Ringtone
Platinum Member
- Sep 3, 2019
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By Michal Rawlings (a.k.a Ringtone)
To read this refutation one must have a Youtube account and log into that account before clicking on the link below. Also, open a new tab and see GMS' video in order to follow my eradication of his gibberish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhHwPoSp7AU
INTRODUCTION
To read this refutation one must have a Youtube account and log into that account before clicking on the link below. Also, open a new tab and see GMS' video in order to follow my eradication of his gibberish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhHwPoSp7AU
INTRODUCTION
While the entirety of GMS' video is a train wreck of factual and logical errors, the arguably most mangled debris among the wreckage is his treatment of the cosmological model of the strong anthropic principle on which the theological inference of the fine-tuned argument is predicated. He invokes the philosophically obtuse and scientifically naive reasoning of Douglas Adams' Puddle Analogy "Yellow Puddle of Soiled Panties Analogy" (YPSPA), which Adams initially presented in a live forum from his unpublished musings. A few years later it was published in a posthumous collection of his previously published and unpublished material in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (2002):
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' —Douglas Adams
The analogy has been panned for years by both theist and atheist philosophers of science alike who grasp the prevailing scientific data and the ramifications thereof. While Adams' Analogy is arguably applicable to Paley's teleological argument from design/complexity, albeit, on a case-by-case basis only, it's an embarrassingly stupid counter to the fine-tuned argument proper. Only philosophically incompetent and/or scientifically illiterate atheists invoke Adams' analogy against the alternate cosmological models of the weak or the strong anthropic principle.
Listen carefully to this portion of GMS' video: (1:27 — 4:31).
GMS unwittingly conflates the fine-tuned argument of the strong anthropic principle and the teleological argument from design/complexity. He thinks they're the same thing in terms of logic, and refers to his delusion as the fine-tuned argument or the teleological argument interchangeably relative to the YPSPA. Douglas Adams, who was not a trained scientist, by the way, made the same mistake two decades ago, and, blindly following his lead, new atheist laymen have been foolishly repeating this error over and over again ever since, so much so that this fallacious conflation has evolved into a standard counterargument in the arsenal of new atheism's apologetics.
In fact, reasoning from this fallacious conflation, Rational Wiki, for example, compounds the matter by mistaking the Goldilocks Zone (GZ) hermeneutic of biblically informed apologetics with the theological inference of the strong anthropic principle (the fine-tuned argument proper). The GZ hermeneutic presupposes the veracity of the biblical imperative that as the home of the bearers of the Imago Dei, Earth is the theological center of the universe. It's not a general teleological argument from design for God's existence at all. Rather, It invites one to marvel at the finely balanced conditions that also prevail in our solar system for the carbon-based, terrestrial life of the image bearers, namely, human beings. Insofar as it may be asserted as an argument, it would be contingently predicated on one of the classical arguments for God's existence or on the theological inference of the strong anthropic principle, and would go toward substantiating the veracity of the biblical revelation of God as opposed to history's competing revelations of God. The Bible is the first and, aside from the Qur'an which copies the Bible, the only sacred text of history that emphatically asserts that "the heavens and the earth" were specifically designed for terrestrial life, crowned by humanity, centuries before mankind had any scientific inkling that life could only exist under intricately favorable planetary conditions. In hindsight, it would appear that only the God of the Bible knew what the rest of us didn't know until the 20th Century.
It’s possible the contributor(s) of Rational Wiki derived his fallacious conflation from the title of Paul Davies’ book The Goldilocks Enigma in which Davies summarizes the various proposals in the literature that attempt to account for the apparent fine tuning of our universe. Davies is a brilliant physicist and has a better grasp of Christian theology than most naturalists, but, apparently, he's not cognizant of the nature of the biblical hermeneutic and the logical order of predication per the fine-tuned argument of the strong, anthropic cosmological principle. This is unfortunate for those who don’t understand that Davies is not alluding to the GZ of our solar system, but to a much broader issue relative to multiverse cosmology: the principle of abundance. More on that later. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_fine_tuning
Behold another urban myth of the new atheism born of philosophical, theological and, as we shall, scientific ignorance. (By the way, for those who might be thinking that any of the other objections raised by Rational Wiki are credible—size, physical constants, ascribing probabilities and natural selection—I assure you that most of them arise out of the fallacious conflation. A few aspects of these objections derive from disinformation propagated by sources that should know better. More on that latter. The result is a stream of misunderstandings of the anthropic principle in general, misunderstandings of the finely tuned construct, misapplications of the multiverse factor, misunderstandings of the essence of the constant-equation bifurcation, presumptuous metaphysics, inherently self-negating contradictions, and bad science. Feel free to ask me about any of these objections and I'll slap 'em down for you.) Once again: (1:27 — 4:31).
GMS stupidly avers that the fine-tuned argument "is no problem for the [Yellow Puddle of Soiled Panties Analogy]" because "[t]he analogy just shifts perspectives, presenting the possibility that the universe existed first and that we in our evolution came to exist as a creature that fits its preexisting environment. . . . It entertains the thought that we are the result of adaptation to our environment, rather than our environment was built to specifically accommodate the capabilities and limitations of humans."
But contrary to what GMS claims, the theological inference of the strong anthropic principle isn't drawn from the observation that "the nature of the cosmos is such that it allows for life as we know it to exist." Straw man!
(I can hear the cackling roar of the thoughtless peanuts in the gallery as they imagine that here I contradict my observation regarding one of the urban myths of atheist apologetics, precisely because they unwittingly presuppose naturalism/materialism and, thusly, fail to grasp the teleological nature of their own reasoning and the actual ramifications thereof when they confound the logic of the scientifically informed fine-tuned argument of recent history with that of Paley's teleological argument, and/or misconstrue the contingently special argument for life from the theological perspective for a general argument for God's existence from design. Objectively speaking, I know of no philosophical or scientific reason to hold that only carbon-based life as we know it or that only carbon-based life can exist in our universe, however unlikely the latter might be. In any event, whatever form life might take in this or in any other universe would at the very least, as GMS puts it, have to conform to "its preexisting environment." In other words, GMS thinks his observation is profoundly obvious, when it's only mundanely obvious and irrelevant.)
The prevailing scientific data evinces that the range of habitable cosmologies is very narrow (finely tuned), such that the statistical odds of our universe coming up heads for any form of life at all (whether it be terrestrial life or not, intelligent life or not) from a single, unguided roll of the dice, as it were, are staggeringly unlikely! In other words, Adams and his lemmings have never understood what finely tuned means in this instance relative to the prevailing scientific data. The theological inference of the strong anthropic principle is not drawn from our extant perspective after the fact of an apparently wonderous complexity that must necessarily be a product of design at all! It is not drawn from the notion that "the nature of the cosmos is such that it allows for life as we know it to exist", as GMS claims. Turek, who understands the matter just fine, doesn't say anything about "life as we know it" relative to the finely tuned range of habitable cosmologies. Why? Because the finely tuned argument does not go to the occurrence or evolution of life in any given habitable environment after the fact; it goes to the apparent fact that the astronomical structures and systems, and the elemental diversity that are necessary for any kind of life to occur or evolve wouldn't exist in the first place if any one of the physical constants or initial conditions were significantly different in this universe or in any other.
Indeed, according to the standard model, if the strength of the cosmic inflation of the Big Bang had varied by 1 part in 10^60 the universe would have never reached the expansion phase at all, but would have collapsed back onto itself faster than you can say lickety-split!
Hello! knock knock Anybody home?
