Intelligence Devolved

Among academics, especially professional philosophers, the metaphysical concept of "intelligent design" is usually referred to as the "fine tuning" argument. It works essentially this way: Despite the numerous advances in physics since Einstein, let alone Newton, physicists have been unable to remove the numerical constants from physical laws, let alone reduce all laws to a single law that is entirely in terms of variables like mass, spin, charge, etc. The probability of these constants randomly coming into being within a range conducive to the existence of life, so the thinking goes, is infinitesimally small. Much more likely, it would seem, that the constants were set somehow by an intelligence with the intent to make life possible. Note that the proponents of this theory are not advocating a metaphysics closer to traditional theology than the metaphysics of mainstream atheism; all three ontologies are categorically distinct. The God or intelligence of "fine tuning" is a modern-day revival of deism; philosophical advocates of the theory sometimes refer to themselves or are referred to as "watchmaker theists," in the sense that their God calibrates the machinery of the universe and then leaves the scene; He is not the angry God of Abraham or the Lamb or the Son of Man or the Word that was with God the Power and the Glory forever and ever amen.

Kriston Capps, in tandem with Julian Sanchez, summarizes the reasons that "fine tuning" is in no way preferable (implicitly on Occam's Razor grounds) to a naturalistic, God-free account. Julian writes:

What's befuddling is why any of these considerations are supposed to provide any support whatever for the God hypothesis. To think that they do seems to rely on a kind of ignotum per ignotius: We have no satisfying account of complex phenomenon X, so we explain it in terms of, even more complex phenomenon Y, a mind capable of consciously producing X. Why is this supposed to be satisfying? Why, in the absence of a culture in which religion is pervasive, would anyone resort to this kind of explanation? Indeed, why would anyone count it as an explanation at all?

And Kriston writes back:

That is indeed one problem with the deus ex machina: the process by which universal preconditions leads to intelligence is no less insoluble with a Creator at hand. One eventually wants to come to terms with the mechanism by which the Creator Created, so there still exists a need for a scientific account of the process. Having arrived at that description, the need for a magical Creator will have been obviated, unless magic is a crucial law of the universe—which watchmaker theists reject. Problem A attenuates both the atheist and theist routes to explanation, but the latter introduces an even more intractable problem B.

What they both seem to be saying in other words, is that the mystery lies in the process by which the constants came to be what they are. Positing a watchmaker-god adds an 8,000,000 lb. ontological element to the theory without going anywhere towards providing an explanation. In a case of theory selection in which two theories are equally satisfactory in terms of data explanation but one is simpler than the other, Occam's Razor is clear on what to do. There are counterarguments that the watchmaker-theorists could provide as to why their ontology is in fact the simpler one, but I won't get into them because it would be straying from the main point I want to make. Suffice it to say that Capps and Sanchez have done nicely in demonstrating why intentional fine-tuning isn't necessarily preferable to a God-free account.

What baffles me---inasmuch as I know I'm not the only one aware of the criticism I'm about to make---is why no intellectual blog I've come across, let alone any of the public advocates of secular education who are put on TV to take on the "intelligent design" anti-Darwin folks, have caught on to the fact that "fine tuning" is not just in no better a position than spontaneous tuning; it's flat-out wrong.

Here's why. Watchmaker-theory is at its root an argument about probability. Suppose that the range of constants that a particular physical law could have had---and notice that even entering into this discussion makes controversial modal assumptions; what if the constants are necessarily as they are---such that the law would be compatible with the existence of life is from .000001 to .000002. I don't think the metaphor of the watch is the most helpful for what fine-tuning advocates are getting at; I prefer to think of it as a dial. The dial that sets the physical constant for this law has X possible values. A microfraction of X is the set of values from .000001 to .000002, and any other value within X would make life impossible. Now consider that there are a large number of dials, and it is not sufficient for life that one or two or even a majority of the dials have to be set to life-compatible values; all the dials must be set to life-compatible values. Hopefully I've been clear enough that the intuitive pull of the probabilistic argument is evident.

But it rests on a mistaken concept of probability assignment. The possible configurations of the dials for physical constants are not restricted over a quantifier like X. Just as it would be absurd to suggest that, say, only natural numbers are possible values for physical constants, it would be equally absurd to restrict the possible range of values to a finite number. Rather than a dial, imagine the value of the constant being drawn out of a hat that includes all numbers from negative infinity to positive infinity. There are as many numbers from .000001 to .000002 as there are from negative to positive infinity not including that range of numbers: infinitely many. The number that is drawn from the hat and becomes the physical constant is neither more likely nor less likely to be conducive to life; the probability of either event is simply indeterminate.

The upshot of the foregoing is that we should have no hesitation in junking "fine tuning" as a metaphysical argument. The purpose of it is to create an intuitive case that the existence of some sort of higher intelligence is likely true; and we have seen that it fails miserably, condemned at the outset by an elementary error. But the criticism of it as an example of faulty probablistic reasoning does not preclude the possibility that there is a God. Just as a sound metaphysical proof of God's existence is impossible (okay, really, really, really unlikely), any such disproof of God's existence is equally impossible. What I like about the fine tuning argument is that it has moved theistic speculative metaphysics away from seeking a proof of God's existence and toward's seeking a proof of God's probable existence. That isn't progress in the intractable dispute between atheism and theism---in which I am unmovably agnostic---but it is progress for philosophy itself.

The lesson to be learned here is that faith is just what Kierkegaard told us it was: a leap made possible "by virtue of the absurd." Faith that looks to logic and metaphysics for its grounding is looking in the wrong place, and is bound to be disappointed.