Rebutting Multiverses, Meta Laws, and Other Materialist Answers to Fine-Tuning
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If a friend, family member, or colleague lodges an objection to the fine-tuning argument for intelligent design, are you ready to respond? On this installment of ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his two-part conversation with philosopher and intelligent design scholar Peter S. Williams. Williams reviews the most common objections to the fine-tuning arguments for intelligent design and explains why each proposal falls short scientifically, logically, and philosophically. Who knew there were over 20 objections to fine-tuning? Even host McDiarmid admits he didn’t know about all of them! The more well-versed you are in responding to objections, the better you’ll be able to stand your ground and offer substantive arguments when you hear them pop up.
In Part 1, Williams and McDiarmid reviewing two groups of objections: the “fine-tuning isn’t real” set and the “fine-tuning is real but no big deal” group. Today, Williams unpacks several objections related to the multiverse and shows why each one fails to adequately explain the fine-tuning evidence.
Williams addresses several sophisticated objections, including the idea that fine-tuning results from a more fundamental law. He uses a memorable analogy here, that of a wrinkle in the carpet, to show that this objection merely shifts the improbability elsewhere while lacking the scope to explain initial conditions. He also critiques various multiverse hypotheses, such as Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection and Roger Penrose’s cyclic cosmology. Williams says these hypotheses are often ad hoc, lack empirical evidence, or require their own finely tuned mechanisms that are more complex than what they seek to explain. And what about the idea that mathematics can bring about universes? That stripe of objection violates Occam’s razor and doesn’t hold up logically, explains Williams. A life-permitting universe, it turns out, remains vastly more probable under a design hypothesis than under the extreme improbability of naturalism.
This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation.
Dig Deeper
- Read Peter’s book An Informed Cosmos: Essays on Intelligent Design Theory.
- Learn more about Peter’s work at his website, PeterSWilliams.com.
- Miss the first half of this interview? Watch it on our YouTube channel: