Behe vindicated, again!

Take the example from the video that you posted, of the guy who is alive because the firing squad marksmen all missed. Yes, it is true that he might still be curious as to why they all missed. But if your answer is “because God wanted them all to miss” then you have not explained anything at all and you have not satisfied he curiosity in the least.

And that’s the problem with fine tuning arguments – they don’t really explain anything at all.

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It is an inconsistent argument. It is ridiculous when invoked by YEC, because the flatness of cosmology and stellar nucleosynthesis, arguably involving the most basic of tuning parameters, are expressly rejected by that camp. As for ID, the entire enterprise is predicated on the constants of nature having insufficient explanatory power.

It is also a limited argument. There are alternate, credible alternatives to a teleological universe.

Yes. You can put me down for golly. I have always been fascinated at how the whole shebang works together. I agree it is not a compelling apologetic.

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Lots of things make me say “golly.” The universe is downright weird, and living things are insanely complicated, and so I find I have many, many causes for golly. I am headed to the UK in a couple of months and am trying to figure out whether I’ve got a few hours to swing through Avebury, where GOLLY doesn’t stop coursing through my head for hours, until I leave. It’s like 200 decibels and a few tens of thousand lumens of GOLLY all at once.

And in a way I think this is part of what I don’t always understand about other people. I suspect we are all full of golly, and the question is what it means to us individually. I took some people, on a trip to Scotland a few years ago, to the Kilmartin Glen, where we visited a series of lovely megalithic constructions in a moody light rain, with mist blowing about and the whole thing seeming terribly mysterious. It became evident that some of my companions, who ranged from Catholic to new-agey, were feeling the “energy” of these places in a profound way. I was, too. But to me it is all about subjectivity, and to them it is not: they feel connected to something. I think we actually feel the same thing, and it’s how we interpret it that varies.

I think that in a way we diminish the compelling nature, the depth, and the texture of these experiences if we try to put them in harness to defend a set of fact propositions. Some things are better if left in the realm of feeling, experience and awe.

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Most stars are red dwarfs, so they would not be optimal for life as we know it. On the other end of the scale, energetic light from hotter stars may be sterilizing. Also, most of the solar spectrum is not within the peak region or frequency utilized by life.

Eddie says Denton believes in the “god of the philosophers,” which only makes me think, “Ray Comfort is a philosopher?”

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Weak faith, which also explains the lack of action.

The bigger mystery is why these bad arguments are typically supported by lying about the objective evidence.

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Yes. It is a bad argument because it proposes an explanation that is just as unlikely as the problem that explanation is invoked to solve. We must fine-tune God so as to explain the constants. Of all imaginable Gods it’s one that wanted this exact universe. So we’re still left with a fine-tuning problem.

Terrible argument.

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I’ve just done a quick internet skim of “god of the philosophers”, what I found was not exactly concise in terms of definition (mostly more about contrasting this god with the conception of the ‘God of Abraham’), but nothing to suggest this god differs from deism or even deism+. The “philosophers” in question seem to have tended to be first Greek pagans, and then Christians, neither group seeming to place any stringent doubt on the existence of a more conventionally religious divine. I’ve seen Denton labelled an agnostic in the past, but his ‘cosmic coincidences’ would seem to go well beyond agnosticism.

Not only that, but you also have to fine-tune God’s timing. Here is a God who has (theologians would have us believe) existed for an infinite time, but purportedly suddenly one ‘morning’ decides to create a universe. Why now? Why not earlier? Why not later? Is this the only universe He created in this infinite time? Did the other ones have the same laws of physics? Etc? Etc?

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How do you calculate the probability of God?

It is a category error to speak of a fine-tuned God.

As does the fact that he seems uncertain as to whether the earth is millions of years old.

Well, that’s a very good question.

If you do not believe it can be calculated, then your argument falls flat on that one issue alone.

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Actualy just wanted to inject some humor. Sorry if I missed?

No one knows, but it’s quite common to see arguments that are equivalent to a Bayes Factor with a tacit prior probability of God/Designer = 1.0. The only possible conclusion is God/designer no matter what evidence is available.

That’s acceptable from a religious standpoint, but it doesn’t work for those pesky scientific questions.

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How do you calculate the probability of the things you’re invoking God to explain? Add an order of magnitude to that.

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The same way you calculate the probability of obtaining the physical constants by chance. Imagine the total space of possible physical constants, imagine the values obtain by chance. What is the probability of the set we get? 1 in total size of the space.

So for God, do the same thing. For every imaginable combination of values for all the physical constants, posit a logically possible God that wants to set that combination of values. That means the space of possible Gods is at least as big as the total possible space of physical constants.

So God is at least as improbable as the set of physical constants.

How so? God is proposed as an explanation for a set of observations. But in order for God to be an explanation for that set of observations, God’s properties must be assumed to be just right. God must have the capacity and desire to produce that which is observed. In that sense, the God-explanation is fine-tuned to explain what we see. There is no category error.

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Okay

Agree

The range useful for life is the visible and near infrared. As I said at 100, the composition of solar radiation is as follow: 6 – 7% ultraviolet light; around 42% visible light and 51% near infra-red .

Fair enough. You are correct that nature utilizes considerably more of the spectrum than the human visible range, from vitamin D synthesis in the UV to pit vipers in the IR. But that point aligns with what others have been stating, that adaptation deals with the light available to service particular needs. Stars that do not shine in a compatible spectrum, such as blue giants or brown dwarfs, are also characterized by much more severe challenges to supporting life, such as short lifespan or hostile habitable zone.

There are systems in living things on earth that sense and respond to IR light that falls outside of the visible spectrum:

https://academic.oup.com/plcell/article/28/3/616/6100933

This means that the chemistry exists on earth that can “detect” electromagnetic radiation outside of the visible spectrum. We don’t need to posit unknown hypothetical chemistries to refute Denton - they can be found on earth.

No. Not if the existence and nature of that god isn’t otherwise established in the first place (which it isn’t – that’s why you’re offering this fine-tuning notion as evidence of such existence). All attributes of this purported god are up for grabs, and philosophical presuppositions that are peculiar to your own religious culture are completely irrelevant.

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I don’t deny this. My claim, or, more precisely Denton’s claim, is that the range useful for life is the visible and near IR. And it is precisely (at 94%) the range produced by the sun. Also, I think it is important to distinguish between sensing systems such as the one you point to and systems, such as photosynthesis, that are able to concert light energy into chemical energy.

Okay. But I’m far from convinced you can mess with physics such that you get a universe with lots of stars that output mostly in the >microwave or <x-ray part of the spectrum without this also affecting the chemistry necessary for life. In other words it’s not clear to me at all that these are independent probabilities.

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