@Osman
It's not often I find myself defending the fine-tuning argument! But just for shits 'n' giggles:
Yeah, it's a good little exercise innit.
The problem, as I see, is not just the matter of unlikely universes, but also the high improbability of each and every one of the required constants being what they need to be too. It's not just a matter of one equally unlikely universe, but rather, every single required constant in that universe being precisely what it needs to be despite the immense improbability of each one.
I did warn you about getting dazzled by big numbers. You need to stop being fixated on them and think conceptually instead.
I think it's quite dubious to compare something like the universe's (apparent) fine-tuning to a hand of cards, given that there are far more possibilities for configurations of universes than there are for potential hands of cards. Still, given that the configuration of each and every constant is precise and perfect, despite the far greater likelihood of other, life-prohibiting configurations, it seems to me to be more correct to compare the fine-tuning itself to consistently and without exception receiving a royal flush, getting no other, lesser hands. This, surely, is vastly less probable than just receiving a single flush, and in such a situation, one may rightly suspect design rather than chance.
This is where you are going wrong, and it is this sort of thing I have been trying to explain to you.
We have only one observable universe to use as a reference sample. I hope we can agree on that. If you wish to disagree with it you'd better be prepared to pony up some extra, real, observable universes for me. Since we have only one universe as our sample this is, in terms of probability calculations, the equivalent of being dealt one hand. It is not, in any way, the equivalent of being dealt billions of hands. If you are considering the likelihood of our universe you have to consider the probablilty of it as it is, not the probablility of every separate component of it. This one hand may have given an extemely unlikely result but it is still only one hand.
Now if we had lots of observable universes available, and if they all supported sentient life and we knew they did, then the fine tuning argument would begin to look very interesting. We don't have that though. We only have the one universe as our sample, and probability calculations tell you nothing at all about whether you are likely to get one alternative or another in a single sample.
Sure, they give you a likelihood if your sample size is sufficiently large but ours is not. No matter what the infintesimal probability of our universe happens to be, in the absence of a larger array of samples we can draw no conclusions from its existence, because drawing reliable statistical conclusions is critically dependent on having a large enough sample size to determine if your result cannot be attributed to chance.
You should also bear in mind that, even for a vast array of hypothetical universes that do not support life,
the probability of any one constant being precisely what it happens to be in that unverse is still going to be vanishingly small. The fact that it does not support life does not change this, so in a very real sense we can say that it would be just as unlikely as our universe anyway. This is a separate point to the sample size problem. The sample size problem alone is enough to kill fine tuning, but say you have half a dozen universal constants in every possible universe. Each one of those can potentially take a range of values that is presumably infinite, in the absence of anything suggesting otherwise. This means that for any and all possible universes, the probability of the constants being precisely what they are is not obviously going to be any higher than the probablity of constants in our universe having the exact values they have.
Besides that, if you're going to argue that such incredibly unlikely configurations can happen, without exception and without being determined by an outside influence, then it seems to me that quite literally any pattern or series of events, however unlikely, could be rationalized and said to be purely coincidental. Of course, it's not the case that all patterns are a result of pure coincidence, though they do happen as such, but on this reasoning, every pattern could be presented as being coincidental when they, in fact, aren't.
They, individually, might all be equally (im)probable, but the probability of all of these immensely improbable configurations occurring simultaneously, coming together in the exact same universe, despite the much greater likelihood of others, does not seem to be, on the whole, equally probable to any other group of possible configurations. Indeed, I'd say it's not.
I see you're using the Argument from Personal Incredulity. My response above covers this.
Whether the multiverse hypothesis does or doesn't serve to explain apparent fine-tuning, it is advanced as a possible explanation for it. And physicists do acknowledge this fine-tuning, regardless of whether you think it's all bunk or not. Here, even Tricky Dicky discusses it and the opinions of physicists on the subject, and he's certainly not in the business of quote-mining scientists to score points for theism:
Ok, but what they are saying is somewhat different to what you originally said. You said this:
People who work with numbers, physicist themselves, acknowledge this apparent 'fine-tuning.' But in any case it's clear that our universe and the configuration of its laws and constants are not equal in probability to that of any other, because every single constant and law is precisely what it has to be in order for life to be able to form, and indeed there is a vast number of alternatives which could easily have been, but are not. Alternatives that would preclude the existence of life.
I don't even really agree with the argument, and in fact it has at least one fatal flaw that I can think of, but the subject of the universe's apparent fine-tuning is an important one, and it can't be flippantly dismissed as an attempt to woo the plebs with big numbers, hence why even physicists try to explain it with things like multiverses and so on.
Your post implied that the reason for multiverse theory being conceived in the first place was because "physicists" (implying any and all of them, by the way) wanted a way of explaining fine tuning. This wasn't what happened, of course. What happened was that, having become aware that our universe is finite in size and age, and not having any obvious proof that it was or could be the only universe, physicists would have to be gobsmackingly unimaginative to not wonder if multiple universes were possible and, if so, what they might be like. As you may have noticed, good theoretical physicists tend not to be gobsmackingly unimaginative.
What Dicky was saying was basically just that we know the constants have to have very precise values to make our particular universe stable, and that some people wonder if there is something more to this. No offense, but I knew that already.
It's not necessarily dishonest to quote the views of experts to support a conclusion, nor is it quote-mining. But indeed, it especially isn't if the experts themselves likewise accept or acknowledge the possibility of fine-tuning.
Yes, but it is if you present their quote snippets as supporting your contention for a deity when they think otherwise, and if you refuse to quote the bits where they say this and why.
I don't think they themselves need to support the design hypothesis if said hypothesis may be safely or plausibly inferred from their evidence. It doesn't matter whether they endorse the existence of a designer, if the existence of a designer is supported by the facts, then it is, regardless of whether anyone accepts that possibility.
The existence of a designer is not supported by the facts, though. The illusion that it is is a result of not undestanding how the probabilities should be assessed.
Topic: The Fine Tuning Argument