Why scientism is bunk

As you may have read, I find fine tuning to be a weak argument - basically because it isn't clear just what is available to be fine tuned.
...
David

Let's use the example of atoms. The strong nuclear force is responsible for binding protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of an atom. If the strong force were only slightly stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life as we know it would be impossible. A stronger force would bind protons so readily that hydrogen would not exist, eliminating the possibility of water, stars like our Sun, and the chemical basis for life. A weaker force would mean protons and neutrons wouldn't bind together, again leading to a universe without atoms complex enough to build life.

I responded to the following argument "..And the worst error of scientism is basic logic, where it is conveniently not recognized that any "theory of everything" is a system of laws governing reality that has to have had some intelligent origin. Nothing comes from absolutely nothing.

The argument claims:

1. Any "theory of everything" is a system of laws governing reality.
2. This system of laws has to have had some intelligent origin.
3. Nothing comes from absolutely nothing.

The assertion in point 2 ("has to have had some intelligent origin") presumes that there must be an intelligent origin for the laws of reality without directly offering evidence or reasoning for this claim. It simply asserts it as a foundational premise. This is essentially taking the conclusion (there is an intelligent origin) and using it as a premise.
..............................

The only alternative to intelligent design considering the confluence of very many fine tuning examples in physics is that this is just a combination of many chance fluctuations in a multiverse, which notion is obviously a rejection of rationality, and therefore doesn't need argumentation against it.

However, if explanation is still needed, the consequences are:

   a. Anything that can happen, no matter how improbable, does happen countless many times in the multiverse.
   b. Anything can be attributed just as readily to intelligent design, as to chance fluctuations of for instance the quantum vacuum of the inflation field (for one        theory of the multiverse).
   c. This then renders all scientific reasoning and explanations unreliable, since one must believe in random miracles.
   
There is no way for certain to attribute events to causal physical laws. All causes as seen to be related to effects really aren't. They're just chance fluctuations, chance events. So you do away with the possibility of all scientific reasoning because scientific explanation and reasoning are unreliable. You absolutely must believe in random miracles. The scientific method is then dead. 

The notion is also self-defeating since it is itself a seemingly rational proposition.

The only alternative to intelligent design considering the confluence of very many fine tuning examples in physics is that this is just a combination of many chance fluctuations in a multiverse, which notion is obviously a rejection of rationality, and therefore doesn't need argumentation against it.

However, if explanation is still needed, the consequences are:

   a. Anything that can happen, no matter how improbable, does happen countless many times in the multiverse.
   b. Anything can be attributed just as readily to intelligent design, as to chance fluctuations of for instance the quantum vacuum of the inflation field (for one        theory of the multiverse).
   c. This then renders all scientific reasoning and explanations unreliable, since one must believe in random miracles.
   
There is no way for certain to attribute events to causal physical laws. All causes as seen to be related to effects really aren't. They're just chance fluctuations, chance events. So you do away with the possibility of all scientific reasoning because scientific explanation and reasoning are unreliable. You absolutely must believe in random miracles. The scientific method is then dead. 

The notion is also self-defeating since it is itself a seemingly rational proposition.

It seems to me this is an argument for the idea that all cause/effect relations must have a mental component, which I would agree with for varied reasons...but not sure this in itself demands that there be an intelligent designer/designers?

Let's use the example of atoms. The strong nuclear force is responsible for binding protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of an atom. If the strong force were only slightly stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life as we know it would be impossible. A stronger force would bind protons so readily that hydrogen would not exist, eliminating the possibility of water, stars like our Sun, and the chemical basis for life. A weaker force would mean protons and neutrons wouldn't bind together, again leading to a universe without atoms complex enough to build life.

Well I am aware of that, and maybe that thought is helping to convince you that the universe needs a creator, etc.

I'm pretty sure that something intelligent did create life on Earth, and maybe he/she/they/us had to create a suitable universe to do it in. However, I am not convinced that it is possible to simulate alternative universes in sufficient detail to rule out other complex possibilities that might provide the complexity needed for life to flourish.

At a more down to earth level, I am becoming less and less confident in the output of science on which all those concepts are founded.

However, this seems a rather strange discussion, since you generally seem to argue that materialism is a good enough explanation, and I argue the opposite.

Since there seems to be a lot of evidence from NDE's and similar phenomena that time is different/strange in the other realm, I'm inclined to consider the possibility that WE (collectively) created life on earth.

David

It seems to me this is an argument for the idea that all cause/effect relations must have a mental component, which I would agree with for varied reasons...but not sure this in itself demands that there be an intelligent designer/designers?

Do you know of anything other than the notion of the multiverse as an alternative to intelligent design for the source of fine tuning?

….

At a more down to earth level, I am becoming less and less confident in the output of science on which all those concepts are founded.

However, this seems a rather strange discussion, since you generally seem to argue that materialism is a good enough explanation, and I argue the opposite.

Since there seems to be a lot of evidence from NDE's and similar phenomena that time is different/strange in the other realm, I'm inclined to consider the possibility that WE (collectively) created life on earth.

David

Science does not inherently advocate for or against materialism. Instead, it serves as a method, a process for understanding the natural world. Its primary objective is to explain phenomena through testable predictions and experiments. A theory or hypothesis gains credibility not because it aligns with materialistic or non-materialistic views but because it's consistently supported by evidence.

At the very core of the scientific method lies the concept of falsifiability. This means that a scientific hypothesis or theory is presented in a way that allows for the possibility of it being disproven. Take the strong nuclear force as an example; its standing as a well-established theory comes from the fact that it has been rigorously tested and has withstood these tests. If new evidence were to challenge our understanding, the scientific community would adapt and refine its perspective.

Regarding phenomena like Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), their often anecdotal nature presents a challenge. While they undoubtedly hold profound significance for those who experience them, their varied and personal nature makes them difficult to study with the reproducibility and falsifiability that scientific inquiry demands.

Do you know of anything other than the notion of the multiverse as an alternative to intelligent design for the source of fine tuning?

1. Luck, in the sense that with a different of constants we would simply not be here.

2. Teleological principles that move the universe toward certain directions without having any definite top-down designer.

The first would seem to go against our usual expectations of what we consider mere chance versus acts of deliberate planning, but it is technically valid.

The second...I'm not sure about. It seems logically possible at least, and would be a way to connect the evidence suggestive of fine tuning with the lack of presence from any designer.

Science does not inherently advocate for or against materialism.
Instead, it serves as a method, a process for understanding the natural world. Its primary objective is to explain phenomena through testable predictions and experiments. A theory or hypothesis gains credibility not because it aligns with materialistic or non-materialistic views but because it's consistently supported by evidence.

Oh boy, do you really believe that? Science is performed by human beings with all kinds of predjuces, and it is funded by people who make no attempt to be unbiased. Do you think the scientific method is immune to such factor?

I'll give you one example, that should give you pause for thought. Dean Radin has done an immense number of experiments that test the idea that the body reacts to upcoming shocks up to 4 seconds before the shocks happen - even when their timing is controlled by a quantum random number generator. He calls the effect presentiment - you may be aware of it. He has replicated his experiment in a variety of forms, others have replicated his experiments, and he has even found a few experiments done for other reasons where it was possible to reanalyse the data to look for presentiment. Sure enough the presentiment effect was present there too.

Now Dean Radin's experiment used completely standard equipment, that is used in many conventional psychological experiments. That means that if this experiment is wrong for some trivial reason, it would be well worth discovering the error because it will happen in many other experiments too. If the effect is real, and short term precognition is happening all the time, this is utterly revolutionary!

How does science treat the preseniment experiments - it ignores them as far as possible.

At the very core of the scientific method lies the concept of falsifiability. This means that a scientific hypothesis or theory is presented in a way that allows for the possibility of it being disproven. Take the strong nuclear force as an example; its standing as a well-established theory comes from the fact that it has been rigorously tested and has withstood these tests. If new evidence were to challenge our understanding, the scientific community would adapt and refine its perspective.

Well my understanding is that the nuclear force comes from the quarks and gluons that are supposed to comprise the protons and neutrons. The trouble is, isolated quarks and gluons have never been detected, and after years of searching for these particles someone has come up with a theory that the forces involved are structured in such a way that free quarks can't be observed!

I don't see much rigor in that way of thinking.

Regarding phenomena like Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), their often anecdotal nature presents a challenge. While they undoubtedly hold profound significance for those who experience them, their varied and personal nature makes them difficult to study with the reproducibility and falsifiability that scientific inquiry demands.

Well if science can study quarks that have never once been observed, I think it could hold its nose and study NDE phenomena more seriously - or just take on board the results of those scientific studies that have been done.

Most scientific bias comes from ignoring experiments that don't agree with preconceived notions.

David

1. Luck, in the sense that with a different of constants we would simply not be here.

2. Teleological principles that move the universe toward certain directions without having any definite top-down designer.

The first would seem to go against our usual expectations of what we consider mere chance versus acts of deliberate planning, but it is technically valid.

The second...I'm not sure about. It seems logically possible at least, and would be a way to connect the evidence suggestive of fine tuning with the lack of presence from any designer.

Your first alternative doesn't seem really to be a viable alternative to me, since it is just a trivial observation of the obvious, the basic anthropic principle. And whether or not we are here, the statement makes no suggestion about the unmentioned "elephant in the room", the question of the source of the apparently finely engineered constants, the point of the whole logical exercise.

The second suggestion just kicks the can down the road a little, so to speak. It seems unlikely that "teleological principles" in the basic mathematical structure of reality could result in the fine tuning presently observed. But even if so, these "teleological principles" would then have to be much more complex and finely and intricately organized and engineered than the primary physics relations of fine tuning themselves, in order for their meta derivations and emergings to exhibit the characteristics that are observed. 

This then demands an explanation, in which the only presently conceivable candidates are either intelligent design or the multiverse. And I have already explained how an infinite multiverse fractures scientific rational enquiry and is self-defeating, therefore is not a viable candidate. 

All this is aside from the facts that the multiverse is not only unfalsifiable and therefore not a scientific proposition, but most important of all, that it is again just kicking the can down the road. This is because the incredible apparently designed structure of reality now has the multiverse level of complexity added to it, which greatly complexifies reality as a whole, and is even more demanding of an even much more intelligent designer or designers.

Since the "teleological principles" suggestion actually greatly increases the overall complexity and sophistication of the structure of reality, this points even more strongly to its source being teleological, an intelligent entity or entities, especially since in our entire experience human intelligence is the only known for certain source for large intricate, organized structures of functional complex specified information.

Your first alternative doesn't seem really to be a viable alternative to me, since it is just a trivial observation of the obvious, the basic anthropic principle. And whether or not we are here, the statement makes no suggestion about the unmentioned "elephant in the room", the question of the source of the apparently finely engineered constants, the point of the whole logical exercise.

The second suggestion just kicks the can down the road a little, so to speak. It seems unlikely that "teleological principles" in the basic mathematical structure of reality could result in the fine tuning presently observed. But even if so, these "teleological principles" would then have to be much more complex and finely and intricately organized and engineered than the primary physics relations of fine tuning themselves, in order for their meta derivations and emergings to exhibit the characteristics that are observed. 

This then demands an explanation, in which the only presently conceivable candidates are either intelligent design or the multiverse. And I have already explained how an infinite multiverse fractures scientific rational enquiry and is self-defeating, therefore is not a viable candidate. 

All this is aside from the facts that the multiverse is not only unfalsifiable and therefore not a scientific proposition, but most important of all, that it is again just kicking the can down the road. This is because the incredible apparently designed structure of reality now has the multiverse level of complexity added to it, which greatly complexifies reality as a whole, and is even more demanding of an even much more intelligent designer or designers.

Since the "teleological principles" suggestion actually greatly increases the overall complexity and sophistication of the structure of reality, this points even more strongly to its source being teleological, an intelligent entity or entities, especially since in our entire experience human intelligence is the only known for certain source for large intricate, organized structures of functional complex specified information.

I do agree that fine tuning being explained by Luck seems to be an absence of explanation in that the range for constants seems quite low to just have it all be chance.

However, I don't fully agree that teleological principles must have a top-down designer. There are Proofs of God that turn on questions such as why don't the laws change or how can there be laws at all if there is no entity making these rules and ensuring they subsist over time. But I don't think this turns on the exact constants but rather metaphysical considerations of causality itself. 

Also, it seems to me if a soul/spirit is an animating principle and-or if all causation is mental causation...then it seems that what fine tuning shows is that life as we know it would not exist but that doesn't preclude other forms of life that might be radically different from the ones whose make up falls (partly?) under organic chemistry.

All this said I do lean toward some kind of "Limited God(s?)" hypothesis over more atheistic teleology, in part for reasons Goff talks about in this Aeon article:

The Canadian philosopher John Leslie proposed an intriguing explanation of the fine-tuning, which in Universes (1989) he called ‘axiarchism’. What strikes us as so incredible about the fine-tuning is that, of all the values the constants in our laws had, they ended up having exactly those values required for something of great value: life, and ultimately intelligent life. If the laws had not, against huge odds, been fine-tuned, the Universe would have had infinitely less value; some say it would have had no value at all. Leslie proposes that this proper understanding of the problem points us in the direction of the best solution: the laws are fine-tuned because their being so leads to something of great value. Leslie is not imagining a deity mediating between the facts of value and the cosmological facts; the facts of value, as it were, reach out and fix the values directly.

It can hardly be denied that axiarchism is a parsimonious explanation of fine-tuning, as it posits no entities whatsoever other than the observable Universe. But it is not clear that it is intelligible. Values don’t seem to be the right kind of things to have a causal influence on the workings of the world, at least not independently of the motives of rational agents. It is rather like suggesting that the abstract number 9 caused a hurricane.

But the cosmopsychist has a way of rendering axiarchism intelligible, by proposing that the mental capacities of the Universe mediate between value facts and cosmological facts. On this view, which we can call ‘agentive cosmopsychism’, the Universe itself fine-tuned the laws in response to considerations of value. When was this done? In the first 10-43 seconds, known as the Planck epoch, our current physical theories, in which the fine-tuned laws are embedded, break down. The cosmopsychist can propose that during this early stage of cosmological history, the Universe itself ‘chose’ the fine-tuned values in order to make possible a universe of value.