Is the Universe fine tuned for life? Sir Roger Penrose vs William Lane Craig

well in the contemporary literature on fine-tuning there are basically three explanatory options either physical necessity that these constants and quantities must have the values they do that it's not contingent or secondly chance and the form that this normally takes would be a kind of multiverse hypothesis and then an appeal to an observer selection self selection effect that we can only observe universes that are finely tuned for our existence so we shouldn't be surprised that somewhere in the infinite multiverse that we should appear in such a universe and then the third one would be design that there is an intelligence that is not designed the universe and Rogers a special contribution I think to this has been to place a very significant objection and question mark behind the explanation of the multiverse hypothesis between the self selection effect because if we were just a random member of a multiverse we ought to be observing a much different universe than we do I want to come to that I mean first of all on this question of fine-tuning which again we might be worth just spelling out a little bit for the audience you've yourself have have contributed interestingly to this there there's a certain aspect of reality the initial low entropy distribution of mass and energy now without getting too technical at this point this is this is essentially the the idea you were sort of alluding to earlier that at that very earliest moment that singularity a big in Big Bang cosmology there's an incredible amount of order versus the disorder the entropy that appears later on that needs to be there in order for a life-sustaining universe to be possible in fact you put this extraordinary number on it of the precision needed to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 which I'm told is if you were to try to write that down there and you put a zero on every single particle in the observe universe it you still wouldn't have enough zeros and and so this is mind boggling stuff but it appears it appears that as though some some someone as you know who was it who said someone's been monkeying with the physics what a loyal bread hall said it looks as though as as bill has said some sort of design is that to ensure that we we got here now yeah now what do you what do you say to that no I did well I'm agnostic I would say on that one you see it's not clear to me I mean people talk about about some Williams the mass ratio between the proton and the neutron and the fact that the neutron is just a little bit more massive than the proton and K is that way around the other way around and so on but but it's it's very difficult to since we only know one kind of life you see or one kind of the production of consciousness it may be very rare throughout the universe we I mean the numbers men are all me that all like all that good you see you can imagine fiddling with themselves so they were consciousness is all over the place you see I don't know you see we don't know enough about that and there are some nice examples from science fiction which show different alter I like the one Fred Hoyles idea of the the black cloud you see where this was a completely different way of imagining a conscious me ago which was this huge cosmic cloud which communicated those mists by electromagnetic signals and things ice the other story which I like to refer to is one by Robert forward which was a Dragon's egg I think was the name of story where there was a neutron star which came close to the Sun and the people on the earth went to explore it and it turned out that they were living beings on this neutron star which instead of using chemistry they use nuclear processes and this means that their lives and evolution took place millions of times faster than us and how you can make a story with us completely imbalanced was an amazing achievement I hope but but but they even had a religion which took place in the Chile's which were the inhabitants of this neutron star and when the thing came close to them they built their complete religion on the on the star which appeared you see in the do you think it's I mean these are obviously stories but do you think it's possible in a sense that some sort of conscious reality could exist even in the absence of the physical sort of carbon-based life that we we obviously need it could have been done very differently in a different totally different many different parts of the universe where the physics is very different from what it is on the earth and maybe a different kind of life could have evolved there and I have no idea I just that we don't know there are puzzles right which look like coincidental things and one of the first ones was Hoyles think about the energy level of carbon which it hadn't been there then then you couldn't have got bill what's your response to these sorts of ways of dealing with the fine-tuning well this is fascinating to me because as I understand you Roger you're not advocating either physical necessity nor chance via the multiverse hypothesis and self-selection effect nor design but rather you would simply deny the fact of fine-tuning altogether that the universe is not fine-tuned for not too strong I said I don't know you don't know yeah and to me that is highly implausible I we just find example after example of fine-tuning in contemporary physics and it seems to me to be a desperate expedient to deny that it exists in the absence of fine-tuning there wouldn't even be matter there wouldn't be chemistry so the idea that that other forms of life would evolve I think is logically possible but it's not I think the most plausible solution to the problem well I mean we just know so little about what constitutes life and how it I mean we have the universe we have and you could imagine fiddling with the numbers and making them to what extent that freedom is even there mathematically isn't clear III think we just know I mean I can see the arguments and I can see there's a case for the argument to say that okay from certain points of view it looks as though there are accidental things about the constants of nature which have allowed things to happen which if they hadn't happened we wouldn't be here and that's true but maybe some other thing would be here which could I was wondering whether you're the the conformal cyclical model in any way sort of does the job of a multiverse in as much as well if the universe has sort of had these rebirths time and time and time again perhaps we're living in the one that was habitable for human life that ability yes there could be an evolution of constants I mean this was an idea that John Wheeler put forward not with this model but with other models with a bouncing universe models that maybe each time there was a new set of constants produce and they were different each time and we happen to be living in the particular eon if I could use that word here in which the constants happen to see the kind of life at least that we experience so that's potentially a solution what do you think though that solution seems to me to fall prey to the very argument that you give against using the anthropic principle with respect to the multiverse because what you've done in trying to push the conformal cyclical model the past infinity is any fact establish a multiverse except it's sequential II ordered rather than simultaneous in that case then the question is why do we observe a fine-tuned universe like this instead of the one which is unfathomably more probable that is signal larger than our solar system a patch of order that is that big that would be unfathomably more probable than a fine-tune universe and indeed maybe we're all just Boltzmann brains with ill delusions motions on the external world around us why it falls prey to this very objection to brain it's an answer you see I'm not giving this out because I don't like it okay so yeah this isn't your favorite this it's not my favorite but it is a possible answer right the eons are different than the numbers are differ you can't different by very much from observational point of view but they I mean some of them don't different right very much but they could differ and they could have off yes it's certainly possible but then I like it but it's a possibility you

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 23,711

Keywords: unbelievable justin brierley premier christian radio christianity atheism philosophy faith theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, universe, fine tuning, cosmology, roger penrose, william lane craig, physics, big bang, kalam, big conversation

Id: OBAbjE-WOJo

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019