Rosio Pavoris

I’ve touched on this before, but I didn’t give it as much attention as it deserved the last time. The fine-tuned universe argument states, simply, that there are a number of cosmological constants which are fine-tuned to allow for life to develop; if they were anything else, life wouldn’t be possible at all, and the odds of them having the values they have are extremely small. Therefore, God exists.
(Well, or some form of creator, anyway.)

There are several assumptions implicit in this. Let’s spell them out.

1. The cosmological constants could be any other value.
2. The cosmological constants are such that the universe is very hospitable to our kind of life.
3. Our kind of life is the only kind possible.
4. There is only one universe.
5. God or some form of creator is the only possible explanation, or at least the most plausible one.

Whether or not the cosmological constants involved could be a different value is open to debate, but it seems pretty likely they could be. Whether they could be any other value is a different matter entirely, and the range in which they could vary might not be as wide as all that. Still, we’ll give them this point.

The second assumption, though, should be obviously preposterous to anyone who stops to think about it. Let’s break it into two further parts: first, the claim that our universe is suited to develop life, and secondly, the claim that, that life having come into existence, it’s a hospitable place for that life to continue to exist.

It’s true that there are some physical constants that are pretty vital to life as we know it. Most of them have no bearing on life one way or the other, but that, of course, is just a minor detail. Apparently.
Either way, life as we know it requires a star, a planet close enough to it to have liquid water but far enough not to fry in its radiation, and perhaps another large body nearby to catch most stray asteroids in the neighborhood (in our case, Jupiter, and our moon). If they get as far as this, usually defenders of the fine-tuned universe point out how wonderfully fortuitous our set-up in our solar system is, and that even that cannot be the product of chance, conveniently failing to point out that not having the asteroids in the first place would be a much better set-up, and perhaps a little less radiation would be nice as well. Either way.
There’s nothing to suggest Earth is unique, or even particularly rare, so perhaps there is other life in our universe (Fermi paradox aside). Perhaps it really is supremely suited to developing life.

It sure seems to suck at keeping it alive once it gets going, though. An obvious point is the fact that the vast majority of the locations in the universe just cannot support our kind of life at all. Freezing cold almost everywhere, scorching heat almost everywhere else, killer radiation throughout (even the cosmic background radiation is enough to kill you in hours), complete lack of breatheable air, &c.
Sticking to planets, then? There seems to be a shortage of habitable planets as well. In our solar system, we have one, and we can only live on the vulnerable surface. Mars might be an option, given some creative terraforming, but out of the box, it doesn’t work.
Staying on a single planet isn’t really an option, from a survival-of-the-species standpoint. Asteroids are an obvious concern. Jupiter helps, and so does the moon, but there have been several close calls already (some not-very-close-but-still uncomfortable ones in recent history, a much closer one a while ago (though there’s an obvious explanation), and a lot of frighteningly destructive ones even further back). And of course, there are things like wandering black holes and the threat of nearby stars going supernova, among many other things. And don’t forget that eventually, our own sun will become a red giant, swallowing up the Earth in the process.
If a creator wanted life to develop in this environment, he must have been a sadist.

I’ve been careful to say “our kind of life” rather than just “life”. This leads us to the next assumption, which, incidentally, is also the reason the fine-tuned universe is often called an argument from lack of imagination: there is no reason whatsoever to believe that our kind of carbon-and-water-based life is the only life possible.
Even within the constraints of our physical constants, that doesn’t seem to be the case; why would you assume that if you vary those constants, any other system couldn’t possibly contain life, if perhaps in a rather different form than we’re used to?
It’s this part of the claim that led to the Douglas Adams quote I used last time:

[I]magine 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!’

This is a form of the weak anthropic principle, which (roughly) states that conditions observed in the universe must be such as to allow the observer to exist. On its own, this may seem like circular reasoning, but it leads us neatly into the next bit.

Is there only one universe?
String theory, of course, disagrees. It (along with some other hypotheses) predicts a large number of parallel universes (that is, a multiverse), each of which could have its own set of physical constants. In this case, a fine-tuned universe wouldn’t just not be evidence of a creator, but it’d be completely inevitable.
And of course, there’s that other theory that says black holes a universe’s way of reproducing, which would essentially subject whole universes to Darwinian selection, but I don’t know enough about that to talk about its validity, I’m afraid.

The last claim is, of course, the most important one: God did it.
As always with these kinds of cop-outs, this raises more questions than it answers. The most obvious one, of course, is “Where did this God come from?”
There can be no coherent answer to this that has anything even resembling evidence to back it up.

It’s just another retreat of the God of the Gaps, and in light of “new” developments in quantum physics, it’s looking like he won’t be able to hide there for much longer.