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The Biggest Problem With Fine-tuning Arguments

Oftentimes, the atheist responses to fine-tuning arguments are really bad, because atheists often choose to engage in a purely scientific debate rather than exposing the massively flawed philosophical assumptions and bizarre statistical thinking being employed by the theist.  In other words, they’ll just end up debating the contingencies of contemporary cosmological theory, a debate which they’ll probably lose since the consensus (http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647) seems to be that the universe is indeed fine-tuned in the sense that out of the range of physically possible values for various constants, only a small number are life-permitting.  Philosophically unrefined atheists tend to fall back on speculative multiverse hypotheses, which the jury still seems to be out on, though I am not a cosmologist, so please correct me if I am wrong on the state of cosmology today.

The thing that scientifically-minded atheists seem to miss, and theists either miss or are happy to pass over, is the odd assumption that a life-permitting universe is begging for some kind of special explanation that a non-life-permitting universe is not, though this isn’t to say that a general account of how universes come to have the constants they do (even if it turns out that there is only our universe) is not of extreme interest.  Why should this be?

To illustrate my thinking, suppose I have a 20 sided die that I need to roll as part of a game.  I should not be surprised that I get some result.  Let’s think of our results as “configurations” with only one changing element; a positive integer value between 1 and 20.  If I’m just rolling the die aimlessly because I’m waiting for my turn, it would not occur to me that, say, rolling a 6 requires special explanation while a 17 does not.

But then my turn comes up.  If I roll a 20, I can get a critical hit on my enemy and my task will be much easier.  However, I only have a 5% chance of doing so.  The odds aren’t good.  I roll the dice…

Miraculously, I get a 20!  Despite having the odds stacked 95% against me, I got a really good result.  Clearly, this is miraculous, and I need some further explanation.  Perhaps God did it.

..wait, what went wrong here?

The key is valuation.  Sure, any given configuration has a low probability, but so what?  The low probability of any given configuration only becomes interesting when there is one configuration that we value somehow.  When I’m not playing the game I don’t feel a roll of 1 is somehow intrinsically more puzzling and special than rolling a 5, but in the context of the game some configurations are more valuable than others, so I am interested in the low probability associated with any given configuration.  Similarly, the low probability of any one configuration of the universe isn’t particularly interesting unless there are beings to value a universe which permits their existence.  A universe which allows us to exist is our 20 on the die roll; we want it, we value it, and we are impressed that we got what we wanted despite the odds being stacked against it.  But before we existed, there was no one to value a life-permitting universe.  Universes need beings with values so that they may be valued – a life-permitting universe is not intrinsically valuable.  Even if it is possible to make sense of objective value, I don’t think it is even coherent for there to be values without valuers.

This is all, of course, unless one assumes the existence of God, which would be a perspective “outside” the universe, which could value a life-permitting universe before it was brought into existence, and deliberately try to bring one about.  For fine-tuning to be a problem, one must still be influenced by latent theistic ways of thinking.  Ultimately, I see this as further vindication of Feuerbach’s view of religion as our projection of ourselves onto the cosmos.  We value our universe because we value ourselves, so we assume that the universe -and something beyond it- value us too.

Changing my mind

As I am still at the outset of my philosophical journey, it is not surprising that I have changed my mind on many substantial issues on more than a few occasions.  So why post about it then?  For one, because it’s the early hours of the morning and I’m bored.  But more importantly, I think it’s important to remind whatever everyday people might read this that one really can change important beliefs in response to evidence and argument.  So what are some areas where I have changed my mind, or my positions are evolving?

-I have switched to anti-foundationalism in epistemology (making the blog title somewhat ironic)

-To use one of Brian Leiter’s useful distinctions, I have stepped back from “substantive naturalism” to a more inclusive, pluralistic methodological naturalism.  I now regard as “naturalistic” any project of inquiry which 1. takes methodological inspiration and form from the sciences and 2. takes serious the results of the science.  E.g. in my understanding of naturalism, even much of the philosophy of later Wittgenstein could be considered naturalistic insofar as it is anti-metaphysical, anti-foundationalist, and recognition of both the social and fallible nature of human inquiry and our nature as real, living creatures embedded in a social context.

-I have switched from reductive (physicalist, specifically) to non-reductive naturalism.  I was inspired both by Quine and Nietzsche on this point.  First, I came to see the choice of “the smallest entities quantified over in our physical theories” as what is “really real” to be arbitrary.  If, say, we were beings living at the sub-atomic level, we might say that our world of probabilities and field behavior and virtual particles was “merely apparent” and the real world “out there” operated on these alien, classical principles.  Second, I don’t see reductive physicalism as actually a necessary or even particularly obvious implication of our best scientific theories.  Now, this is not to posit any kind of dualism; I accept supervenience in nature as fairly obvious.  However, I now say that “what there is” is simply what our best natural theories (philosophical and scientific) say there is (I may eventually accept something like Quine’s ontological commitment, though for now Nietzsche has made me cautious of ontology and I will proceed with great caution in this area).  There is no reason to regard composite entities as “less real,” for as Nietzsche points out in Beyond Good and Evil, it only makes sense to speak of mere appearance as merely illusory if there is some “really real” thing-in-itself (a la Kant or Plato) lurking out there/back there somewhere.  If there is no ultimate thing-in-itself, however, as I understand from non-reductive naturalism, then the “mereness” of composite entities goes away.

-In metaethics I am becoming skeptical of moral realism, a position I previously embraced.  I’ve been on an increasingly rapid slide towards anti-realism.  Originally I defended reductive naturalist moral realism, what I suppose one might call a sort of “welfarism,” but was never very confident about it.  I desperately wanted to be a moral realist, and I felt like I could almost grasp a working theory if I just reached a little farther.  As my own reductive naturalism/physicalism crumbled before me, I initially grew optimistic about the prospects for moral realism, because now I didn’t have to provide a reductionist account of the good, leading me to read up on and briefly entertain the Cornell realism of David Brink et al.  But now I am finding even this unpersuasive after having read Nietzsche – again, more seriously, at an older age (though still young – I’m just out of high school as opposed to in high school!) – and Bernard Williams.  This is not to say there isn’t an ethical dimension to life in that we still have to navigate the difficulties of figuring out how to live together and how to live good lives.  But the key is that this “good” means “good” like “good sex,” not morally good.  There is no further fact of moral rightness or wrongness once we’ve dealt with all the particulars of the issue at hand.

-In political philosophy, I have become less of an “idealist” and more of a realist.  This is related to my developing moral skepticism.  If morality really is, as Bernard Williams calls it, a “peculiar institution,” then there are no problems pertaining to the relationship between law, politics, and morality.  Positivism, interpretavism, and natural law all become extraneous.  Politics are just one more thing humans do, and it is a nuanced, fallible enterprise that we use in the course of existing as beings which live in a society.  This is not to say we can’t do it better, or that there is no political normativity, merely that we should not start with some vision, defined in terms of (even if disconnected from in the case of positivism) morality, of how things ought to be, but rather that we should just look at how things actually are and then try and work from there.  Like in morality, this is a broadly “ethical” enterprise in nature, but it is not “moral” in the sense that there is some further rightness or wrongness beyond all the particulars.

“The Singularity is near!”

More anti-gay silliness from the natural law camp

Douglas Farrow, professor of Christian Studies at McGill, has written a blog post (http://www.ruthblog.org/2012/01/04/why-fight-same-sex-marriage/) attacking same-sex marriage from -you guessed it- a natural law perspective.  This is really just excerpts from a longer Touchstone article (http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=25-01-024-f#ixzz1iXEDxQfl).  It makes the same arguments as always:

-Marriage as a union of a man and woman with one of the central purposes being procreation is a metaphysical fact (it is “pre-political”)

-Such a fact ought to be enshrined in law

-The consequences of doing so are better than the alternatives anyway

This is the same crap that is peddled by all the “new natural lawyers,” e.g. Robert George, John Finnis, and Germain Grisez.  Richard Chappell over at Philosophy, et cetera (please check out his site if you haven’t already!) already has an excellent response to such views here (http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/05/whats-wrong-with-what-is-marriage.html).

As usual, the natural lawyers are heavy on hand-waving, citations of ancient thinkers, and hyperbolic language, and light on evidence and positive arguments.