COLLINS/FIESER DEBATE ON THE FINE TUNING ARGUMENT

e-mail exchange from Sept. 2002

FIESER’S CRITICISM

The religious skeptic has a response to Collins’s fine tuning argument. Suppose I walk through my yard and pick up an ordinary stone. I then consider all the conditions that had to take place for a stone precisely this shape to be located in my yard precisely where it is. If any one of a thousand factors had been slightly different -- glacier activity, yearly temperature, rainfall, soil composition, animal activity -- then the stone would not be exactly as it is. Although this may be true, I would not be justified in concluding that there must be a divine designer who fine-tuned the factors that produced that stone in its present form. Now, the skeptic would argue, the fine-tuning surrounding the stone is substantially the same as the fine-tuning that Collins appeals to in defense of a divine designer. The principal difference is that we consider the shape of a stone in my yard to be a rather trivial matter, but consider biological life on earth among the most important of all matters. From the skeptic’s position, the fine-tuning argument for God simply recognizes how fortunate we are that things turned out as they did, but it adds no evidence to the hypothesis of a divine designer. In fact, the skeptic would argue, it is superstitious to speak of divine activity anytime something fortunate happens in our lives, regardless of how much fine-tuning is involved. What if I turned left at the stoplight; I would have been killed in an accident. What if I didn’t look in the help wanted section of the newspaper; I wouldn’t have gotten this job. What if I didn’t walk into that store when I did; I would not have met my future spouse. All of these what ifs involve some subtle fine-tuning, but we should not push the issue to the point of concluding that God had his hand in these matters. Fortunate events simply happen just as do unfortunate events and even trivial ones. The fine-tuning argument presents a big “what if,” but, according to the skeptic, we should simply recognize our good fortune and leave it at that.

COLLINS’S RESPONSE

Concerning your objection to the fine-tuning argument, I think you misunderstood the version of it that I have presented.  To see this, consider the following selection out of my earliest published piece on the argument, the one occurring in the Murray volume.  After presenting the selection I will analyze where your objection goes wrong:

 Selection: We will formulate the fine-tuning argument against the atheistic single-universe hypothesis is in terms of what I will call the prime principle of confirmation. The prime principle of confirmation is a general principle of reasoning which tells us when some observation counts as evidence in favor of one hypothesis over another. Simply put, the principle says that whenever we are considering two competing hypotheses, an observation counts as evidence in favor of the hypothesis under which the observation has the highest probability (or is the least improbable). (Or, put slightly differently, the principle says that whenever we are considering two competing hypotheses, H1 and H2, an observation, O, counts as evidence in favor of H1 over H2 if O is more probable under H1 than it is under H2.) Moreover, the degree to which the evidence counts in favor of one hypothesis over another is proportional to the degree to which the observation is more probable under the one hypothesis than the other.(2) For example, the fine-tuning is much, much more probable under the theism than under the atheistic single-universe hypothesis , so it counts as strong evidence for theism over this atheistic hypothesis. In the next major subsection, we will present a more formal and elaborated rendition of the fine-tuning argument in terms of the prime principle. First, however, let's look at a couple of illustrations of the principle and then present some support for it. 

Response to Objection: Once you buy into the prime principle of confirmation, (PPC) and the premises, then the conclusion follows.  So, what you would need to do is deny one of the premises or the PPC.  The PPC shows why the fine-tuning of the stone is not the same. The reason is that it would also be very improbable for the stone to have all the fine-tuned tuned features even under the hypothesis of design, since there is no reason for a designer to form the stone with the particular features in question, versus the trillions upon trillions of other possible incompatible features.  If the stone had features that were in some way special — and such that we would expect a designer to produce — such as being what we would recognize as an art work, we would probably conclude it was designed.  Isn't this just what archeologists do all the time? The key is that the fine-tuned features of the thing you are looking at must be such that you have some expectation that they are the sort of thing that a designer would produce.  This is what allows the probability under the design hypothesis to be something more than that under the chance hypothesis.