Great to hear from some exceptional minds in the different fields!

A total pleasure to spend time with smart people who treat a subject very seriously and still manage to make the arguments clear enough to follow for the layperson (even if i had to stop the video every now and then to totally get a certain point!) Thanks to all involved in producing this.

I’m scratching my head thinking - How can theists avoid the problems that arise from theistic dualism? How is mind contingent on material constants? _"under theism life could exist under any conditions"_ - Sean Carroll

We can only be sure of this: the universe is either fine-tuned or it appears to be fine-tuned based on our flawed limited observation and theory, to allow for life at least here on this one planet. And we and consciousness are here or appear to be here. Thanks for another provocative video.

I always thought the fine tuning argument was akin to claiming that Victoria sponge is so finely crafted that the ingredients moving just a little would mean other cakes don’t exist.

Thank you for doing this reply. I was hoping you all would respond to that critique! Thanks!

Yay, so excited to watch this! I'm also curious to see if Luke Barnes gets his 'real position' on fine tuning presented. He commented on the last one that we misunderstood him without him telling us what in the world he does think.

Really appreciate all the videos on this, thanks all!

Thank you Phil for this amazing video! 🙏

I respected Barnes and Goff at certain earlier times that I encountered their thoughts. I even brought up Barnes' arguments to people who dismissed fine-tuning on what I thought was an unfair or uninformed basis. I eventually discovered that Barnes was motivated by his theism rather than science. (I was so disappointed! I really thought it was an interesting scientific question why the constants are the values they are.) Seeing Goff's participation in the Capturing Christianity video made me more skeptical of his other ideas. That video prioritized theism over a dispassionate analysis of the facts. Do I know enough to critique their science? No. But I know enough to trust the scientists who are starting with the science, without a theological axe to grind, more. And again, I'm just really disappointed. Why can't interesting questions be explored without trying to turn it into a "therefore God" argument? You will never have a real "therefore God" unless God comes out and speaks for him (or her or it) self at some point. (And I mean without depending on telepathy to our minds. If a God wants to communicate to us, it has a lot of ways that could be independently confirmed.) The best you can get is "this seems unlikely" and when you're talking about universes, you don't know the landscape of possible universes and creators in the first place to know the likelihoods.

Great Video! Would love to see the video about the Mentaculus come about. Barry is not only funny but super interesting.

That's cool! I'm adding this video to my counter-apologetics playlist.

my other (!) thought is, if god has to turn the dials to just the right values, whose laws of physics is he using? he should be able to use any value he feels like.

when it comes to the multiverse - sean carroll was talking to antonio padilla about "really big numbers" where padilla suggested that if you travelled far enough for long enough, sooner or later you would encounter another milky way galaxy, pretty much identical to our own, because given the numbers and given the variations in galaxy formation, we will keep encountering duplicates of familiar places. this was interesting but kinda confused me, cos this is "the multiverse" but within the bounds of our own universe / cosmos, what am i missing?

Thanks for bringing big people.

I think it's funny how Graham is just sitting there nearly through the whole thing😂

would it be fair to say that if we assume random distribution among the possible values of the constants, then we get such a low number that the assumption of random distribution among the constants is almost surely false. So there 'has' to be a connection between them (unless we take an infinite try approach like the multiverse). Either a conscious agent setting them or them being different representations of an underlying principle (kind of like electric and magnetic effects). So is it a good argument to show that their relative values is most likely not random? Or we can't even say that?

I completely agree with Loewer that objective Bayes is completely useless, which has been known in statistics for a few decades now. It's just a made up idea to make their argument seem more legitimate.

1:11:02 _"Then Alice goes to University to read physics and she learns that the probability for life is quite low, in that case Alice is rationally compelled either to lower the [prior] probability of God or to lower the probability of life given God"_ I like this response because it turns the claim of the "objective bayesianist" against himself. If the objective bayesianist want to claim that the problems of the principle of indifference don't apply for the FTA because in the context of the FTA they are talking about probabilities that are actual in _"physical reality"_ (1), then if we indeed think that the probability that the universe is life permitting in _"actual physical reality"_ , then it would clearly indicate that the theistic hypothesis in wrong ! (1) The following is a quote from Robin Collins 1999 on the FTA : _"The proportion given by the scale used in one's representation must directly correspond to the proportions actually existing in physical reality"_

What I recognize is that the exact definitions of the physics resides in the mathematical equations that relate physical attributes. In Newtonian Mechanics, the mathematical expressions are presenting relationships that are very close to our intuitive experience. So, when describing these in prose, in the colloquial language that everyone is familiar, not much gets lost and the language doesn't skew the meaning much from what the math is explaining. Quite to the contrary, for the more modern descriptions like quantum mechanics and GR, what is being described by the mathematics is far from anything intuitive, far from what our common experience presents. The words used to describe the meaning beneath the mathematics are, at best, presenting analogies. I cannot see that, in most cases, they can be taken literally. The reality of the physics is so far afield of our experience and language that no explanation presented in prose can be used as a starting point for inferring anything beyond what is stated. Indeed, what is stated is barely able to constrain the concepts to the exact meaning of the mathematical descriptions. As I listen to the apologists, what I see is that they continuously interpret the prose in a manner that is not what the math and the physicists intend and in a manner that is misleading and based on what they want it to mean to justify their a priori conclusion.

1:29:54 _"I'm suggesting is that you know so you realize that you're not a pulseman brain some of these hypotheses uh have balls and brains of predominate but and so those certainly take a hit"_ Godda love KZfaq automatic transcription !

Do you think you could do a similar video with philosophers and ethicists responding to this philosophical argument called "name-the-trait"? CosmicSkeptic, RationalityRules and Matt Dillahunty debated it and its a popular argument for vegan ethics online. It would be cool to see what professional philosophers and ethicists think of it.

Omg a new skydivephil vid!

If the multiverse is real then one of two things is possible: 1. Universes all have different values of constants 2. Universes all have the same values of constants

Am I wrong in thinking that there is no computer model for our universe let alone any other universe - that is something where you could play with the "tuning" (of whatever) and see what sort of universe would be produced? If they had actual data to look at, you would think they would show it.

There is life, because life is possible.

Vilenkin published a paper in 2021 ("Black holes and up-tunneling suppress Boltzmann brains") proving that Boltzmann brains are not more common than ordinary observers in the multiverse. So, I guess that settles it.

This was frustrating. Why not just have Goff and Barnes sit down and talk with Loewer and Priest (or whoever)? Having the conversation always one step removed makes it hard to get clear on where exactly the disagreements lie and why exactly each side lands where they do.

My first response upon learning that Trump was going to be president was to intuitively exclaim, “There is no god!” 😂

I would like an artificial intelligence to try to make sense of some of these questionable arguments.

I am waiting for Alex(CosmicSkeptic) and Joe(Majesty of Reason) and Phil to get together in one frame! That’s my dream hopefully one day!🙏🏽

I daw Barry in Newark airport some months ago, wanted to say hi but couldn’t get myself to do it😂

1:12:28 Law of excluded middle.

17:14 Doesn't Swineburne treat theism as a scientific hypothesis?

The universe isn't "Fine tuned for us" The universe is what it is, & we are what grows under these conditions.

needs to be a curve over the space of options and the integral of the probability dist needs to be 1, simple. or you have a deterministic situation where probabilities are just not there really, but can be estimated for some sort of dist you sample or something. who cares? in terms of empirical knowledge we have an uncountable set of things we could measure and at most a countable infinity of things we end up measuring so we are shit out of luck with respect to getting 100% confidence in anything except datapoints not coinciding with a certain model.

I agreed with Luke and Goff's point about the orginal title and I'm glad you changed it and made the purpose as a polemical film clear in your description. I wish you had titled your responses to Kalam a similar way tbh.

I tried to explain all this to Goff a while back but he just blocked me. Hopefully he respects you guys enough to get the point. He just couldn't catch on to the idea that if we are being indifferent towards the possibility of circumstances then we should be indifferent on the question of whether or not the universe could be different at all. It's like he won't let go of the idea that if he thinks something could have been different then it had to be able to, can't realize that conceivability isn't a direct indicator of real possibility.

As an empirical observation it is axiomatic that the universe is conscious. Not by outside agency but inherant .

"God loves boltzmann brains". Love it!

Maybe if consciousness is understood this problem will go away because it will be understood that fine tuning results from consciousness. Consciousness means awareness so that cannot leave out a cosmic mind or intelligence which is generally referred to as god. So it happening without consciousness or mind is not easy to imagine or to even make sense.

By just accepting a parameter can vary, you’re letting the idea of a multiverse in. Either there’s a degree of freedom and that’s a form of multiverse or there isn’t and the probability of our universe is 1.

They are just trying to suggest they happen to be naturally ugly guys, and that God could not have done that.

Dan linford has a wise face in addition to his wise mind. 😊 I liked the point he made when he said "small relative to what?" Actually I am writing a book that kind of has an answer to it.

I like the fine tune argument. It comes down to the universe being too special, so something must be responsible. Of course objection to the special means that the something responsible can't be too special 🙃

which is why science is in the business of proving shtuff wrong not right, but anyway we can find a theory that explain everything in a self consistent way, without options in that manner of description and then find it is always in agreement with measurements, and then we have a sort of system, that is not necessarily correct but as close at possible. we are not there yet, we still have options. but its quite boring to talk about metaphysics outside such a model with no ambiguity and that we cant poke holes in theoretically. seems to me its okey to have effective theories that have as few holes as possible, but its also okey to have attempts at final theories that really cant have any holes as long as you admit it has to do the job in a way where you cant poke any holes in it theoretically or empirically, my view is that the dynamics of a final theory has to be encoded in the state of the system, such that the exact laws and state of nature is restricted to one and only one configuration, thereby making the theory completely free of tuning, meaning with the right principles with respect to how all subsystems relate to each other you only have one choice for the entire thing as long as you define any part of any subsystem faithfully. for example a traditional classical theory postulates that all matter follows the same laws of nature, meaning the action for one trajectory has the same dependence on the environment as any other path, this leaves the only ambiguity as the state of the whole universe with respect to each subsystem, at least approximately and in special cases you can get substitutions of other subsystems that will have the same effects on another subsystem. for an action that is defined by the state of the whole and the subsystem itself by proxy you would get something equally well defined without any defined action in mathematical terms other than the effect of the exact state of the system/subsystem in question, but then you need the relationship between the different subsystems to be related as strongly or more so than in the case of fundamental entities subject to the same physical law, or different physical laws even. the point is you need each subsystems evolution to be perfectly defined by its relation to other subsystems, such that picking an exact state gives you exact dynamics as well, this isn't the case for fundamental entities subject to arbitrary laws of nature, you need to specify laws for each type entity or a set of different laws for each subsystem, but in either case you have a free choice of evolution that is independent of the initial condition, and you can put together a theory that has no such free choice, and then you have a completely self consistent and un-tune-able representation of the world. if you can figure out how to do that it might still be the case that this one allowable state that satisfy the constraints you need for realism has different subsystems that look more or less similar at a point in time, and so you will not be able to know in which part you are just by knowing the approximate state, lets imagine you could search for segments of history to pop up, or some long sequence of random ups and downs you got in an experiment, maybe look up the lottery numbers from all the lotteries you have ever gotten or something, you might then get some solution close to the world we live in and maybe after checking more and more historical facts you can predict the future more or less at all scales accurately until next Tuesday but then even the cases that share your past almost exactly might diverge chaotically. whether we get some description with no choice or not, we will still have trouble with probabilities because quite likely the description in full will contain subsystems that do just about anything remotely sensible. we will probably stay in the realm of effective theories is my guess in terms of practical physics, but as a metaphysical system there is nothing wrong with asking whether such a description even if not expressible is still faithful to the world as it is. the main point of arguing for such a thing anyway, is to say that we should be really careful about treating laws of nature that might be effective as fundamental, thats all.

NUMERO UNO!

If Dr. Linford is right about fine tuning in the physicist's sense when "fine" means something like exact or precise? Why not say that a theory is imprecisely or inexactly tuned? When Google quoted its Oxford dictionay's senses of that word, none of them suggested any flaw in anything. But Dr. Linford seems to think that in physics, any finely tuned theory is imperfect. "Fine" can also mean admirable as in "a fine opera-composer." The physicist's sene of "fine tuning" seems strange and unintuitive.

Surely, if our universe needed to be fine tuned for us to exist, there must be someplace, some meta universe where God exists. Who fine-tuned that meta universe for God?

somebody should calculate the probability that the fine tuning defenders are all believers.A pretty big number that you should take in account for intellectual honesty.

Why does this sound just like modern politics/news?

Took millions of years for life to even be a thing so how is it that the unverse is "tuned" for life again? Its so silly. Theists will say anything to get to the god they beleve in.

Of course there is a designer, just concider the fine tuning of the female body. It’s an absolutely brilliant design

What is the point of studying all this knowledge if, on the most important question, your going to say, "I don't have a clue!"

fine tuning has nothing to do with the universe, just a theory space, and assigning probabilities in an absence of such a space is meaningless and assigning probabilities for expectations in absence of a model of the world and taking data points from the world is also arbitrary :P. there is nothing wrong with a universe with only fixed dice that come up only 6 and 3, but in the world we find dice that equally distribute roughly speaking over each side. i think people are just confused about what probabilities are in relation to the world and to theory really, we can build distributions for anything we like and then see if we can find analogs in the real world, its kind of boring to reify the models outside some sort empirical inquiry, or in some sort of systematic inquiry into the mathematics of possible distributions, well defined ventures are nice, but mixing the two without any clear guidelines seems just to be a kind of numerology as metaphysics. what i argue is possible in terms of dynamics being fully dependent on the state of the world in a concrete way is a completely deterministic situation where you have no choice what so ever in the laws of nature or the state if you represent any subsystem in a completely accurate way, but it is also not necessarily possible to do so faithfully, so any partial expression might just be like an effective theory anyway, so the choice of how to define an effective theory is free, as long as it gives definite results for experiments, however as a metaphysical foundation you can argue about the structure of a fully state dependent law of nature and what it means for effective theories, one thing that is immediately obvious is that if there is such a faithful description of nature, one would expect all the different scales to have some aspects of almost irreducible probabilistic nature as if they originate in stochastic processes even if the processes can be structured in a such a way that subsystems can be correlated in a contextual way. but whatevs :)

If the level of order in the universe requires an intelligent agent, that intelligent agent would have to be so highly ordered as to also require an intelligent creator by the logic of theistic fine-tuning. Theistic fine-tuning implies *an infinite regression of ever-greater gods.* They try to extricate themselves with special pleading, e.g. “I define my god in way that it is the exception to order requiring an intelligent creator.”

And i'm sorry but subsystems being perfectly correlated in some way with all other subsystems by the state on its own and that defining the dynamics is a sensible idea whether you think so or not. might not be practical to express anything in that form, but given that it could easily be true without being in conflict with any empirical points of data or theorems in mathematics, nor is logically inconsistent in any way i have heard of, its the case that our metaphysics so to speak should take this into account as a non necessary but possible way to get laws of nature and so we should be careful about arguing about the foundations of physics so liberally as if saying something not effective. this picture for example can contain all the features of many worlds without a single branching, and no objective probabilities with room for correlations between subsystems being as weird as you like when viewed from an effective point of view.

1:00:00

You should start hosting debates, get luke Barnes or craig on one side and someone else on the other. It will be really nice

Eternal Inflation Theory is still the leading candidate as the choice among a large plurality of credentialed theoretical physicists. The only remaining significant problem besides observational evidence, is the so called measurement problem. It is well on its way to being overcome. Reference: Alan Guth. The theist argument for fine tuning? It always was & will always remain, a circular argument

if the chances of life are so incredibly unlikely, that seems and odd route for god to take, surely god's odds are 1:1 not bzillions to one.

It's all speculation if we can't reproduce these conditions some sentient being did it for us and we have to understand what is thought that's right the mind

How do we know that any of these "thinkers" are competent? Has anyone ever asked an artificial intelligence if what they're saying makes linguistic sense?

The question is why is there complexity! Proposing a greater complexity in the form of a god is a logical failure, particularly when complexity can be seen to arise naturally; in stellar fusion, biological evolution, or as a simple example, in Conway's game of life.

They dont want god forever thy will be Done

If your father never met your mother you would not exist. The fact that you do exist is not an argument that your father meeting your mother was fine tuned.

if you know which door a fella might open, then well anything could happen.

We have to *assume that there is no omni god or that it isn’t interactive* in order to have meaningful conversations If there is an Omni god, these discussions are pointless, because it can change our minds, the evidence, and what we hear others saying. And the god(s) of the Bible does similar things.

can god create life using only one particular set of constants? if yes then god is not all powerful. can god create life with any set of constants? if yes then why speak of fine tuning?

In a moment of crisis of physics like we're are now into physicists really need to sit around a table and discuss some good philosophy

*God wouldn’t create anything* if it wants perfect morality, obedience, etc, because it already has all those things in itself

we just got lucky to exist in a universe like this, i guess...

Physics becoming the new metaphysics. Multiverse or God. Both are metaphysics aproaches to reality.

The universe isn’t fine tuned. Life is fine tuned to the universe through evolution. If the physics of the universe were different then a different kind of life would evolve

I mean... god, who is god (almighty I say, not peanuts) created a universe in its almost total entirety cold, deadly, uninhabitable, but in which in certain rather rare circumstances life can develop naturally? In short, a smart guy... (If he is omnipotent he is at least an a smart guy... he I say, I didn't say who believes him eh...). I wrote 'naturally', but maybe those guys are saying that god created the stage first and then had to intervene again to create life? Are we still talking about science? Nh... ok o_0 :| :* :] ^^

1:08:34 Luke Barnes : _"It's not that there is this low probability that just exists there [...] the probability space changes entirely..."_ If Luke Barnes is an "objective bayesian" then yes, there is an objective probability that _"exists there"_ and objective probabilities cannot _"change entirely"_ . I know objective bayesianism was the position defended by Philip Goth, and not Luke Barnes. So I don't know if Luke Barnes is an objective bayesian. I guess this is more a response against Philip Goth than Luke Barnes.

God really like phenomenon P. 99% of all universes have P, so God is happy. Unfortunately it so happens that life exists in the 1% of universes that do not have P. So God doesn't care about life at all. He cares about P

Why stop at the multiverse why not trillions of multiverses each with trillions of universes. I am calling it the megametaverse there could be trillions of megametaverses call it the multimegametaverse we should look at the bigger picture.

Biological cells exist that are extremely complicated and are based on established chemistry and physics. The existence of cells can only be explained by Intelligent Design.

Poor audio

all of this having nothing to do with bob gob or god really :P

Whatever happened to critical thinking?

Principle of indifference: either it happens or it doesn't, so the probability is 50/50

Religion, real arguments? That just ain't possible. Religion has never been based on anything real. If one needs to base arguments on religious books, there can be no true argument.

Still luk for anser fill. So sad.

Please do not speed up "quoted" videos: it makes it difficult for older people to follow.

Sorry but there never was real good case anyway.. actually you could with equal arguments say that the universe was fine tuned for neutron star collisions.. or supermassive black hole mergers etc...

I do not subscribe to the notion that any refutation of fine tuning has occurred here. Here is an interesting look at the fine tuning argument: Ever played the game Riven? At the start of the game there is a rotating chamber that rotates a cycle when you press a button. It reveals a door, a slit where you can see the interior ,or most of the time, you just see a wall. My view of fine tuning goes a similar way. Although it is possible that an omnipotent God could create life anywhere, it dismisses the statistical significance that life has occurred within a narrow range of values. So while you are not given access to the room, you can still see the inside via the slit!

I don't take advice from anyone who says God should not have made Trump.

I do not understand why this discussion is necessary. There is nothing "fine-tuned" about our world. Our world - and every thing in it - is a happy result of the physical/natural forces that exist. No "designer" required.

I’m don’t believe in atheism

The religious,want there to be a god.To justify their fantasy of there being one.

Speak louder