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.
Rational A Priori 