Did you miss my comment about turtles or do you not understand the reference?

My point is that, by definition, we can only exist in a universe that is suitable for us. There are theories that postulate multiple universes. It may be that most of those are unsuitable for us. By necessity, we exist in one that is. There is no reason to believe that our form of life is the only possibility. Other universes may be suitable to life in ways we can't even imagine.

The theory is that within social species, "immoral" actions make it less likely for an individual to reproduce. An individual that goes about harming other members of the group will be quickly ostracized and unlikely to reproduce. Over generations, the group "selects" for individuals which do not harm the other members. Seems pretty straightforward.

So did thousands under the Roman Empire.

Show me.

According to the Bible.

So, if people who actually lived in Jesus's time didn't believe it, why should we believe it 2000 years later?

Of the three, a miracle is more likely than a lie or hallucination? Miracle : 1) an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

Are you sure that's the direction you want to go?

Your response is like me saying, "I can't prove to you that Santa Claus exists because you don't believe in flying reindeer. Until you accept my assertion that reindeer fly, there is no hope of convincing you that Santa Claus exists." Sounds rather silly, doesn't it?

Absolutely correct. As I have said more than once, it is the responsibility of the side making a fantastic claim to provide proof. There is no need to provide proof for "not invisible unicorns".

Craig can debate very well, and he certainly isn't a creationist moron like Comfort, but when it comes to evolution he still makes very ignorant statements, attacks strawmen, cites dubious sources, and ignore things he doesn't want to hear.

Yeah, he is a good presenter, I don't know how smart he is, but his intellectual honesty is about nil.

I expected Thunderfoot to be clean-cut and professorial. I guess that's just what the accent does to me.

i love how people still make the argument about constants being slightly different, i challenge someone to show me a calculation actually proving that if the constants are different by a tiny margin the universe wouldn't be fit for life. i hear this over and over and i even recall hearing that this calculation was done in the 80s and may very well be based on assumptions that are now known to be false. i'm not saying that it isn't true, i'm just curious to see where people keep getting this statistic that gets thrown around.

Even if it were true, it wouldn't matter. The constants we've identified are not absolute properties of the universe. They are simply the best reduction of universal properties that we have been able to achieve. It's not like there are numbers floating in the stars somewhere, and we can just change a dial in order to alter them. The numbers are descriptions of what we see.

Saying that a change in the universal constants could be disastrous implies fine-tuning is no more relevant than saying that a change in pi could be disastrous implies fine tuning.

Furthermore, we do not know all the effects of the mechanisms that these constants describe. We describe those effects based on our observations of how the universe works. We cannot predict fundamental mechanics, except based on previous measurements of those same mechanics. And we cannot apply measurements of how the universe works given this particular set of constants in predicting how the universe would work given a different set of constants! The only way we could possibly predict how a universe with different constants would work is to gather measurements from such a universe. We can't extrapolate the principles we have derived based on the values of the constants to universes with differing constants!

And finally, the constants themselves may only be properties that arise from yet more fundamental universal mechanisms (which may not be quite so fine-tuned). Our constants may represent something a stable outcome for an equation governed by parameters far more fundamental than those constants. And we may not even have access to these parameters.

The "fine-tuning" argument is either naive or illogical, depending on how it's presented.

Oh man, from part 7 or 8 when they were talking about evolution.

oh don't get me wrong, i am totally for the idea that our constants aren't arbitrary values that happened to work out but are the result of underlying principles that generate such values. i just think its great that these numbers keep getting thrown around and no one bothers to show their work. i can make shocking claims too if i don't need to tell you where they came from or how i got them.

Even if you want to give someone some philosophical latitude and call the universe as it is "fine-tuned" for (human?) life, and even if you were to take it for granted that "changing some of the dials" would make the universe as we know it inhospitable for life -- which you ably point out may not be a reasonable claim -- there are still problems with the claim that this constitutes proof or evidence for god(s).

Namely, unusual things happen. Pick a number between 1 and 1 trillion. WHAT ARE THE ODDS THAT YOU WOULD PICK THAT NUMBER?!?!? They are 1/1,000,000,000,000. So ****ing what. Is that proof of god(s)?

Unless you have a perch "outside" and "before" the universe (whatever that may mean), and make a bet with your cousin that the universe will not be hospitable to human life, the fact that we are able to exist is simply not a weird coincidence, because we have nothing to compare it to.

I'm sure I lifted this from somewhere, but for years I've been using a golf course analogy. You hit a golf ball, it eventually comes to rest, and therefore must eventually settle on some blade of grass. Out of all the millions if not billions of blades of grass, it landed on that one. Is that an amazing event, though, just because it had slim odds? Not at all. On the other hand, if I number the blades of grass, and then write down one of them on a piece of paper without you seeing it (and you aren't a crafty magician), and then hit the ball and it comes to rest on the blade of grass baring the number I wrote down on my piece of paper, that would be pretty startling.

is "thunderfoot" just some random internet guy? or were you guys familiar with him before this?

Total random internet guy for me. Never heard of him before watching the videos.

I understand the analogy you are trying to make, but you are missing the point. Yes, if you pick a number 1 to 1,000,000,000,000 you are going to pick some number, and yes you picking the number has odds of 1/1,000,000,000,000.

But suppose you have 1 trillion regular silver dollars, with 1 dollar being made out of iron instead of silver. The odds of picking any is 1/1,000,000,000,000, but the odds of you picking that on your first try is for all intensive purposes statistically improbable or at the very least impossible. If you made a wager with your cousin about him choosing the iron silver dollar on his very first pick (among the sea of dollars), you would have to be confident in almost any odds you gave him. If, however, he did choose the iron dollar on the very first pick would you conclude, "well he had to pick one and he just happened to pick that one?" or would you think there was some sort of prior knowledge/angle shooting/magnet involved.

And from all we know from the big bang (despite big crunch proponents) the universe only had one and only one chance to form, so the odds of conditions being the way they are is quite remarkable. I am not saying that the delicate balance of the universe is in itself "proof" for God"s existence. Even with the plethora of signs and reasons I could give you for a deity"s existence, I have never believed that you can prove God in the way you can prove the theory of gravity. But as you said we would need to sit on a "perch" outside the universe to have any kind of standard or perspective to compare it to, which is consistent with the Christian/Judaic view of God (exists outside time and space and the natural laws of the universe)

Now let's say every time your friend picks a silver dollar, you vanish out of existence. Now from your perspective, he will pick the iron dollar every time!

Did you see madnak's post above about this? The pi example is a good one. Could pi have a different value? It's entirely plausible that the "fine-tuned constants" have to be exactly what they are.

This is not the same problem.

Why is it entirely plausible? Proof...?

Wouldn't you need to establish that it is even possible for a universe with conditions other than these to form in the first place before you can even begin to talk about the odds?

He is the guy that created "Why do people laugh at creationist." I think it had something like a million plus hits on youtube or something like that. I watched it one afternoon its entertaining.

You explicitly acknowledge that what makes the picking of the iron coin special is that there is only one of them out of a trillion, and you pick randomly, and happened to draw the iron coin on the first attempt. That would be a coincidence indeed.

That is exactly the point I am trying to make.

You are making a number of assumptions that as far as I am concerned are unjustified. Most importantly, you have decided a priori that human life is the iron coin, instead of silver like the trillion other options.

Like I said in the original post, (human) life might have been very lucky to made to develop, but that fact of human life in the universe is not statistically impressive unless you is distinctly an iron coin among silver coins, instead, as I would argue, an iron coin among trillions of coins, each of them made of a different material and a different shape. They are all different, and if one of them is selected, then one of them is selected, and the fact that the iron coin was selected is no less spectacular than if the gold annulus had been selected.

Referring back to the golf ball example, I believe you are thinking from the perspective of the blade of grass. "What are the odds that it would land on me???" But in reality, you are just a blade of grass like all the other blades of grass. What is so special about it landing on you? Nothing in particular.

One final analogy. If you flip a coin 6 times, you do realize that HHHHHH is just as rare an outcome as HTTHHT, right? They are both 1/6. Now, if H wins you money, but T costs you money, then HHHHHH sure seems special and getting it would be extra appreciated. The same concept can be extented to a million or billion, etc., flips. Your claim, above that "so the odds of conditions being the way they are is quite remarkable" is really misleading. If we treat the constants of the universe as random events, the odds of it being the way they are might very well be low (then again, they might not; we are assuming this for the sake of conversation, though), but that still doesn't make it "quite remarkable." If a universe like ours bith with gravity a little stronger is one of the other choices, whether or not it could support life, or human life, it is still exactly as rare and "remarkable" as our universe.

You follow?

Even though I am an agnostic and an atheist, I must admit/claim that this argument comes purely from the statistician in me, and has nothing to do with god(s) or religion or that kind of debate. It is simply not a legitimate claim, statistically speaking, that because something has a low probability, it is amazing that it occurred. Again, it is only if you predicted or anticipated it ahead of time, that you could make that claim.

You can't really beat someone over the head with your ideas in such a topic of great conflict, they're simply going to ignore you and retain their beliefs with much resentment, even if you prove to them that they are wrong.

Maybe I'm uneducated about this topic, but I've always wondered why a constant would need to exist and why it would be relevant?

If it changed, wouldn't everything be changed in scale proportionally? D:

Of course not. I changed it so that it would more closely resemble what we're talking about. You agree that if the universe were not like it is, that we wouldn't be here discussing it right? The probability that the universe can handle life, given that we exist, is one. It's nonsensical to talk about stuff like the probability the universe would be like it is, because we have absolutely no other information.

You've got it backwards. For a theist to make an argument for God based on fine-tuning, the theist is the one who has to show these "constants" could be anything but what they are.

Agreed.

Yeah, saying that is USELESS, because if you NEVER pick the one number that causes the universe to spawn then the universe would have never spawned, and you would have never been around to perceive that you were never spawned.

Now explain again what purpose does that probability calculation serve?

First of all, the odds are 1/64 of HHHHHH or HHTHTH.

Secondly, you are talking about a scientific conundrum. Science can only explain the universe in the way we perceive it because our universe is the only thing (we know of) that exists. For science to make any other claims apart from that (whether the constants could change or whether other universes could have formed) is beyond the realm of science and dabbles into the metaphysical and philosophical. So madnaks claim that our constants had to be what they are because our universe exists is purely speculative and has no real scientific basis.

Assume for a minute that the universe had an astronomically high amount of ways it could have formed based of thousands of astrophysical and elemental properties. If (again this is an assumption) there were only one or a hugely small percent chance that that universe would be life sustaining and in the one explosion from the singularity it did indeed produce habitats that are life sustaining. This begs the question why? Was it indeed pure coincidence? Or perhaps what is planned, fine tuned and adjusted to be just as it is? This is a philosophical question, and should be treated as such.

Furthermore, to even have this discussion we have to be the iron coin ...

Assuming that these "constants" can only be what they are, how were they set, and what set of laws govern these constants? Why are two masses attracted to one another rather than repulsed?

Saying that the constants had to be this way doesnt answer the question, it just leaves you with a whole other set of unanswered questions.

So why does "God of the gaps" deserve a new name just because he's been stuffed away in the gap that is the least likely to be closed in the near future?

Because that's exactly what we have, unanswered questions!

Now if you would just admit it...

See, this bothers me. Sciences says that God is not allowed to be the answer. So when you find the only sort of evidence that could exist that would imply God, you go and claim that it is "god of the gaps" and that we will just figure it out later.

When applying this sort of reasoning you guarantee yourself that "God does not exist"