What is it with these philosophers...
Goff:
Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University in the UK, and author of Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. His research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview.
Huh...
You'd think a philosopher might be able to "reason" that he's making the same mistake as the anthropic principle addicts.
Goff is quite a personable guy, but he doesn't appear to be an expert in either cosmology, physics or brain science (his view of consciousness is panpsychism). I don't think his Scientific American article is entirely free of bias - most multiverse models (including inflation) do involve many possible values of the physical constants, and a particular difficulty of String Theory is that it predicts an astronomical number of them without yet giving a way to find those of our universe among them.
The 'Fine Tuning' problem (or, the
appearance of fine tuning as it should really be called), is mainly a matter of the unknown. A multiverse of one sort of another is an entirely reasonable (though unsatisfactory for some) explanation. Most cosmologists would prefer to find a reason for the particular values we see rather than rely on self-selection in a multiverse landscape.
On the other hand, we can simply accept that we don't yet know why the values appear to be fined-tuned. Certainly, the alternative to the known is not 'GodDidIt' - that's a false dichotomy; there are other possibilities, and there may be other explanations we are unaware of.
One argument against an omnipotent creator deity is the very nature of the cosmos we observe, including fine-tuning itself; a universe created by an omnipotent entity would not need fine-tuning to exist - nor would it need the unnecessarily low-entropy initial condition and other oddities we find. If the universe was created for humans, the vastness of the universe, with its hundreds of billions of distant galaxies, with their quadrillions of planets, is completely unnecessary. The solar system is more than sufficient to support us, and if some celestial interest is considered useful, our galaxy can do the job.
IOW, what we observe out there, and down here on Earth, is not consistent with what might be expected from an anthropocentric Abrahamic God, and while a disinterested deistic creator god is one hypothesis, there are others.
But, as I've pointed out before, the God hypothesis necessarily ranks at the bottom of the heap, due to its complete lack of explanatory and predictive power - unless someone can argue for it being a better explanation than the magic hypothesis ("It's magic!"), given reasonable criteria for a good explanation, in which case we can rank it second last.