God and Cosmology: William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll in Dialogue by Robert B. Stewart

Author:Robert B. Stewart [Stewart, Robert B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506410777
Barnesnoble:
Published: 2019-06-24T19:18:18+00:00

4

The Fine-Tuning for

Discoverability

Robin Collins

I. Introduction

One of the most persuasive evidences for the existence of God from the cosmos is the argument from the fine-tuning of the cosmos for the existence of life, the so-called anthropic fine-tuning. This refers to the fact that the laws, initial conditions, and fundamental parameters of physics must be precisely set for life to exist. The relevant kind of life depends on the hypotheses that the evidence is supposed to support, which, in the case of theism, is embodied conscious agents who can interact with each other, based on what they perceive as moral criteria. For convenience, I will simply use the abbreviation “ECAs” for such agents. The most commonly cited case of anthropic fine-tuning is that of the cosmological constant.1 If it 1. More accurately, it is the fine-tuning of the effective dark energy density of the universe, which is the sum of Einstein’s original cosmological constant with various energy fields that, of themselves, would cause an accelerated expansion or contraction of the universe. However, 141

God and Cosmology

were not within one part in 10120 of its theoretical possible range of values, either the universe would expand, or collapse, too quickly for galaxies and stars to form, and hence, ECAs to exist. There have been a variety of challenges to the fine-tuning evidence itself, and whether it supports the existence of God or a multiverse. I have developed a detailed argument elsewhere2 that the fine-tuning evidence does provide strong confirmatory evidence for theism over naturalism.

Further, I have argued that the underling mathematical structure of the universe is much more elegant than would be expected under naturalism—something often noted by scientists. Here, I primarily want to explore another kind of fine-tuning and its implications for this debate: the fine-tuning of the universe for developing scientific technology and being scientifically highly discoverable, which I will just call the fine-tuning for discovery. By this fine-tuning, I mean that the laws, fundamental parameters, and initial conditions of the universe must be just right for the universe to be as discoverable as ours. After presenting examples to illustrate this kind of fine-tuning, I will argue that if this kind of fine-tuning exists, in general, it cannot be explained by a multiverse hypothesis—by far the leading non-theistic explanation for anthropic fine-tuning. Further, I will show how the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for discovery answers some other commonly raised objections against the fine-tuning argument, and finally, I will look at its potential predictive and explanatory power.

Finally, to be absolutely clear, my project in this chapter is not so much to argue for the existence of God as it is to explicate a place the cosmological literature has typically talked about it in terms of the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant.

2. Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe.” In The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, William Lane Craig and J. P.

Moreland, eds., Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 202–81.

142

The Fine-Tuning for Discoverability where there is potentially new evidence, one way or another.

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