Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 9/10/2010

Question
I believe that as a hypothesis, a designer can not be ruled out. My view of God is akin to the Kabbalistic Ein Sof or Platonic "Divine Mind" BTW so I'm not what one would call a classical theist.
Here are my arguments for a designer

1. Life on Earth. Our planet is at the perfect distance from the sun to support life on our planet. No other planet that we know of can support life. If life arises randomly why didn't a form of life arise on every planet?
2. The order of nature. Nature operates according to rational and orderly laws-this is the whole basis of science. From the law of gravity to the chemical reactions within our bodies everything operates in an orderly manner. I am aware of chaos theory, but this does not account for an inherently orderly universe. If the universe arose randomly why isn't the universe more chaotic?
3. I realize that this is a weak argument, but how do atheists account for thousands of years of human experience that points to a higher power?

Answer
"1. Life on Earth. Our planet is at the perfect distance from the sun to support life on our planet. No other planet that we know of can support life. If life arises randomly why didn't a form of life arise on every planet?"

It does not follow from life arising naturally that it would form on every planet. You just mentioned for instance, the condition in which to close to the sun our planet would be vaporized and too far it wouldn't receive enough energy. It is also speculated that life on Earth is facilitated by the presence of Jupiter draws away a lot of the asteroids which would bombard Earth, the co-existence of three states of matter in an organic substance (water on Earth, hydrocarbons on Titan[1]), and a unitary (as opposed to binary) star system. There are a bunch of conditions that seem to make life rare in the universe and intelligent life even rarer. These are mostly independent conditions, none of them are contradictory, so each one makes life less frequent, but doesn't make life impossible.

I don't know how rare exactly life is in the universe- that's because we haven't searched that much of the sky for signals[2], we haven't seen that many other planets[3][4], and we haven't tested that many planets for microbial life[5][6]. But let's just say that it is really rare - that of all the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, ours is the only one that has life and we are the only planet that has life orbiting that star. We would still expect billions of other planets on other galaxies to have life and for us not to know about it, because the nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is millions of light-years away and we are just starting to be able to detect a planet on it[7].

But let's say life is even rarer - Of all the billions of galaxies, ours is the only one that has life, and of all the billions of stars in that galaxy, ours is the only one that has life, and of all the planets around that star, the only one that has life is this one. Now whatever that probability is, let's half it. Then we would still expect life to form, but take twice as much time in the universe (give or take) for such an opportunity to arrive. And there we would be, in another 13.75 billion years, why this spot on the universe seemed to be made just for us. As you can see, what we would expect from nature is not to be able to find anything else hospitable.

Consider the lottery - the chances of any one person winning the lottery is slim (close to 0) but the chances that any person at all will win the lottery is 1 (that is, the conditional probability[8]). There is no reason for someone who wins the lottery to conclude the lottery was rigged just for them from the fact that their particular chances were slim. Similarly, if it wasn't here now at Earth, than it would be somewhere else that would be unique, but not special.
Thing about the Fine-Tuning argument is that it relies on scientific findings that are arrived at by making sense of the universe from a naturalistic perspective, and then tries to say that those findings are unnatural.

What would be really strange is to know of a lot of planets that shared all the conditions Earth needed to develop life and to have tested these planets only to not find the slightest evidence for the beginnings of life. That would make it seem like there was some magical condition outside of science which God had to change to allow life to grow on Earth. That would be an argument that would conjecture that because science doesn't know something that it leaves from for God to be the answer. But even then there is so much that we don't know that it would seem more likely that we just hadn't answered that question yet. So another big problem with the Fine-tuning argument is that it is an argument from ignorance[9].


"2. The order of nature. Nature operates according to rational and orderly laws-this is the whole basis of science. From the law of gravity to the chemical reactions within our bodies everything operates in an orderly manner. I am aware of chaos theory, but this does not account for an inherently orderly universe. If the universe arose randomly why isn't the universe more chaotic?"

Well my first reaction is that the order of nature makes more sense to me. When someone was challenging me on how to explain the universe from a naturalistic perspective, I made my case by arguing that its laws were even more orderly than my questioner supposed[10]. On previous occasions I made commentary about how the universe was simpler than God and how it seemed odd that God would follow rules, whereas it would make sense for the universe to do so naturally[11].

Let me first say that changing rules are less parsimonious[] than consistent rules. A changing rule (say gravity pulls on Monday through Wednesday, pushes on Thursday through Saturday, and rests on Sunday) is actually composed of a consistent rule for each state (gravity pulls, pushes, rests), and another consistent rule or set of rules for the change (gravity is oscillating in this theoretical and weirdly shaped field and the rule dictating the shape of this field is best given by...). In the converse however, it doesn't make much sense to describe a consistent rule in terms of changing ones, because they have to cancel each other out in a way that doesn't make sense (gravity pulls everyday of the week because changing rule A says it pulls on even days and changing rule B says it pulls on odds days).

So I'm not sure how you feel about the principle of parsimony[12], but it is generally not justified because it is taken as so intuitive. The idea is essentially to make fewer assumptions you should go with the fewest number of rules that explain the most. One way to justify the claim is with conditional probability[8]. If I came home and found a window broken and my stuff missing than it would make sense for me to conjecture that a robber had broken the window, taken the stuff, and left. If my friend thought it would be useful to add to the theory that the robber was also wearing a red hat, but he didn't have any reason to suppose this was true, than that explanation would be necessarily less likely because the probability of any robber includes the possibility that the robber was wearing a red hat.

But I left out chaos theory, which says we can have consistent, "orderly" rules which lead to chaotic results. But another finding of chaos theory is that the opposite happens as well, in which the instability of chaotic solutions makes them randomly encounter a stable, non-chaotic solution (especially when a large number of chaotic systems interact). The word "self-organization" or "anti-chaos" is often used to describe this and shows how the mathematical modeling is consistent with biology[13]. This is another that brings out a broader range of dynamical applications, including orbital mechanics that may pertain to your first question[14]. This means that even if we started from some rules that would create a chaotic situation, we could still settle into a stable pattern like we see around us.

But even if it were the case that complete never-resolving chaos was the norm for the generation of universes, I still think we can come up with a good naturalistic explanation for why we don't live in a "normal" universe. To ask "why these conditions as opposed to another" or "why these rules of physics as opposed to another", you would have to assign the probability to these, which means that you have a general equation for generating universes of which we would be just one example (whether or not we are an unlikely one). If you've gotten that far, it seems natural to say that the probability is really a proportion (that is that all possible universes are generated) or that the generation of the universe happened more than once (probability is after-all, defined as what proportion you would get in infinite iterations). And from here I can essentially make the same anthropic argument that I made with respect to the first question - only in universes that could support life would we have the luxury of sitting here and discussing the universe, so even if life is an unlikely case we know we belong to that case already. Stephen Hawking thinks the concept of a multiverse (that is, many universes) is plausible[15], but we only need that explanation if order is unlikely (and as I said, order seems likely to me).


"3. I realize that this is a weak argument, but how do atheists account for thousands of years of human experience that points to a higher power?"

When you say "account for thousands of years of human experience that points to a higher power", I assume you mean "account for thousands of years of humans believing in a higher power". I agree that this is a weak argument. I've previously answered why I don't think the testimony of any particular religion is true[16], and to say the same of all religions we can add what I call the Argument from Symmetry[17]. If there is anything left after you only consider propositions for which all religions would agree, I don't think it is anything specific enough to be useful. For more still, here is a survey of secular explanations of religion[18], written by Austin Cline (who incidentally, is another AllExperts Atheism writer[19).


Links:
Question 1:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28moon%29
[2] http://www.setileague.org/askdr/howmuch.htm
[3] http://www.public.asu.edu/~sciref/exoplnt.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extrasolar_planets
[5] http://www.examiner.com/astronomy-in-seattle/don-t-rule-out-life-on-mars
[6] http://zerowing21.xanga.com/729446561/precursors-for-life-possible-on-titan/
[7] http://www.universetoday.com/32288/first-extra-galactic-planet-may-have-been-det...
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
Question 2:
[10] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/9/x-17.htm
[11] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2010/8/Paradox-Design-Argument.htm
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_parsimony
[13] http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4006/CxSys%20Readings/Antichaos/Antichaos%20and%2...
[14] http://omnis.if.ufrj.br/~monica/ACMSM2008/StrogatzPD2000.pdf
[15] http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553805371/ref=sr_1_1?s=bo...
Question 3:
[16] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Response-Testimony.htm
[17] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best-1.htm (scroll all the way down past the Problem of Evil to the line break in my second response where I go into detail about the Argument from Symmetry)
[18] http://atheism.about.com/od/philosophyofreligion/p/ExplainReligion.htm
[19] http://www.allexperts.com/ep/2724-35947/Atheism/Austin-Cline.htm