Chris Street comments / notes are in bright green;
highlights in yellow blockquotes.
Thanks to Florian Widder for the links.
This took place at Tufts University on November 30, 2007.
Description:
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw7J15TeDG4
Is God a human invention? World Christian Enclyopedia - only religion growing is Islam (by birth rate - not by conversions in); Christianity is not growing - but growing louder and agressive; how much more religious is USA than Europe; homicide + abortion + STD+ teen pregranancy - higher in USA than Europe; non-religious (16%) is fastest growing than any religion. Islam (16%) is not as fast growing as non-religious.
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7MGyayvAa8
Dan Dennett: proposes a compulsory 4th R - Religion - education on religion for all children, starting in primary school, in public and private schools and home schooling.
Subjects: History, creed, rituals, music, symbols, ethical commands and prohibitions. That's it! Just tested, non controversial facts that everyone can agree to about the worlds religions.
I believe in freedom of religion. As long as you teach your children the above syllabus you can teach them whatever you want - so long as it does not disable them from informing themselves further.
In a Ted.com speech (Teach all religions: 5-10 minutes) Dan Dennett also proposes ' no particular spin. Democracy depends on an informed consent. Misinformed does not count - like throwing a coin. Children below age of consent are a special case. Parents are stewards of children - you have a responsibility to the world, to the state , to them - to teach your own creed but also ALL the other creeds in the world. Facts only no values. One reviewer called this totalitarian (surely libetarian), another hilarious. Many religions are so anxious to preserve the purity of their faith among their children and so want to keep their children ignorant of other faiths. But it is indefensible to keep your children ignorant of other faiths.
Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgK6M3WRFcc
Religions are human inventions. Not like the telephone but like music or language. Religions have evolved as much in the last 200 years as the last 2000 and will continue to evolve as much in the next 20 years as the last 200 years. Most of the 10,000 new religions have a half life of a few weeks.
There is no one to thank for this wonderful world - just thank Goodness!
Darwins Theory. Trickle down theory. Evolution of God.
Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUUnjcTkQg
DD: Evolution of God. Risk of world conflagration started by religious leaders in Iran / Pakistan / USA.
Dinesh D'Souza: Religious numbers are growing. Social Darwinson / Nietsche atheism - rise of Nazi. The Inquisition. Atheism regimes (Mao, stalin, pol pot, castro, communism) have produced millions dead.
Part 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnGGOKDGLYw
Dinesh D'Souza: Darwin - design and no designer, science supports theism, big bang evidence supports that all of matter came into existence at same time, agreeing with Augustine. Why does universe have the values (mass of electron, elecromagetic force) it has? If you touch expansion rate of universe - we would have no universe and no life (S Hawking). Constants are finally tuned for us! Ockhams Razor says that a Creator created the universe. Science decodes the intelligence out of nature? Why does nature obey laws in the first place. Premises of science are based on Christian values.
Part 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcunc_hQ8U8
Dinesh D'Souza: religion is man made, no evidence of life after death - impossible to have this. Evidence arguement is hubristic. (Dinesh fails to understand evolving nature of science) Nature (eg stones) and human nature (free will, choice, feelings, consciousness). Everything in Dennetts world has to be reduced to materialism. Both are agnostics. Faith is rational based on science. Pascals Wager. We are product of divine intelligence and divine love.
Part 7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SryFVhNfvow
who created god? Trickle down theory. How did we get here. Anthropic principle - we exist in a finely tuned universe. Stalin believed in god - the god was called Stalin! Kim ill sun - same. Darwin can explain free will, feelings etc.
Dinesh D'Souza: everything has a cause has a begining. I call the cause of the universe God! (if i dont understand it I call it god!!)
Part 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8puuM-C9XIY
Dinesh D'Souza: infinite universes but no evidence for this (eg Lee Smolin - frank speculation, a fantasy); laws of nature may require some divine explanation.
Dan Dennett: scientists are speculating about possible causes to the fine tuning of the universe (other than a creator did it). Some Atheists make a mistake - think that there is no difference between right or wrong.
Part 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Ts_kPn5Tg
Dinesh D'Souza: morality is a universal phenemenon - 'evolution' transmution from biological meaning; religion is blamed for events that are not religious issues; atheist bigotry;
Part 10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMEu_pGCCU0
Questions: Ockhams Razor and the big bang; Pascals' Wager;
Part 11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqpumHZGx7c
Questions: ways of experiencing the sublime / god, mutual exclusivity of religions - decide which religion is right - dont just assume they are all wrong
Part 12:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rae3EUR-W4s
Questions: god is outside human realm of testing - too easy an answer; spheres of human experience (consciousness, love, morality) that rely on subjective human experience - Dennett 'understanding of consciousness' is increasing greatly by scientific study. ID is just a hoax! D'Souza: Universe does require an explanation - a cause!
Part 13:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADLjLcS2kJs
low altruism, man is moral and spiratual; evolution has not accounted for morality (Dinesh); evolution has an explanation for morality (Dennett); Sweden (70% atheist) has a better record than USA - time to grow up; Nietsche (if kill god, lose Christian morality eg value of human life, equality of races or man /woman, abortion); how is Jesus differant from John Frum? is god the goodness we have around us (its good but its not supernatural);
Part 14:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KgVtKKgoks
Stalin advertised himself to be a god; limits of knowledge - limited to senses; cannot get beyond 5 senses (Dinesh); what if we are wrong? trust faith! Parsimony principle
Part 15:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM5mv-g2kUU
everything has to have a creator - so who is gods creator; evolution run amoc? Fundamentalist Evolution (Dinesh)
Selected Comments from http://richarddawkins.net/article,1942,n,n
I wonder what people here think of Dennett's proposition that we should teach world religion.
I agree with Dennett's proposition of teaching religions in school. Not much else to say about it, other than it should not evangelize. As long as religites stop trying to push religion into Science class.
While these debates interest me and i enjoy watching them, I can't help but think it's a complete waste of time.
The only person on that stage with the intellectual ability to change his mind is Dan Dennett.
Christians have had centuries of evidence contradicting their scriptures and blowing their "reasons" for believing in god out of the water, and they still hold their facile beliefs. It's pointless to have a "battle" where one side is able to concede defeat and the other only able to deny that they were defeated.
He did make some terrific arguments on a variety of subjects.
I'll also be honest, I was impressed with a few of the counterpoints that D'Souza made as well.
I think Dennett made a good case that religion is man-made invention just like language...
However, he didn't prove the point of the debate which was the GOD is a man made invention.
Dennett thanks goodness that he is alive. Some people thank God they are alive. Couldn't you see this as exactly the same thing? I asked him this very question (after the video cut off) and he responded with "yes, in fact you can see god = goodness")
In which case, goodness exists is to say god exists, which is to say that God isn't manmade.
yoyoman812 - How does that follow? Dennett was probably saying that you may thank "god", but all you're doing is thanking "goodness." Not necessarily that god = goodness
I see your point, but I think this is the wrong way to deal with this.
I believe there is an issue about why the universe seems so suitable to life (and, despite what so many have argued, this really is the case, or so I believe). I don't think this issue can be easily dismissed.
However, what can be easily dismissed is the idea that a universe suitable for life could be the result of an enternal first-cause creator called God.
Whatever the fine-tuning we may currently think is needed for a universe which allows sufficient physical complexity to permit life to appear, that is unimaginable orders of magnitude less 'fine-tuning' than that needed to allow a God-like creator to exist.
This was expressed very well by Dawkins in TGD.
I believe that this is the argument we should use. If you want to declare the universe unlikely, fine. But then you have to accept the vastly greater unlikeliness of an infinite and omnipotent mind, so your argument fails.
37. Comment #92782 by Terry Thompson on December 1, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I think that we atheists make a mistake in arguing any hypothesis as to what "preceded" the big bang. At this point there is no consensus and it looks silly when we supply hypothesis with little or no evidence. Instead we should point to the fact that the supernatural has now been pushed back from explaining why it rains to reason for the big bang back 13.7 billion or so and THANKS in no small part to Daniel Dennett that our understanding now includes conciesness.
Also I think that we need to distinguish between science and our philosophical suppositions based on our current understanding of science. Evolution is a well tested theory, but to go from the fact that now we do not need supernatural to explain life to the conclusion that there is no supernatural is well rationed philosophy. We can argue that it has much more weight than christianity or any supernatural, but it is a philosophical metaphysical argument nonetheless.
and lastly we need to show why this world view will benefit man better than supernatural. Just arguing it is infinantely more probable does not mean it is a better understanding. It is one argument, as would an argument that understanding better the basis of our morality (from biological and cultural evolution IMHO) will better aid us in improving our morality and culture.
I think the opposite is true. Our solar system is probably wonderfully adapted to life. There is liquid water everywhere.. in the atmosphere of Jupiter, almost certainly in the oceans of Europa and Callisto, and it looks likely that underground seas exist on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. The old idea of a 'Goldilocks zone' - a narrow band around a Sun where life could exists as a result of the heat of the Sun - looks very out of date.
Also, we have hardly explored our Universe. Who knows where life could exist? There have been suggestions that life could even be most abundant between the stars, on numerous extra-solar planets, using radioactive heating as a source of energy.
But anyway. The real issue with the physical constants is that until we know why they are as they are, we have no reason to pin them down to values friendly to life, or even to allow complexity. If you look at the cosmological constant, unless it is extraordinarily fine tuned, the universe would not even allow atoms, let alone complex chemicals or life.
At least that is my understanding of things. I have yet to read Stenger's writings on this matter, and the contrary views of Martin Rees and others.
EDIT:
You make a good point. However, if I understand things right, the issue of fine tuning is primarily not about whether or not life can exist in a universe, but whether or not anything like atoms can exist.
@SPINOZA
Like it or not religion is prevalent in the world. I think a critical and comparative teaching of the different world religions is a good idea. In Scotland when I was at school about 7-9 years ago we had Religious Education class which taught about other religions. We also had Modern Studies and History. Surely within those 3 disciplines it could be taught. I would however like it to be taught in an unbiased manner.
Part 14: Dinesh tries to have it both ways (and this is the crux of his entire argument). First he posits that we can't know what happened before the Big Bang or what happens outside of the Universe, because we are limited by the Universe. We are of this Universe and thus cannot fully (or even partially) understand anything outside of it. HOWEVER, then he (and others like him) says, "Ah, but there's a god, and I know this." Someone needs to ram home "how does he knows this?" if he is constrained by the Universe and the "lens" of his own senses.
I felt that to, im not sure that is actually important, when challenging the notion of an all powerful supernatural deity it is impossible to show it is in actual fact a human construct (in the same way that cthulhu may or not be), dennet knows this and i think the point he makes by displaying the various religions is to introduce the notion that how people interpret god (irrspective of its existence) is instrumental to how they act and if there are various ways of behaving how god wants then maybe this will lead ultimately to questioning the validity of one and alls religion and ultimately god/s it/themselves.
the fact that he then suggests that atheists should share the responsibility of 'atheist' dictatorships is preposterous.
D'Souza muddles every debate. He really doesn't debate, instead he brings a lot of different topics like life freewill, big-bang, ultimate-cause,etc., that, like Dennet said, would require hours to be explained. I think this is a strategy not to answer the issues in the debate.
Also, if Dinesh agrees with evolution, isn't there evidence of intelligence and consciousness ramping up over small, incremental degrees to our current state?
Thanks, Pat. I was there and enjoyed myself. Dennett's concern regarding toxic belief is exactly my own. D'Souza would earn more of my respect if he would tackle that problem directly. Like many here, I'm acutely worried about the elementary school teacher in the Sudan, Ayan Hirsi Ali's safety, and so on.
I often wish I could continue a debate after it ends, so here goes:
1. The evolution of life is something we observe. Natural selection is our theory to explain those observations.
2. The evolution of the universe from the Big Bang forward is not explained by Darwinian natural selection but by an incomplete set of physical laws. These laws are a human invention. When you speak as though the laws of physics somehow exist in the universe, you're guilty of reification.
D'Souza never answered Dennett's 5 opening questions.
Maybe they could wrassle over those in a text debate.
That'd be cool to see.
I think the debate mostly revolved around the same old ideas that D'Souza kept repeating:
a. Pascal's wager.
b. The uncaused cause argument.
c. The tweaking of the universal constants argument
Secondly I think it was an ugly debate (to put it politely) primarily because D'Souza kept bringing in all sorts of arguments each of which may be a subject of an individual debate. There is no possible way one can have a reasonable debate with this guy if he doesn't stick to the topic.
He kept ridiculing the speculations of the multiverse theory and I was surprised that Dan didn't point it out that D'Souza's alternative (god dunnit) is equally if not more speculative.
At one point he said that the caveman in 2000 BC wouldn't know anything outside of a 2 mile radius. Does this guy know anything about ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, South America?
I am glad that Dan caught him when he tried to pin one of his arguments on the irreducible nature of consciousness.
D'Souza talked about humans not evolving in recent history (~last 5-15k years), I believe there are studies that have shown otherwise.
He ridiculed the multiverse hypothesis (or speculation if you like that word) by giving some crazy argument about O J Simpson's defence etc. That is not what the multiverse hypothesis is about!
Bringing out why this might be more psychologically satisfying than intellectually helpful is actually quite difficult.
I think that the fine-tuning argument is the most powerful weapon in the theists' armoury, because it can at least tempt us to deism ... and once we reach deism, it may seem natural to wonder whether there isn't something to revelation after all.
I don't think the argument from fine-tuning should compel any commitment to belief. It has a lot of difficulties, but they are not straightforward to explain in real time. I've always thought that hammering this argument would be the best approach for a theist in live debates. The best strategy is to make deism seem plausible, then ask if it is plausible to stop at deism when the deist god could easily reveal itself, take an interest in its creation, etc.
I haven't watched this debate yet, but that's how I would handle the brief if assigned the theist side of one these debates.
The challenge for atheists is to come up with a response that is cogent ... yet simple and clear enough, and sufficiently independent of other assumptions, to be expressed in real time in a live debate. The best approaches, I think, are the ones that build on problems with whether positing God is a genuine explanatory advance.
Dennett's comment about "creation" being a concept from the novel (DSouza's analogy) and therefore not applicable outside the novel (if all other terms from the novel are rejected) is excellent.
WRT fine tuning: Before Darwin, we guessed that life was designed by God. We couldn't understand how complex life could emerge without a designer.
Isn't it risky for the theist to link God to our current ignorance regarding the fine tuning problem? If this gap in understanding is filled, intellectual honesty requires that we reject the God hypothesis a second time.
What is the purpose of having a course where children are taught the "history" of religion but where you leave out the FACT that they are all created by man and this is all easily verified by historical data? I can see the value of preserving some aspects of religion but those aspects are not unique to religion, they are precepts that make sense for people living in groups to adhere to, especially in a civil society. Children should be taught this, they should also however be taught that there is no correlation between moral actions on the part of people and any (sometimes contradictory regarding what is "moral")guide book as defined by religions. In my view Dennet is going a bit to light on the punching bag of religious belief. Ostensibly he does this in hopes of making inroads into existing entrenched religious modes of thought, though I commend this slow and steady technique it is a bit annoying especially when you know that the facts to offer a more complete refutation of divinely inspired religious belief can be employed in its stead.
"In the name of atheism", Dinesh D'Souza is a complete dick. He is using a different definition of atheism on purpose to argue against points made by Dennett, Dawkins, and others. Atheism as a lack of belief in God never motivated anyone to kill, because killing people or not killing people doesn't logically follow from a lack of belief in something.
At best one could say that a belief in God is necessary to stop the inherent nature of humans to kill one another. I would accept an argument with it as its premise to be logically consistant. I wouldn't accept the premise though.
Steve99 and Russell Blackford
I agree that the fine-tuning argument does seem quite strong. But I tend to think that that is because it is like other after-the-fact statistical arguments. In other words, it's a bit like the woman who dreamt of her sister last night and, what do you know, her sister just phoned her! After the fact, it seems amazing to her, and surely didn't happen just by chance, so she ascribes her dream to something supernatural. Similarly, we look at the physical constants and it seems amazing that the way they are should be as they are, but I am wary of giving this 'seeming amazing' more importance that we should.
I know I haven't set this out too well, but what I am trying to get at is that I think we need to be very careful about arguments based on some form of 'it couldn't have happened by chance'. As RD and others have pointed out, we haven't evolved as beings who are able to evaluate the meaning of probability very well, and it seems to me that acquiring meaning from probability (or improbability) is precisely what the fine-tuning argument tries to do. Indeed, that is what most people did in respect of life on earth before Darwin came along, and they arrived at a Creator.
Russell
(Re 'fine tuning')
I would talk about needles in haystacks.
When people say:
"How likely is it that we are in this given environment with so many things just right?"
I would say:
'Yes. It is almost like looking for a single needle in a million, million haystacks, isn't it?'
[Furious nods]
I would then ask how long it would take to find the needle if we were actually the pointy item in question.
Answer: not very long.
Ok this would need clarification and work, if further questions were asked, and I admit not by me as my understanding of physics is simplistic, at the very best :-)
However, the sudden switch in perspective could elicit the queasy realisation that it is possible to couch questions in inappropriate or simply meaningless terms.
Also, it could also make the point that, in terms of the universe, we are tiny beings indeed.
To automically presume that this is all for us has always struck me as the height of hubris, as well as an error of reasoning.
Fine tuning again.
Unless you are a full blown creationist, even "fine tuning" doesn't lead to the conclusion that the universe was created for us.
Once we have the right "initial conditions" such as the right physical laws and constants and the initial organic molecules the subsequent history of life on earth is well explained by evolution.
Even if the initial conditions were "fine tuned", the subsequent evolutionary history that eventually led to us definitely wasn't.
We owe our existence to some key events which were more or less accidental, like the meteorites that killed off the dinosaurs, climatic and geological catastrophes etc. So even if initial conditions were "fine tuned", there is no reason to expect that would result in us being here, unless the theists argue that "God" also fine tuned his celestial missiles to kill of the dinosaurs, among other things. That would be quite a theological problem.
116. Comment #92892 by Don_Quix on December 1, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I've always found the "universe is fine-tuned" argument to be quite silly. It's easy to take the wind out of this one by pointing out that anywhere in about 99.99999999999% of the Universe, a human being would almost instantly die a very gruesome and painful death. Fine-tuned indeed.
Ludacrispat26: Well done for organising this debate, and posting the videos. My verdict is that Dennett did a great job. No other antagonist got D'Souza to admit that religions were man-made inventions, forced him into defending a Deist position only, and got him to admit that he (D'Souza) needed to read Dennett's books on morality and consciousness. As usual, D'Souza sprinkled so many false statements and non-sequiturs into his rapid-fire delivery that it was exceedingly hard to pin him down.
Regarding the fine-tuning argument, Russell writes:
Ante Kepler, the motions of the planets could be predicted to high accuracy, by means of circles, and circular motions around the current point on that circle, and then circular motions about the current point on that circle, etc. The system was called epicycles. It had a long history. Thousands of years ago, the greeks made gadgets called astrolabes, looking like 19th century clockwork, that computed the positions of the planets by this means. To get high accuracy, multiple epicycles were needed, making it possible to predict planetary motions with high accuracy, but the theory had complex structure, needing various critical numbers (the ratios of the various diameters of the circles, and the speeds of movement around each circle) to get the desired accuracy. The theory was successful however, and people at the time generally assumed that the planets moved in epicycles, rather than regarding epicycles as merely the best available model of the motions.
Post Kepler, the same accuracy could be obtained by far fewer numbers and a simple formula, operating on a quite different principle. Universal gravitation was discovered soon after, and the complex epicycle theory was seen to be a poor theory, despite its great precision (for its time) because there was a simpler, even more precise way to describe the motions, which was discovered to apply to all motions observed throughout the universe.
In the 20th century a proliferation of "elementary" particles was discovered, with even more "magic numbers" than the current theories. The best available model of physical motions today, the "standard model", is simpler, using only 26 (currently) key numbers, and if those 26 numbers are chosen right, they model the entire universe as perfectly as we know how to measure it. But it is still a model. Most physicists suspect an even simpler model will one day be discovered, using different principles and fewer numbers still.
We just don't know whether the actual universe requires fine tuning to obtain interesting complexity within it or not. The fact that our current best model requires fine tuning is a property of the model, and we should not assume, as so many popular science writers do, that the underlying universe is (in the sense of perfectly isomorphic to) our current model. That wasn't true for past models, and there are good reasons to think it isn't true of our current models.
The truth of the matter may be this. If you already believe in revelation, can somehow rationalise away the evidence against a providential and beneficent god, and just feel a psychological conviction about religion, the fine-tuning argument will seem like powerful confirmation.
Conversely, if you find the supposed revelations unconvincing, find the evidence against any kind of providential and benevolent god overwhelming, don't see any signs of disembodied spirits floating around (so invoking one now is invoking something totally new as part of the total ontology, and is thus ad hoc), and are impressed by humans' tendencies to reach for explanations of phenomena that rely on intelligent agency (and by how often such explanations fail even when they are initially psychologically satisfying), then you are likely to look for some kind of mechanism that explains how the constants are what they are and how they have turned out to allow complexity.
That may not be an easy point to package up, but I think it's close to the truth of the matter.
Obviously, I'm in the camp of those who see the evidence against a providential, benevolent god as strong, think the evidence of revelation is unimpressive, etc. Debating this in front of people from the other camp would be difficult, though. Dennett didn't have to do that, but such debates have a wide range of audiences.
Wow, I like how Dinesh uses that reduction to Hitler, and also how he brings up the old red herring "Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists therefore Atheism is evil". Not impressed at all.
And that "fine tuned" rant is ridiculous, Richard challanged this in "The God Delusion", if the universe wasn't in a state where we could exist then we wouldn't exist to debate it or think about how the universe is fine tuned.
Don_Quix
I think you're mis-understanding the argument. The idea is that the atomic forces seem to be fine tuned to allow gravity to form stars and planets, and the elements to be made by fusion in stars from hydrogen, and building on that chemistry, then biology.
I think this is very much a valid question as to why this is so.
The young man in Part 10 with Gray sock cap, destroyed Dinesh. Dinesh had to take deep breath
and babble about something off topic.
When he asked Dinesh "Where do you draw the line
on absurdities?" was a stunning!
It's not really a valid question. For example what if the universal laws were different? Humans and life in general can only exist because of the universal laws, but if the universal laws were different then there'd probably be phenomana equally as complex as life, just different. We're a product of the universe, it's no good to take the stance that the universe was tweaked to fit us in. It's like asking why the animal was designed around the working heart, he's approaching it from the wrong direction.
Up to video 7 now, one thing I can say about D'Souza is he's a master at walking the fine line of an argument. Instead of attacking a point directly, he'll bring up some tangential and at first blush intriguing idea which ultimately is irrelevant to the discussion. He mentions Pascal's wager for example, which to the layman seems like a very compelling argument. To paraphrase, "If it cost me nothing to believe, then why shouldn't I?" However this means nothing as few believers use such a restricted description of faith, in fact those that do are known as deists at best rather than as theists. Once the trappings of dogma and ritual possessed by real world religions are added upon this kernel of zero loss belief, the recipe for destruction and conflict with other such systems is set. Further, when we analyze the contradictions these varying sets of dogma and ritual bring forth we see that if the God is there it is anything but a good or just one. So the best we can conclude, even giving D'Souza a bone by asserting that yes we agree there is a God, is that that God is either on vacation or crazy. Yes D'Souza is free to go with believing since it costs him nothing but that very choice damns him to also believe that his God is either dead (which is materially identical to non existent as atheists assert) or crazy. This latter option contradicts the thousands of lines of scripture and dogma created by religions to describe, supposedly through divine inspiration, what "God" wants for us. Well if "he" is giving every culture dichotomous commands every few hundred years then he is either malicious or crazy assuming he does exist, but he's definitely not good. I'd rather believe that God was dead than that he was a drunkard, and if he is dead , that is the same as the position that an atheist takes that he does not exist, so it does make more sense to NOT believe, as believing forces us to accept a contradiction of an at times sleeping, at times lightning throwing, at times capricious and malicious "God".
Again I commend D'Souza for bringing up the muddled issues that misdirect from the arguments at hand, ultimately he builds on a house of cards but his job is not to bring you the truth it is simply to *convince you* (ie. "win" the argument) and his style does work if the sales of his book are any indication.
Sure it's a valid question, when it's posed in a genuine way. But, the implication D'Souza and most other people who toss about this argument make is that because the forces seem to be favorable for the universe to exist as it does, and we can't yet explain why, GODUNNIT.
Nobody knows why the universe exists at all. More importantly, we don't have any understanding whatsoever of what the universe actually is. It could be that it is the fundamental nature of a universe to be the way it is right now, and that it is simply not possible for it to be any other way. It's also possible that there are an infinite or near-infinite number of universes with different settings and we just happen by chance to be in one that has conditions favorable to increased complexity. With a near-infinite number of universes, it would not only be possible that our kind of universe could form, but it would be astronomically (pardon the pun) unlikely for it not to form. There are many other possibilities as well.
All I was saying is that the way people like D'Souza use (or abuse) this argument is disingenuous. It's just another aspect of the argument from ignorance. "We don't know why things are the way they are, so godunnit! QED."
My original statement was not a misunderstanding. It was an illustration of how ridiculous it is that a God would go to all the trouble of "fine-tuning" a universe so perfectly so that we could come about, but then neglect to account for the fact that almost the entirety of Its grand creation is instantly lethal to Its most special creatures (us). Of course, as others have stated, the universe may not have been created for us -- that could pose some serious problems for old Dinesh. :D
Dr. Benway wrote:
Well said, but the first statement brings an interesting idea. We know that the current known candidates (string theories mainly) for grand unified theories that do a job of integrating gravity in with the other forces of nature along with predicting the correct values for the fundamental constants all suffer from providing too many answers. Namely, they seem like over broad mathematical constructions that give us all the possible answers instead of just the one that fits our universe, employing unseen dimensions and entities beyond our universe to explain our universe. It may be the case that this is a requirement of explanation of our universe and the state of the various values. This could be true since lacking an ability to view the universe from the outside our logical constructions must necessarily be as generalized as possible, and from this generalization collapses the certainty that is our universe. It is unfortunate that we may be unable to determine "which universe is ours" while bound inside. I say "may be" since the work of an early 20th century mathematician, Kurt Godel essentially defined the limits of what questions can be asked using a logical /mathematical construction. In essence, it is possible for a system constructed to find answers to be unable to answer questions definable using its language. It may be the case that the mathematics foundation that we have created is unable to allow us to answer the question of why the constants seem "fine tuned" and of allowing us the ability to pose questions in the universe to determine the answer. The system itself may preclude our asking falsifiable questions about the universe that can tie one or another GUT to OUR universe and in the language of science that would make the conclusion only a hypothesis.
I am confident though that whatever is outside our universe communes with what is inside and has effects that we can test for and thus allow us to select from the embarrasment of theories that do explain the constants. All that said, there is absolutely no reason to jump from our current state of understanding back to saying "a magic man done it!" when scientific investigation has gotten us so splendidly to the very edge of the universe itself as D'Souza and other theists are always eager to do.
Atlas
Come now, surely inquiry into why things are the way they are is fundamentally what science is all about.
Rather flawed logic there. I think you had better go back and re-read TGD. Not that I consider TGD/Dawkins to be the last word on this matter,to my recollection he does not dismiss this idea. There are some theory's as to why the universe is the way it is and, as I recall he and other scientists consider it to be a valid question. What if atomic forces were such that gravity could not form stars? Then there could be no other elements but hydrogen and consequently no chemistry and biology.
Of course we should try to find out why the laws of physics are the way they are, but to start from the assumption that they're the way they are for some big reason is wrong in my opinion, we shouldn't focus entirely on looking for reason when there maybe none.
It's like asking "why was the universe created in the first place?", we can attempt to find out the sequence of events that lead up to the creation of the universe but is asking that question the correct one for science? Religions often start with the assumption that everything has some deep rooted meaning to it's existance and go from there, and that simply doesn't have to be the case.
What I stated was the Anthropic principal, which is a good argument against the "divine engineer twiddling his knobs" theory. It doesn't disprove there is one, but it's a good reason for why there doesn't have to be one.
Blasphememe
Perhaps you should go back and read the second paragraph of page 143 of TGD in the chapter The Anthropic Principle: Cosmological Version. I don't see how the anthropic principle is "flawed logic." Dawkins certainly didn't invent it. I believe Stephen Hawking is one of its main proponents.
blaspheme wrote:
I don't see how the quoted portion of Atlas' text was flawed logically. It seemed like a perfect paraphrase of the rebuttal to the theist invocation of the anthropic principle. The state of the universe is conducive to our life necessarily since we are here, we should not be surprised that it is so conducive to life because we are here is another way of saying it. The Universes state is a precondition of our existence, our existence is optional among many things that we could be, for example if this was 20 million years ago, life still exists but there is no sentient beings on earth to contemplate it. The fact the universe will (in the future) support sentient life in the form of us does not mean it was made for us (since 20 million years ago there was no "us" but there was all the things needed for us to survive.)
Most annoying bits for me:
1. The yelling. Even with the volume turned low my orienting response is repeatedly provoked. It disrupts my ability to reflect and organize my thoughts while I'm listening. I need the occasional pause.
2. The accusation that Dennett over-extends Darwin into inappropriate domains. He doesn't quote Dennett or anyone to illustrate his point. Unlike D'Souza (apparently), I've never heard an atheist argue that Darwin's model of natural selection explains abiogenesis or the fine tuning of the universe. D'Souza had better back up this accusation with a material example if he doesn't want people to believe he's a liar.
Evolutionary psychology is an emerging field and it's possible a fair amount of human behavior won't be well accounted for by a Darwinian model. But there's nothing inappropriate about the effort to understand how natural selection might favor certain behavioral traits.
3. "My neurons made me do it." You are your neurons. If you say there's no point in telling you it's wrong to kill people because you can't help yourself, we'll simply lock you up. Need anything more be said?
4. If D'Souza truly believed that the fine tuning problem was evidence for God, he'd recommend physicists stop investigating the problem. Why isn't he campaigning against CERN?
Homework for D'Souza:
1. Reification (the map is not the territory)
2. Falsification
3. Fallacy of affirming the consequent
4. Tu quoque
5. God of the gaps
6. What happens when we throw out parsimony?
7. What happens when we throw out corroboration?
8. Try decaf
There is nothing strong about the fine-tuning issue. It is a piece of science that theists have picked up on to try to support their special beliefs.
Argument from ignorance. God of the gaps. Argument from incredulity. Take your pick.
I think it was Dr. Massimo Pigliuci who has talked about how religious claims always occur at the boundary of knowledge. The fine-tuning topic just happens to currently be in that zone. When our understanding encompasses these topics theists will shift their arguments to new ground.
In that sense I think it is a no-win situation trying to have these arguments with theists and I think Dan was somewhat less comfortable when D'Souza galloped off in that direction.
I think a more useful approach, which is what Dan is all about, is presenting the overwhelming evidence that gods and religion and all the ideas about divine connection inherent in them, are entirely man-made. That is the strongest tactic to fight religion, the dangers of which are not supernatural, but are exclusively real things that are done by real people.
156. Comment #92956 by McLir on December 1, 2007 at 8:23 pm
On the talking point of Stalin and Pol Pot being murderous atheists, I think this is an issue worth fleshing out. Totalitarian state communism resembles theocracy in some important ways. There might be some other useful analogies between religious zealotry and certain kinds of secular zealotry -- neo-conservatism and market fundamentalism come to mind. The dangers of these come from valuing ideological systems over actual humans. Perhaps a generalized definition of toxic zealotry could be very useful.
Dennett's resolution sounds like an extremely good idea. If any schools adopt it, I will be very interested to see the results.
158. Comment #92958 by edejard on December 1, 2007 at 8:30 pm
With respect to the "fine tuning" argument, it seems to me that some have misunderstood (misrepresented?) D'souza's version of it. He made it quite clear that it doesn't provide "proof" of god's existence as some have misleadingly suggested (indeed, at another point in the debate D'souza admits that he is an agnostic, which is to say that he doesn't "know" god exists, yet chooses to believe); rather, he argues, the fine tuning evidence "fits" with the theistic worldview. You many agree or disagree with this argument, but you must present it accurately first.
And D'souza's take on the anthropic principle is a bit more nuanced than some have suggested. He has said that if you respond to the fine tuning argument by saying, "Of course the universe -- or at least one small part of it -- is capable of supporting life, whatever the improbabilities, since, well duh, we're here to think about it" you've basically missed the point, because you haven't explained the improbability! The philosopher John Leslie has posited a thought experiment to make this a bit clearer: A man is in front of a firing squad. After dozens of unsuccessful volleys, the warden approaches the prisoner and tells him that this result is too improbable to have happened by chance, and that there must be some conspiracy afoot involving the shooters. The prisoner laughs off this suggestion by saying, "the shooters obviously missed because if they hadn't, I wouldn't be here to have this discussion." This is not a very satisfying answer, since it (like the argument above) leaves a massive improbability unexplained.
After watching the video I was particularly troubled when Dinesh dodged the question on why the Scadinavian societies, by far the most Agnostic/Atheistic in the world, perform the highest on the U.N. development index, have very low levels violent crime, and have the some of the highest per-capita contributions to overseas charity in the world?
This point is particularly useful because much of the questions at the debate (and discussions on this board) seem pointed towards a complete refutation of an a priori God (in a very lose "first cause" deistic sense). Most people here are aware of the argument that if you can posit a "God", then you can also posit an universe with less assumptions. Although the God assumption is substantially (even exponentially) more unlikely than the naturalistic universe assumption. It is still in some sense possible, which means that arguments around this point are at best byzantine. By examining the Scandinavian model I should hope that Dinesh should ask himself: would it be "good" to sell or convert the Atheistic/Agnostic Scandinavians to any particular religion? If so, what are the empirical societal effects would he believe that this would serve?
Dinesh was very disingenious throughout the whole debate because his positions seemed to rely on the most wooly ecumenical deism I've ever seen. Even if we accept (which I don't based on likelyhood)some of his first cause points, he has not given us a reason to care/waste time on contemplating, revering, praying and worshiping towards this very vague "first cause" God. Furthermore, his assertion that Nietzche statement that "Christian values would survive the death of God" proves that the Scandinavian societies are the most just because of their previous Christianity is flawed. First, Nietzche is not axiomatic, or equivalent to a controlling court decision in law, you cannot cite Nietzche as incontrovertible authority. Obviously, Nietzche said a very many horrid things (about women for example) and I doubt that Dinesh would quote him as authority on the matter. Second, if his premise is that a Christian history serves to inculcate greater values, he would still have to grapple with the fact that Scandinavia is by all accounts MORE moral now that it has abandoned its vestigial Christianity.
Is he in a sense advocating a sort of Liberal post-christianism? If he is not then he should ask himself what he finds offensive in this view?
Mango, not at all. First, one can say that the anthropic principle doesn't do the heavy lifting you want it to do without presupposing any sort of agency.
Second, the point of Leslie's thought experiment is that the anthropic principle isn't an explanation at all. It's like saying that the presence of a corpse with gunshot wound, coupled with the absence of a gun, explains a murder. It does nothing of the sort. It does present us with dispositive evidence that a murder has occurred, but it doesn't "explain" the murder. Similarly, the fact that we are here does provide us with dispositive evidence that our part (at least) of the universe is capable of supporting life, but it decidedly doesn't "explain" that fact, especially when it seems to be the case that a very specific set of conditions had to be fulfilled to bring this fact about.
Now I happen to think that Dinesh's answer is very problematic, but I think we must address it without resorting to simplistic references to the anthropic principle.
edejard wrote:
What improbability are you referring to? The improbability of their being sentient life able to ask the question? Who said that was improbable and has *accurately* quantified this "improbability"? We know there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy *alone* a large percentage of them similar in structure to our own star. We also know , just in the last 10 years, that there are over 200 extra solar planets revolving a smaller set of stars. It sounds like our probability of existence is quite high from these numbers but then there is the chance of planets in the habitable zone (and note assuming the life is OUR type in that it is carbon based), factoring in these variables can lead to widely diverging results of any estimate of "improbability". The estimates (The Drake equation being a famous one) that have been made to try to put a number on how probable it is that we are here are just that estimates. In fact they are very wild ones as certain variables we know little to nothing about at this time or leave out other ideas of what life can be. So though I am of the view that we will find more refined values to these variables and be able to make more accurate predictions of the probabilities of life or sentient life (and note again, it is always "life like us" the probabilities change when we entertain types of life which is hard for us to imagine), we aren't there yet. This works both ways mind you, we can't state accurately how probable it is , nor can we state how improbable it is. (since that guess also leaves out important variables for which we have little to no data)
The only other "improbability" I can think you are referring to is the one of a universe with the constants that make our type of life possible, again , since we have no idea how universes form or what minimum attributes define universe, we can't say squat about how probable it is for us to be here in this one, either for or against. We already know that there are an infinite number of mathematical possibilities for universes, just because ours is perfect for our type of life doesn't mean that one of the many others that may also exist don't have life which is similarly perfect for those universes even if that "life" is like nothing we can imagine. So again, our ability to define "improbability" goes out the window as we can't even limit what is possible let alone what is life. We shouldn't be surprised that if we apply every filter necessary to restrict life to our own type that the probability of such life will go down but that is a different question from determining the probability of sentient life, whatever form inside our universe or outside it. With the "improbability" misunderstanding explained, surely it should be clear that going from this state of uncertainty in even being able to guess the probabilities of our existence or our universes existence, to asserting "a magic man done it." is irrational. The scientific view is to keep acquiring data and forming hypothesis until we can refine our view and our calculations for these probabilities, giving up the game shouldn't enter into the equation.
edejard; So what you're asking, then, is why are the laws of physics they way they are, which is the step beyond glibly reciting the anthropic principle. Dinesh frames the question as if there are "dials" that have been turned, painting for the listener a scene ripe for a turner of dials. And since he flatly rejected parsimony nothing stops him from a "leap of faith."
For me, and the people I converse with who are not deep into physics, the anthropic principle suffices. It holds water, even though it's not an explanation at a deeper level of understanding of how the laws of physics arose.
All the fundamental constants seem so fine tuned that even slightest variation in any one of them and 'we wouldn't exist'. Therefore the universe must have been fine tuned (by a creator/intelligence/god) with us in mind.
My questions:
1> If one of the questions had a different value, perhaps we (i.e life on planet earth or planet earth itself) would not exist. But how do you know that in whatever universe that did come into existence (with the different constants than ours), life or some complex phenomenon that resemble life and conscious beings would NOT exist? Is there some proof that shows that with slight variation in any of the constants, matter as we know it would not exist at all?
2> Let us accept for a moment that the universe is fine tuned by a creator. What makes you think that the creator had 'us' in mind? We have good reasons to believe from probabilistic calculations that life and perhaps intelligent life exists in other parts of the universe. What is the proof that the creator actually favor the beings on Blargon 7 somewhere in a solar system in Andromeda galaxy? Why us? In all probability the earth is a penal colony to dump all the "failed" models (I think Hitchens has mentioned this idea in god is not great.)
3. To what accuracy do we know these constants. E.g the gravitational constant G = 6.67428[+/-0.00067] x 10^-11 N.m^2.kg^-2. This means there is uncertainty about the 14th decimal place onwards and the value could be:
6.67495 x 10^-11 N.m^2.kg^-2 to 6.67361 x 10^-11 N.m^2.kg^-2. Granted that the uncertainty is very small (~ 0.01 %) but doesn't this in itself prove that things are doing fine with small uncertainty? How much does one of the constants have to vary to make things as we know blow up or not appear at all?
4. Last but not least... it seems like use of the fine tuning argument is nothing but an extension of the god the gaps argument. We don't know why the universe looks fine tuned for life... goddunit. Maybe in my life time I would be lucky enough to see that gap closed.
The fine-tuning argument is based on the same fallacy that so many theistic arguments are based on: special pleading.
If the coincidence of the universe being what it is demands an explanation, then the coincidence of God being what It is demands the same kind of explanation. And if God doesn't demand an explanation, neither does the universe. As always, God is superfluous.
Danesh D'Souza has these views.
1) The big bang created by God created the universe 14 billion years ago.
2) 4.6 billion years ago the earth forms
3) 3-4 billion years ago life starts.
4) 100,000-200,000 years ago humans eventually evolve (in Gods image).
5) 2,000 years ago he finally intervenes to kill his own son which is also himself.
WTF!
D'Souza also uses this argument(I have replaced moustache for atheism).
"Stalin and Hitler where both moustache wearers"
"Moustaches are bad"
"All moustache wearers must take the blame for the atrocities of previous moustache wearers"
Well, my understanding is that the cosmological constant has to be tuned within 1 part in 10 to the 50th power to prevent the universe blowing up.
Steve, do you have a reference for this? I find it very hard to believe given that we don't have the capability to take any physical measurement to past about 12 decimal places of resolution.
I have probably phrased things clumsily. This does mean that we can measure anything to that accuracy, it is more about the possible range of the constant.
For example, in String Theory there are a phenomenal amount of possible universes, most of which have cosmological constants which would result in a rapidly expanding universe with no structure.
Well, God is superfluous, but it does not mean that the fine tuning argument is, in general, a fallacy.
We are probably in the same situation regarding the settings of the constants of the universe as we were in terms of trying to explain the compexity of life before Darwin and Huxley. There really was something that needed explaining, and we found that explanation.
It is as misguided, in my view, to casually dismiss the apparent fine tuning of the universe as 'not a problem' as it would have been to dismiss the complexity of life as 'not a problem'. We should admit that it does need explaining while making it clear that God is not the answer.
Denevius, what? That's exactly the same as saying "Women can complain all they want, but non-suffrage is here to stay as long as women are emotional and non-rational."
Surely that is not what you meant to say.
I think you meant to say something else, and I think you may be right... What you seem to have meant is that the majority of people on earth are too stupid to think for themselves, or do the intellectual leg-work to come to the realizations that intellectual atheists have come to...
But I think it's scarier than that...
... I also think we need to TRY our damnedest (no pun intended), to BRING THE FACTS to people, and to try and lift them up out of their "dogmatic slumber" as Hume did to Kant... and as public education has improved the intelligence of enormous numbers... so too could continued (and length) criticism of religion (which began the instant religions were created) bring more and more people to the truth.
And there is much value in that.
I find it ironic that Dinesh paints a caricature of Dennet disbelieving in things in earlier times such as other planets (I forget what the other thing was). 'Well, there's no evidence for other planets existing!' Well, look at yourself, Dinesh. The apparent 'fine tuning' and 'first cause' point to a god existing? Surely in the earlier time to which you transported Dennet, you would have cited rainbows, lightning and the sun as things that point to a god. You're simply filling the remaining gaps with God.
The fine-tuning argument is no problem when dealing with any reasonable person under normal circumstances, but under the conditions inherent to a formal debate (and against someone like Dinesh), it poses a problem. There is no one-line knock down argument to be provided.
There is the possibility that the universe must exist this way for reasons currently unknown. RD talks about this briefly in TGD. Perhaps the constants are no more free to vary than the proportion of a circle's radius is to its circumference.
Of course, there is the idea of a multiverse. Of all the possible universes, we necessarily exist in one friendly to our form of life.
Then again, who's to say that a different configuration of the constants wouldn't be friendly to life in some different way, or to life unlike any we can imagine? Dinesh baits one questioner into making his point that we as humans aren't capable of knowing/understanding everything. So, why assume that matter must be made of atoms? "For all we know, there might be intelligent beings in another universe arguing that if fundamental constants were only slightly different, then the absence of free quarks and the extreme weakness of gravity would make life impossible."
Any argument of fine-tuning assumes life as we know it is a given. The universe does not care if we're here. We happened to come into existence in the only known part of this vast universe that seems conducive to our form of life for a brief period of time (considering from the BB to whenever we die out, which I see as a small blip on the timescale of the universe). Does any of this imply a designer? If it does, said designer appears to be quite inept, and at best lucky that his 'finely tuned' creation actually gave rise to life on this obscure lump of rock.
Anyway... people actually clapped at Dinesh's handling of parsimony? Well, I suppose it was an impressive 'tactic'.
Also, there's Dinesh's assumption that the BB need a 'first cause'. Yes, time began with the BB… and 'cause' is a temporal concept that only applies to a situation in which time exists. Despite any need you have to invoke a cause and give that cause the attributes of your god, the BB (beginning of time) does not need one.
Some forms of multiverse should be testable. Future observations of the cosmic microwave background may reveal patterns due to gravity waves, and if they do, that has the potential to tell us a lot about the nature of things at the time of the big bang, including several multiverse ideas.
Well, I think that 'knowing the unknowable' is self-contradictory. And you are certainly doing that if you label the unknowable 'God'.
I agree.
Part 14: As I understand it, in answer to a question, DDS says that our whole experience is a product of, and limited, by our 5 senses and we should not deny the existence of god because we cannot sense him.
However, if he cannot be detected or sensed then doesn't this mean that he must be an invention of the human mind!
Maybe i'm just missing something simple here ..
Neal: no, not really. Logically, there is nothing wrong with the existence of a god (or any object) which we can't sense. But if this is a god, it is the deist's god. If you claim an interventionist god, then you have a problem.
xale66x wrote:
I agree, and believe this is is precisely what the universe would look like if we are only seeing or existing in part of an over riding geometry. The funny thing is the proposed candidate theories (mostly string) that successfully integrate and explain the constants are precisely higher geometric (dimensional) systems. I don't see this as a coincidence. We lack experiments yet to pin down the veracity of the statement, but we just may in time.
Fascinating stuff. Is there a concrete hypothesis formulated connecting the existence of a multiverse to expected patterns or is it all just a preliminary conjecture? Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
Ah, but here lies the catch: They don't claim to know it; they only claim to believe it :)
This is perhaps going a bit far, as these theories haven't really explained anything yet, as they aren't really what we could sensibly call 'theories'. Anyway, String Theory seems to suggest a phenomenal number of possible universe with widely differing values of the physical constants, so it hardly pins them down.
agg wrote:
There are several such hypothesis. Regarding gravity waves, some theorists think analysis of waves reverberating through the universe since the big bang may tell us a bit about the initial conditions that set our universe off to expansion. This may allow us a selection target in the various types of string theories that offer solutions that necessitate a multiverse.
First, I'd like to clarify some often mistaken ideas concerning what a multiverse is. The term multiverse was originally associated with the idea of determining the history of particle trajectories as studied in the QED (quantum electrodynamics) Richard Feynman was the first person to popularize the idea in physics that the trajectory and or energy state of a particle that IS measured, exists because all the other possibilities that are not have "collapsed". In terms of analysis of particle trajectories a mathematical object called the wave function is said to "collapse" to the measured trajectory from all the possible ones. Later, in popular descriptions and science fiction this mathematically useful tool was extrapolated to have physical significance for literary purposes.(search "multiverse" for details of this history)
If the possibilities of alternative paths are infinite then maybe they actually exist and collapse to a given result here because the attributes of our universe "tunes" them in that way. There is no physics behind this assertion, it is only a supposition that comes out of trying to ascribe a physical meaning to Feynman's "sum over histories" the math that describes collapsing wave functions. The newer idea of "multiverse" concerns mathematical solutions to extremely complex multidimensional models for describing not just particles, but all possible interactions of varyingly discrete entities of energy. Mathematical physics has evolved to the point that entire "algebras" can be judged for their merit in predicting all the phenomena we see in our universe in a consistent manner. The problem is that there are many possible solutions to the set of mathematical models that are being studied and we lack experiments to pin down which solution defines OUR universe. The concepts are complex but a rough over view can be had by reading on various topics.
I am an electrical engineer by degree and we have similar examples of mathematical structures that require the existence of infinite entities in order for us to make efficient real world calculations concerning signals, energy, power content, voltage, current...etc. In the EE realm these tools (Fourier, Laplacian and z transforms) are practically limited in how they can be applied by the need to realize a desired level of accuracy in the results in a given computation time, they also have prescience over a discrete set of attributes of electrical signals and make no predictions on particles as we understand them in the science of physics. I think this is the chief distinction that has kept a similar analogy being made between these structures and the possibility of "real" versions of the entities described in the tools. (For example in discrete and continuous signal theory we play with imaginary values freely but we don't assume that somewhere they actually exist, they are for us tools which have amazing ability to simplify real calculations without having any real analog) It is unfortunate that the nuance of mathematical physics are usually grossly mis characterized when prepared for public consumption since they necessarily cover a larger suite of entities, many of which map closely to physical entities that we have discovered to govern our existence in the real universe.
Read more on:
basics:
Richard Feynman
multiverse
"sum over history"
QED
infinite series
differential equations/non linear partial
advanced:
gauge theories
sum over histories /Feynman diagrams
QED (quantum electrodynamics)
E8 symmetry
Heterotic string theory
M theory
Wikipedia has several well written articles for general introductions to these concepts. As always don't use it as a "last word" consult the citations as well.
steve99 wrote:
You are correct, in the strictest popular scientific sense they are as yet unfalsifiable and are technically not even theories. My point is simply that the embarrassment of choice for all these values makes them unique in being best candidates for saying something about why the fundamental values are what they are. Until that first experiment comes however, their just mathematically defined and related but untested ideas.
Some of the reviewers (my good friends) have completely missed the point. The debate resolution was: "God is a man made invention".
Daniel Dennet signed, sealed and delivered his verdict in the 5 questions posed to Dinesh at the end of his first 5 minute speech. Question 4 directly addressed this, and was basically ignored by Dinesh. It asked: "Do you agree that John Frum, Ganesh, Angel Moroni, and Angel Gabriel are human inventions?
The rest of the debate was over the existence of God, at Dinesh's insistence.
Anyone trained in Philosophy (or the sciences) should know that it is a fruitless endeavor to try to prove or disprove God. Dawkins does a good job of explaining this in the God Delusion, Chapter 3 "Argument for God's Existence" and Chapter 4 "Why There Almost Certainly is No God".
The point being that there is no absolute proof either way. (hence the use of "almost certainly" is used in the title of the chapter)
Keep the great debates coming!
Well Done Dennett
Well Done Organizers
Dsouza babbled through most of it.
I think that the best point to come out was the request to teach world religion. Even Dsouza admitted support for this.
There should be a poll in the forum on this question.
I think it's sinister, deliberate and cynical. I think maybe Dinesh knows he's misrepresenting evolutionary psychology (in this example) but that really 'saving souls' is more important than getting the facts of the table. I'm guessing he knows that evolutionary psychology has a much more nuanced explanation for moral behaviour, but he thinks that ultimately it still pales in comparison to the Great Truth, which he has been charged with dispatching.
Since he thinks the ends justify the means, he cheats. More mic time spent muddying the waters is more potential saved souls, he thinks, and let's not worry about having an honest discussion.
I'd like to make a point regarding the teaching of religion in schools. As a Christian I have no problem with the whole smogarsboard of human religion being represented, without the dice being loaded in favour of one or the other. If I were an RE teacher I would do my honest best to do justice to my duty to present the facts about the rituals and underlying worldviews of each of them. I would not by any means (I hope) try to win converts for Christianity while doing my job. I would be prepared to have the content of lessons vetted by adherents of all the religions being studied to make sure that I ws being fair.
What Dennett wants is to teach religion as a function of natural selection. In order to teach religion in that way you have to have a prior commitment to natural selection, which, insofar as it claims to explain everything, is a philosophical worldview that not all RE teachers will necessarily hold. Or should they be required to demonstrate a commitment to natural selection before being appointed? Is this the kind of scenario that Dennett envisages? Do you people, committed as you surely are to the principle of freedom to believe or not to believe, really want to see this happening? - teachers and educators of all kinds being selected on the basis of a priori ideological commitments? Natualistic selection procedures! Purposeful (not at all random) weeding out of undesirable mutations within our educational fraternities!
Not in the talks I have listened to (I have not listened to this one). I last heard him mention this in a TED talk (www.ted.com). All he wants is for children to learn about all major world religions without these religions being preached at them. If that is done, he has no objection even to faith schools.
This took place at Tufts University on November 30, 2007.
Description:
Dinesh D'Souza, Christian and best-selling author, faced off against Tufts professor, author, and atheist Daniel Dennett in a debate on the existence of god. The resolution for the debate was as follows: "God is a manmade invention." Daniel Dennett argued the affirmative, and Dinesh D'Souza the negative.All 15 video parts: http://tinyurl.com/2mww7m
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw7J15TeDG4
Is God a human invention? World Christian Enclyopedia - only religion growing is Islam (by birth rate - not by conversions in); Christianity is not growing - but growing louder and agressive; how much more religious is USA than Europe; homicide + abortion + STD+ teen pregranancy - higher in USA than Europe; non-religious (16%) is fastest growing than any religion. Islam (16%) is not as fast growing as non-religious.
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7MGyayvAa8
Dan Dennett: proposes a compulsory 4th R - Religion - education on religion for all children, starting in primary school, in public and private schools and home schooling.
Subjects: History, creed, rituals, music, symbols, ethical commands and prohibitions. That's it! Just tested, non controversial facts that everyone can agree to about the worlds religions.
I believe in freedom of religion. As long as you teach your children the above syllabus you can teach them whatever you want - so long as it does not disable them from informing themselves further.
In a Ted.com speech (Teach all religions: 5-10 minutes) Dan Dennett also proposes ' no particular spin. Democracy depends on an informed consent. Misinformed does not count - like throwing a coin. Children below age of consent are a special case. Parents are stewards of children - you have a responsibility to the world, to the state , to them - to teach your own creed but also ALL the other creeds in the world. Facts only no values. One reviewer called this totalitarian (surely libetarian), another hilarious. Many religions are so anxious to preserve the purity of their faith among their children and so want to keep their children ignorant of other faiths. But it is indefensible to keep your children ignorant of other faiths.
Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgK6M3WRFcc
Religions are human inventions. Not like the telephone but like music or language. Religions have evolved as much in the last 200 years as the last 2000 and will continue to evolve as much in the next 20 years as the last 200 years. Most of the 10,000 new religions have a half life of a few weeks.
There is no one to thank for this wonderful world - just thank Goodness!
Darwins Theory. Trickle down theory. Evolution of God.
Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUUnjcTkQg
DD: Evolution of God. Risk of world conflagration started by religious leaders in Iran / Pakistan / USA.
Dinesh D'Souza: Religious numbers are growing. Social Darwinson / Nietsche atheism - rise of Nazi. The Inquisition. Atheism regimes (Mao, stalin, pol pot, castro, communism) have produced millions dead.
Part 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnGGOKDGLYw
Dinesh D'Souza: Darwin - design and no designer, science supports theism, big bang evidence supports that all of matter came into existence at same time, agreeing with Augustine. Why does universe have the values (mass of electron, elecromagetic force) it has? If you touch expansion rate of universe - we would have no universe and no life (S Hawking). Constants are finally tuned for us! Ockhams Razor says that a Creator created the universe. Science decodes the intelligence out of nature? Why does nature obey laws in the first place. Premises of science are based on Christian values.
Part 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcunc_hQ8U8
Dinesh D'Souza: religion is man made, no evidence of life after death - impossible to have this. Evidence arguement is hubristic. (Dinesh fails to understand evolving nature of science) Nature (eg stones) and human nature (free will, choice, feelings, consciousness). Everything in Dennetts world has to be reduced to materialism. Both are agnostics. Faith is rational based on science. Pascals Wager. We are product of divine intelligence and divine love.
Part 7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SryFVhNfvow
who created god? Trickle down theory. How did we get here. Anthropic principle - we exist in a finely tuned universe. Stalin believed in god - the god was called Stalin! Kim ill sun - same. Darwin can explain free will, feelings etc.
Dinesh D'Souza: everything has a cause has a begining. I call the cause of the universe God! (if i dont understand it I call it god!!)
Part 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8puuM-C9XIY
Dinesh D'Souza: infinite universes but no evidence for this (eg Lee Smolin - frank speculation, a fantasy); laws of nature may require some divine explanation.
Dan Dennett: scientists are speculating about possible causes to the fine tuning of the universe (other than a creator did it). Some Atheists make a mistake - think that there is no difference between right or wrong.
Part 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Ts_kPn5Tg
Dinesh D'Souza: morality is a universal phenemenon - 'evolution' transmution from biological meaning; religion is blamed for events that are not religious issues; atheist bigotry;
Part 10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMEu_pGCCU0
Questions: Ockhams Razor and the big bang; Pascals' Wager;
Part 11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqpumHZGx7c
Questions: ways of experiencing the sublime / god, mutual exclusivity of religions - decide which religion is right - dont just assume they are all wrong
Part 12:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rae3EUR-W4s
Questions: god is outside human realm of testing - too easy an answer; spheres of human experience (consciousness, love, morality) that rely on subjective human experience - Dennett 'understanding of consciousness' is increasing greatly by scientific study. ID is just a hoax! D'Souza: Universe does require an explanation - a cause!
Part 13:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADLjLcS2kJs
low altruism, man is moral and spiratual; evolution has not accounted for morality (Dinesh); evolution has an explanation for morality (Dennett); Sweden (70% atheist) has a better record than USA - time to grow up; Nietsche (if kill god, lose Christian morality eg value of human life, equality of races or man /woman, abortion); how is Jesus differant from John Frum? is god the goodness we have around us (its good but its not supernatural);
Part 14:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KgVtKKgoks
Stalin advertised himself to be a god; limits of knowledge - limited to senses; cannot get beyond 5 senses (Dinesh); what if we are wrong? trust faith! Parsimony principle
Part 15:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM5mv-g2kUU
everything has to have a creator - so who is gods creator; evolution run amoc? Fundamentalist Evolution (Dinesh)
Selected Comments from http://richarddawkins.net/article,1942,n,n
I wonder what people here think of Dennett's proposition that we should teach world religion.12. Comment #92747 by eXcommunicate on December 1, 2007 at 11:41 am
I agree with Dennett's proposition of teaching religions in school. Not much else to say about it, other than it should not evangelize. As long as religites stop trying to push religion into Science class.While these debates interest me and i enjoy watching them, I can't help but think it's a complete waste of time.The only person on that stage with the intellectual ability to change his mind is Dan Dennett.
Christians have had centuries of evidence contradicting their scriptures and blowing their "reasons" for believing in god out of the water, and they still hold their facile beliefs. It's pointless to have a "battle" where one side is able to concede defeat and the other only able to deny that they were defeated.
21. Comment #92761 by yoyoman812 on December 1, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I wanted to mention that I was at the debate and thought the Dennett did not prove his point.He did make some terrific arguments on a variety of subjects.
I'll also be honest, I was impressed with a few of the counterpoints that D'Souza made as well.
I think Dennett made a good case that religion is man-made invention just like language...
However, he didn't prove the point of the debate which was the GOD is a man made invention.
Dennett thanks goodness that he is alive. Some people thank God they are alive. Couldn't you see this as exactly the same thing? I asked him this very question (after the video cut off) and he responded with "yes, in fact you can see god = goodness")
In which case, goodness exists is to say god exists, which is to say that God isn't manmade.
22. Comment #92762 by eXcommunicate on December 1, 2007 at 12:15 pm
yoyoman812 - How does that follow? Dennett was probably saying that you may thank "god", but all you're doing is thanking "goodness." Not necessarily that god = goodnessHey, Dinesh, the Universe is just how it is. Life evolved according to the conditions in which it found itself, not the other way around.
I see your point, but I think this is the wrong way to deal with this.
I believe there is an issue about why the universe seems so suitable to life (and, despite what so many have argued, this really is the case, or so I believe). I don't think this issue can be easily dismissed.
However, what can be easily dismissed is the idea that a universe suitable for life could be the result of an enternal first-cause creator called God.
Whatever the fine-tuning we may currently think is needed for a universe which allows sufficient physical complexity to permit life to appear, that is unimaginable orders of magnitude less 'fine-tuning' than that needed to allow a God-like creator to exist.
This was expressed very well by Dawkins in TGD.
I believe that this is the argument we should use. If you want to declare the universe unlikely, fine. But then you have to accept the vastly greater unlikeliness of an infinite and omnipotent mind, so your argument fails.
37. Comment #92782 by Terry Thompson on December 1, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I think that we atheists make a mistake in arguing any hypothesis as to what "preceded" the big bang. At this point there is no consensus and it looks silly when we supply hypothesis with little or no evidence. Instead we should point to the fact that the supernatural has now been pushed back from explaining why it rains to reason for the big bang back 13.7 billion or so and THANKS in no small part to Daniel Dennett that our understanding now includes conciesness.
Also I think that we need to distinguish between science and our philosophical suppositions based on our current understanding of science. Evolution is a well tested theory, but to go from the fact that now we do not need supernatural to explain life to the conclusion that there is no supernatural is well rationed philosophy. We can argue that it has much more weight than christianity or any supernatural, but it is a philosophical metaphysical argument nonetheless.
and lastly we need to show why this world view will benefit man better than supernatural. Just arguing it is infinantely more probable does not mean it is a better understanding. It is one argument, as would an argument that understanding better the basis of our morality (from biological and cultural evolution IMHO) will better aid us in improving our morality and culture.
The rarity of life in our own solar system seems to suggest that life managed to come about inspite of the physical constants. They maybe fine tuned for the universe to exist in the way it does but this universe seems to do a bad job in supporting life as we know it.
I think the opposite is true. Our solar system is probably wonderfully adapted to life. There is liquid water everywhere.. in the atmosphere of Jupiter, almost certainly in the oceans of Europa and Callisto, and it looks likely that underground seas exist on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. The old idea of a 'Goldilocks zone' - a narrow band around a Sun where life could exists as a result of the heat of the Sun - looks very out of date.
Also, we have hardly explored our Universe. Who knows where life could exist? There have been suggestions that life could even be most abundant between the stars, on numerous extra-solar planets, using radioactive heating as a source of energy.
But anyway. The real issue with the physical constants is that until we know why they are as they are, we have no reason to pin them down to values friendly to life, or even to allow complexity. If you look at the cosmological constant, unless it is extraordinarily fine tuned, the universe would not even allow atoms, let alone complex chemicals or life.
At least that is my understanding of things. I have yet to read Stenger's writings on this matter, and the contrary views of Martin Rees and others.
EDIT:
2) Your statment assumes that life as it exists on earth is the only possible form life can take.
You make a good point. However, if I understand things right, the issue of fine tuning is primarily not about whether or not life can exist in a universe, but whether or not anything like atoms can exist.
@SPINOZALike it or not religion is prevalent in the world. I think a critical and comparative teaching of the different world religions is a good idea. In Scotland when I was at school about 7-9 years ago we had Religious Education class which taught about other religions. We also had Modern Studies and History. Surely within those 3 disciplines it could be taught. I would however like it to be taught in an unbiased manner.
45. Comment #92791 by eXcommunicate on December 1, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Part 14: Dinesh tries to have it both ways (and this is the crux of his entire argument). First he posits that we can't know what happened before the Big Bang or what happens outside of the Universe, because we are limited by the Universe. We are of this Universe and thus cannot fully (or even partially) understand anything outside of it. HOWEVER, then he (and others like him) says, "Ah, but there's a god, and I know this." Someone needs to ram home "how does he knows this?" if he is constrained by the Universe and the "lens" of his own senses.49. Comment #92797 by phasmagigas on December 1, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I wanted to mention that I was at the debate and thought the Dennett did not prove his point.
I felt that to, im not sure that is actually important, when challenging the notion of an all powerful supernatural deity it is impossible to show it is in actual fact a human construct (in the same way that cthulhu may or not be), dennet knows this and i think the point he makes by displaying the various religions is to introduce the notion that how people interpret god (irrspective of its existence) is instrumental to how they act and if there are various ways of behaving how god wants then maybe this will lead ultimately to questioning the validity of one and alls religion and ultimately god/s it/themselves.
56. Comment #92806 by phasmagigas on December 1, 2007 at 1:55 pm
dinesh parades the false notion that pol pot etc killed because they were atheists, this is ridiculous, is there any evidence anywhere that anybody has ever killed another because they were atheist? There is however lots of examples counted daily where one person will kill another primarily based on their acceptence of a god and what they believe its requirement of them is.the fact that he then suggests that atheists should share the responsibility of 'atheist' dictatorships is preposterous.
D'Souza muddles every debate. He really doesn't debate, instead he brings a lot of different topics like life freewill, big-bang, ultimate-cause,etc., that, like Dennet said, would require hours to be explained. I think this is a strategy not to answer the issues in the debate.
69. Comment #92824 by drenghdndvtm on December 1, 2007 at 2:22 pm
I find it so frustrating that Dinesh couldn't/wouldn't understand that if you assert God always existing it's just as plausible to do the same for the universe. At least there is something testable with the latter.Also, if Dinesh agrees with evolution, isn't there evidence of intelligence and consciousness ramping up over small, incremental degrees to our current state?
Thanks, Pat. I was there and enjoyed myself. Dennett's concern regarding toxic belief is exactly my own. D'Souza would earn more of my respect if he would tackle that problem directly. Like many here, I'm acutely worried about the elementary school teacher in the Sudan, Ayan Hirsi Ali's safety, and so on.I often wish I could continue a debate after it ends, so here goes:
D'Souza: Dennett is guilty of over-extending Darwin. Evolution can't explain why we believe certain propositions are true. The premises of modern science are based upon Christian metaphysics, namely that the universe follows rational laws because there is a rational law-giver.Whaa?
1. The evolution of life is something we observe. Natural selection is our theory to explain those observations.
2. The evolution of the universe from the Big Bang forward is not explained by Darwinian natural selection but by an incomplete set of physical laws. These laws are a human invention. When you speak as though the laws of physics somehow exist in the universe, you're guilty of reification.
Descriptions of God are to a large degree man made.By what method do we sort the man-made part from the ___ part? Does this method exclude toxic superstitions?
Propositions concerning God and the afterlife aren't going to be supported by decisive empirical evidence. Still, we ought to take these propositions seriously, as our beliefs about God and the afterlife affect how we live now.If how we live now is what matters, why not focus upon that and screw the rest?
Atheists naively deem everything we don't know as "can't possibly exist."Actually, science is a method for falsifying hypotheses. Propositions not yet falsified often can be assigned a degree of confidence in relation to competing hypotheses using standard criteria.
The atheistic viewpoint cancels out the subjective dimension.Actually, we have developed ways to study subjective experience. And further: although matters of feeling and preference may not serve as reliable guides to what's true about the universe, they remain important truths about one's self.
Free will and morality have no meaning for a materialist.Nonsense. Dualism, BTW, is highly problematic.
We are both reasoning in the dark. The only difference is he won't admit it.In order to reason together both parties must agree upon the rules. If parsimony is accepted as a rule, the self-creating God hypothesis must be afforded a lower probability than the self-creating universe hypothesis. If parsimony is rejected as a rule, things are going to get pretty wacky.
Humbly open yourself to God. You might come to see that humans are a divine creation, a product of divine intelligence and divine love.Personal revelation provides no barrier to toxic belief.
D'Souza never answered Dennett's 5 opening questions.Maybe they could wrassle over those in a text debate.
That'd be cool to see.
89. Comment #92847 by SameerMarathe on December 1, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Okay I watched the full debate. My impressions:I think the debate mostly revolved around the same old ideas that D'Souza kept repeating:
a. Pascal's wager.
b. The uncaused cause argument.
c. The tweaking of the universal constants argument
Secondly I think it was an ugly debate (to put it politely) primarily because D'Souza kept bringing in all sorts of arguments each of which may be a subject of an individual debate. There is no possible way one can have a reasonable debate with this guy if he doesn't stick to the topic.
He kept ridiculing the speculations of the multiverse theory and I was surprised that Dan didn't point it out that D'Souza's alternative (god dunnit) is equally if not more speculative.
At one point he said that the caveman in 2000 BC wouldn't know anything outside of a 2 mile radius. Does this guy know anything about ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, South America?
I am glad that Dan caught him when he tried to pin one of his arguments on the irreducible nature of consciousness.
D'Souza talked about humans not evolving in recent history (~last 5-15k years), I believe there are studies that have shown otherwise.
He ridiculed the multiverse hypothesis (or speculation if you like that word) by giving some crazy argument about O J Simpson's defence etc. That is not what the multiverse hypothesis is about!
92. Comment #92851 by Hume is our politiks on December 1, 2007 at 3:18 pm
First time I see this guy D`Souza, he is really something. How a person of apparent intelligence can come to such obscure conclusion as to posit another entity outside the universe to explain it is beyond my understanding. He says "The universe is exactly fine tuned for life to exist", I wonder if he skipped his astronomy and biology classes and didn`t realized how marginalized life is and how harsh conditions have been for any type of life to survive. Dennet should`ve pointed this out96. Comment #92858 by Russell Blackford on December 1, 2007 at 3:42 pm
People here often seem to miss the strength of the fine-tuning argument. It's not really that the universe is fine-tuned for life. It's that the universe is fine-tuned for any sort of complexity at all. It looks as if there has to be an explanation as to how there is an internally-complex universe, when almost any combination of possible physical constants and other basic givens would yield a universe without complexity - perhaps one that doesn't last long enough, perhaps one that never expands, perhaps one that expands too fast, etc. I think that it is actually tempting to say, "A powerful intelligent agency must be responsible." That's the kind of answer that many people find psychologically satisfying.Bringing out why this might be more psychologically satisfying than intellectually helpful is actually quite difficult.
I think that the fine-tuning argument is the most powerful weapon in the theists' armoury, because it can at least tempt us to deism ... and once we reach deism, it may seem natural to wonder whether there isn't something to revelation after all.
I don't think the argument from fine-tuning should compel any commitment to belief. It has a lot of difficulties, but they are not straightforward to explain in real time. I've always thought that hammering this argument would be the best approach for a theist in live debates. The best strategy is to make deism seem plausible, then ask if it is plausible to stop at deism when the deist god could easily reveal itself, take an interest in its creation, etc.
I haven't watched this debate yet, but that's how I would handle the brief if assigned the theist side of one these debates.
The challenge for atheists is to come up with a response that is cogent ... yet simple and clear enough, and sufficiently independent of other assumptions, to be expressed in real time in a live debate. The best approaches, I think, are the ones that build on problems with whether positing God is a genuine explanatory advance.
Dennett's comment about "creation" being a concept from the novel (DSouza's analogy) and therefore not applicable outside the novel (if all other terms from the novel are rejected) is excellent.WRT fine tuning: Before Darwin, we guessed that life was designed by God. We couldn't understand how complex life could emerge without a designer.
Isn't it risky for the theist to link God to our current ignorance regarding the fine tuning problem? If this gap in understanding is filled, intellectual honesty requires that we reject the God hypothesis a second time.
What is the purpose of having a course where children are taught the "history" of religion but where you leave out the FACT that they are all created by man and this is all easily verified by historical data? I can see the value of preserving some aspects of religion but those aspects are not unique to religion, they are precepts that make sense for people living in groups to adhere to, especially in a civil society. Children should be taught this, they should also however be taught that there is no correlation between moral actions on the part of people and any (sometimes contradictory regarding what is "moral")guide book as defined by religions. In my view Dennet is going a bit to light on the punching bag of religious belief. Ostensibly he does this in hopes of making inroads into existing entrenched religious modes of thought, though I commend this slow and steady technique it is a bit annoying especially when you know that the facts to offer a more complete refutation of divinely inspired religious belief can be employed in its stead."In the name of atheism", Dinesh D'Souza is a complete dick. He is using a different definition of atheism on purpose to argue against points made by Dennett, Dawkins, and others. Atheism as a lack of belief in God never motivated anyone to kill, because killing people or not killing people doesn't logically follow from a lack of belief in something.
At best one could say that a belief in God is necessary to stop the inherent nature of humans to kill one another. I would accept an argument with it as its premise to be logically consistant. I wouldn't accept the premise though.
Steve99 and Russell Blackford
I agree that the fine-tuning argument does seem quite strong. But I tend to think that that is because it is like other after-the-fact statistical arguments. In other words, it's a bit like the woman who dreamt of her sister last night and, what do you know, her sister just phoned her! After the fact, it seems amazing to her, and surely didn't happen just by chance, so she ascribes her dream to something supernatural. Similarly, we look at the physical constants and it seems amazing that the way they are should be as they are, but I am wary of giving this 'seeming amazing' more importance that we should.
I know I haven't set this out too well, but what I am trying to get at is that I think we need to be very careful about arguments based on some form of 'it couldn't have happened by chance'. As RD and others have pointed out, we haven't evolved as beings who are able to evaluate the meaning of probability very well, and it seems to me that acquiring meaning from probability (or improbability) is precisely what the fine-tuning argument tries to do. Indeed, that is what most people did in respect of life on earth before Darwin came along, and they arrived at a Creator.
Russell(Re 'fine tuning')
The challenge for atheists is to come up with a response that is cogent ... yet simple and clear enough, and sufficiently independent of other assumptions, to be expressed in real time in a live debate.
I would talk about needles in haystacks.
When people say:
"How likely is it that we are in this given environment with so many things just right?"
I would say:
'Yes. It is almost like looking for a single needle in a million, million haystacks, isn't it?'
[Furious nods]
I would then ask how long it would take to find the needle if we were actually the pointy item in question.
Answer: not very long.
Ok this would need clarification and work, if further questions were asked, and I admit not by me as my understanding of physics is simplistic, at the very best :-)
However, the sudden switch in perspective could elicit the queasy realisation that it is possible to couch questions in inappropriate or simply meaningless terms.
Also, it could also make the point that, in terms of the universe, we are tiny beings indeed.
To automically presume that this is all for us has always struck me as the height of hubris, as well as an error of reasoning.
Fine tuning again.
Unless you are a full blown creationist, even "fine tuning" doesn't lead to the conclusion that the universe was created for us.
Once we have the right "initial conditions" such as the right physical laws and constants and the initial organic molecules the subsequent history of life on earth is well explained by evolution.
Even if the initial conditions were "fine tuned", the subsequent evolutionary history that eventually led to us definitely wasn't.
We owe our existence to some key events which were more or less accidental, like the meteorites that killed off the dinosaurs, climatic and geological catastrophes etc. So even if initial conditions were "fine tuned", there is no reason to expect that would result in us being here, unless the theists argue that "God" also fine tuned his celestial missiles to kill of the dinosaurs, among other things. That would be quite a theological problem.
116. Comment #92892 by Don_Quix on December 1, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I've always found the "universe is fine-tuned" argument to be quite silly. It's easy to take the wind out of this one by pointing out that anywhere in about 99.99999999999% of the Universe, a human being would almost instantly die a very gruesome and painful death. Fine-tuned indeed.
Ludacrispat26: Well done for organising this debate, and posting the videos. My verdict is that Dennett did a great job. No other antagonist got D'Souza to admit that religions were man-made inventions, forced him into defending a Deist position only, and got him to admit that he (D'Souza) needed to read Dennett's books on morality and consciousness. As usual, D'Souza sprinkled so many false statements and non-sequiturs into his rapid-fire delivery that it was exceedingly hard to pin him down.
Regarding the fine-tuning argument, Russell writes:
People here often seem to miss the strength of the fine-tuning argument. It's not really that the universe is fine-tuned for life. It's that the universe is fine-tuned for any sort of complexity at all. It looks as if there has to be an explanation as to how there is an internally-complex universe, when almost any combination of possible physical constants and other basic givens would yield a universe without complexity - perhaps one that doesn't last long enough, perhaps one that never expands, perhaps one that expands too fast, etc.It is worth noting there is a difference between current theories of the universe and the universe itself. Our best current theories are excellent at predicting physical behaviour with unprecented, amazing precision. But they are mathematical formulas combined with various assumptions. We don't know what the actual universe is.
Ante Kepler, the motions of the planets could be predicted to high accuracy, by means of circles, and circular motions around the current point on that circle, and then circular motions about the current point on that circle, etc. The system was called epicycles. It had a long history. Thousands of years ago, the greeks made gadgets called astrolabes, looking like 19th century clockwork, that computed the positions of the planets by this means. To get high accuracy, multiple epicycles were needed, making it possible to predict planetary motions with high accuracy, but the theory had complex structure, needing various critical numbers (the ratios of the various diameters of the circles, and the speeds of movement around each circle) to get the desired accuracy. The theory was successful however, and people at the time generally assumed that the planets moved in epicycles, rather than regarding epicycles as merely the best available model of the motions.
Post Kepler, the same accuracy could be obtained by far fewer numbers and a simple formula, operating on a quite different principle. Universal gravitation was discovered soon after, and the complex epicycle theory was seen to be a poor theory, despite its great precision (for its time) because there was a simpler, even more precise way to describe the motions, which was discovered to apply to all motions observed throughout the universe.
In the 20th century a proliferation of "elementary" particles was discovered, with even more "magic numbers" than the current theories. The best available model of physical motions today, the "standard model", is simpler, using only 26 (currently) key numbers, and if those 26 numbers are chosen right, they model the entire universe as perfectly as we know how to measure it. But it is still a model. Most physicists suspect an even simpler model will one day be discovered, using different principles and fewer numbers still.
We just don't know whether the actual universe requires fine tuning to obtain interesting complexity within it or not. The fact that our current best model requires fine tuning is a property of the model, and we should not assume, as so many popular science writers do, that the underlying universe is (in the sense of perfectly isomorphic to) our current model. That wasn't true for past models, and there are good reasons to think it isn't true of our current models.
119. Comment #92896 by Russell Blackford on December 1, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Bonzai, I agree that the evidence against a providential deity is very strong. So strong, that it looks to me that the fine-tuning was not done by anything even like the wishy-washy god of the deists, whch tends to have something to do with goodness and the like. If you ascribe fine-tuning to a deity, that deity starts to look more like a cosmic mad scientist conducting a cruel experiment.The truth of the matter may be this. If you already believe in revelation, can somehow rationalise away the evidence against a providential and beneficent god, and just feel a psychological conviction about religion, the fine-tuning argument will seem like powerful confirmation.
Conversely, if you find the supposed revelations unconvincing, find the evidence against any kind of providential and benevolent god overwhelming, don't see any signs of disembodied spirits floating around (so invoking one now is invoking something totally new as part of the total ontology, and is thus ad hoc), and are impressed by humans' tendencies to reach for explanations of phenomena that rely on intelligent agency (and by how often such explanations fail even when they are initially psychologically satisfying), then you are likely to look for some kind of mechanism that explains how the constants are what they are and how they have turned out to allow complexity.
That may not be an easy point to package up, but I think it's close to the truth of the matter.
Obviously, I'm in the camp of those who see the evidence against a providential, benevolent god as strong, think the evidence of revelation is unimpressive, etc. Debating this in front of people from the other camp would be difficult, though. Dennett didn't have to do that, but such debates have a wide range of audiences.
Wow, I like how Dinesh uses that reduction to Hitler, and also how he brings up the old red herring "Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists therefore Atheism is evil". Not impressed at all.
And that "fine tuned" rant is ridiculous, Richard challanged this in "The God Delusion", if the universe wasn't in a state where we could exist then we wouldn't exist to debate it or think about how the universe is fine tuned.
125. Comment #92911 by blasphememe on December 1, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Don_QuixI've always found the "universe is fine-tuned" argument to be quite silly. It's easy to take the wind out of this one by pointing out that anywhere in about 99.99999999999% of the Universe, a human being would almost instantly die a very gruesome and painful death. Fine-tuned indeed.
I think you're mis-understanding the argument. The idea is that the atomic forces seem to be fine tuned to allow gravity to form stars and planets, and the elements to be made by fusion in stars from hydrogen, and building on that chemistry, then biology.
I think this is very much a valid question as to why this is so.
The young man in Part 10 with Gray sock cap, destroyed Dinesh. Dinesh had to take deep breath
and babble about something off topic.
When he asked Dinesh "Where do you draw the line
on absurdities?" was a stunning!
It's not really a valid question. For example what if the universal laws were different? Humans and life in general can only exist because of the universal laws, but if the universal laws were different then there'd probably be phenomana equally as complex as life, just different. We're a product of the universe, it's no good to take the stance that the universe was tweaked to fit us in. It's like asking why the animal was designed around the working heart, he's approaching it from the wrong direction.
Up to video 7 now, one thing I can say about D'Souza is he's a master at walking the fine line of an argument. Instead of attacking a point directly, he'll bring up some tangential and at first blush intriguing idea which ultimately is irrelevant to the discussion. He mentions Pascal's wager for example, which to the layman seems like a very compelling argument. To paraphrase, "If it cost me nothing to believe, then why shouldn't I?" However this means nothing as few believers use such a restricted description of faith, in fact those that do are known as deists at best rather than as theists. Once the trappings of dogma and ritual possessed by real world religions are added upon this kernel of zero loss belief, the recipe for destruction and conflict with other such systems is set. Further, when we analyze the contradictions these varying sets of dogma and ritual bring forth we see that if the God is there it is anything but a good or just one. So the best we can conclude, even giving D'Souza a bone by asserting that yes we agree there is a God, is that that God is either on vacation or crazy. Yes D'Souza is free to go with believing since it costs him nothing but that very choice damns him to also believe that his God is either dead (which is materially identical to non existent as atheists assert) or crazy. This latter option contradicts the thousands of lines of scripture and dogma created by religions to describe, supposedly through divine inspiration, what "God" wants for us. Well if "he" is giving every culture dichotomous commands every few hundred years then he is either malicious or crazy assuming he does exist, but he's definitely not good. I'd rather believe that God was dead than that he was a drunkard, and if he is dead , that is the same as the position that an atheist takes that he does not exist, so it does make more sense to NOT believe, as believing forces us to accept a contradiction of an at times sleeping, at times lightning throwing, at times capricious and malicious "God".Again I commend D'Souza for bringing up the muddled issues that misdirect from the arguments at hand, ultimately he builds on a house of cards but his job is not to bring you the truth it is simply to *convince you* (ie. "win" the argument) and his style does work if the sales of his book are any indication.
The idea is that the atomic forces seem to be fine tuned to allow gravity to form stars and planets, and the elements to be made by fusion in stars from hydrogen, and building on that chemistry, then biology. I think this is very much a valid question as to why this is so.
Sure it's a valid question, when it's posed in a genuine way. But, the implication D'Souza and most other people who toss about this argument make is that because the forces seem to be favorable for the universe to exist as it does, and we can't yet explain why, GODUNNIT.
Nobody knows why the universe exists at all. More importantly, we don't have any understanding whatsoever of what the universe actually is. It could be that it is the fundamental nature of a universe to be the way it is right now, and that it is simply not possible for it to be any other way. It's also possible that there are an infinite or near-infinite number of universes with different settings and we just happen by chance to be in one that has conditions favorable to increased complexity. With a near-infinite number of universes, it would not only be possible that our kind of universe could form, but it would be astronomically (pardon the pun) unlikely for it not to form. There are many other possibilities as well.
All I was saying is that the way people like D'Souza use (or abuse) this argument is disingenuous. It's just another aspect of the argument from ignorance. "We don't know why things are the way they are, so godunnit! QED."
My original statement was not a misunderstanding. It was an illustration of how ridiculous it is that a God would go to all the trouble of "fine-tuning" a universe so perfectly so that we could come about, but then neglect to account for the fact that almost the entirety of Its grand creation is instantly lethal to Its most special creatures (us). Of course, as others have stated, the universe may not have been created for us -- that could pose some serious problems for old Dinesh. :D
Dr. Benway wrote:Perhaps those constants aren't independent. Perhaps if we understood more about the geometry of reality, we'd see how all the parts stand in relation to each other, and how each value couldn't be otherwise.
Or maybe God used a machine with dials and carefully rigged the game.
Either way, it's a long way from Big Bang to eat-my-body-drink-my-blood.
Well said, but the first statement brings an interesting idea. We know that the current known candidates (string theories mainly) for grand unified theories that do a job of integrating gravity in with the other forces of nature along with predicting the correct values for the fundamental constants all suffer from providing too many answers. Namely, they seem like over broad mathematical constructions that give us all the possible answers instead of just the one that fits our universe, employing unseen dimensions and entities beyond our universe to explain our universe. It may be the case that this is a requirement of explanation of our universe and the state of the various values. This could be true since lacking an ability to view the universe from the outside our logical constructions must necessarily be as generalized as possible, and from this generalization collapses the certainty that is our universe. It is unfortunate that we may be unable to determine "which universe is ours" while bound inside. I say "may be" since the work of an early 20th century mathematician, Kurt Godel essentially defined the limits of what questions can be asked using a logical /mathematical construction. In essence, it is possible for a system constructed to find answers to be unable to answer questions definable using its language. It may be the case that the mathematics foundation that we have created is unable to allow us to answer the question of why the constants seem "fine tuned" and of allowing us the ability to pose questions in the universe to determine the answer. The system itself may preclude our asking falsifiable questions about the universe that can tie one or another GUT to OUR universe and in the language of science that would make the conclusion only a hypothesis.
I am confident though that whatever is outside our universe communes with what is inside and has effects that we can test for and thus allow us to select from the embarrasment of theories that do explain the constants. All that said, there is absolutely no reason to jump from our current state of understanding back to saying "a magic man done it!" when scientific investigation has gotten us so splendidly to the very edge of the universe itself as D'Souza and other theists are always eager to do.
137. Comment #92928 by blasphememe on December 1, 2007 at 7:15 pm
AtlasIt's not really a valid question. For example what if the universal laws were different? Humans and life in general can only exist because of the universal laws, but if the universal laws were different then there'd probably be phenomana equally as complex as life, just different. We're a product of the universe, it's no good to take the stance that the universe was tweaked to fit us in. It's like asking why the animal was designed around the working heart, he's approaching it from the wrong direction.
Come now, surely inquiry into why things are the way they are is fundamentally what science is all about.
And that "fine tuned" rant is ridiculous, Richard challanged this in "The God Delusion", if the universe wasn't in a state where we could exist then we wouldn't exist to debate it or think about how the universe is fine tuned.
Rather flawed logic there. I think you had better go back and re-read TGD. Not that I consider TGD/Dawkins to be the last word on this matter,to my recollection he does not dismiss this idea. There are some theory's as to why the universe is the way it is and, as I recall he and other scientists consider it to be a valid question. What if atomic forces were such that gravity could not form stars? Then there could be no other elements but hydrogen and consequently no chemistry and biology.
Of course we should try to find out why the laws of physics are the way they are, but to start from the assumption that they're the way they are for some big reason is wrong in my opinion, we shouldn't focus entirely on looking for reason when there maybe none.
It's like asking "why was the universe created in the first place?", we can attempt to find out the sequence of events that lead up to the creation of the universe but is asking that question the correct one for science? Religions often start with the assumption that everything has some deep rooted meaning to it's existance and go from there, and that simply doesn't have to be the case.
What I stated was the Anthropic principal, which is a good argument against the "divine engineer twiddling his knobs" theory. It doesn't disprove there is one, but it's a good reason for why there doesn't have to be one.
Blasphememe
Rather flawed logic there. I think you had better go back and re-read TGD.
Perhaps you should go back and read the second paragraph of page 143 of TGD in the chapter The Anthropic Principle: Cosmological Version. I don't see how the anthropic principle is "flawed logic." Dawkins certainly didn't invent it. I believe Stephen Hawking is one of its main proponents.
blaspheme wrote:Rather flawed logic there.
I don't see how the quoted portion of Atlas' text was flawed logically. It seemed like a perfect paraphrase of the rebuttal to the theist invocation of the anthropic principle. The state of the universe is conducive to our life necessarily since we are here, we should not be surprised that it is so conducive to life because we are here is another way of saying it. The Universes state is a precondition of our existence, our existence is optional among many things that we could be, for example if this was 20 million years ago, life still exists but there is no sentient beings on earth to contemplate it. The fact the universe will (in the future) support sentient life in the form of us does not mean it was made for us (since 20 million years ago there was no "us" but there was all the things needed for us to survive.)
Most annoying bits for me:1. The yelling. Even with the volume turned low my orienting response is repeatedly provoked. It disrupts my ability to reflect and organize my thoughts while I'm listening. I need the occasional pause.
2. The accusation that Dennett over-extends Darwin into inappropriate domains. He doesn't quote Dennett or anyone to illustrate his point. Unlike D'Souza (apparently), I've never heard an atheist argue that Darwin's model of natural selection explains abiogenesis or the fine tuning of the universe. D'Souza had better back up this accusation with a material example if he doesn't want people to believe he's a liar.
Evolutionary psychology is an emerging field and it's possible a fair amount of human behavior won't be well accounted for by a Darwinian model. But there's nothing inappropriate about the effort to understand how natural selection might favor certain behavioral traits.
3. "My neurons made me do it." You are your neurons. If you say there's no point in telling you it's wrong to kill people because you can't help yourself, we'll simply lock you up. Need anything more be said?
4. If D'Souza truly believed that the fine tuning problem was evidence for God, he'd recommend physicists stop investigating the problem. Why isn't he campaigning against CERN?
Homework for D'Souza:
1. Reification (the map is not the territory)
2. Falsification
3. Fallacy of affirming the consequent
4. Tu quoque
5. God of the gaps
6. What happens when we throw out parsimony?
7. What happens when we throw out corroboration?
8. Try decaf
There is nothing strong about the fine-tuning issue. It is a piece of science that theists have picked up on to try to support their special beliefs.
Argument from ignorance. God of the gaps. Argument from incredulity. Take your pick.
I think it was Dr. Massimo Pigliuci who has talked about how religious claims always occur at the boundary of knowledge. The fine-tuning topic just happens to currently be in that zone. When our understanding encompasses these topics theists will shift their arguments to new ground.
In that sense I think it is a no-win situation trying to have these arguments with theists and I think Dan was somewhat less comfortable when D'Souza galloped off in that direction.
I think a more useful approach, which is what Dan is all about, is presenting the overwhelming evidence that gods and religion and all the ideas about divine connection inherent in them, are entirely man-made. That is the strongest tactic to fight religion, the dangers of which are not supernatural, but are exclusively real things that are done by real people.
156. Comment #92956 by McLir on December 1, 2007 at 8:23 pm
On the talking point of Stalin and Pol Pot being murderous atheists, I think this is an issue worth fleshing out. Totalitarian state communism resembles theocracy in some important ways. There might be some other useful analogies between religious zealotry and certain kinds of secular zealotry -- neo-conservatism and market fundamentalism come to mind. The dangers of these come from valuing ideological systems over actual humans. Perhaps a generalized definition of toxic zealotry could be very useful.
Dennett's resolution sounds like an extremely good idea. If any schools adopt it, I will be very interested to see the results.
158. Comment #92958 by edejard on December 1, 2007 at 8:30 pm
With respect to the "fine tuning" argument, it seems to me that some have misunderstood (misrepresented?) D'souza's version of it. He made it quite clear that it doesn't provide "proof" of god's existence as some have misleadingly suggested (indeed, at another point in the debate D'souza admits that he is an agnostic, which is to say that he doesn't "know" god exists, yet chooses to believe); rather, he argues, the fine tuning evidence "fits" with the theistic worldview. You many agree or disagree with this argument, but you must present it accurately first.
And D'souza's take on the anthropic principle is a bit more nuanced than some have suggested. He has said that if you respond to the fine tuning argument by saying, "Of course the universe -- or at least one small part of it -- is capable of supporting life, whatever the improbabilities, since, well duh, we're here to think about it" you've basically missed the point, because you haven't explained the improbability! The philosopher John Leslie has posited a thought experiment to make this a bit clearer: A man is in front of a firing squad. After dozens of unsuccessful volleys, the warden approaches the prisoner and tells him that this result is too improbable to have happened by chance, and that there must be some conspiracy afoot involving the shooters. The prisoner laughs off this suggestion by saying, "the shooters obviously missed because if they hadn't, I wouldn't be here to have this discussion." This is not a very satisfying answer, since it (like the argument above) leaves a massive improbability unexplained.
After watching the video I was particularly troubled when Dinesh dodged the question on why the Scadinavian societies, by far the most Agnostic/Atheistic in the world, perform the highest on the U.N. development index, have very low levels violent crime, and have the some of the highest per-capita contributions to overseas charity in the world?
This point is particularly useful because much of the questions at the debate (and discussions on this board) seem pointed towards a complete refutation of an a priori God (in a very lose "first cause" deistic sense). Most people here are aware of the argument that if you can posit a "God", then you can also posit an universe with less assumptions. Although the God assumption is substantially (even exponentially) more unlikely than the naturalistic universe assumption. It is still in some sense possible, which means that arguments around this point are at best byzantine. By examining the Scandinavian model I should hope that Dinesh should ask himself: would it be "good" to sell or convert the Atheistic/Agnostic Scandinavians to any particular religion? If so, what are the empirical societal effects would he believe that this would serve?
Dinesh was very disingenious throughout the whole debate because his positions seemed to rely on the most wooly ecumenical deism I've ever seen. Even if we accept (which I don't based on likelyhood)some of his first cause points, he has not given us a reason to care/waste time on contemplating, revering, praying and worshiping towards this very vague "first cause" God. Furthermore, his assertion that Nietzche statement that "Christian values would survive the death of God" proves that the Scandinavian societies are the most just because of their previous Christianity is flawed. First, Nietzche is not axiomatic, or equivalent to a controlling court decision in law, you cannot cite Nietzche as incontrovertible authority. Obviously, Nietzche said a very many horrid things (about women for example) and I doubt that Dinesh would quote him as authority on the matter. Second, if his premise is that a Christian history serves to inculcate greater values, he would still have to grapple with the fact that Scandinavia is by all accounts MORE moral now that it has abandoned its vestigial Christianity.
Is he in a sense advocating a sort of Liberal post-christianism? If he is not then he should ask himself what he finds offensive in this view?
Mango, not at all. First, one can say that the anthropic principle doesn't do the heavy lifting you want it to do without presupposing any sort of agency.
Second, the point of Leslie's thought experiment is that the anthropic principle isn't an explanation at all. It's like saying that the presence of a corpse with gunshot wound, coupled with the absence of a gun, explains a murder. It does nothing of the sort. It does present us with dispositive evidence that a murder has occurred, but it doesn't "explain" the murder. Similarly, the fact that we are here does provide us with dispositive evidence that our part (at least) of the universe is capable of supporting life, but it decidedly doesn't "explain" that fact, especially when it seems to be the case that a very specific set of conditions had to be fulfilled to bring this fact about.
Now I happen to think that Dinesh's answer is very problematic, but I think we must address it without resorting to simplistic references to the anthropic principle.
edejard wrote:"Of course the universe -- or at least one small part of it -- is capable of supporting life, whatever the improbabilities, since, well duh, we're here to think about it" you've basically missed the point, because you haven't explained the improbability!
What improbability are you referring to? The improbability of their being sentient life able to ask the question? Who said that was improbable and has *accurately* quantified this "improbability"? We know there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy *alone* a large percentage of them similar in structure to our own star. We also know , just in the last 10 years, that there are over 200 extra solar planets revolving a smaller set of stars. It sounds like our probability of existence is quite high from these numbers but then there is the chance of planets in the habitable zone (and note assuming the life is OUR type in that it is carbon based), factoring in these variables can lead to widely diverging results of any estimate of "improbability". The estimates (The Drake equation being a famous one) that have been made to try to put a number on how probable it is that we are here are just that estimates. In fact they are very wild ones as certain variables we know little to nothing about at this time or leave out other ideas of what life can be. So though I am of the view that we will find more refined values to these variables and be able to make more accurate predictions of the probabilities of life or sentient life (and note again, it is always "life like us" the probabilities change when we entertain types of life which is hard for us to imagine), we aren't there yet. This works both ways mind you, we can't state accurately how probable it is , nor can we state how improbable it is. (since that guess also leaves out important variables for which we have little to no data)
The only other "improbability" I can think you are referring to is the one of a universe with the constants that make our type of life possible, again , since we have no idea how universes form or what minimum attributes define universe, we can't say squat about how probable it is for us to be here in this one, either for or against. We already know that there are an infinite number of mathematical possibilities for universes, just because ours is perfect for our type of life doesn't mean that one of the many others that may also exist don't have life which is similarly perfect for those universes even if that "life" is like nothing we can imagine. So again, our ability to define "improbability" goes out the window as we can't even limit what is possible let alone what is life. We shouldn't be surprised that if we apply every filter necessary to restrict life to our own type that the probability of such life will go down but that is a different question from determining the probability of sentient life, whatever form inside our universe or outside it. With the "improbability" misunderstanding explained, surely it should be clear that going from this state of uncertainty in even being able to guess the probabilities of our existence or our universes existence, to asserting "a magic man done it." is irrational. The scientific view is to keep acquiring data and forming hypothesis until we can refine our view and our calculations for these probabilities, giving up the game shouldn't enter into the equation.
edejard; So what you're asking, then, is why are the laws of physics they way they are, which is the step beyond glibly reciting the anthropic principle. Dinesh frames the question as if there are "dials" that have been turned, painting for the listener a scene ripe for a turner of dials. And since he flatly rejected parsimony nothing stops him from a "leap of faith."For me, and the people I converse with who are not deep into physics, the anthropic principle suffices. It holds water, even though it's not an explanation at a deeper level of understanding of how the laws of physics arose.
175. Comment #92981 by SameerMarathe on December 1, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Much is made of the "fine tuning" argument. As I see it the crux of the argument from the theists' side is:All the fundamental constants seem so fine tuned that even slightest variation in any one of them and 'we wouldn't exist'. Therefore the universe must have been fine tuned (by a creator/intelligence/god) with us in mind.
My questions:
1> If one of the questions had a different value, perhaps we (i.e life on planet earth or planet earth itself) would not exist. But how do you know that in whatever universe that did come into existence (with the different constants than ours), life or some complex phenomenon that resemble life and conscious beings would NOT exist? Is there some proof that shows that with slight variation in any of the constants, matter as we know it would not exist at all?
2> Let us accept for a moment that the universe is fine tuned by a creator. What makes you think that the creator had 'us' in mind? We have good reasons to believe from probabilistic calculations that life and perhaps intelligent life exists in other parts of the universe. What is the proof that the creator actually favor the beings on Blargon 7 somewhere in a solar system in Andromeda galaxy? Why us? In all probability the earth is a penal colony to dump all the "failed" models (I think Hitchens has mentioned this idea in god is not great.)
3. To what accuracy do we know these constants. E.g the gravitational constant G = 6.67428[+/-0.00067] x 10^-11 N.m^2.kg^-2. This means there is uncertainty about the 14th decimal place onwards and the value could be:
6.67495 x 10^-11 N.m^2.kg^-2 to 6.67361 x 10^-11 N.m^2.kg^-2. Granted that the uncertainty is very small (~ 0.01 %) but doesn't this in itself prove that things are doing fine with small uncertainty? How much does one of the constants have to vary to make things as we know blow up or not appear at all?
4. Last but not least... it seems like use of the fine tuning argument is nothing but an extension of the god the gaps argument. We don't know why the universe looks fine tuned for life... goddunit. Maybe in my life time I would be lucky enough to see that gap closed.
178. Comment #92984 by SameerMarathe on December 1, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Is there some place where I can look up schedules for talks, presentations, other speaking engagements or these debates by Dan, Richard, Sam Harris et al. I would like to attend one of these things if they happen to be in the neighborhood. I could search on this website but if someone already knows a link or links I would greatly appreciate their passing on the info.The fine-tuning argument is based on the same fallacy that so many theistic arguments are based on: special pleading.If the coincidence of the universe being what it is demands an explanation, then the coincidence of God being what It is demands the same kind of explanation. And if God doesn't demand an explanation, neither does the universe. As always, God is superfluous.
Danesh D'Souza has these views.1) The big bang created by God created the universe 14 billion years ago.
2) 4.6 billion years ago the earth forms
3) 3-4 billion years ago life starts.
4) 100,000-200,000 years ago humans eventually evolve (in Gods image).
5) 2,000 years ago he finally intervenes to kill his own son which is also himself.
WTF!
D'Souza also uses this argument(I have replaced moustache for atheism).
"Stalin and Hitler where both moustache wearers"
"Moustaches are bad"
"All moustache wearers must take the blame for the atrocities of previous moustache wearers"
How much does one of the constants have to vary to make things as we know blow up or not appear at all?
Well, my understanding is that the cosmological constant has to be tuned within 1 part in 10 to the 50th power to prevent the universe blowing up.
Well, my understanding is that the cosmological constant has to be tuned within 1 part in 10 to the 50th power to prevent the universe blowing up.
Steve, do you have a reference for this? I find it very hard to believe given that we don't have the capability to take any physical measurement to past about 12 decimal places of resolution.
Steve, do you have a reference for this? I find it very hard to believe given that we don't have the capability to take any physical measurement to past about 12 decimal places of resolution.
I have probably phrased things clumsily. This does mean that we can measure anything to that accuracy, it is more about the possible range of the constant.
For example, in String Theory there are a phenomenal amount of possible universes, most of which have cosmological constants which would result in a rapidly expanding universe with no structure.
The fine-tuning argument is based on the same fallacy that so many theistic arguments are based on: special pleading.
If the coincidence of the universe being what it is demands an explanation, then the coincidence of God being what It is demands the same kind of explanation. And if God doesn't demand an explanation, neither does the universe. As always, God is superfluous.
Well, God is superfluous, but it does not mean that the fine tuning argument is, in general, a fallacy.
We are probably in the same situation regarding the settings of the constants of the universe as we were in terms of trying to explain the compexity of life before Darwin and Huxley. There really was something that needed explaining, and we found that explanation.
It is as misguided, in my view, to casually dismiss the apparent fine tuning of the universe as 'not a problem' as it would have been to dismiss the complexity of life as 'not a problem'. We should admit that it does need explaining while making it clear that God is not the answer.
Denevius, what? That's exactly the same as saying "Women can complain all they want, but non-suffrage is here to stay as long as women are emotional and non-rational."Surely that is not what you meant to say.
I think you meant to say something else, and I think you may be right... What you seem to have meant is that the majority of people on earth are too stupid to think for themselves, or do the intellectual leg-work to come to the realizations that intellectual atheists have come to...
But I think it's scarier than that...
... I also think we need to TRY our damnedest (no pun intended), to BRING THE FACTS to people, and to try and lift them up out of their "dogmatic slumber" as Hume did to Kant... and as public education has improved the intelligence of enormous numbers... so too could continued (and length) criticism of religion (which began the instant religions were created) bring more and more people to the truth.
And there is much value in that.
I find it ironic that Dinesh paints a caricature of Dennet disbelieving in things in earlier times such as other planets (I forget what the other thing was). 'Well, there's no evidence for other planets existing!' Well, look at yourself, Dinesh. The apparent 'fine tuning' and 'first cause' point to a god existing? Surely in the earlier time to which you transported Dennet, you would have cited rainbows, lightning and the sun as things that point to a god. You're simply filling the remaining gaps with God.The fine-tuning argument is no problem when dealing with any reasonable person under normal circumstances, but under the conditions inherent to a formal debate (and against someone like Dinesh), it poses a problem. There is no one-line knock down argument to be provided.
There is the possibility that the universe must exist this way for reasons currently unknown. RD talks about this briefly in TGD. Perhaps the constants are no more free to vary than the proportion of a circle's radius is to its circumference.
Of course, there is the idea of a multiverse. Of all the possible universes, we necessarily exist in one friendly to our form of life.
Then again, who's to say that a different configuration of the constants wouldn't be friendly to life in some different way, or to life unlike any we can imagine? Dinesh baits one questioner into making his point that we as humans aren't capable of knowing/understanding everything. So, why assume that matter must be made of atoms? "For all we know, there might be intelligent beings in another universe arguing that if fundamental constants were only slightly different, then the absence of free quarks and the extreme weakness of gravity would make life impossible."
Any argument of fine-tuning assumes life as we know it is a given. The universe does not care if we're here. We happened to come into existence in the only known part of this vast universe that seems conducive to our form of life for a brief period of time (considering from the BB to whenever we die out, which I see as a small blip on the timescale of the universe). Does any of this imply a designer? If it does, said designer appears to be quite inept, and at best lucky that his 'finely tuned' creation actually gave rise to life on this obscure lump of rock.
Anyway... people actually clapped at Dinesh's handling of parsimony? Well, I suppose it was an impressive 'tactic'.
Also, there's Dinesh's assumption that the BB need a 'first cause'. Yes, time began with the BB… and 'cause' is a temporal concept that only applies to a situation in which time exists. Despite any need you have to invoke a cause and give that cause the attributes of your god, the BB (beginning of time) does not need one.
As a real scientific hypothesis, the multi-verse hypothesis, should be (is?) actually testable. You seem to dig physics better than I do; perhaps you can shed some light on that.
Some forms of multiverse should be testable. Future observations of the cosmic microwave background may reveal patterns due to gravity waves, and if they do, that has the potential to tell us a lot about the nature of things at the time of the big bang, including several multiverse ideas.
It may become mind-bogglingly absurd but the only chance you would have to logically disprove such a thing would be for it to be self-contradictory
Well, I think that 'knowing the unknowable' is self-contradictory. And you are certainly doing that if you label the unknowable 'God'.
But what I wanted to say is that even if somebody comes up with a logically consistent bullshit explanation, they would still need to overcome the burden of proof and show some evidence. And that's often forgotten in debates like this.
I agree.
Part 14: As I understand it, in answer to a question, DDS says that our whole experience is a product of, and limited, by our 5 senses and we should not deny the existence of god because we cannot sense him.
However, if he cannot be detected or sensed then doesn't this mean that he must be an invention of the human mind!
Maybe i'm just missing something simple here ..
Neal: no, not really. Logically, there is nothing wrong with the existence of a god (or any object) which we can't sense. But if this is a god, it is the deist's god. If you claim an interventionist god, then you have a problem.
xale66x wrote:Perhaps the constants are no more free to vary than the proportion of a circle's radius is to its circumference.
I agree, and believe this is is precisely what the universe would look like if we are only seeing or existing in part of an over riding geometry. The funny thing is the proposed candidate theories (mostly string) that successfully integrate and explain the constants are precisely higher geometric (dimensional) systems. I don't see this as a coincidence. We lack experiments yet to pin down the veracity of the statement, but we just may in time.
Future observations of the cosmic microwave background may reveal patterns due to gravity waves, and if they do, that has the potential to tell us a lot about the nature of things at the time of the big bang, including several multiverse ideas.
Fascinating stuff. Is there a concrete hypothesis formulated connecting the existence of a multiverse to expected patterns or is it all just a preliminary conjecture? Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
Well, I think that 'knowing the unknowable' is self-contradictory. And you are certainly doing that if you label the unknowable 'God'.
Ah, but here lies the catch: They don't claim to know it; they only claim to believe it :)
The funny thing is the proposed candidate theories (mostly string) that successfully integrate and explain the constants
This is perhaps going a bit far, as these theories haven't really explained anything yet, as they aren't really what we could sensibly call 'theories'. Anyway, String Theory seems to suggest a phenomenal number of possible universe with widely differing values of the physical constants, so it hardly pins them down.
agg wrote:Fascinating stuff. Is there a concrete hypothesis formulated connecting the existence of a multiverse to expected patterns or is it all just a preliminary conjecture? Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
There are several such hypothesis. Regarding gravity waves, some theorists think analysis of waves reverberating through the universe since the big bang may tell us a bit about the initial conditions that set our universe off to expansion. This may allow us a selection target in the various types of string theories that offer solutions that necessitate a multiverse.
First, I'd like to clarify some often mistaken ideas concerning what a multiverse is. The term multiverse was originally associated with the idea of determining the history of particle trajectories as studied in the QED (quantum electrodynamics) Richard Feynman was the first person to popularize the idea in physics that the trajectory and or energy state of a particle that IS measured, exists because all the other possibilities that are not have "collapsed". In terms of analysis of particle trajectories a mathematical object called the wave function is said to "collapse" to the measured trajectory from all the possible ones. Later, in popular descriptions and science fiction this mathematically useful tool was extrapolated to have physical significance for literary purposes.(search "multiverse" for details of this history)
If the possibilities of alternative paths are infinite then maybe they actually exist and collapse to a given result here because the attributes of our universe "tunes" them in that way. There is no physics behind this assertion, it is only a supposition that comes out of trying to ascribe a physical meaning to Feynman's "sum over histories" the math that describes collapsing wave functions. The newer idea of "multiverse" concerns mathematical solutions to extremely complex multidimensional models for describing not just particles, but all possible interactions of varyingly discrete entities of energy. Mathematical physics has evolved to the point that entire "algebras" can be judged for their merit in predicting all the phenomena we see in our universe in a consistent manner. The problem is that there are many possible solutions to the set of mathematical models that are being studied and we lack experiments to pin down which solution defines OUR universe. The concepts are complex but a rough over view can be had by reading on various topics.
I am an electrical engineer by degree and we have similar examples of mathematical structures that require the existence of infinite entities in order for us to make efficient real world calculations concerning signals, energy, power content, voltage, current...etc. In the EE realm these tools (Fourier, Laplacian and z transforms) are practically limited in how they can be applied by the need to realize a desired level of accuracy in the results in a given computation time, they also have prescience over a discrete set of attributes of electrical signals and make no predictions on particles as we understand them in the science of physics. I think this is the chief distinction that has kept a similar analogy being made between these structures and the possibility of "real" versions of the entities described in the tools. (For example in discrete and continuous signal theory we play with imaginary values freely but we don't assume that somewhere they actually exist, they are for us tools which have amazing ability to simplify real calculations without having any real analog) It is unfortunate that the nuance of mathematical physics are usually grossly mis characterized when prepared for public consumption since they necessarily cover a larger suite of entities, many of which map closely to physical entities that we have discovered to govern our existence in the real universe.
Read more on:
basics:
Richard Feynman
multiverse
"sum over history"
QED
infinite series
differential equations/non linear partial
advanced:
gauge theories
sum over histories /Feynman diagrams
QED (quantum electrodynamics)
E8 symmetry
Heterotic string theory
M theory
Wikipedia has several well written articles for general introductions to these concepts. As always don't use it as a "last word" consult the citations as well.
steve99 wrote:This is perhaps going a bit far, as these theories haven't really explained anything yet, as they aren't really what we could sensibly call 'theories'. Anyway, String Theory seems to suggest a phenomenal number of possible universe with widely differing values of the physical constants, so it hardly pins them down.
You are correct, in the strictest popular scientific sense they are as yet unfalsifiable and are technically not even theories. My point is simply that the embarrassment of choice for all these values makes them unique in being best candidates for saying something about why the fundamental values are what they are. Until that first experiment comes however, their just mathematically defined and related but untested ideas.
Some of the reviewers (my good friends) have completely missed the point. The debate resolution was: "God is a man made invention".Daniel Dennet signed, sealed and delivered his verdict in the 5 questions posed to Dinesh at the end of his first 5 minute speech. Question 4 directly addressed this, and was basically ignored by Dinesh. It asked: "Do you agree that John Frum, Ganesh, Angel Moroni, and Angel Gabriel are human inventions?
The rest of the debate was over the existence of God, at Dinesh's insistence.
Anyone trained in Philosophy (or the sciences) should know that it is a fruitless endeavor to try to prove or disprove God. Dawkins does a good job of explaining this in the God Delusion, Chapter 3 "Argument for God's Existence" and Chapter 4 "Why There Almost Certainly is No God".
The point being that there is no absolute proof either way. (hence the use of "almost certainly" is used in the title of the chapter)
Keep the great debates coming!
Well Done DennettWell Done Organizers
Dsouza babbled through most of it.
I think that the best point to come out was the request to teach world religion. Even Dsouza admitted support for this.
There should be a poll in the forum on this question.
227. Comment #93083 by Creationismsucks on December 2, 2007 at 6:41 am
Does anyone else notice how Dinesh, and believers in general, just trot out the same old crap over and over? Regardless of how many times they're corrected on, for example, what evolutionary psychology is really saying about morals, the next time they talk about it, it's as if no correction had ever occured.I think it's sinister, deliberate and cynical. I think maybe Dinesh knows he's misrepresenting evolutionary psychology (in this example) but that really 'saving souls' is more important than getting the facts of the table. I'm guessing he knows that evolutionary psychology has a much more nuanced explanation for moral behaviour, but he thinks that ultimately it still pales in comparison to the Great Truth, which he has been charged with dispatching.
Since he thinks the ends justify the means, he cheats. More mic time spent muddying the waters is more potential saved souls, he thinks, and let's not worry about having an honest discussion.
I'd like to make a point regarding the teaching of religion in schools. As a Christian I have no problem with the whole smogarsboard of human religion being represented, without the dice being loaded in favour of one or the other. If I were an RE teacher I would do my honest best to do justice to my duty to present the facts about the rituals and underlying worldviews of each of them. I would not by any means (I hope) try to win converts for Christianity while doing my job. I would be prepared to have the content of lessons vetted by adherents of all the religions being studied to make sure that I ws being fair.
What Dennett wants is to teach religion as a function of natural selection. In order to teach religion in that way you have to have a prior commitment to natural selection, which, insofar as it claims to explain everything, is a philosophical worldview that not all RE teachers will necessarily hold. Or should they be required to demonstrate a commitment to natural selection before being appointed? Is this the kind of scenario that Dennett envisages? Do you people, committed as you surely are to the principle of freedom to believe or not to believe, really want to see this happening? - teachers and educators of all kinds being selected on the basis of a priori ideological commitments? Natualistic selection procedures! Purposeful (not at all random) weeding out of undesirable mutations within our educational fraternities!
What Dennett wants is to teach religion as a function of natural selection.
Not in the talks I have listened to (I have not listened to this one). I last heard him mention this in a TED talk (www.ted.com). All he wants is for children to learn about all major world religions without these religions being preached at them. If that is done, he has no objection even to faith schools.
Actually that's not an ad hominem. That's merely abuse. The core of D'Souza's argument against atheism is an ad hominem, however - i.e., refusal to believe due to egocentrism."The worst thing that spouts out of the orifice of that awful being ..."Can I ask you why you indulge in this ad hominem abuse?
What Dennett wants is to teach religion as a function of natural selection.Dennett made his proposal quite explicit. Natural select was not included in the content.
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