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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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While some of the points are good, there are difficulties.

The difficulty of abiogenesis doesn't actually change much, as long as you think that the universe is unbounded. As long as it's much more likely than things like Boltzmann brains, you should be fine, as it'll arise somewhere, and you, the observer, can thus account for your existence. What it does affect is how likely we are to find other life within our solar system or galaxy or light cone, or it starts to provide insight again once we have any reason to think that the universe is not infinite.

Cosmological fine-tuning is much more relevant, because it's much more plausible that we don't get graham's number of chances at it. But that also provides a strong argument in favor of a multiverse, which I don't think you actually gave any reasons why you think that that would be unlikely.

I'm not sure how persuasive your made-by-Jesus world is. It does show ways that people might misuse the anthropic principle, a little, but it doesn't touch a proper use of it.

But let's look at the 7 objections.

1: We don't know how to tell if it's actually unlikely, since we don't have a set way to sample?

This one's interesting. I don't know entirely what to make of it. We should probably have priors of some sort, but I'm not really sure. I don't know if this is similar to 4, in practice, albeit more like "fine-tuning is likely" than necessary.

2: Anthropic principle explains everything

The key thing here is that there be enough chances. If there's only one universe, than the anthropic principle is insufficient to explain life. If there are many, it works much better.

3:Well, why would God want this?

This is a good question. However, for the theism hypothesis to be useful relative to chance, it only requires that we think it's more likely than the chance of generating a good universe randomly, and then you have to take into account your priors on theism.

4: Fine-tuning is necessary

I think the fine-tuned for life vs. the fine-tuned for made-by-Jesus are not the same, since it seems more plausible that kinds of complexity would be likely than that Jesus specifically would be necessary? At least, the existence of entropy makes that seem not totally crazy of a hypothesis to me, which, when we're dealing with things this literally astronomically unlikely, that's probably good enough.

5: multiverse: why not made-by-Jesus

Yeah, the reason here is the anthropic principle. In a multiverse, all observers should see worlds conducive to life. Far fewer of those observers would see "made-by-Jesus." Given a multiverse, we should expect existence. Given a multiverse, we should not expect "made-by-Jesus" to be written into the physics.

6: Maybe other parameters could be life permitting.

It seems much more likely to me that there could be exotic forms of life than exotic forms of "made-by-Jesus."

7: god-of-the-gaps

In this case, I think the comparison might actually a good comparison, showing that there needs to take some care in dismissing based a "God-of the gaps" argument.