On Saturday, April 21, 2018 I’ll be hosting a new live discussion between Luke Barnes and Alex Malpass on the Fine-tuning Argument for God’s existence. Skeptics have gone on record saying this is by far (in their estimation anyway) the strongest evidence for God. For more on the basic structure of the argument, see below. Important to note that Luke will be defending his own version.
The discussion goes live at 3pm Central (1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern) on Saturday, April 21, 2018. Here’s the link to view live (and watch later):
Click Here to View the Live Event
Luke Barnes
Dr. Luke A. Barnes is an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Western Sydney University. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney, before undertaking PhD research at the University of Cambridge. He is the author, with Geraint Lewis, of “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos
”, published by Cambridge University Press. He blogs at Letters to Nature.
Alex Malpass
Dr. Alex Malpass is an armchair philosopher. He completed his PhD in philosophy from the university of Bristol in 2011, and now he does philosophy for a hobby. He occasionally records conversations with philosophers for his podcast, Thoughtology.
The Fine-Tuning Argument
How does one explain the fine-tuning argument in a few sentences? I have an idea: check out this 6-minute video from Reasonable Faith on the argument. That should give you an idea of what the discussion will be like:
Luke thought a strength of the Fine Tuning argument is that it does not derive from top down, but from the bottom up — i.e. measurements and calculations. Alex spoke of his “mystery explanation,” which might be like a multiverse explanation. Luke said even multiverse would be found to be a case of fine-tuning.
But since measurements for a multiverse theory are not possible, it cannot enjoy the probability of fine tuning as does our existing, measurable universe. I gather from this that an untuned multiverse cannot be ruled out with any certainty.
Why do people keep saying that we could NEVER detect a multiverse? We still haven’t even figured out what dark matter is. Why do apologist assume this, they characterize the multiverse as “imagined” but it wasn’t imagined its PHYSICALLY MOTIVATED. And it “might” be that we will never detect the multiverse but we don’t “know” this yet.