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Daniel Greco's avatar

On the "Eulering", I think the dialectic would be different if the fine tuning argument were posed informally, and treated as a vaguely strong, but difficult-to-quantify reason to believe in God.

But it's often not posed that way. Rather, proponents will say things like: "because of fine tuning, your prior for atheism needs to be 10^kajillion times greater than your prior for theism for the posterior of atheism to remain greater than the posterior for theism." And once the argument is posed that way, I think it's absolutely fair to take the measure problem very seriously, and to treat solving it as a prerequisite for making quantitative claims about the strength of the evidence provided by fine tuning.

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JerL's avatar

I'm a *little* sympathetic to the Eulering objection, but 1) as Daniel Greco notes above, the FTA itself is a (IMO) spurious over-mathematization of a simple idea, and 2) the basic objection can be explained without fancy math: "we don't know what possible values the physical constants 'could have' taken, and we have no clear model that assigns 'probabilities' to possible values".

To me, the big issue with not being careful with the probability space isn't exactly, "you forgot to do this weird math; your viewpoint is this invalid", so much as, "by not doing this weird math explicitly you're allowing yourself to smuggle in a whole bunch of assumptions that are probably directly related to the crux of disagreement".

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