Richard Carrier’s Rough Fine-Tuning Argument
Tim Hendrix
∗
January 2016
1 Introduction
The fine-tuning argument for Gods existence is considered by many atheists andtheists alike to be one of the best arguments for the existence of God. RecentlyDr. Richard Carrier presented what he considerd a definate rebuttel to thefine-tuning argument in his chapter of
”The end of christianity”
(TEC). Theconclusion:
1
This entails the Bayesian conclusion that the probability that Godintelligently designed the universe cannot be any higher than 15percent (and is almost certainly a great deal less than that). Thatmeans no rational person can believe the probability that God intel-ligently designed the universe is any better than 1 in 6. This meansevery rational person must conclude God probably didn’t do that.(RCB)
∗
Tim Hendrix is not my real name, for family reasons I prefer to stay anonymous. Com-ments or questions may be directed to
timhendrix@gmx.com
. This is version 2 of the document,correcting minor typographical and language errors.
1
I have tried to faithfully quote all sources, however I have in places changed typography bye.g. replacing mathematical symbols and notation with that used in this text for readability.
1
So not only is the fine-tuning argument supposed to be shown to be false, it isshown to actually work in reverse and provide evidence
against
the existence of God and this must be accepted by
every rational person
. In this article I willinvestigate Dr. Carriers argument in more details and point out where I beliveit fails.I should say this is in parts a continuation of a discussion with Dr. Car-rier on his blog which will henceforth be referred to as RCB (
Richard Carrier Blogs
)
2
. the discussion on RCB was in turn a response a follow-up of a set of articles addressing Dr. Carrier’s claims by the astrophysicist and writer LukeBarnes on his blog
Letters to nature
(LTN)
3
and subsequent discussion by Jef-frey Jay Lowder on
the secular outpost
4
; Luke Barnes has written extensivelyon astrophysics and fine tuning
5
and I strongly encourage a reader to read hisreplies to Dr. Carrier and his other articles.This response will not contain much new over what Luke has already writtenso why bother? Firstly, Dr. Carrier still accepts his arguments as being validand I believe in the subsequent discussion on RCB he has supported his viewwith additional arguments as well as made his position more clear. This articlewill respond to these points as they relate to his main arguments and hopefullyprovide a concise statement of the central objections Luke and I share. Secondly,I hope it will be helpful to re-state Dr. Carrier’s argument and my objectionaimed at a reader who is not familiar with the discussion, has not read TECand do not have a background on Bayes theorem. Notice I will solely focus onDr. Carrier’s argument and not discuss my view on the fine-tuning argumentwhich can be found in the last section for those interested.Dr. Carrier’s argument rests upon Bayesian probabilities and a Bayesianapproach to confirmation which will therefore be briefly sketched. The nextsections lays out the fine-tuning argumentin it’s classical formulation and Dr.Carriers response. The final part discusses the reasons why I consider Dr. Car-riers argument to be fallacious and various attempts by Dr. Carrier to justifyhis argument.
2 Bayesian approach to probability
A Bayesian approach to probabilities considers all statements of interest to bebinary True/False propositions, for instance:
A
=
”The next flip of the coin will be heads”
B
=
”God created the universe”
C
=
”Saturn has an even number of moons”
,
Since we do not have perfect knowledge we must reason about these proposi-tions under uncertainty. Our certainty of a proposition
A
given that another
2
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9429
3
https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/probably-not-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-richard-carrier-part-1/
and
https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/probably-not-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-richard-carrier-part-2/
4
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/01/17/dr-richard-carriers-rebuttal-to-my-commentary-on-his-exchange-with-dr-luke-barnes-about-the-fine-tuning-argument/
5
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~luke/blog/
2
proposition
B
is accepted as true is written as the conditional probability:
p
(
A
|
B
)And we say we condition
A
on
B
. We write
A
to indicate the negation of aproposition
A
(”not
A
”) and
AB
to indicate the proposition:
”
A
and
B
”
. Inthis way
P
(
AB
|
CD
)is read as
The probability
A
is true and
B
is false given that
C
is false and
D
is true
. We need one final ingredient namely the rules of probability theory. Forall propositions
A
,
B
and
C
it holds:
p
(
AB
|
C
) =
p
(
A
|
BC
)
p
(
B
|
C
)
p
(
A
|
C
) +
p
(
A
|
C
) = 1The first rule, the product rule, is saying that the probability of
A
and
B
given
C
is the same as the probability of
B
given
C
times the probability
A
given
BC
and the last rule, the sum rule, says the probability of
A
and not
A
must sumto 1. Keep in mind these rules hold in general and for all propositions. Thisdocument will only use the first rule.
2.1 Reasoning with evidence
Suppose you want to reason about a hypothesis
H
being true or not true (
H
) inlight of some evidence
E
and general background knowledge
b
. Then we can usethe product rule:
p
(
HE
|
b
) =
p
(
H
|
b
)
p
(
E
|
Hb
) and
p
(
HE
|
b
) =
p
(
E
|
b
)
p
(
H
|
Eb
).Using these two equalities it follows:
p
(
H
|
Eb
) =
p
(
HE
|
b
)
p
(
E
|
b
) =
p
(
E
|
Hb
)
p
(
H
|
b
)
p
(
E
|
b
)What we are interested in is
p
(
H
|
Eb
), the probability of
H
being true in lightof all our evidence and all our background-knowledge. It is more convenient touse the ratio of
H
against
H
:
p
(
H
|
Eb
)
/p
(
H
|
Eb
). If this ratio is larger than 1,
H
is more likely on not given the evidence. We can compute:
p
(
H
|
Eb
)
p
(
H
|
Eb
)=
p
(
E
|
Hb
)
p
(
E
|
Hb
)
×
p
(
H
|
b
)
p
(
H
|
b
)(1)Notice
p
(
H
|
b
) is the probability our hypothesis is true given no evidence calledthe
prior probability
of
H
. Usually when we consider an argument the fraction
p
(
H
|
b
)
p
(
H
|
b
)
is not very relevant since we want to examine how the evidence changesthis fraction (i.e. makes the hypothesis more or less likely than we a-prioribelieved it to be).3
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