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The Fine-Tuning Argument is dead


ydoaPs

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In same cases it doesn't matter if you move more than 1 constant.

 

Like for the example I gave, what would change the odds on that?

 

 

http://www.is-there-a-god.info/clues/designfacts.shtml

 

 

Odds? You are going with odds? Even if as you say the universe is fine tuned it most certainly is not fine tuned for life. In fact as far as we can tell we are the only life in this vast universe, how can you say it's fine tuned for life when so little of it is suitable for life?

 

It should be pretty obvious what the odds are of life in this universe starting even if we are the only ones here to see it...

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Our claim isn't that this universe contains the most amount of life that you could fit in it. We're saying that if things were slightly different, there wouldn't be any life at all. Saying how horrible things have been and will become doesn't change the precision of the fine-tuning. There are many Bible verses saying bad things will happen before the end. Luke 21:11, Luke 21:25, Matt 24:29, Matt 24:7, Luke 17:29, Mark 13:25, Rev 6:12-13, 2 Peter 3:10-12.

 

By “fine-tuning” one does not mean “designed” but simply that the fundamental constants and quantities of nature fall into an exquisitely narrow range of values which render our universe life-permitting. Were these constants and quantities to be altered by even a hair’s breadth, the delicate balance would be upset and life could not exist.

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By “fine-tuning” one does not mean “designed” but simply that the fundamental constants and quantities of nature fall into an exquisitely narrow range of values which render our universe life-permitting. Were these constants and quantities to be altered by even a hair’s breadth, the delicate balance would be upset and life could not exist.

 

Except you're leaving out that every single paper that does proper multivariable analysis fails to find fine tuning. This "exquisitely narrow range of values" is so huge that we can completely remove one of the four fundamental forces and still get life-bearing universes. Come on, Crispy, give me ONE paper that does actual multivariation analysis and finds fine tuning.

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Our claim isn't that this universe contains the most amount of life that you could fit in it. We're saying that if things were slightly different, there wouldn't be any life at all. Saying how horrible things have been and will become doesn't change the precision of the fine-tuning. There are many Bible verses saying bad things will happen before the end. Luke 21:11, Luke 21:25, Matt 24:29, Matt 24:7, Luke 17:29, Mark 13:25, Rev 6:12-13, 2 Peter 3:10-12.

Yes if things were different they would be different... what is your point? the bible is hardly a source of empirical evidence of anything

 

 

By fine-tuning one does not mean designed but simply that the fundamental constants and quantities of nature fall into an exquisitely narrow range of values which render our universe life-permitting. Were these constants and quantities to be altered by even a hairs breadth, the delicate balance would be upset and life could not exist.

 

No, you cannot say that! You cannot know that a set of rules exist that makes life easier might exist, you assume it has to be tuned for life as we know it, we cannot know if any other constants would produce it's own unique life forms...

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Yes if things were different they would be different... what is your point? the bible is hardly a source of empirical evidence of anything

 

 

No, you cannot say that! You cannot know that a set of rules exist that makes life easier might exist, you assume it has to be tuned for life as we know it, we cannot know if any other constants would produce it's own unique life forms...

 

Okay forget the Bible verses and focus on everything else I said. I will repost my same message without the Bible verses to make you happy.

 

Our claim isn't that this universe contains the most amount of life that you could fit in it. We're saying that if things were slightly different, there wouldn't be any life at all. Saying how horrible things have been and will become doesn't change the precision of the fine-tuning.

 

The formation of stable nuclei depends on the ratio of the strong and electromagnetic forces - the protons in a nucleus repel each other, but the strong force overcomes this repulsion. A small change in their relative strengths would allow the electromagnetic force to overcome the strong force, and atoms could not exist. If electrons were any more massive, then electrons and protons would be disposed to bond and form neutrons, thus disrupting the formation of heavy elements. The strength of gravity is also important: if it were any stronger, stellar matter would bind more strongly and stars would use their nuclear fuel much faster, thus negating the possibility of the evolution of life. If gravity were any weaker, matter would not "clump together" to form larger structures, thereby preventing the formation of stars in the first place.

 

http://www.is-there-a-god.info/clues/designfacts.shtml

Except you're leaving out that every single paper that does proper multivariable analysis fails to find fine tuning. This "exquisitely narrow range of values" is so huge that we can completely remove one of the four fundamental forces and still get life-bearing universes. Come on, Crispy, give me ONE paper that does actual multivariation analysis and finds fine tuning.

 

How does multivariation help? Please explain.

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Okay forget the Bible verses and focus on everything else I said. I will repost my same message without the Bible verses to make you happy.

 

Our claim isn't that this universe contains the most amount of life that you could fit in it. We're saying that if things were slightly different, there wouldn't be any life at all. Saying how horrible things have been and will become doesn't change the precision of the fine-tuning.

 

The formation of stable nuclei depends on the ratio of the strong and electromagnetic forces - the protons in a nucleus repel each other, but the strong force overcomes this repulsion. A small change in their relative strengths would allow the electromagnetic force to overcome the strong force, and atoms could not exist. If electrons were any more massive, then electrons and protons would be disposed to bond and form neutrons, thus disrupting the formation of heavy elements. The strength of gravity is also important: if it were any stronger, stellar matter would bind more strongly and stars would use their nuclear fuel much faster, thus negating the possibility of the evolution of life. If gravity were any weaker, matter would not "clump together" to form larger structures, thereby preventing the formation of stars in the first place.

 

http://www.is-there-a-god.info/clues/designfacts.shtml

 

 

How does multivariation help? Please explain.

Okay forget the Bible verses and focus on everything else I said. I will repost my same message without the Bible verses to make you happy.

 

Our claim isn't that this universe contains the most amount of life that you could fit in it. We're saying that if things were slightly different, there wouldn't be any life at all. Saying how horrible things have been and will become doesn't change the precision of the fine-tuning.

 

The formation of stable nuclei depends on the ratio of the strong and electromagnetic forces - the protons in a nucleus repel each other, but the strong force overcomes this repulsion. A small change in their relative strengths would allow the electromagnetic force to overcome the strong force, and atoms could not exist. If electrons were any more massive, then electrons and protons would be disposed to bond and form neutrons, thus disrupting the formation of heavy elements. The strength of gravity is also important: if it were any stronger, stellar matter would bind more strongly and stars would use their nuclear fuel much faster, thus negating the possibility of the evolution of life. If gravity were any weaker, matter would not "clump together" to form larger structures, thereby preventing the formation of stars in the first place.

 

http://www.is-there-a-god.info/clues/designfacts.shtml

 

 

How does multivariation help? Please explain.

Again, you are making an unsupportable assertion that life is impossible outside those supposedly narrow limits, we only know one type of life in our universe, their could be others even in our universe. It reminds me of how a silicon life from on Titan would look toward the sun and see earth as an inhospitable hell.

 

We cannot say the universal constants are random either, it may very well be that our type of universe is all that can be... in fact it is all that there is...

 

There is no way to say that life as we know it is the only possible life, in other universes there might be other ways we cannot even imagine to produce life in universes we wouldn't recognize at all.

 

If things were different... things would be different...

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How does multivariation help? Please explain.

It gives you the right answer.

Imagine you are making a car. You change just one thing- say using metric thread nuts, rather than imperial and it doesn't work. You conclude- wrongly, that it's impossible to use metric threads.

But multivariate analysis lets you change more than one thing at a time.

You change the nuts, but it also lets you change the bolts.

So, if you pick randomly for metric or imperial for both buts and bolts you get a 50% change of getting the same thread- and it works.

 

Now consider all the bits of a car. You can't generally swap parts from a a Ford to a Volkswagen so uo would say that it's only possible to build the Ford.

You would clearly be wrong.

 

Changing more than one parameter at a time lets the effects cancel out.

It shows that the universe may be "finely tuned" but lots of other universes also would be.

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How does multivariation help? Please explain.

Look at the following picture.

 

200px-Saddle_point.png

 

If I only let one variable vary, and you don't know how to do multivariable analysis, I can convince you that the red dot is the highest value that function gets. However, if we allow everything to vary, we see that that is far from actually being the case.

 

This is how every single paper ever to find 'fine-tuning' works. No paper that has allowed everything else to vary has found fine tuning. Your "exquisitely narrow range of values" is a lie. Look at the paper in the OP, that paper looks at only one universe, but that one shows exactly how huge that "narrow range" is. We can remove one of the four fundamental forces entirely and be just fine.

 

It gives you the right answer.

Indeed.

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!

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50% change of getting the same thread- and it works.

 

 

What if you change it in a bad way? I think you have been listening to Victor Strenger.

 

Strenger's work has been criticized by other physicists for having several fundamental flaws. He ignores the most significant factors in his calculations. He even admits his "oversimplification" LoL. Also Luke Barnes argues his "solutions" to the fine-tuned universe are fine-tuned themselves!

 

MonkeyGod is bollocks. It is worse than irrelevant – it is misleading. It is a distraction, encouraging us to simply look the other way, to condescending dismiss the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe for life. It is utter garbage, thinly concealed behind a veil of mathematics. – Luke Barnes (Postdoctoral researcher at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney)

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647

 

http://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/in-defence-of-the-fine-tuning-of-the-universe-for-intelligent-life/

We can remove one of the four fundamental forces entirely and be just fine.

 

 

 

Don't be so sure

 

http://www.bama.ua.edu/~lclavell/Susyria.pdf/weakless4a.pdf

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What if you change it in a bad way? I think you have been listening to Victor Strenger.

 

Then you are not in this universe, but in the other 50% of cases, you are a winner.

That's the point. The "fine tuning" argument said that you couldn't change anything without killing the universe.

However, you can change things if you change more than one thing at at time.

 

Re " He even admits his "oversimplification" "

​Anyone who doesn't admit it's a simplification is kidding themselves or lying to their audience.

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Then you are not in this universe, but in the other 50% of cases, you are a winner.

That's the point. The "fine tuning" argument said that you couldn't change anything without killing the universe.

However, you can change things if you change more than one thing at at time.

 

Re " He even admits his "oversimplification" "

​Anyone who doesn't admit it's a simplification is kidding themselves or lying to their audience.

 

Read Luke Barnes critique of his arguments.

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647

 

http://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/in-defence-of-the-fine-tuning-of-the-universe-for-intelligent-life/

 

Also watch this...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZVhstOstdY

I better summarize the video so I don't get in trouble :P

 

basically he says that Victor Strenger goes as far as saying "the world wide web seems to have taken on a life of its own". The problem is when we talk about life we mean the property of organisms that take in food, extract energy from it, adapt, grow, and reproduce.

 

We don't mean the worldwide web when we are talking about life... LOL

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A man who says that "fine tuning is simply a scientific fact" is not someone in a position to criticise other for use of metaphor.

 

"We don't mean the worldwide web when we are talking about life... LOL"

Nobody said that we did, so what, exactly, are you laughing about?

 

He has, I suspect deliberately, missed the point. If the universe were different then life would be different. It's amusing to contemplate a comparable universe to our own where some guy is on you tube saying "We know that you can't make life out of carbon" because, in their universe, you can't.

He would have fallen into the same trap of assuming that "ours" is the only way to do it.

 

And, if he also forgot (or ignored) the fact that you can change more than one parameter at a time, then he would be a fool or a liar.

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Did you even read that paper? On top of its carbon chauvinism, it uses things that it even admits are speculative as requirements for life. Then the others don't even show the requirements aren't met.

 

Have you found a single paper that finds fine-tuning which does the requisite multivariable analysis yet?

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A thread which was reported earlier reminded me of this thread.

 

I recently ran across another paper called "Stars in Other Universes" which does the kind of multivariable analysis that should be done (but never is) by those who claim fine tuning. This paper looks specifically at star formation and finds that about a quarter of the possible universes (though, the author doesn't look into forces/constants that are just 0 in our universe) have stellar formation. The paper in the OP is about just one of the universes this paper analyzes.

 

For your first paper on Fred Adams "stars in other universes".

 

"Adams’ work cannot support these claims. Even if the figure of 25% were robust, it still wouldn’t follow that fine-tuning has been “negated” – there are plenty more fine-tuning claims that Adams hasn’t addressed (even with regard to stars), and hasn’t claimed to address. But most importantly, he could have just as easily concluded that only 1 part in 10^42 of parameter space allows for stars." - Luke Barnes

 

For your second paper.

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0609050v1.pdf

Did you even read that paper? On top of its carbon chauvinism, it uses things that it even admits are speculative as requirements for life. Then the others don't even show the requirements aren't met.

 

 

They also say "that on closer examination the proposed "weakless" universe strongly inhibits the development of life in several different ways. One of the most critical barriers is that a weakless universe is unlikely to produce enough oxygen to support life."

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And, if he also forgot (or ignored) the fact that you can change more than one parameter at a time, then he would be a fool or a liar.

What does that, combined with the fact that there is not a single paper which finds fine tuning that has allowed multivariation, tell you about the fine-tuning argument?

 

Oh, boys and girls, we're only on the first bit of why fine-tuning is predicated on a false assumption (which isn't the only problem with it, btw). Not only is the false premise based on faulty math, it's also based on faulty metaphysics.

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Gribbin & Rees ("Cosmic Coincidences"): "The conditions in our universe really do seem to be uniquely suitable for life forms like ourselves."

 

Leonard Susskind ("The Cosmic Landscape")" "To make the first 119 decimal places of the vacuum energy zero is most certainly no accident."

 

Lee Smolin ("Life of the Cosmos"): Perhaps before going further we should ask just how probable is it that a universe created by randomly choosing the parameters will contain stars. Given what we have already said, it is simple to estimate this probability. For those readers who are interested, in the arithmetic is in the notes. The answer, in round numbers, comes to about one chance in 10229."

 

Roger Penrose, former Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University and a cosmologist who worked with Stephen Hawking ("The Emperor's New Mind"): "This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. This is an extraordinary figure."

This is extremely disingenuous quote mining.

 

Susskind advocates for an infinitely large universe in which inflation made for drastically different conditions in different parts of this vast universe. Even if the vast majority of the universe is hostile to life, there are bound to be a huge (potentially infinite) number of pocket universes that are conducive to life.

 

Rees is an advocate for the concept of a multiverse, Smolin advocates for an extreme form of this concept. If something isn't out-and-out impossible, it will happen somewhere in one of those infinite, potentially uncountably infinite, multiverses.

 

Penrose rejects the multiverse concept as unscientific but instead advocates for a cyclical universe. In his mind, we are able to be here because this particular cycle is conducive to life. Cycles that aren't? There aren't any thinking beings in those cycles to ask such silly questions.

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For your first paper on Fred Adams "stars in other universes".

 

"Adams’ work cannot support these claims. Even if the figure of 25% were robust, it still wouldn’t follow that fine-tuning has been “negated” – there are plenty more fine-tuning claims that Adams hasn’t addressed (even with regard to stars), and hasn’t claimed to address. But most importantly, he could have just as easily concluded that only 1 part in 10^42 of parameter space allows for stars." - Luke Barnes

 

For your second paper.

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0609050v1.pdf

 

 

They also say "that on closer examination the proposed "weakless" universe strongly inhibits the development of life in several different ways. One of the most critical barriers is that a weakless universe is unlikely to produce enough oxygen to support life."

So, you didn't read a word I said, did you?

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Which, of course, wouldn't need a "creator".

 

As I said before, the new Planck data render many cyclic models, including the ekpyrotic universe, a lot less likely (That means cosmological natural selection is out the window). A lack of non-Gaussianities in the CMB spectrum rules out the conversion mechanism required by most cyclic models.

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As I said before, the new Planck data render many cyclic models, including the ekpyrotic universe, a lot less likely (That means cosmological natural selection is out the window). A lack of non-Gaussianities in the CMB spectrum rules out the conversion mechanism required by most cyclic models.

Do you know what any of those words mean?

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As I said before, the new Planck data render many cyclic models, including the ekpyrotic universe, a lot less likely (That means cosmological natural selection is out the window).

You leap, in a series of non-sequiturs from "less likely" to "not possible" to "creation" to "therefore god!". At no point is evidence or logic involved.

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