Arguments For God
Tier-list
February 16th, 2025
Read the My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God article by Ross Douthat in The New York Times, stumbled across these lines, "But do I have a favorite argument within this larger run of converging claims? I was thinking about this while reading the effort by the prolific and precocious (he’s apparently still an undergraduate) essayist who writes under the name Bentham’s Bulldog to rank or grade a long list of arguments for God’s existence." and had to follow the link down the rabbit hole:
Via Bentham's Newsletter: "Tier lists on arguments for God are all the rage! Tier lists rank arguments for God on a scale from F to S, where F is the worst, S is the best, and the rest follow a traditional letter grade—A better than B, B better than C, and so on. [...]
Fine-tuning (S)
The fine-tuning argument is widely seen as the best argument for God. But crucially, there are actually three kinds of fine-tuning, and two of them dodge most of the standard objections (for more on the argument, see my very long post about it):
1. A priori fine-tuning: this kind isn’t about the specific laws. Instead, it’s about the more general point that most ways the world could be wouldn’t produce anything interesting. If the laws are very simple, then probably they’d just result in a basic pattern—too basic to produce anything. For instance, the ultimate laws could have just involved particles aimlessly bouncing around, or moving in a circle, or disappearing after a second, or moving in a line. If the laws aren’t simple, then they’d be almost guaranteed to produce random chaos. This kind of fine-tuning is probably the most convincing, and isn’t threatened by findings from physics.
2. Anthropic fine-tuning from physics: this kind proceeds from the striking observations that the constants of physics—the values that are plugged into the laws—fall into an incredibly narrow range needed to give rise to life. For example, if the cosmological constant weren’t in a tiny range, on the order of one part in 10^120 of its possible values, no life or complex structures of any sort would arise.
3. Fine-tuning for discoverability: this builds on work mostly from Robin Collins. What Collins argues is that some of the constants are precisely set in a way ideal for scientific discovery. For instance, he claims that the masses of many of the particles in particle physics happen to be an ideal quantity for us to measure them. This is expected if God set the constants in ways ideal for us to do science, but unexpected if they took their values by chance.
Taking into account all three kinds of fine-tuning, this argument is utterly devastating. Maybe an atheist can explain the second kind by a multiverse—though, as I’ve explored, a multiverse has various problems—but certainly they can’t use a multiverse to explain the first and third kind.
The problem for the atheist is that the improbability is so vast—it’s so wildly unlikely that we’d get a fine-tuned universe by chance—that they must, for their view to be plausible, have some explanation of fine-tuning. But the explanations of the first kind of fine-tuning just transfer the fine-tuning back a level—if the atheist invokes a multiverse, for instance, the multiverse itself is just a physical system that generates universes. But to generate the right kinds of universes—and universes at all, rather than producing nothing—it needs fine-tuning. Thus, even the multiverse just transfers things back a level.
While there are some mild ways to criticize the likelihood of fine-tuning on theism, the atheistic replies are not enough to overcome the vanishingly low probability of fine-tuning on theism. Atheism predicts a barren wasteland—the fact that isn’t what we observe strongly undermines it."
