
In this regard, if you think God left this evidence behind to move people to believe in God, it falls into similar problems as the Christian problem of suffering for dinosaurs: Why did God create all of this suffering in the animal kingdom over millennia to finally send Jesus to redeem the world? Why wait? It seems so inefficient. Why not cut out the dinosaurs or make the cosmological evidence or Bayesian Probability much easier to understand?
Why place this breadcrumb of evidence out of reach of so many, so only a few can understand the proof, and a sizable proportion of that understanding population of scientists (maybe even majority?) reject it? It doesn’t make sense.
You could say that this is a long-winded way for God to make humans more morally and intellectually developed, but any student of philosophy will tell you that most philosophical problems prove insoluble and continue indefinitely without resolution. For goodness sake: We’re still arguing about the existence of God and the truth of Christianity, after hundreds and thousands of years!
In this way, the fine-tuning argument isn’t obviously true, and it seems more likely false to me. And if it were true, it raises all sorts of problems about the philosophy of religion and God, that themselves seems insoluble or unverifiable. It’s much simpler - dare I say rational - to just reject the assertion of fine-tuning advocates.
Closing Thoughts:
There’s a (likely apocryphal) story about the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, upon reaching outer space, saying “I don't see any god up here.” I think this is a silly way to falsify theism. Similarly, it’s silly to look for specific facts about the physical universe to prove God. Time and time again, those explanations prove to be unsatisfactory, not least of which because science often (perhaps even usually?) finds ways to prove religious explanations wrong.6
Having said that, I don’t think one needs to give up on religion or theism, just on religious explanations for scientific realities.
For me, it’s much more fruitful of a discussion to debate the resurrection of Jesus,7 or evolution, or any number of things that we have direct evidence we can contextualize and evaluate. The fine-tuning argument does not meet that standard. There’s just so many things about the universe and theoretical physics that we just don’t know about.
Indeed, most people misrepresent or misunderstand physics to the point where it’s mostly a meme for Christian Apologists. At the same time, Christian Apologists are cagey about the falsification conditions for the fine-tuning theory. All the while, theoretical physicists seem to evaluate theist fine-tuning claims as inconclusive, not supported by the evidence, or outright false.
I’m a nonbeliever. I’d like to think I’m open to God’s existence, but try as I might, I’m not going to find it in religious apologetics.8 Having said that, if God is real, I don’t think we’re going to find God in the fingerprints of the universe. If he wanted to give us that, I don’t think he would have given us atoms.
I would love to read an argument on this, even if I don’t ultimately agree with it
And I must reiterate: The purpose of the fine-tuning argument is to persuade people who don’t already assume that God exists, is all-loving, and has benevolent intentions. I’m perfectly content with someone who believes in God for other reasons, looking at the universe and being in awe of defying the odds to create life. There’s something beautiful about that. But that’s poetry, not philosophy. I can say a basketball team coming back from 10 points down in a minute or 20 seconds is improbable, beautiful, and poetic, but I can’t support the argument that the fact that it happened proved that rules of basketball exist to create this low probability outcome.
The late Dr. Victor Stenger even formulated what such a universe would look like
But I’m also not an expert on the literature!
<Shakes Fist> DOUTHAT!
It’s unfashionable on substack to say that God of the Gaps explanations are bad explanations, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter: God of the Gaps explanations are bad explanations!
I’m drafting this on Easter
That’s a post for another time.
I just discovered your writing and have found your last couple articles to be quite interesting, even if much of it goes a bit over my head given that a lot of this is territory I’m just not very familiar with (even if I do find it compelling). Anyway, your discussion of fine-tuning caught my attention.
I realize this is a bit tangential to what you’re writing about since you’re discussing fine-tuning in the context of the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence, but I’m curious if you’ve heard about cosmological natural selection and the arguments it makes about why fine-tuning exists.
It’s a hypothesis put forward by physicist Lee Smolin which suggests that on the other side of black holes are big bangs, which is how we get new universes.
From there, Smolin suggests that black holes create conditions that can alter fundamental physical constants, and that these alterations are “heritable”, meaning that the “baby” universes created by these black holes would create their own black holes with fundamental physical constants that retained the alterations from their “parent” black holes.
Black holes with fundamental physical constants more conducive to creating more black holes (thus birthing more universes) would then be more reproductively successful, leading to cosmological natural selection and the fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants that lead to conditions conducive to star formation, and all the conditions that make life possible (at least, without those conditions created by this fine-tuning process, life would be impossible).
I was introduced to this hypothesis by Julian Gough’s Substack The Egg and the Rock (which is entirely dedicated to promoting this hypothesis) and I found it quite persuasive, which led me to read Lee Smolin’s book The Life of the Cosmos ( I’m still working my way through it) in which he laid out this hypothesis.
Of course, like you I’m not familiar enough with physics to be well-equipped to judge the soundness of the physics behind this hypothesis, but for what it’s worth, Lee Smolin is a very influential and well-respected physicist and Julian Gough makes what I find to be a convincing case that this hypothesis has failed to gain much traction for reasons that have nothing to do with any scientific shortcomings on Smolin’s part.
I apologize for how long-winded that was, but perhaps you’ll find it worth looking into. I think more people should be exposed to this hypothesis, and I wonder if you would find Smolin’s arguments particularly engaging, if not convincing, given how he bridges physics and philosophy (he’s also a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto).
Fine-tuning has always been one of the weaker arguments for theism, in my experience. It just betrays a lack of understanding of what it means when our models don't match observations or how scientific theories correspond to reality. If I have a model that predicts the number of jelly beans in a jar, and it's based on a successful tradition of other models that help me guess the quantity of other small, round objects in a food containers. Now it turns out my model is over by a factor of 20. Do I conclude that a supernatural entity set up the universe such that every time I went to measure the number of jelly beans in a jar, it was way off from my model? No, it just means my model is wrong and I don't know why. The fine-tuning argument only seems plausible if you think it's more probable that our predictions about the behavior and motivations of an omnipotent being are accurate than our understanding of how certain locally observed physical constants ended up are inaccurate.