As for philosophy going beyond what science can tell us, swell. I’ve got no objections, always provided you have some basis to speculate. In fact, what passes for philosophy in these discussions is simply theology. The God who is supposed to have fine tuned the universe is simply the God of the Bible or a somewhat etiolated version of the same. Absent faith, why would you think of invoking a God to explain anything? There are literally an infinite number of other possibilities, each equally plausible or rather implausible. Certain Hindus maintain that the Vedas are eternal objects that persist even though worlds and their gods come and go. Maybe the parameters are simply the Veda.

I’m pretty hard line about this, I know. I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about anything but animals or perhaps robots “acting” or “making” as in “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” So far as we know, even to have intentions requires a front end and back end, if not a mouth and a butt. Do you really think that God Highest and Best has HOX genes? And if not, why do you think it is legit to use categories like doing when speaking about anything but mobile organisms?

BTW Loki, it’s being “imaginable” that a wide range of parameters could give rise to life is just a hunch. Barrow and Tipler carefully picked over the subject, citing many authorities, and found fine tuning to be very narrow. Maybe they’re wrong, but you’d have to take their argument on and not just blow it off.

Sad, thanks about the Everything list - I will look. Here’s something like it I found: http://www.nabble.com/Which-mathematical-structure–is–the-universe-in-Physics–td16847937.html.

It’s quite imaginable that almost any set of parameters would allow some mechanism of increasing complexity leading to conscious observer of some form. E.g., when people say that some set would lead to quick collapse of the Universe back to singularity - what do they mean by “quick”? I recall science fiction abt life on the surface of a neutron star - that was “quick” for humans, but enough for local cheela.

Off course, Neil, your general ontological point is still valid. But while i keep reading your comments for years here and can’t sensibly object to some of them, i can’t get rid of the feeling that it’s all some linguistic trickstery

Fine tuning is a metaphor. It may or may not be the case that life is only possible because certain parameters have particular values,

The phrase “fine tuning” may well be a metaphor, however the improbability of our universe being propitious for life, rather than otherwise, is a very real fact that cries out for explanation.

Garth

I also get a kick out of the suggestion that the evidence for the big bang is evidence for a universe that had a beginning in time. The big bang might or might not be the earliest event we can know about, but that doesn’t imply it was either a unique event or the first event. Maybe somebody will come up with plausible physical arguments for the temporal finitude of the universe, but for the moment I’m sticking with Kantian skepticism about that question and the question of the infinity of the world as well.

Garth