Since you refuse to provide any actual examples of probability calculations @Guy_Coe , I’ll pull one up for you. Here is the ultimate Design Compendium:
Pick one of the files, preferably either part 3 or part 4 which claim to be actual probability calculations. Let’s go to part 3. And then is the hard part. The actual probabilities do not have any references next to them, all the references are scattered throughout the bottom of the PDF. How on Earth one is supposed to check any of these remarkable probabilities that are presented all over the country to Christians and university students is beyond me. But let’s try doing one of them.
Something specific like ‘distance from nearest Seyfert galaxy’ gives a probability of 90%. So there is a 90% chance that the distance that we are from the nearest Seyfert galaxy is within the region to sustain bacteria for 90 days or less. What paper reference might this be in? God only knows. But let’s do a search for ‘Seyfert’ in the document:
It pulls up 3 times it is used in the document:
- There’s a 90% chance that the distance we are from the nearest Seyfert galaxy is sufficient to sustain bacteria for 90 days or less.
- There’s also a 90% chance the distance we are from the nearest Seyfert galaxy is sufficient to sustain unicellular life for three billion years.
- There’s also a 90% chance that the distance we are from the nearest Seyfert galaxy is sufficient to sustain intelligent physical life in a globally distributed high-technology civilization.
- And that’s it- no references to any paper titles with that word in it.
Maybe one can search the RTB website for that term and find the only webpage that seems to just be a copy of this ‘design probability compendium’: Probability For Life On Earth - Reasons to Believe
Now a quick glance on the Wikipedia page for Seyfert galaxies says that roughly 10% of galaxies are Seyfert galaxies, but that says nothing about the probability of our distance from the nearest Seyfert galaxy. I’m not going to bother to try to figured out anything more than I’ve already done.
And voila. I give up. I just chose a random one that had a specific enough phrase I thought I could figure it out and lo and beyond, I couldn’t.
So I’ll probably still stand by my claim: made up probabilities multiplied by made up probabilities make for impressive apologetics but little more than that.
I also linked above to a critique from Luke Barnes which has the following paragraph in it:
Some of the items on the list are indeed questionable. E.g. point 109 (which is similar to point 6): decay rate of cold dark matter particles. If too low: insufficient production of dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which will limit the maintenance of long-lived large spiral galaxies. If too high: too many dwarf spheroidal galaxies produced, which will cause spiral galaxies to be too unstable. The relevant paper is by Renyue Cen, who considers the problem of star-formation being observed in low-mass galaxies when CDM galaxy formation models predict that photoionisation by the UV background would prevent gas cooling. Cen suggests that the decay of dark matter particles could help: these galaxies accreted their gas in the past when they were larger, but have since lost mass due to the decay of dark matter particles.
While this is an interesting idea, it is currently nothing more than speculation – it isn’t the only possible solution to the problem; there is no unambiguous, direct evidence of dark matter decay (we don’t even know what the dark matter particles are); the paper only presents a general outline of the idea (there are no plots); in the last 9 years, the paper has received just 14 citations; and there are enough uncertainties surrounding galaxy formation that the claim that dwarf spheroidals are crucial for intelligent life is plausible, but far from established. It is thus highly questionable to claim the dark matter decay rate as a candidate for fine-tuning.
If this example of “fine-tuning” makes the list, then Ross can’t have very high standards. This calls into question all the other items on the list, most of which are outside my area of expertise (the layman’s dilemma!). What we want is a carefully considered, critically compiled collection of well-studied, well-understood examples of fine-tuning. Instead, we seem to have a list where any claim to fine-tuning, no matter how speculative or marginal, is included. Some items surely deserve a place on the list, but we have no way of knowing which ones.