Common Bullshit Used to Turn You to Faith: Episode II

14Jan07

This is episode two in this series in which I take a look at some common arguments that are used to convince you either that there’s a higher probability of there being a God than there not being one, or that you’re somehow better off believing than not.

The Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle, in its weakest form, is this observation:

The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.

In other words, the values of the physical constants observed must fit the requirement that carbon-based life can evolve, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe them. This is all well and good, but some people take this further. The values of and relationships between the physical constants of the world seem to be almost magical in that only small variations would disallow for life to form at all. This, they reason, can only be because the universe was fine-tuned for life. This fine-tuning could only be done by an Intelligent Designer.

This argument has, like all the arguments from the Intelligent Design-crowd, a number of flaws. First of all, it assumes that just because something seems improbable, it is impossible. Too understand this flaw, let’s make a thought experiment. You can do this yourself, or you can just think about it. Throw five dice (or throw a single die five times). You now have a series of five numbers. What’s the probability that you’d get exactly that series? One in 6⁵ = 1:7776. That’s a 0.013% chance. Yet you got exactly those numbers. It can’t possibly be a coincidence. Or can it?

We don’t know the cause of the universe. If we did, ID arguments would either be proven or disproven. We don’t know whether there’s some meta-law behind the universe, or if its creation was totally random. Assigning various sets of physical laws probabilities seems very premature given how little we know about the conception of the universe. There are hypotheses that we might be living in a single universe out of many with differing constants or even laws, in which case the fact that we’re living in a universe habitable to life gets robbed of its mystery, given that in an infinity of universes some of them must support life.

The anthropic principle was originally meant to caution scientists that their results must match the criteria for life (i.e. data that disallow for carbon-based life to arise must be false, because we know that carbon-based life exists). It was not meant to be, and still isn’t an argument for the existence of a God. We have no access to other universes, so there’s no way for us to collect the statistics necessary to say whether our universe is remarkable or not. Intelligent Design in its various forms is not, and has never been science. It is faith rationalized and disguised as science.

Using the anthropic principle as an argument for ID is flawed at best. It is not science; there’s no way we can verify that this universe couldn’t have been created by chance. We don’t have access to other universes, so there’s no way to measure how common universes that are capable of evolving life are. We don’t know the ultimate cause of the universe, or indeed whether it has a cause at all, so there’s no way we can calculate the chances of ending up with this universe. It’s basically an attempt to rationalize faith. Ironically, faith isn’t necessary if there’s evidence, so the whole foundation of religion would basically be ripped away if ID was ever proven.

There are also some arguments against the anthropic principle itself. It might seem like an argument from lack of imagination, because it cares only about carbon-based life. This is easy to understand given that it wasn’t originally an argument for Intelligent Design, but still. Theoretically there could be other life forms not based on carbon. As far as we know, our universe has a very low density of life versus non-life. Perhaps there are other configurations of constants (and/or laws) that allow for far higher density of life. As far as we know, we are the only life forms in the universe. On one single planet, in the vast universe. Now, does that sound like the ideal environment for life as designed by God? It sure doesn’t to me. If there was a God, and that God had the amazing capabilities that the ID fanatics claim, I’d imagine the rest of the universe would be a lot less hostile to life.

See also Episode I, which looks at Pascal’s Wager (hint: it’s totally flawed) and the claim “Albert Einstein Believed in [a Personal] God” (hint: it’s wrong and the reasoning is flawed).

Filed under: atheism, bullshit arguments, philosophy, religion, superstition, theism   |  Closed