This thread is going to be about honesty, specifically intellectual honesty. Please only post here if you're genuinely interested in pursuing the truth with no interest in the outcome favoring your current beliefs.
I've only seen two, perhaps three, of my arguments truly fail on these forums, but all of them were attacks on God or the Bible and not defenses of atheism and so at this point my worldview has gone completely unchallenged. I'm not very satisfied with that, so I want to address fine tuning because I think that is perhaps the one thing that lends the strongest case to theism.
Now, I think that the fine tuning argument can be shot down immediately because it is an argument from ignorance, which is a fallacy. But in the interest of pursuing truth I'm dropping the formalities so that you all can present the best informal case for fine tuning. But that doesn't mean you can simply tell me to look at the stars and somehow know there has to be a God. Please... not
that informal.
The case
for and
against fine tuning would be the following bullet points:
1.) Formally, the argument is a fallacy as mentioned above.
1.) [I can think of no rebuttal to this.]
2.) We only fine tune things (cars, etc) because of uncompromising, external constraints; God has no uncompromising, external constraints that he must satisfy, so on a theistic worldview we do not expect to see a finely tuned universe.
2.) Regardless of expectation, a finely tuned universe implies the existence of an intelligence beyond our universe. [However, the point in question still must be demonstrated.]
3.) There is no evidence that the physical constants of our universe could have been anything other than what they are, so fine tuning has no case.
3.) We can mathematically model universes with different constants, and they generally are unstable or unsuitable for life. [Is this factually correct? Does anyone have sources?]
4.) Many constants are certainly not finely tuned, such as the speed of light.
4.) Certain physical constants must be accurate to within 1 part in 10^(many) for life to be possible. [Is there a source for this? How can we be sure we're characterizing all possible forms of life?]
5.) Calculations concluding that the universe is finely tuned are fallacious because the physical constants were initially defined in the Big Bang. The Big Bang occurred on a scale so small that quantum mechanics must be considered; the Big Bang involved so much mass (all mass in the universe) that effects of relativity must be considered.
As of yet we lack the physical language to unite quantum mechanics with relativity, so we lack the ability to describe the Big Bang and that is why we return absurd calculations which imply fine tuning.
5.) [I can think of no rebuttal to this.]
Point 5.) is the reason I've rejected fine tuning up to this point. This makes the matter inconclusive, so either apologists are aware of this and yet are arguing on behalf of fine tuning nonetheless, or else apologists are certain of their position because of some other argument that I've not yet seen.
