This forms the third in a series of ‘More Wrong?’ posts, written to stress-test the two core tenets of the LW tribe’s credo – rationality is the best path to truth, and belief in God is irrational. Whilst the former is ‘official policy,’ the latter represents a widely held position amongst a high proportion of users. The first post discussed the dangers of ‘assumption conceit.’ The second explored the significance of the ‘fine-tuning’ problem.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has no bearing on the fine-tuning problem. The Darwinian mechanism only comes into play once biological life has been established; it cannot explain the physical conditions that permit the existence of life in the first place. Responding to the insane precision of fine-tuning found in the physical constants, some physicists have attempted to try and introduce a similar selection principle into cosmology. They have proposed that a version of adaptive fitness may be appropriate for universes, being related to the number of black holes they contain that give birth to other new universes. But such a hypothesis seems more an act of desperation than a credible explanation.
Instead, the default, rationalistic explanation for fine-tuning within our cosmos invokes a multiverse theory in partnership with the anthropic principle: given an infinite number of universes, it logically follows that life would only arise where suitable conditions exist for life. Therefore, we should expect that our universe would be suitable for life. Whilst this is a reasonable conjecture, it leaves one question unanswered: why should we observe anything at all? This point is well-made by Nobel prize-winning biochemist Christian de Duve -
However many universes one postulates, ours can never be rendered insignificant by the magnitude of this number. Whether the combination of constants that allowed life and mind is unique or only one in a very large number of combinations most of which lack this property, what to me appears as supremely significant is that a combination capable of giving rise to life and mind should exist at all. Life, mind, and the ‘superminds’ that may arise, later or elsewhere, are such extraordinary manifestations that their emergence, by whatever mechanism, cannot but be a telling revelation of ultimate reality. [1, pp. 299-300]
Herein lies the nub of the matter: even if we are willing to accept, without evidence, infinite additional universes, the rationalist must still explain how a conscious mind ponders its own existence from within a fluke cosmos. Moreover, what makes de Duve’s question even more compelling is the fact that the conscious mind we encounter here seems to be extraordinarily well-adapted to reflect on its own existence. Why should we have been able to reason so effectively, using highly abstract concepts, to reveal the precise nature of our fine-tuned cosmos? It is a conundrum we shall examine in greater detail later in this series.
[1] C. de Duve, Life Evolving – Molecules, Mind and Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
This forms the third in a series of ‘More Wrong?’ posts, written to stress-test the two core tenets of the LW tribe’s credo – rationality is the best path to truth, and belief in God is irrational. Whilst the former is ‘official policy,’ the latter represents a widely held position amongst a high proportion of users. The first post discussed the dangers of ‘assumption conceit.’ The second explored the significance of the ‘fine-tuning’ problem.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has no bearing on the fine-tuning problem. The Darwinian mechanism only comes into play once biological life has been established; it cannot explain the physical conditions that permit the existence of life in the first place. Responding to the insane precision of fine-tuning found in the physical constants, some physicists have attempted to try and introduce a similar selection principle into cosmology. They have proposed that a version of adaptive fitness may be appropriate for universes, being related to the number of black holes they contain that give birth to other new universes. But such a hypothesis seems more an act of desperation than a credible explanation.
Instead, the default, rationalistic explanation for fine-tuning within our cosmos invokes a multiverse theory in partnership with the anthropic principle: given an infinite number of universes, it logically follows that life would only arise where suitable conditions exist for life. Therefore, we should expect that our universe would be suitable for life. Whilst this is a reasonable conjecture, it leaves one question unanswered: why should we observe anything at all? This point is well-made by Nobel prize-winning biochemist Christian de Duve -
Herein lies the nub of the matter: even if we are willing to accept, without evidence, infinite additional universes, the rationalist must still explain how a conscious mind ponders its own existence from within a fluke cosmos. Moreover, what makes de Duve’s question even more compelling is the fact that the conscious mind we encounter here seems to be extraordinarily well-adapted to reflect on its own existence. Why should we have been able to reason so effectively, using highly abstract concepts, to reveal the precise nature of our fine-tuned cosmos? It is a conundrum we shall examine in greater detail later in this series.
[1] C. de Duve, Life Evolving – Molecules, Mind and Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.