Last month I caught up on an old thread with On the Bayesian Reversal of the Fine Tuning Argument by Sober, Ikeda, & Jefferys (against Barnes & Lowder). Luke Barnes has now thrown up a bunch of responses that are even more bizarre. One of the things I observed is how he never addresses any of my actual arguments. And now he keeps doing this yet again. And I think he sincerely doesn’t even know this is what he is doing. It looks like he delusionally believes I argued things that I didn’t, and delusionally doesn’t see the things I did argue, even when I explain them to him. I don’t know how to interact with someone like that. And on top of that, now he seems to be contradicting himself and isn’t aware he is. This is genuinely strange.

Because continuing this looks impossible—Barnes has so consistently ignored what I actually say, that I do not see the likelihood of his ever actually responding to me, making any further engagement a waste of my time—this might be the last time I bother addressing him. I’m giving him one more shot only because he’s supposed to be an actual cosmologist and not some rando. But be aware, yet again, he is already refuted by everything I already actually wrote in the original TEC article and in my latest reply to him (with one exception I’ll get to below). So honestly, you could just go back and read those. That’s all you need to see how irrelevant or wrong everything he keeps saying is. But I’ll survey it anyway.

I shall be ignoring everything he says that he doesn’t back with any argument or evidence (all his complaining, for example; all his unsupported assertions, about me or what I claim or argue; and so on). He makes a lot of assertions (such as that I didn’t do one thing or another; or that he doesn’t have to address one argument or another) but never shows this is the case. Those claims I am disregarding as undefended. You should too. If he doesn’t back a claim, if he just asserts something, you should discard it as unverified. But some of his claims he at least sort of tries to justify. Those I’ll address point by point.

Parts One & Two

Barnes has replied with a post in several parts. Here are the only points he makes in entry one that he presents any case for:

(1) The first argument Barnes makes is:

Deriving frequencies from reference classes is trivial—you just count members and divide. The problem that references classes create for finite frequentism is their definition, not how one counts their members. So, Carrier doesn’t understand the reference class problem.

This is not true. I discuss the problem extensively in Proving History (e.g. pp. 229-56; see also index, “reference class”). Once again, Barnes ignores everything I actually say, claims I said nothing about it, and makes a false assertion in result. His link is irrelevant. He never explains how this problem affects my argument in TEC. He also doesn’t explain how it isn’t the exact same problem for proponents of the fine tuning argument. Consequently, his first argument lacks any substantive content relative to this debate.

(2) The second argument Barnes makes is:

Carrier’s approach to probability is inconsistent. He keeps shifting the goalposts. In TEC, when talking about a cosmic designer, he says “Probability measures frequency (whether of things happening or of things being true)”. Only known cases, verified by science, can be allowed in a reference class. But now, in OBR, it’s OK to put hypothetical possibilities in a reference class.

This baffles me. Because if he actually thinks you can’t put hypothetical possibilities in a reference class, then he must conclude the fine tuning argument invalid. Because if you can’t put hypothetical possibilities in a reference class, you can’t put hypothetical universes in a reference class. And if you can’t put hypothetical universes in a reference class, you can’t make any claim about the frequency of those universes that would or would not bear life. Ironically, he almost is here getting precisely the point I myself made when I cited the McGrews paper at him demonstrating pretty much this very point: that the fine tuning argument is a non-starter because you can’t generate any usable probability for it.

Notice, once again, this is yet another argument of mine that Barnes ignores.

Notice, also, that my argument in TEC does not require solving this problem. At no point does it involve calculating the frequency of universes that would bear life among all possible universes. I don’t even do that in my multiverse argument (see below). That Barnes doesn’t notice this, is just about the Platonic ideal of what I’m talking about: Barnes is not even addressing anything I have ever argued!

(3) The third argument Barnes makes is an extension of that one:

This destroys his argument on page 282-3 of TEC, in which Carrier distinguishes cases that science has verified from “alleged cases”, which must be excluded from the reference class. But alleged cases are logically possible, so they should have been included all along, according to OBR.

This makes no logical sense. Once again, he thinks somehow I am running frequency estimates in the later argument (about fine tuning), when I am not (in fact, that we don’t have to is the argument). But worse, he ignores the actual conclusion of the section he is now talking about, which is that the prior probability the universe was intelligently created I will regard for the rest of the chapter to be 25%! Barnes is not even arguing here against my conclusion! He is therefore not arguing against anything I actually said. Again.

At my most charitable, I can suppose maybe Barnes means this as a meta-argument, not against anything I actually argued (about what prior to use in the fine-tuning argument, or later about the fine-tuning argument), but against what he thinks is an inconsistency in how I estimate frequencies in general, even though it has no bearing on anything we are debating. But even then his statement is bizarre. When I talk about the prior on pp. 282-83 of TEC, I mention we have to exclude “alleged cases” of confirmations of supernatural agency from our knowledge-base, because we don’t know they were or would have been confirmed, so we can’t count them as having been confirmed—a fundamental axiom of science. Why Barnes is now against science, I don’t know. But Barnes is actually now saying that because it is logically possible that we might be able to confirm instances of supernatural agency someday, that therefore when we ask how likely that is based on past cases, we should count all supernatural agency claims as already having been confirmed to be actual supernatural agency claims! That. Makes. No. Fucking. Sense.

I cannot fathom why Barnes would ever say this.

Probabilities must be based on knowledge. Even in hypothetical sets, things we don’t know about the set have to be excluded as not being known.

Notably, this is what I keep explaining to him about all the physics papers on fine-tuning he cites: they lack sufficient information to make usable claims for a fine tuning argument. Barnes never responds to any of my arguments on that point. He just gainsays the point, as if I made no arguments.

(4) The fourth argument Barnes makes is:

A fine-tuned universe is 100% expected on atheism if and only if observers are 100% expected on atheism. Observers are not 100% expected on atheism, because most possible universes do not support observers—that’s the point of fine-tuning. Thus, a fine-tuned universe is not 100% expected on atheism.

Technically this I should include in the set of mere assertions. Since there is no actual argument here. Just an assertion. But I include it as a representative example of an assertion I refuted in detail in TEC and again in my latest reply. Barnes just keeps ignoring everything I said and claims to have refuted me. He can’t have, since he never even addresses any of my arguments. Which already refute him. This is maddening. Why do I bother?

One more time:

Yes, less than 100% of possible universes will contain observers; but those other universes will never be observed; therefore, we can’t be in one. The fact that we are observing, entails we are in an observable universe. So we cannot use that fact to distinguish what caused this universe to exist. All atheist universes with observers in them will be fine-tuned. Thus, since fine-tuning exists in all atheist universes, it cannot be evidence against atheism. We thus are left to decide on the prior probability. Which is an entirely different question. One that does relate, for example, to what Barnes dismisses as the threshold probability of fine tuning, but he shows no signs of understanding what that’s based on or why it’s relevant. Nor does he propose any alternative to it. He also shows no signs of understanding the relevance of prior observations as well, such as I discuss in TEC, pp. 282-83. Again, Barnes is simply dismissing and thus ignoring everything I argue.

I’ll also reiterate a point I made last time, that still seems to elude Barnes, that “less than 100% of possible universes will contain observers” is actually just as true on theism as on atheism. Since the assumption that God would ever or only make inhabited universes is actually unjustified by any evidence or logical entailment. So you have to arbitrarily choose a God with the requisite motives out of the set of all possible gods to get observers on theism, just as physics had to arbitrarily choose a universe with the requisite features to get observers on atheism. And so far as we know, it’s a wash. We can’t show one more likely than the other (as I explained in detail in my last reply). Worse, it just so happens, that more God universes aren’t fine tuned than atheist universes, because gods don’t need finely tuned universes. Another argument Barnes keeps repeatedly ignoring.

I know it’s futile. Barnes ignores everything I say. But for my non-delusional readers, this is how it breaks down. When ~e = a non-fine-tuned universe, then P(~e|God) is more than 0. Just for illustration, let’s say it’s 60%, since there are so many better universes a God could make without the limitation of finely tuning obscure physical constants. So imagine for a moment that 60% of all the universes God could make do not require such fine-tuning. Thus, P(~e|God) = 0.60. But if P(~e|God) = 0.60, then it is necessarily the case that P(e|God) = 0.40, since P(e|God) is necessarily the converse of P(~e|God). And P(e|God) means P(fine tuning is observed|God). So on this illustration, fine tuning is only 40% expected on theism. It is by contrast 100% expected on atheism. Because P(~e|Atheism) equals flat out zero. If atheism is true, then there are no universes we could ever observe ourselves in that would not be finely tuned.

All the objections Barnes tried to raise against this were already in fact dealt with in TEC, as I explained yet again in my last reply, where I reiterated and explained those objections. Barnes still ignores every single one. He thinks he isn’t ignoring them. He keeps making arguments. But none of them address any of my arguments. Barnes has still not even indicated that he understands what my arguments are. Because he thinks he knows what they are. But he is arguing with a delusion of me in his head. Not with the actual arguments I have made. And there is no point arguing with someone like that.

(5) The fifth argument Barnes makes is:

Carrier’s discussion of the multiverse uses a different approach to probability, one that is inconsistent with the approach to probability applied to fine-tuning elsewhere in TEC. This inconsistency undermines his entire approach—the goalposts shift at will.

Ironically, now Barnes is moving the goal posts by changing what his argument was. Originally it seemed he was trying to make an argument about our supposedly being unable to develop a probability distribution over an infinite space for the purpose of calculating the probability of a life bearing universe among all possible universes—a point that in fact I have agreed with (I even cited a formal paper demonstrating it)—but anyone who concedes it, must concede the fine tuning argument is invalid. Barnes does not seem to recognize this consequence. Even though I have said it to him multiple times now. And yet he contradicts himself elsewhere by insisting we can develop those infinite probability distributions. He can’t decide which it is.

Again, nowhere in TEC do I use an infinite probability distribution. It seems like Barnes is admitting this now. So maybe he will confess that this argument of his has no relevance whatever to my argument in TEC. To again try to be as charitable as I can, I will assume Barnes meant to be criticizing a completely different argument of mine (which I completed here). There, I do not attempt to calculate a probability! Rather, I show that whatever probability would result given a certain set of assumptions (which assumptions I clearly state), it must be infinitesimally close to 100% that there would be a life-bearing multiverse.

To head off Barnes-style misreading here, let me reiterate that that argument is only based on stated assumptions, and explicitly says the conclusion does not follow if we abandon one of those assumptions; it also shows the consequences of abandoning any of those assumptions. And also, one must be clear, that to say we don’t know how to calculate that probability is not the same thing as saying that we can say nothing at all about that probability. This is easily shown by simply doing it all with finite probability distributions, and then using the method of exhaustion (increasing the finite number of universes logically possible) to show near where the probability is going to be, even though we can’t get all the way to precisely what it is. Barnes never addresses any of these points.

So, not only does this have nothing to do with my Bayesian argument in TEC, and not only it does it not use Bayesian arguments at all (and so is irrelevant to any debate over my use of Bayes’ Theorem), it’s a completely different argument based on completely different premises, not a single one of which Barnes interacts with.

Now, having moved the goal posts himself, Barnes accuses me of moving the goal posts with his bizarre claim about me being inconsistent somehow. This wasn’t his argument before. But stymied on that, he has switched gears and is making it his argument now. That accusation is false. Which is bizarre enough. But it’s even more bizarre because it makes no sense to say I can’t use different interpretations of probability in different arguments. As long as I am consistent within each argument, there is no inconsistency to complain about.

I don’t use different interpretations. But even if I did, that’s perfectly legitimate. Unless Barnes means to insist that only one interpretation is valid and anyone (not just me) who uses a different one is always wrong. But weirdly, Barnes seems to be trying to insist upon the opposite, that I am wrong to insist on only one interpretation (that it all reduces to frequency). So Barnes is contradicting himself. On the one hand, he doesn’t like that I argue that all interpretations of probability reduce semantically to some statement or other about a frequency. And on the other hand, he insists I not use more than one interpretation of probability, because doing so is somehow “being inconsistent.” Baffling. Truly utterly baffling.

But it’s also just plain wrong. In my multiverse argument, I do not use anything but a frequency interpretation of probability. Why he thinks I’m not, totally escapes me. On the one hand, he seems to think hypothetical universes can’t be counted (which refutes all fine tuning arguments—thank you, Luke Barnes!). On the other hand, he seems to think they can be counted and that that count will be small for life-bearing universes against all non-life-bearing universes. Which, as I explained to him, the McGrews refuted. But remember, Barnes never responds to any arguments I make or cite.

Barnes is the one contradicting himself here. Not me. Pick a lane, Dr. Barnes. Can hypothetical universes be counted to generate a frequency of life-bearing universes among them? Or not?

(6) The sixth argument Barnes makes is:

There is no such thing as “transfinite frequentism”. Take a moment to Google that phrase – the only result is Carrier’s blog post (and possibly now this one). Literally no one ever – no mathematician, no scientist, no philosopher … not even a clueless quack – has ever used that phrase before, so far as Google (and Google Scholar, Google Books, Wikipedia, arxiv.org, Bing, Yahoo!, and even Ask Jeeves) can tell. Draw your own conclusion. The two kinds of frequentism are called “finite frequentism” and “hypothetical frequentism”.

This is really a face palm moment. First, let me google that for you. And then google “transfinite probability” since remember, I am talking about Barnes’s claim that transfinite probabilities cannot derive from transfinite frequencies. He’s the one claiming you can’t do “frequentism” on infinite sets. I then responded by saying, neither am I, so what’s your point? Barnes then ignores what we are actually talking about, flips his lid over a mere coin of phrase I used to communicate that to a popular audience, and then thinks “hypothetical frequentism” isn’t what I was talking about, when obviously it was. It’s just that readers won’t know what that means or what connection it has to transfinite mathematics, the point Barnes was trying to make (a point that’s going over most readers’ heads), so it wouldn’t have been a useful term to use. Scientists tend to have a real hard time understanding the importance of mass communication and that most readers are not going to know what their jargon means. And I write for a mass audience. Get over it, Luke Barnes.

So let’s stop flipping our lids over pointless bullshit, and let’s talk about what we are actually arguing. Barnes is claiming we can’t get probabilities by counting frequencies on infinite sets. In what sense that is or isn’t true is a whole other debate. But it doesn’t matter. Because I don’t do that in TEC. So it’s moot. And I don’t even do it in my multiverse argument. What I do there follows by method of exhaustion, just like all other hypothetical frequentism: I show that as the number of possible universes approaches infinity, the probability of getting a multiverse with at least one life-bearing universe within it approaches 100%. That is not stating what the probability is. It’s stating a general area in the overall probability space it must lie. Barnes has never even described this as my argument, much less rebutted it. Once again, Barnes would rather whine about terminology than ever even respond to anything I’ve ever actually argued.

Barnes also references cool articles by Alan Hajek against finite and hypothetical frequentism. And once again, Barnes does not interact at all with my defense of hypothetical frequentism (in Proving History, pp. 257-65). He doesn’t say how the cited article is even a rebuttal to that. For instance, my discussion of physical-hypothetical modeling (a generalization of exactly what Barnes says physicists do to get frequencies of fine tuning) refutes a third of Hajek’s points, and substituting the method of exhaustion refutes another third of Hajek’s points, and the remaining third doesn’t relate to anything we are discussing, because they only pertain to the difficulties specifying infinitesimal probabilities (a problem Hajek himself even proposes to solve), and I have never relied on specifying an infinitesimal probability. This is just another example of how Barnes ignores everything I say. And makes zero effort to understand it.

Part Three

Here are the only points Barnes makes in entry two that he presents any case for:

Actually, apart from one exception, there are no points he makes in entry two that he presents any case for. He just makes a bunch of assertions, none of them supported. And ignores much of what I said as well.

So all I was left with to respond to (for the rest, what I have already actually argued is sufficient response) is actually the one example I’ve yet encountered where Barnes actually responds to something I said, and correctly rebuts it!

Barnes shows (through linked work) that Fred Adams’ finding of a 25% habitability space within variances of physical constants should be dismissed from this debate, because Adams only meant within an arbitrary space of all universes that could have stars in any conventional sense, not all possible spaces (much of which, Adams concludes, will have stars in some unconventional sense, but we can’t be sure such universes would produce organized life). I am now convinced Barnes is correct on that point (and have added a note to my last reply accordingly). I’ll assume Barnes has similarly good arguments against the others who come up with similarly large spaces of habitability (though I didn’t check them all).

This then gets us back to where we started:

My argument in the article was, “We actually do not know that there is only a narrow life-permitting range of possible configurations of the universe.” Barnes can cite no paper refuting that statement. I give two reasons why. Barnes pretends I only gave one. And then when he gets to the second, he forgets the relevance of my second argument to the first. Only one of my two arguments for that general thesis (that we don’t know) is that some studies get a wide range not a narrow one. … Then I go on to give the second reason, which is that even those papers are useless. Because my very next sentence, the sentence Barnes hides until later, and pretends isn’t a continuation of the same argument, says: “And even those models are artificially limiting the constants that vary to the constants in our universe, when in fact there can be any number of other constants and variables, which renders it completely impossible for any mortal to calculate the probability of a life-bearing universe from any randomly produced universe. As any honest cosmologist will tell you.”

The first argument I now concede Barnes has a case against. But that leaves the second. That second argument consists of two points: one is the mathematical impossibility and the other is the parameter problem.

The math problem Barnes simply insists he can get around—but all he does is handwave; he still never addresses or rebuts the McGrews arguments on this. Their arguments thus stand unrebutted. Instead Barnes uses the most astonishing ad hominem fallacy ever: he quotes the McGews trash-talking me on a blog, as if that had anything to do with their being right about their peer reviewed published paper refuting Barnes. Really. Now, what the McGrews say about me on their blog is hardly an honest and credible treatment (you can see that for yourself—it’s also six years out of date). But it’s still completely irrelevant to what Barnes and I are debating. Barnes can’t avoid my arguments by claiming someone else thinks I suck. And for him to use that as an excuse to avoid the arguments of even them, the very people whose judgment he thinks we should trust, is some chutzpah. It seems he is just intent on avoiding their paper and its implications to his case altogether. And hopes you don’t notice that’s what he’s doing.

Then there is the parameter problem. The number of possible parameters is not limited to the parameters in our universe. In our universe, many of those parameters may be zeroed out or so small as to be undetectable, or not even physically possible yet possible in universes of other configurations. And since I wrote this article, numerous leading cosmological physicists went on record siding with me on this, so Barnes is pretty well cooked here. I’m voicing the expert consensus. He’s ignoring it.

For example, Adams only ran the math for the parameters that exist in our universe. But this does not address universes that have other parameters. Adams explored what happens when you vary with respect to each other four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces (which two he combines into a single factor). But what if in our neighboring universe, let’s say, there is a fifth force that changes how these forces interact? Indeed what if that fifth source is repulsive instead of attractive? What if it is only carried by some particles and not others? What happens then? Will some of those universes contain stars and thus chemistry and thus life? How are we supposed to claim to know? We can’t. Similarly, our universe has three open dimensions of space. What about universes that have four or ten or a million? What happens then? Show me the paper that covers this, and the infinite number of possible other forces, and everything else.

Then what if when the gravitational force increases beyond a certain point greater than the other forces (however many forces there happen to be in this hypothetical alien universe we are discussing) that it collapses the resulting universe, causing another Big Bang? (As it surely would do, barring the introduction of yet more infinitely possible changes to the physics.) And what if that always resets the value of gravity, as it presumably must if the strength of gravity could be chosen at random in the Big Bang in the first place? Then there will be an upper limit on the gravitational constant’s size in relation to the other forces—because all universes with larger gravitational forces will keep collapsing until a smaller force is generated. So, what is that upper limit? Are there similar upper limits on the other forces? Again, which other forces? (Since there can be more than the ones we have.)

BTW, Barnes now insists “Bayesian probability deals with free parameters with infinite ranges in physics all the time.” Contradicting his claim that I can’t do probability with free parameters with infinite ranges. Sigh. But that’s still only when you know the constraints. So he is still not getting the point I am making now, and have been making since my last reply, which is that a truly infinite parameter space includes infinite possible numbers of spatial dimensions, infinite possible numbers of forces, repulsive as well as attractive, infinite possible laws of physics governing the interplay of those forces, and an infinite possible number of ways these forces could be constrained by processes that reset them. Truly, Dr. Barnes, has any peer reviewed paper done the math taking all these actual possibilities into account? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. As I said from the beginning. And Barnes simply won’t admit this.

If a universe is picked out of all randomly possible universes, what is the probability it will generate any kind of intelligent life somewhere inside it?

We don’t know the answer to that question.

Part Four

There is only one point Barnes makes in entry three that he presents any case for:

In response to my saying:

Barnes wants to get a different result by insisting the prior probability of observers is low—which means, because prior probabilities are always relative probabilities, that that probability is low without God, i.e. that it is on prior considerations far more likely that observers would exist if God exists than if He doesn’t.

Barnes says this:

Those sentences fail Bayesian Probability 101. Prior probabilities are probabilities of hypotheses. Always.

And he rightly goes on about that. But my wording misled him. So I can’t blame him here.

What he means is indeed what I meant: hypotheses of a coincidental God creating observers or a coincidental physics doing so. I should have said “prior probability of Godless observers being low.” In other words, he wants the prior probability of an observer-creating physics to be a lot lower than the prior probability of an observer-creating God. But as these are relative probabilities, the prior probability of “an observer-creating God” is not simply the converse of the probability of fine tuning, any more than the prior probability of a rich person having gotten rich by winning the lottery is the probability of winning the lottery. If there are only two ways to get rich, A and B, and each one has a probability of 1 in 1,000,000, then the prior probability of a rich person having gotten rich by A is not 1 in 1,000,000, it’s 50%. I was trying to make the same point about the hypotheses of how observers came to exist. And Barnes still has never responded to this point. Although perhaps in this case because I confused him.

A posterior probability generated by one datum becomes a prior probability for the next run of the equation. So that if we run the math for only one datum (there are observers), we can start with the priors for the two hypotheses “God” or “Godless Physics,” and generate the posterior probability of observers. And then that posterior probability is used as the prior probability when we run the math for the next datum (fine tuning is observed) for the same two hypotheses. This is what I was referring to. I was assuming he wanted to break the argument into two stages, one run on the bare fact of observers (before we consider fine tuning), and then plug the result into the run for “fine tuning.” I just worded this badly.

A wholly better way to say it is:

Barnes wants the probability of Godless observers to be low, in order to argue (perhaps?) that the probability we are God-created observers is high. And he wants to do this by saying “observers” are unlikely on Godless Physics but likely on God. And he wants to use fine tuning to do that. But fine tuning doesn’t help with that. Because fine tuning is always true when there are observers and no God. So we need something unusual about observers alone. We can presuppose a God that will likely create observers, but what’s the probability of that God among all other possible gods? Is it higher than the probability of a life-bearing universe among all other possible universes? How would we know? If you just presuppose a life-interested God, then you can just presuppose equal luck for the Godless Physics. And that gets us nowhere.

Everything Barnes thus says at this point is correct. It just doesn’t address what I was actually talking about (or anything I have discussed at all). Though in this case, his confusion is entirely my fault. Whether for that reason or not, he still has never addressed the point.

Conclusion

That’s it. That’s all Barnes had in reply to my last entry in this debate. He left most of it without response. And got wrong everything else (in one case because I misled him), except for one good rebuttal (of my citation of Fred Adams), which I now acknowledge.

Barnes summarized his points at the end. Let’s look at that recap:

  • “Carrier has not addressed the charge of inconsistency with probability theory.”

Barnes has not identified any inconsistency relevant to my article in TEC or my (very and completely different) multiverse argument.

  • “He has made up probability concepts that no one has ever heard of before, including ‘transfinite frequentism’ and ‘existential probability calculus’.”

Colloquialisms are not relevant to this debate. Barnes needs to address the arguments signified by the words. Not complain about how much he doesn’t like colloquial words (especially jokes, like the latter was).

  • “He has abandoned his previous claim that ‘all the scientific models we have … show life-bearing universes to be a common result of random universe variation, not a rare one’.”

This I now agree with. I will correct the article in which I said that.

  • He completely misunderstands my rather obvious point that ‘for a given possible universe, we specify the physics’, and in so doing, shows that he does not understand fine-tuning at its most basic level.”

Actually it is Barnes who doesn’t understand what I am talking about. You don’t get to just decide which universes are physically possible. There are more possibilities in the possibility space our universe would be randomly chosen from than universes with only and all the same parameters as ours. Universes can have different shapes, dimensions, forces, physics, they can have repulsive forces as well as attractive, they can have physical limits on how strong the forces in them can be, and many other physical differences. Barnes has consistently failed to grasp the significance of this point. Any argument of the form “observer-making universes are extremely few in the set of all the universe that could randomly exist without a God” cannot be made. Because we cannot even define all the possible universes in that set. We certainly have never counted them all up and determined how many would make observers possible. I’m pretty sure none of the papers Barnes cites has ever done that. I am pretty sure it’s impossible to do. The number of possible ways to vary a universe is multiply infinite (infinitely many dimensional structures, infinitely many arrays and combinations of forces, infinitely many ways force maximums can be limited, and so on). And the McGrews paper on the mathematical fact that this can’t be done, either, stands unrebutted. By Barnes or anyone.

  • “And, finally, Carrier’s argument regarding the ‘Real Heart of the Matter’ is rendered meaningless by a deep misunderstanding of probability theory’s basics.”

Barnes actually did not show that. He correctly identified some poor wording at one point. But correcting the wording doesn’t change the argument there. And he still has never rebutted the argument.

Where things stand right now:

  • Barnes has never rebutted my actual arguments in TEC. He has gainsaid it. But he still won’t respond to the arguments in it that rebut him.
  • Barnes does not even seem to understand my multiverse argument. He has yet to correctly describe it, or rebut any of its premises.

Barnes seems to contradict himself by denying we can use hypothetical frequency sets, then insists we use hypothetical frequency sets to calculate how many hypothetical universes would bear life; and by denying we can derive frequencies from infinite sets, then insisting we can derive frequencies from infinite sets. He needs to pick lanes here. Can we use hypothetical frequency sets to calculate how many hypothetical universes would bear life? Then we can use hypothetical frequency sets. Can we derive frequencies from infinite sets? Then I can derive frequencies from infinite sets. Although I never have. Neither my argument in TEC nor even my multiverse argument (which alone even discusses infinite sets) does that.

What Barnes doesn’t get is that fine tuning will be observed in all observed atheist universes. Therefore P(fine tuning is observed|atheism) = 1. This is not the case for God-made universes. P(fine tuning is observed|God) is actually less than 1. Because on theism (and only on theism) could we ever have observed ourselves in a non-finely tuned universe. This brings us to the question of the basic probability that there would be observers in any sense at all (apart from God). This depends on the relative probability of getting a lucky God or a lucky universe; not the absolute probabilities of either. And the probability of fine-tuning a universe is an absolute, not a relative probability; that means we still have to put it in ratio to the probability of the requisite fine tuning of a God. And we don’t know what that relative probability is. No matter how low fine-tuning may be as a probability, the luckiness of our God may be just as improbable. We literally don’t know.

And note that it can’t be just a God lucky enough (for us) that it happened to want to create any kind of observers—since we observe we aren’t angels in heaven, for instance—but who wanted to create observers of our specific, messy, physical, unheavenly kind, in an almost entirely inhospitable universe, a universe built in exactly all the ways a Godless universe would have to be. In other words, a God who not only luckily exists, and who was not only amazingly luckily possessed of all the requisite knowledge and powers and desires, but a God who had the very specific and peculiar desire to create a universe that looks exactly like a universe without a God in it.

That’s the argument of TEC. And Barnes has still to this day simply ignored it.

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