Three musings on fine tuning
One
The argument from fine tuning purports that the mathematical unlikeliness of a life-supporting universe suggests a designer: If any of at least 25 parameters were a little bit off from what they are, the universe would explode or implode or not support life. The universe is finely tuned to exist and support our existence: Hence, intelligent design.
This argument isn’t hard to rebut. The puddle rebuttal is the most poetic. But there’s also the “infinite number of universes” argument. And my favorite: Maybe these values weren’t set by someone spinning a dial and arriving at just the right number. Maybe they simply are what they are; the numbers describe what they are, they don’t determine what they are.
Even if these rebuttals succeed, the math is still against us.
Two
The chances of you existing are infinity to one against, in two ways:
- There are about 50 million sperm in a. . .er–how to put this delicately–contribution. If a different sperm had won the race on that fateful occasion, the person resulting from that encounter wouldn’t be you. It would be someone else. So, even if we stipulate that your bio father meets and greets your bio mother on that occasion, the odds against you being you are 50 million to one. Go back a single generation, and the odds against you ever happening are 2.5 quintillion to one. Regress that by the number of generations of life before your grandparents. You are a mathematical impossibility.
- Let’s say you overcome those odds. After all, you did. If you throw a dart at a timeline of the universe, what are the chances of that dart hitting the span of time in which your life occurs? The universe is 13.7 billion years old and is expected to exist for about 100 trillion years. You live up to maybe 100 years. Prior to that, no you. Afterward, no you. Let’s give that dart a name: “Now.” So a priori, the chance of now falling within your lifespan is one to a trillion against. Yet here you are, right now, and I as well.
I’m sorry to say it, but the a priori chances of you and I being here now to have this conversation are zilch.
Three
And here’s proof that God is a jokester: Music itself is not finely tuned. Our basic musical scale can be represented in various ways, but among the most famous is Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do. You could probably sing that in your head or out loud right now.
The shocking truth is that the scale is loaded with minor imperfections for which musicians have spent centuries devising various coping mechanisms. I scarcely understand nor can explain these imperfections, but basically the math keeps breaking. You fix an interval in one place and it breaks another one somewhere else. The standard tuning of a piano consists of a slew of little compromises to make everything sound close enough to right. Even the circle of perfect fifths isn’t perfect–it fails to close by about a quarter of a half-step.
Music–my second favorite pastime, and the one thing you would expect to be finely tuned–is not finely tuned. Go figure.
Questions:
- Some say the “hard problem” of consciousness isn’t hard. It’s an emergent phenomenon arising from physical processes, full stop. In your view, is that an adequate solution?
- Is the math as stacked against us as I suggest? Please elaborate.
- If the math is so stacked against us, it seems we are down to either infinite chances plus survivorship bias, or there’s something funny going on. How do you roll?
- If music is from God, and God is perfect, why is music so imperfect?
- What’s Michael Stipe got to do with it?