“Such as ourselves?” Very few.
Now, what do you think the answer is after you remove your thumb from the scale?
The fact of the matter is, we don’t know. From what we do know, the true “number” could be from “durned few” to “more than I can count on everyone’s fingers and toes”, to anywhere in between. Someone like Denton who leaps from “golly gee water is so interesting” to “a designer must have designed water to be oh so special” is just making stuff up, because they have no idea where in the spectrum of “impossibly few” to “surprisingly many” reality sits. And to resort to “well, it’s possible that the answer is “impossibly few””, and then assert “God” (or designer) is being either intellectually lazy or just plain dishonest.
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Have read Lewis, and found him intolerable and intellectually useless, years ago. Picked up Mere Christianity again a year or two ago to double-check, and found it much the same as I remembered. Flew, I read a bit, long ago. Feser, not at all. But the notion that I would find something useful in reviewing their statements of their own motives isn’t very promising. It wouldn’t shed any light on my own motives or lack thereof, certainly. I have no creed here to defend. I just am aware that there is no good evidence for the empirical component of any of the known religions, no good evidence for the existence of any other ghostly presences, and no way to prove that these broad categories of things absolutely don’t exist. All of that can change, with evidence, but I would be more interested in the evidence than in the views of philosophers.
And that, again, is the problem: ID and religion in general seems to be populated by people who think that thinking about things other people think, as opposed to thinking about evidence, is useful. I think that thinking about what other people think is only useful when those other people are thinking about the evidence and expressing useful views about how to understand it. As I have said before, argument is like a mill. A mill is useless without its grist, and evidence is the grist for argument’s mill. Who can possibly care what a philosopher has to say, in the absence of evidence? And why are the proponents of these views so blasted interested in arguments to the exclusion of evidence? It’s not a promising sign.
Evidence would be nice. And in its absence, nobody can really have a defensible stance that doesn’t contain a huge component of “I don’t know.” I am not able to pretend that things like “fine-tuning” arguments are evidence. I actually am content not to know whether there is an uber-Geist, or whether my body is being driven around by an endo-Geist, in a world where the absence of evidence of these Geists is the clearest fact in the world. But I am perfectly content for these things to exist, unknown to me; what choice do I have, if indeed they do exist but fail to manifest themselves in evidentiary terms?
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Sorry, I can’t hear you over the noise of the crickets.
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I should have put in a comma; I did not mean the phrase restrictively. Altering my description to make it clearer: “highly intelligent rational beings of any kind.”
Before you answer, think about what sort of bodily systems might be needed for such rational beings as you have in mind (make them anything you like, intelligent octopuses or cockroaches or some living being unknown to us), and what sort of biology might be needed for such systems, and what sort of chemistry might be needed for the biology, and what sort of physics might be needed for the chemistry, and what sort of fundamental laws and constants might be needed for the physics. Could just any old set of laws and constants do the trick? Could a universe with no laws or constants do the trick? Food for thought.
I agree. And that is why I don’t regard Denton’s presentations as proofs. But they are instructive, because they document (far more in his books than in a short video) hundreds of overlapping and reinforcing coincidences. And not just regarding water, but regarding light, fire, and many other things.
(Which is why his whole series should be read.) Such a high number of coincidences might occur in a few other imaginable worlds, maybe even in many, but I find it a stretch to imagine that they would occur in a majority. (I’m not claiming that argument is scientific, by the way, and I don’t think these ultimate questions can be settled scientifically.)
Note that whereas Behe, etc. tend to argue about particular structures such as the flagellum, Denton focuses on general properties of nature. Denton’s line of argument, being about the big picture, is not subject to charges of “god of the gaps” reasoning. It doesn’t matter if a mechanistic origin of the flagellum is found. His argument would remain the same.
Hi Puck
I think this is well written and isolates the debate. One area of common ground that I have never seen reached is what is evidence. What is not evidence? @Eddie I apologize in advance if this is off topic and if it is please feel free to obtain from commenting at this point.
But if the character of this material is consistent with the video, most of them are NOT coincidences. The fact that living things use the solar energy that does reach the surface, rather than the energy that doesn’t, is not a “coincidence.”
Arguments like that suggest desperation. They suggest that someone is motivated to grasp for straws. And so they tell me nothing about the merits, but are informative in rhetorical terms: they tell me that the one propounding these arguments has nothing better, which is at least suggestive that nothing better exists of which he is aware.
Of course, “coincidences” wouldn’t be worth a damn anyhow; but I think that calling them coincidences is itself a serious error. They are much less useful even than that.
I don’t know that one can define what is “not evidence.” In the broadest sense of the term, “evidence” is some fact which makes some other fact likelier or less likely. But, of course, what is “evidence” of any particular proposition does depend upon surrounding knowledge and upon the strength of particular forms of inference.
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These questions are unanswerable. Some people are too foolish to realize this. That is not my problem.
Here’s how I approach this issue: Imagine someone is present at the exact moment of the Big Bang who possesses all the knowledge of the laws of physics that we now possess, but who has no idea what the history of the universe will be from that moment onwards.
Would that being be able to predict that, 14.5 billion years later, there would be giraffes?
If so, how would they be able to predict this?
If not, then on what basis do we expect someone to reliably predict what will or will not happen in a universe that is instantiated with entirely different physical parameters?
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@Eddie, the problem is, not you, not Denton, not anyone really knows if all of the things that so amaze Denton in fact amount to a “high number of coincidences”. Denton is arguing from a sample size of 1 (this planet) and making guesses and extrapolations that are entirely, completely unwarranted.
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As I said before, I think Denton’s argument is much sillier than that. For instance, he says that the level of nitrogen in our atmosphere is such that forest fires do not burn completely out of control and consume the whole continent once they start. (Actually, he only talked about the US. Somehow, we in Canada seem to be spared this conflagration).
Well, OK, great. But there are 1025 other planets in the universe, give or take. What are the odds that there would not be at least one planet with an atmosphere whose nitrogen content is in the range of values that allow that? Pretty much a certainty, don’t you think? And so it goes for all the other “amazing coincidences” he lists.
It’s just Texas Sharpshooter, gussied up to impress the slack-jawed yokel creationists. Nothing more.
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Okay, smart guy. But how many of those planets have a Canada? And how many of those Canadas have poutine? Huh? Huh? Clearly these coincidences just become unsustainable after a while, and the fact that the world was made by Paul Bunyan becomes pretty hard to deny. Note that I do not claim that it PROVES Paul Bunyan exists. It’s just that any other possibility strains my poor imagination.
Taken individually, yes. But you’re misunderstanding his argument if you think he’s saying there couldn’t be other planets with other conditions. He’s talking about a set of hundreds of overlapping coincidences, not isolated ones. For each of the individual points of “fitness” he discusses, there might be a thousand or a million planets where one or two or more conditions match those on earth; but how many where all the conditions match?
And of course, from what we know of the size, composition, and distance from their stars of extrasolar planets, most of the 10^25 other planets are very likely hostile to even primitive life, let alone complex multicellular life. Too much nitrogen would be the least of their problems.
But hey, don’t worry about it, because tentative models in physics (which must automatically be true, if they reflect the “consensus”) tell us (via Forbes magazine, that great peer-reviewed astrophysics journal) that a multiverse must exist, so even if it’s extremely unlikely that there is more than one planet like earth in our universe, there are lots of other universes, and so lots of earths, with no need for design. Thank God for physics models and Forbes magazine, for teaching us the truth about ultimate questions which the great thinkers have been unable to answer over the course of 3,500 years. We are all so much smarter than any of the ancient, medieval or early modern philosophers and scientists. We can settle ultimate questions now with three or four sentences on a blog site.
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I don’t think you’re doing the math right. Intuitively, I would expect the number to be well into the millions, or even billions. 1025 is a very, very big number. “Hundreds” is considerably smaller.
But who cares what we think? This is Denton’s argument, that he put into a book, which you have apparently read. Please show us how he calculated the odds…
It seems to me that if the Universe was tuned especially for intelligent life, suitable planets should not be vanishingly rare. (Although we must remember that the level of oxygen is a product of life). There seems to be a definite tension in the argument there,
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Indeed. It is not quite a counterargument to the FTA as it is a parallel argument, but it is worth noting that of all the possible life-sustaining universe that could exist if there was a Creator God, we happen to live in the only type of universe that could sustain life if naturalism was true. i wonder what the odds are against that?
My sense has always been that this argument has a great gap in it that can’t be filled. Even if it were not for the various reasons why the facts aren’t so amazing as they are supposed to be, the argument is basically a “hey, this is amazing!” which ought to be met, as I meet it, with a great shrug and “well, maybe.” How it leads to the inference of a god is anyone’s guess. Nothing here is remotely suggestive of such a thing.
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I’ve got a new thread brewing in my mind on this topic, but there is an obvious asymmetry in is considered an explanation under science, and under supernaturalism.
While in science “It happened thru physical and chemical processes, don’t know exactly how yet.” is not considered an explanation, supernaturalists expect to get away with “God did it with his powers, no more to say.”
Not exactly an even playing field.
I think the “god of the gaps” is okay, as long as it is acknowledged openly and is understood to be a non-scientific notion, basically a prejudice of faith, of zero significance to anyone who is genuinely curious about the phenomenon in question. The problem comes when people want to elevate it and call it science.
I recall expressing my atheism to a secretary back at the law firm during one of our long and deep after-work drinking sessions, and having her sort of flummoxed by the notion. She sort of moved her arms around in a gesture to invoke the spirits of the trees, the bar and the spirits behind the bar, and suggested that all the stuff in the world was just too doggoned swell for there not to be a god. Having already had a few beers I probably said little other than that I didn’t see how that followed, but it was my first introduction into a phenomenon which, it turns out, is widespread in certain schools of philosophy: the Argumentum Ad Allathestuff.
As a tavern argument it isn’t so bad. It appears without benefit of formal structure and it has no pretensions: it is as naive as it seems, and as useful, too. It forces the other person in the discussion to, if he has not had one too many Orval Trappist Ales, express why he thinks that, indeed, allathestuff may have its origins elsewhere. But, as I say, it is, in that context, unpretentious, and so what can one do but call someone a bit naive, call someone a bit over-faithful, or call someone a cab?
This sort of tavern-banter, however, does not thrive when put in stricter terms and offered up as a fine herb growing out of the ground of pure reason. Pure reason, as we know, obtains its purity from its being unadulterated with fact. One can ooh and aah at how neato-keen the universe is, but it just doesn’t go anywhere. It points to nothing except, well, the universe being neato-keen. One can allege that this neato-keen-keit can be obtained only by the intervention of an intelligence or, having witnessed too much of humanity at the tavern, one can allege that such intelligences as are known are not up to the task of imbuing a universe with neato-keen-keit. Neither of these are good inferences, and my own sense is that they are quite equal in their rottenness, with no good way to choose between.
That is what I make of Denton and his ilk. So much ink wasted, when so much inquiry might have been had, instead.
I wasn’t presenting a calculation, just giving an outline of the reasoning. But if you treat the various conditions as independent events, 10^25 could easily be eaten up if a few hundred coincidences are counted. If we say there is a .5 probability that another planet will have the same nitrogen level as earth, and a .5 probability that another planet will have the same ozone protection as earth, etc. (I’m making all the probabilities higher than realistic), and if there are a hundred such things to consider, then you get (.5)^100 which is 7.88 x 10^-31, meaning that even with 10^25 planets there would be only a one in a million chance of all the same conditions being found. And if the number to be considered is 200, you get (.5)^200, which is 6.22 x 10^-61, a number 30 zeroes bigger, which would swallow up 10^25 as the Sun would swallow up a flea.
I’m not insisting on these numbers, because it might be that not all the factors are completely independent, and that might lower the final numbers considerably, but still, that gives you an idea of how even very large numbers can be quickly exhausted. I don’t remember Denton doing any probability calculations of this kind, but given the logic of his exposition in his books, I think he would tend to treat all or many of the conditions as independent, and would come up (if asked) with numbers like the ones I’ve given.
His point is actually a rather obvious one: the more conditions that have to be satisfied, the lower the probability that all will be satisfied in more than one place, unless there is rigging of some kind. It’s quite possible that you and I both have grandmothers who studied Sanskrit, had 12 children, married a man 5 years younger than themselves, liked grapefruit, hated coconut, were Marxist, and purchased a Hyundai Pony, but the probability is slim. Even with, say, a billion women on earth who are grandmothers, the odds are not great. Add a dozen more conditions, and 20 billion women couldn’t meet them.
But none of this matters, since, even if Denton’s intuitive calculations proved correct for one universe, the multiverse would be dragged in to swamp his numbers with still larger ones. (Especially if the multiverse means infinitely many universes.) If the multiverse were suddenly abandoned by theoretical physics tomorrow, I wonder what the anti-fine-tuners would do. I find it very hard to believe that all of them would turn around and say, “OK, now that the multiverse is out, intelligent design is the best hypothesis.” I think they’d find another way to block the inference, or deny its validity. I don’t believe that personal preferences aren’t involved – on either side of such debates.
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“By their fruits ye shall know them”. I see that as emphasizing the importance of actions.
That is something that I can take for granted for any Christian, whether explicitly stated or not.
A personal belief is not a claim.
I’m not answering for him. I am merely explaining why I do not see this as a problem.
If that is Denton’s thinking, doesn’t that make Denton a multiverse proponent?
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