Fine-Tuning Argument vs Argument From Miracles

[Brian63]

Both the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) and the Argument from Miracles (AFM) are unsound arguments by themselves, but I am still confused about the relationship between the two---whether their premises and conclusions are consistent with each other, whether they contradict each other, if one renders the other obsolete, or something else.

The FTA essentially states that if the various physical features and natural laws of the universe were even slightly different from what they currently are, then we humans would not exist. Since we do exist, then the universe is fine-tuned to have those features and laws, and the best explanation for that fine-tuning is a divine or supernatural sentient being. God.

The AFM states that the natural laws of the universe are incapable of producing certain effects which have been observed (Jesus’s resurrection, Donald Trump getting elected as president of the U.S, someone getting over a really bad cold, etc.). For those events to occur, it must have required a divine and supernatural force to interfere with the natural laws of the universe, i.e. a "miracle."

So I am confused about whether God could, with his infinite power and knowledge, fine-tune the natural laws so that they could produce any outcome he wanted and he happened to want us---or whether the natural laws are incapable of producing us and so God had to override the natural laws to create us. In place of the FTA, the argument from intelligent design (ID) would probably serve the same role on a narrower scale, to just biological characteristics. Did God intelligently design life using natural processes he created, or did he override those natural processes by performing supernatural miracles?

Can anyone lend a helping hand here? Thanks.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I don't see any real difference between fine tuning and miracles since God is claimed to have created the universe and be able to change anything about it at any time.

Sure, for us to exist the universe needs to exist within certain parameters, unless and until God decides to poof us into existence and set those parameters (if even just for a moment or until he changes his mind).

 

[Keith&Co.]

So I am confused about whether God could, with his infinite power and knowledge, fine-tune the natural laws so that they could produce any outcome he wanted and he happened to want us---

No, no, no, wrong outlook.
See, to ME, if the laws of the universe were slightly different, life might have evolved slightly different, and that's okay.

On another forum, we mentioned that the design of the octopus' eye was superior to human's. No blind spot. A creationist responded with, "But if your wife had these 'perfect' eyes, you'd be looking into an octpus' eyes at night, you want that?!?!"

Hey, if that's what we evolved to have, sure. I'd be okay with it. But 'they' can't make that leap. The people flogging the AFM and the FTA all assume that we, as we are, MUST be the entire purpose of creation. Variation neither desired nor required nor tolerated. We are in God's image, so we are as He intended, as we MUST be.

So, the two views dovetail nicely, because God purpose-built the universe to achieve US (fine-tuned), and tweaked the situation as necessary during installation to keep it on track (miracles). in the Old Earth Creation, the tweaks might have been small ones, with time multipliers. In Young Earth Creationism, the tweaks would have come more rapidly and been much more flashy.

 

[Brian63]

Sorry, I am just not comprehending this. I think the sticking point is this:

...God purpose-built the universe to achieve US (fine-tuned), and tweaked the situation as necessary during installation to keep it on track (miracles).

A god that really was omnipotent/omniscient would never have to do any tweaking though. You tweak and adjust things because unknown factors and surprises come into play. That would not be an issue for God though, being omnicrap. He could just get it right, right from the start.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Sorry, I am just not comprehending this. I think the sticking point is this:

...God purpose-built the universe to achieve US (fine-tuned), and tweaked the situation as necessary during installation to keep it on track (miracles).

A god that really was omnipotent/omniscient would never have to do any tweaking though. You tweak and adjust things because unknown factors and surprises come into play. That would not be an issue for God though, being omnicrap. He could just get it right, right from the start.

But you have to remember that people are involved. less perfect, and out sin somehow changes how the world works. People vote liberal and we get gay marriage, earthquakes, abortions, and hurricanes.
I mean, look at genesis. Everything was perfect, as perfectly created by perfect God, then Woman fucked it all up. Now God has to station an angel at the garden, spiders now eat flies, lions eat lambs, and sharks eat anything. Tweaks are emergent necessities after God looks away, for just an INSTANT.
Anyone with a 4-year-old will understand.

 

[Treedbear]

...
Anyone with a 4-year-old will understand.

I think we need to give 4-year-olds the vote. Sufferage to the little children.

 

[Keith&Co.]

...
Anyone with a 4-year-old will understand.

I think we need to give 4-year-olds the vote. Sufferage to the little children.

president Barney?

 

[Brian63]

Tweaks are emergent necessities after God looks away, for just an INSTANT.

God is aware of everything though, nothing gets by without him knowing about it, even in advance. Maybe that is the point where we differ---I believe God would be aware of every event to ever occur in the future. Nothing will ever surprise him. "Looking away" is a human behavior, but not an omni-deity behavior. It sounds like you hold the view that we could surprise god and that there are things that he is unaware of, is that right?

 

[ideologyhunter]

From chapter 6 of his weird book: When the Lord God saw how great was the wickedness of man on earth, and how the hearts of men turned always toward evil, he regretted that he had ever made them.
(So....when he created them in the first place....he didn't know what it would lead to?) (Not that the whole story isn't crazy and not that Genesis 6 and 7 are examples of morality that you'd want to teach to children.)

 

[Brian63]

Yeah, the Christian spin on it also confuses more than it clarifies. Sometimes people point to the FTA or the AFM, as a response to us atheists, to prove that *some* deity must exist, even before they get into identifying it as the Christian god. The FTA and AFM work off contradictory premises, it seems to me. Either God is unlimited in power and knowledge and can create natural laws to accomplish any task, or God is limited and constrained in what he can make the natural laws be, so sometimes he has to veto and overrule his own natural laws to get the job done.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Maybe that is the point where we differ---

No, not really.
I agree with you, the whole concept makes no sense and is not internally consistent.
But that's because we try to keep the whole concept in mind, or at least work through all the consequences of all the stated traits.

For the B'leever, God's traits are only important as they are necessary to explain the world we find ourselves in.

In Genesis, God 'looked away' from Woman and Adam, just so they could screw things up. If He was omnipotent and omnipresent at that time, He'd bear some responsibility for what happened. But that wouldn't make sense, as the whole point of the story is to explain why a god of infinite mercy and love exists but we do not live in paradise. WE need to be the ones that deserve punishment, not God.

So, yeah, we can surprise and disappoint God, if the narrative requires that, just as God already knows everything that's going to happen and thus His prophecies prove His divinity.

 

[Torin]

The fine tuning argument is a species of the argument from miracles which alleges that the fine tuning we observe is miraculous.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Sorry, I am just not comprehending this. I think the sticking point is this:

...God purpose-built the universe to achieve US (fine-tuned), and tweaked the situation as necessary during installation to keep it on track (miracles).

A god that really was omnipotent/omniscient would never have to do any tweaking though. You tweak and adjust things because unknown factors and surprises come into play. That would not be an issue for God though, being omnicrap. He could just get it right, right from the start.

Imagine you're writing about a wizard with superhuman powers. With his staff he can ride out against the nazgul, blind them and drive them off, saving his people from destruction. Yet when the bad guys are breaching the walls of his fortress he has to fight them individually with a sword.

If our wizard was a real wizard and not just a wannabe there wouldn't even be nazgul, bad guys to attack his fortress. That he has to fight with a sword is the ultimate contradiction, and this is of course how fiction works. We see it with modern superheroes as well. The superhero called god is no different.

 

[abaddon]

Yeah, the Christian spin on it also confuses more than it clarifies. Sometimes people point to the FTA or the AFM, as a response to us atheists, to prove that *some* deity must exist, even before they get into identifying it as the Christian god. The FTA and AFM work off contradictory premises, it seems to me. Either God is unlimited in power and knowledge and can create natural laws to accomplish any task, or God is limited and constrained in what he can make the natural laws be, so sometimes he has to veto and overrule his own natural laws to get the job done.

I agree. The FTA and the AFM contradict each other. You can't fine-tune a universe and then have fuckups that require interventions.

It doesn't matter that Christians do a song and dance about sin causing the fuckups, because fine-tuned is fine-tuned.

The Bible and the later Greek-inspired theological arguments tell two completely different tales about God, so Christians often switch between the abstract omni-God and the tribal dumbass God. Or try to mingle them with no success at all. But considering the two arguments without referencing the biblical fables, they are contradictory.

I've seen Michael McCormick's Atheism and the Case Against Christ mentioned as one source of this criticism.

 

[atrib]

The FTA essentially states that if the various physical features and natural laws of the universe were even slightly different from what they currently are, then we humans would not exist. Since we do exist, then the universe is fine-tuned to have those features and laws, and the best explanation for that fine-tuning is a divine or supernatural sentient being. God.

The fine tuning argument implicitly assumes that the universe has a purpose, and that purpose is to support life, specifically human life on this piece of rock we call Earth. We have no evidence to support the idea that the universe has a purpose to its existence, much less that the purpose is to support life on Earth. Without this underlying assumption, the fine tuning argument falls apart, especially when we consider that an overwhelmingly large proportion of the universe, including much of Earth except for a thin sliver at the surface, is inhospitable to life.

The honest answer is that we don't know why the universe exists, how it came into being, or even if the visible universe is all there is. We have cosmological models that attempt to describe its origins from a state of extreme low entropy, but not the ability to test the models as yet. Life exists on Earth because the conditions on Earth allows life to exist. Anything more is speculation driven by religious bias.

 

[Politesse]

I think these are probably different parties; someone who believes that the universe is fine-tuned probably does not think of miracles as supernatural events that "break" nature, but rather seek rational explanations for why that thing happened at that time, visualizing them as events that were always meant to occur as they did. The idea that miracles are a violation of natural law is a common one, but not universally held or dogma for any official body that I know of.

 

[Brian63]

The fine tuning argument implicitly assumes that the universe has a purpose, and that purpose is to support life, specifically human life on this piece of rock we call Earth. We have no evidence to support the idea that the universe has a purpose to its existence, much less that the purpose is to support life on Earth. Without this underlying assumption, the fine tuning argument falls apart, especially when we consider that an overwhelmingly large proportion of the universe, including much of Earth except for a thin sliver at the surface, is inhospitable to life.

The honest answer is that we don't know why the universe exists, how it came into being, or even if the visible universe is all there is. We have cosmological models that attempt to describe its origins from a state of extreme low entropy, but not the ability to test the models as yet. Life exists on Earth because the conditions on Earth allows life to exist. Anything more is speculation driven by religious bias.

Agreed on all those criticisms of the FTA argument. I was wondering if there was an additional flaw in the FTA on top of those, namely that it contradicted the AFM. On second thought though, if the FTA was refined so that the fine-tuner was not omni-everything but was just powerful and smart enough to create our universe, then that could allow for it to make some errors and have unknown consequences that would need correction for. It is only when we call the fine-tuner "God" and state that the fine-tuner is omnipotent/omniscient that the FTA and AFM contradict.

I've seen Michael McCormick's Atheism and the Case Against Christ mentioned as one source of this criticism.

Minor correction---On googling that is Matthew, not Michael, McCormick.

 

[Lion IRC]

You can harmonize the two arguments by accepting that God doesn't find anything 'miraculous' about His own actions.

Ask Him...
"did you finely tune the laws of physics?"
"is your design intelligent?"

I don't think God has any need for the categories "supernatural" or miraculous".

 

[Treedbear]

You can harmonize the two arguments by accepting that God doesn't find anything 'miraculous' about His own actions.

Ask Him...
"did you finely tune the laws of physics?"
"is your design intelligent?"

I don't think God has any need for the categories "supernatural" or miraculous".

Nor intelligence.

 

[Brian63]

Even if God does not use those labels, people who make arguments on behalf of God use them. They should stop, since they apparently do not apply to God.