Hello,

I found an argument for 'design of the universe' in Youtube which goes like:

######### start of argument ##############

P1 The fine tuning of the universe is either due to chance, physical necessity or design P2 It is not due to chance or physical necessity C Therefore is due to design

The Ps are support by: P1: What is fine tunned? around about 50 or so constants but heres 2 e.g. 1st Penrose calculates that the odds of our universe's low entropy condition obtaining by chance alone are on the order of 1:10^10(123), an inconceivable number. The odds of our solar system's being formed instantly by random collisions of particles is, on the other hand, about 1:10^10(60), a vast number, but inconceivably smaller than 10^10(123). Penrose calls it "chicken feed" by comparison!

Steven Weinberg says the cosmological constant is fine tunned to 1:1^56-1^120 Without which the universe would either expand too fast for stars to form or too little the universe collapses. John Jefferson Davis points out, an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at one inch target on the other side of the observable universe, 20 billion light years away, and hitting the target

P2: 1st option- It turns out that string theory allows a "cosmic landscape" of around 10^500 different universes governed by the present laws of nature but with different values of the physical constants.There independent of the laws of nature

2nd option -chance mathematicians ususally have a limit as to what is possible by chance F.Tipler sets it at 10^80 the fine tuning is much greater

3rd therefore it is due to design, Unless you can show design is less plausable than either

######### end of argument ##############

I asked the Youtube user, who placed the argument on Youtube, what 'design-of-a-universe' is, he replied: 'design-of-a-universe is when it was designed' and by that he claims that his argument holds true.

Maybe, the argument is formally true as a logical argument. Personally I don't think the argument is applicable to the natural universe because we have no empirical procedure to test what 'design-of-a-universe' is. It is a non-testable/non-falsifiable hypotheses. Thus the entire argument is (in a scientific view) meaningless.

I would be interested in your comments on this issue. Thanks for your interest and help.

Yes. It assumes its conclusion and is therefore invalid.

This is my fav subject of all, as I am one of the few (maybe the only person, I don't know as I look all the time) that starts the universe from nothing. My book, (which I love to promote) "The Answer to 42" is a funny take on just that subject (although I use real science to back up the facts). Anyway in all the years that I have studied the universe at large, I have come to a conclusion, that life, or design is not a part of the entire situation at all. There is no mechanism that suggest that higher intellegence, or "life" has to exist for the universe to exist. If you look at the time-scales involved, our universe has spent much of it's existance with no life in it. A simple way to put this is, as time passes in the universe (billions upon billions of years) life come and goes based on random situations. Life, or no life, the universe can exist in many differing forms, such as the quark qluon soup of "our" early universe. It can, and will be around long before, and long after intellegent life has come, or will come into existance. Ronald von Mitchel

Yay, logic!

So, let's start by fixing the argument; without doing this, the argument is destroyed from the get-go by the fallacy of begging the question:

P1: The universe is fine-tuned. (for the existence of life, I assume?) - They hid this one.

P2: The fine-tuning must be due to chance, physical necessity, or design.

P3: The fine-tuning is not due to chance or physical necessity.

C: Therefore, the universe is designed. - written this way it removes the premise from the conclusion, but I believe preserves the intent.

Now it no longer contains the fallacy of begging the question. P2 may be a false trichotomy, but we'll leave that alone. Just know that he has to support that these are the only three possibilities.

So, let's look at P1: They throw a lot of numbers around in their math of the odds of the constants being the way they are. Here's an easier number: 1. The odds of the universe forming the way it did are exactly 100%. I know this because it did. It's like calculating the odds that you survived a car wreck after surviving it. It doesn't matter what the odds were at the time, the fact that you're here to say "hey, that was a close one" means you DID survive it.

All of the crap they spew about how improbable we are requires that we are here to analyze the improbability, which means the universe couldn't have formed in any way that doesn't allow for our existence. So, there's no fine-tuning, which destroys the rest of the argument.

But let's look at what else they provided for support (his P2, my P3): They provided a claim that there are 10^500 universes? I don't know if this is a real number in string theory, but assuming it is I don't see how this does anything other than support the idea that our universe could have arose from chance with so many universes to choose from. Maybe there's something missing from the argument?

"There independent of the laws of nature " - I don't understand this sentence, even if I substitute "they're" in place of "there".

I would need support for this claim that there is a limit to chance. To use his example, if there are 10^500 universes to pick from, your odds of getting any one of them by picking among them at random is 1:10^500, which is greater than the so called limit of 10^80.

"therefore it is due to design, Unless you can show design is less plausable than either " - What? What does plausibility have to do with truth? Whether or not you can believe it is utterly irrelevant to whether or not it is true.

At any rate, I think you can see that not only did his argument fall apart at the first step, it began to disintegrate afterward. I don't see how he established P3 at all. And P1, which he (or rather the people he got this argument from) tried to sneak past, was worthless. He certainly failed miserably to support his conclusion.

"I asked the Youtube user, who placed the argument on Youtube, what 'design-of-a-universe' is, he replied: 'design-of-a-universe is when it was designed' and by that he claims that his argument holds true." - I don't know why you were asking him that, but if that's his response he certainly didn't answer your question.

Manu191357 *** P1 The fine tuning of the universe is either due to chance, physical necessity or design P2 It is not due to chance or physical necessity C Therefore is due to design

Yes, that is all theists ever have is argument without evidence. Where is the evidence for the 'sky fairy' who " fine tuned " the universe for life this isn't really, and never has been a debate about science. It's about religion. In fact, the creation story in Genesis. Let's make this excruciatingly clear; you list all the things that point to "fine tuning" of the universe without proving the universe is "fine tuned". Just assume a Creator exists that created the world and then work backwards to try to prove it. Then hold your breath while your waiting to get all the answers.

"The 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun demonstrates that the universe may have indeed risen from chaos, rather than God's hand. That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions - the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings." Stephen Hawking

Manu191357 *** The Ps are support by: P1: What is fine tunned? around about 50 or so constants but heres 2 e.g. 1st Penrose calculates that the odds of our universe's low entropy condition obtaining by chance alone are on the order of 1:10^10(123), an inconceivable number. The odds of our solar system's being formed instantly by random collisions of particles is, on the other hand, about 1:10^10(60), a vast number, but inconceivably smaller than 10^10(123). Penrose calls it "chicken feed" by comparison!

This is just the failure to understand that with a large enough sample, many seemingly unlikely coincidences are in fact likely coincidences (meaning) likely to happen.

Isaac Newton believed God created and conserved order in the universe. He believed that a creator designed it specifically for the existence of human life. The discovery of other solar systems outside our own, in 1992, proved that our world was not so uniquely designed and that human life could exist throughout the universe.

Manu191357 *** Steven Weinberg says the cosmological constant is fine tunned to 1:1^56-1^120 Without which the universe would either expand too fast for stars to form or too little the universe collapses. John Jefferson Davis points out, an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at one inch target on the other side of the observable universe, 20 billion light years away, and hitting the target

Physicist Alan Lightman on the multiverse in the Dec. 2011 of Harper's "The Accidental Universe," Multiverse theories posit that what we have long thought of as the Universe, all the galaxies we can observe, is just one of many universes--perhaps an infinite or endlessly growing number of them, or perhaps a fixed but large number like 10^500. (The number of atoms in the observable universe is only about 10^80, so 10^500 is a lot, as in 10^420 universes per atom. For comparison, a trillion is only 10^12.) etc...

Manu191357 *** P2: 1st option- It turns out that string theory allows a "cosmic landscape" of around 10^500 different universes governed by the present laws of nature but with different values of the physical constants. There independent of the laws of nature

Physicist Alan Lightman on the multiverse in the Dec. 2011 of Harper's - "Multiverse theory explains fine-tuning without dragging in God. If it is true, most universes are not livable, so they contain no observers: observers can only arise in livable universes. Given the very large number of universes in the multiverse, there is no "knife-edge of improbability" but rather a near-certainty that some universes will, by pure chance, turn out life-friendly. We, inevitably, live in one (this is the "anthropic principle"). A close parallel is the fact that within our own universe, all observers must evolve on habitable planets like Earth, even though planets form in a scattershot way and most are lifeless. Not all planets or universes are habitable; but all inhabited planets or universes are habitable."

Stephen Hawking: this problem (cosmological inflation) "thought this a problem for the big bang theory before cosmological inflation is taken into account. When it is, the fine-tuning problem of the expansion rate goes away."

The expansion rate of the universe and the mass density of the universe values are set by cosmological physics and do not need to be fine-tuned.

Manu191357 *** 2nd option -chance mathematicians ususally have a limit as to what is possible by chance F.Tipler sets it at 10^80 the fine tuning is much greater 3rd therefore it is due to design, Unless you can show design is less plausable than either

As many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. One of astronomy's goals is to find 'eta-Earth,' the fraction of sun-like stars that have an earth. The number could be one in eight. But it's not one in 100, which was previously estimated. There could be even more Earth-size planets at greater distances, including within the habitable zone (or Goldilocks zone) located at a distance from the star where conditions are not too hot or too cold to allow the presence of liquid water. These are things we know exist.

Some physicists have theorized that only universes with laws of physics that are "fine tuned" could support life. If things were even a fraction different from our universe there would be no intelligent life. That would mean that our physical laws might be explained "anthropically," meaning if they were not as they are there would be no life otherwise to observe them. But MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe and his collaborators decided to test this anthropic explanation. So, they tested whether universes with different physical laws could support life. The MIT physicists have showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us, even when the masses of elementary particles called quarks are dramatically altered.

They also claim that a complex system can only arise out of something with high intelligence. So, the universe and life can only have arisen out of something even more intelligent and complex; it's nothing more than Intelligent Design. There is no reason why the physical universe cannot be it's own first cause. As we know from both everyday experience and highly structured scientific observations, complex systems develop from simpler systems all the time in nature (with not even low intelligence required.) Life can evolve from bacteria. And our relatively complex universe could have arisen out of the entity that is the simplest and most mindless of all--the void.

Carl Sagan: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." watching Intelligent Design videos is not one of them, but Carl Sagan's books can't make you laugh Baah Whaaaa! He can't explain why a banana is proof of intelligent design?

The "god did it" explanation does nothing to establish what actually was the cause of the existence of the universe or life. Scientists discovered and observe evolution-taking place. Scientists have observed replicating chemical chains forming from non-replicating chains. Scientists have found the answers that have unlocked many of the mysteries of the universe and life in the universe. "God-did-it" has answered nothing. The universe evolved and continues to evolve. The universe is expanding. The majority of the objects in the universe are moving away from the Earth. The farther away an object is from the Earth, the faster it is moving away from the Earth. If we keep looking back in time, consequently further collapsing the universe, we eventually reach a time in which the universe has been so thoroughly collapsed that it no longer exists. At this point in (time and space) will be the singularity.

"We are star stuff, which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter." Carl Sagan

This is essentially the first cause argument again, is it not? As far as I know, that argument invalidates itself almost immediately.

The universe is so beautiful/complex/improbable that it must have had a creator.

Surely, the creator is more beautiful/complex/improbable. Therefore he/she/it must have had a creator.

Of course, this is where they try to pull a fast one and say that god is the uncreated creator or that god is somehow exempt from the very rule they insist must apply to the universe. If god does not need a creator, then why does the universe?