From the WSJ: Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God
Is this legit? (And/or new?) And if not, where is it wrong?
Not new. Absolutely everything is absurdly improbable, including the odds that I ate corn flakes this morning or that any particular poker hand had been dealt in the order that it was. What these arguments ignore is that it is almost certain that I ate something for breakfast or that cards were distributed. And unlikely odds do not necessarily require a God to resolve them.
^
This being the main point of rebuttal.
There are at least 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 billion or more. And extrapolating statistically there are at least 10,000 billion billion planets in the observable universe. We have already detected numerous potentially habitable planets in our own galaxy and our observations have barely begun. To suggest that earth is somehow special and unique in the galaxy, let alone the entire universe, is exactly the same absurdity as the religious geocentric ideas that preceded real science.
The information about the delicate balance of fundamental forces is correct, and so are the values and ratios of particle masses; if electrons were just a little lighter, stars could never form. However these are just restatements of the anthropic principle, which simply says that these were the necessary conditions for us to be here and observe the conditions; if they were otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to observe them, and perhaps in many other universes there are no such observers. From a scientific standpoint it’s really a pretty meaningless truism.
Odds against life? I’d say what the odds are really against is the existence of a bearded guy in a white robe living in the clouds who smiles down on us and occasionally waves a magic wand and works a miracle. I have no problem with spirituality, I just object to the stupid Biblical-literalist kind.
I knew that Murdoch was turning the WSJ into right-wing dreck, but now it seems he’s also turning it into evangelical dreck.
P.S.- Nothing I have seen in the WSJ about climate science has ever been right, either.
Actually, I think you snipped the main point of rebuttal–the entire argument simply fails to understand probability.
There is a profound failure to understand probability in the WSJ editorial. But I don’t find that the validity of the probability argument matters in the least, because even if correct, no god is necessarily required to resolve unlikely odds.
Well, I agree with the lead of the article (which is all I could read without subscribing) that the “Secularization Thesis” is not correct, and there is growing consensus I believe for the same opinion among academics.
However, fantastically unlikely does not equal miraculous. “It just happened” does not defy common sense because it did happen, we’re here. And while the parameters discussed in the OP are interesting, and I wouldn’t begrudge someone who wants to take from them some kind of meaning about our uniqueness etc., I haven’t seen any that actually contradict a natural model of planetary formation and abiogenesis.
Oh yes. We are finding that you can’t swing a cat without hitting a planet. I can imagine inhabitants of HD 189733b thanking their deity for the marvelously fine tuned universe that provides them with just exactly the right molten glass rains to support their lives.
Also…why do such articles never say “Brahma” or “Tawa” or “Gaea?” It’s always their god, but never someone else’s.
It is actually a collection of very old arguments just chained together to get a very ridiculous number. Responses to most of those points are in Talkorigins.org:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB010.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB940_1.html
The biggest surprise to me is that the opinion from the WSJ linked in the OP uses the newly found planets as a way to reduce the probabilities; mind you, the reality was that that there was no good evidence until recently that there were in fact planets around stars and the fact that we continue to discover planets nowadays is actually increasing the odds of life existing out there.
Back in 2011 Lawrence Krauss did tackle the argument about the universal ratios and the seemingly long odds:
These WSJ guys should read more about the weak anthropic principle. This idea is definitely not new.
Also, you can’t reach the conclusion that life is fantastically unlikely here. You could, I suppose, argue that life is absolutely 100% impossible anywhere, and that its existence is thus evidence of a miracle, but so long as you allow for a probability that’s anywhere in the least greater than zero, it’s going to happen somewhere in an infinite universe, and the place where it happens, wherever that might be, is going to end up defined as “here”.
From a probability standpoint the issue here revolves around whether there is anything special about life. To the extent that this notion is derived from theology, the argument would then be circular.
Appealing to cosmic constants is called the fine tuning argument and it’s been around for about a hundred years or so. It’s a more specific form of the Teleological argument, which goes back thousands of years and usually involves someone waxing poetically about how the universe is a well run clock that follows such beautiful laws. Newton was a fan:
Like many arguments for God it’s based on personal incredulity. The emotional language just in your quoted sections is kinda funny. “Feel free to gulp.” I ain’t wheezing.
Can you expand on this?
In a nutshell, a few at talkorigins explains it like this:
“Probability estimates that ignore the non-random elements predetermined by physics and chemistry are meaningless.”
For a longer explanation one should consult Richard Dawkins’ “Climbing Mount Improbable.”
http://www.todayinsci.com/D/Dawkins_Richard/DawkinsRichard-Quotations.htm
One of the lectures he did awhile ago explaining the “smearing out the luck” with a lock analogy can be seen here:
I gave up on it all because even if the argument proves god exists it says nothing about what god might be. maybe god’s just a force that was required to get the universe going, then he/she/it dissipated like a popcorn fart. every god i can think of right now is just a heap big tribal chieftain. i think a good editor running a story proving the existence of god should always explain exactly what god is. my worst fear is that the wsj god is Hillary and that the porkalypse is closer than we know.
Just as an added note to what I said in #4, and with which I think most are in agreement, I would also note that the author of that article is basically a crusading evangelical who has been criticized as an intellectual lightweight with little regard for fact. No surprise there.
I don’t think we necessarily “know” any of that at all. We now know there are lots and lots of planets Out There, which (barring weird lifeforms that somehow evolve in the middle of nebulas and clouds of interstellar dust, or in the atmospheres of stars, or super-intelligent shades of the color blue) would seem to be a number that we need to get a reasonable handle on in order to have any idea of how common life may be. And a lot of people have suggested that this, that, or the other thing, is clearly, no doubt about it, absolutely necessary for life to have possibly evolved. But we still don’t actually know. For all we actually know, the Universe may be teeming with weird creatures who are all saying “Thank Xzlrorz our planet doesn’t have a giant moon/axial tilt/less than 90 degree axial tilt/huge gas giant in the outer reaches of our planetary system deflecting all of those life-giving and beneficial comets from hitting us! Otherwise Life As We Know It could never possibly have evolved!”