Physicists & Philosophers debunk The Fine Tuning Argument

(We define God as a perfect Omni immaterial mind as for example modern Christians and Muslims advocate, there are other conceptions of God which our video does not address).
Just to be clear, this is a polemical film arguing against the fine tuning argument.

Timecodes

0:00 Introduction
4:11 The universe as a roll of the dice
6:15 what is probability?
7:28 probability problems
9:25 measure problem
15:45 deceptive probabilities
20:23 the flatness problem
22:14 counterfactuals versus probabilities
23:59 fine tuning versus God
37:02 necessity
38:53 multiverse and anthropics
47:34 Boltzmann brains
49:45 Entropy
52:45 Cosmological Natural Selection
59:10 conclusion

[allgodsmyth]

Skydivephil once again assembles a magnificent array of brilliant minds, this time deconstructing the fine-tuning argument from many different angles. Well done - you and your team do a great service to science, philosophy, and humanity!

[invisiblegorilla]

I can't smash that like button enough! Excellent work as usual Phil! Thank you.

[carlmurphy]

What this illustrates is that an argument that can be stated in 5 minutes needs an hour to debunk, which is why throwing out four or five of these arguments in a debate is a sneaky tactic since in order to properly refute the arguments the debate opponent would need far more than the allotted time to adequately point out the flaws in the argument.

[mikesmith]

Wow! An ensemble of people with brilliant minds who can nevertheless express their arguments with such clarity for a lay person like me. The best thing I have watched in ages, thanks.

[papsaebus]

This has got to be the greatest channel on YouTube ❤‍🔥

[sciphon]

It must've cost Phil a LOT to make all these high quality documentaries.

[LukeABarnes]

I wonder what would happen if, say, one of the people shown on screen at @32:37 turned up in the comments and said: "I have numerous times - in a published book, peer reviewed papers and in talks - explicitly **denied** the view that this video attributes to me. It is exactly what I don't believe."

Prediction: this comments section will be totally fine with it. No one will think that misrepresentation is a problem. No one will suspect that it flushes all credibility of this video down the toilet. No one will suggest that skydivephil should amend the video. Commenters will change the subject and make snarky comments about something else.

Let's see, shall we?

[CosmoPhiloPharmaco]

Man, I can't imagine how much work Phil must have put into it to produce this masterpiece.

[Bob-of-Zoid]

As a guitar builder I too am into fine tuning! 😂 Oh, and EXCELENT as usual Skydivephil! You rock!

[lilrobbiek]

Yet another fantastic video! This channel should be fine-tuned to have an infinite amount of subscribers.

[LomuHabana]

It’s a shame that a YT channel which interviews some of the smartest people on earth, the real experts on the subject who give valuable insights, gets relatively few views, while the videos of apologists like Craig get millions of views even though their rambling is nothing but hot air.

[whiteninjaplus]

Its fun hearing the same objections I've independently found to this argument put into different and more elegant ways. For example at 17:11 I always thought of this type of thing as someone asking, what are the chances of water just freezing? It's a meaningless question. If the conditions are right it will freeze. There are no odds.

[AhmedDahshan_]

Man your channel and your team are so lovely and your products are of high quality! Thanks!
Skydivephil doing God’s work!

[rogermills]

I really loved the lentils and the black beans example. Until you understand the processes at stake, how can you ever assign probabilities?

[garybala]

Many thanks for “fine-tuning” this impressive video. Alas, I fear however that in a vast multiverse landscape, there are innumerable such “fine-tuned” videos, thus rendering it repetitive rather than fine-tuned.

[mickmccrory]

The Universe isn't "Fine tuned for life."
Life is fine tuned for this Universe.

[hp]

I never understood this fine tuning for life argument: at least 99% of the universe is extremely hostile for life.

[MaverickChristian]

A few comments:

7:21 to 8:10 - A flagrant omission here is epistemic probability of objective evidential relations (e.g., it's an objective fact that the scientific evidence supports evolution). (Yes, epistemic probability is addressed in a later video, but this segment gives the false impression that this sort of epistemic probability isn't a standard probability interpretation).

8:42 to 8:58 - Short answer: no it doesn't, and this can be shown with the help of math. See Wolfgang Tschirk's "The Principle of Indifference Does Not Lead to Contradictions."

15:45 to 20:23 - This misses the point. Even if you assume that the fundamental constants are physically necessary, we can just as easily imagine a physical necessity to land on one of the far larger regions of life-prohibiting ranges. You'd just be pushing the same problem back a step. Matthew O'Dowd raises the same point at PBS SpaceTime ("Can You Observe a Typical Universe?" in 15:26 to 16:21; see also 14:20 to 15:26 responding to those who would deny fine-tuning), noting that a multiverse explanation is preferable.

23:59 to 37:02 - The fact that God doesn't need certain physical configurations for life to exist may be true but it's irrelevant and does nothing to refute a design inference. To give an analogy, suppose a meteorite shower clearly spelled out on the moon the first four verses of the Gospel of John in New Testament Greek, and scientists learn that certain parameters were fine-tuned for this meteorite shower text to appear such that if the parameters were altered even slightly, no meteorite shower text would appear. The reply, “God wouldn’t need certain physical configurations for that message to appear” would be true but would also be impotent in refuting a supernatural explanation. To claim that God's omnipotence would rob him of any motive to design the universe this way (at around 23:28 to 23:44) is false; one possible motive would be to imprint an earmark of design for future scientists to discover.

32:36 to 32:41 - This is a straw man of what Luke Barnes actually believes. He doesn't believe or claim that fine-tuning is _likely_ given theism, just that it's not vanishingly small.

37:02 to 38:53 - Apply the "maybe the parameters are necessary" to the fine-tuned meteorite shower scenario and see what happens.

My thoughts: a multiverse explanation is by far the best hope the nontheist has to avoid a design inference, but a satisfactory multiverse hypotheses must meet a number of desiderata for it to be a better explanation than design (e.g., the mechanism for generating multiple universes must not itself require fine-tuning, it must avoid the Boltzmann brain problem, etc.) and it's unclear at best that there is a current multiverse hypothesis that meets all the desiderata (it largely depends on who you talk to). See Capturing Christianity's "Philip Goff and Luke Barnes DEFEND the Fine-Tuning Argument" video for more.

[Carlos-flch]

Phil. You keep doing this amazing work. It should be compulsary material on schools all over the world. People have so many believes that are based on absolutely nothing at all presented by people like WLC who have the gift of making stupid nonsensical claims sound logic and resonate with your intuition. I readily hace to admit that this one is easier to fight than the Kalam once you get people to understand that a value of a constant has no correlation whatsoever whit it's probability distribution. But getting people to see that is hard with those thought leaders who Keep on pretending that it does. Thanks a lot man.

[tedgrant]

The universe must be fine-tuned otherwise I would not be able to play Bach's 48 preludes and fugues.