New Miscellany: more on fine-tuning (General)

by dhw, Friday, February 21, 2025, 11:02 (13 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You have it backwards as usual. All necessary fine-tuning factors are known. If they are present, life is allowed to appear. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO APPEAR TO MAKE/PROVE THE POINT.

dhw: 1) All necessary fine-tuning factors are not known. Nobody knows how life originated!

DAVID: The discussion has nothing to do with origin of life. […]

This is the daftest of all your arguments. How can you possibly say that everywhere in the universe is fine-tuned for life if our planet is the only place we know that has produced life?

DAVID: Life can pop up anywhere with a hospitable environment.

dhw: ....... 4) I find it doubly surprising that someone who believes his God’s one and only purpose was to create us and our food, also believes […] that given the right environment, life can pop up anywhere! But your version of a God has never been one for logical behaviour, has he?

DAVID: It is you who are illogical. Fine-tuning allows life to appear anywhere, nothing more. Fine tuning factors do not make life.

How can you tell that a place is fine-tuned for life if there is no life? One moment you say “life can pop up”, and the next moment, it’s so complex that only your God could create and combine all the necessary factors. If “fine-tuning” for life is not the combination of all the necessary factors that results in life, what is it? And if “fine-tuning” has nothing to do with the origin of life, what function can it possibly have?

Biological complexity

QUOTE: We hope that one day we will be able to unlock the secret of how nature produces all the oxygen molecules that surround us and that we breathe every day," says Ablyasova."

DAVID: it took highly sophisticated lab work to do it. How do natural mutations achieve such a complex enzyme? Not by chance.

So it’s all part of the “fine-tuning”, and you think the whole universe combines all of these highly sophisticated factors, and life can pop up anywhere. Once more: you can only know that a place is fine-tuned for life if it harbours or has harboured life! What other proof can you possibly have?

Bird brains

DAVID: Cells are not intelligent enough to design a new type of organism.

dhw: Yes, I know you prefer your theory of ad hoc divine dabbles or the first cells being provided with 3.8000,000,000 years’ worth of instructions.

DAVID: And you have your brilliant cell committees.

dhw: I don’t dislike your “committees” image, though I would never use it. Virtually every article on cellular behaviour that you present to us draws attention to the manner in which cells/cell communities communicate and cooperate with one another as they process new information and decide how to handle it. But they don’t sit round a table sipping their pints of beer.

DAVID: No, they automatically communicate.

dhw: What does that mean? One set of cells is programmed to quote your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old instructions to other sets? Or God pops in and tells one set what to tell the other sets?

DAVID: No popping. All automatic from the beginning.

So your God provided the first cells with programmes for every species, every strategy, every response to every new threat/opportunity, to be passed on through billions of years even into our present and future. I get it. I just don’t believe it.

DAVID: LUCA indicates it:

LUCA has nothing to do with it!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535311-100-when-did-life-begin-on-earth-new-ev...

QUOTE: "...genetics points to an early origin. In a study published in July 2024, Donoghue and his colleagues attempted to date the last universal common ancestor (LUCA): the organism that is the ancestor of all life today. They did so by identifying genes found in all living organisms, which probably date back to LUCA. Their best estimate was that LUCA lived 4.2 billion years ago. That’s just 300 million years after Earth formed. And things would have got started far earlier than that. “LUCA isn’t the origin of life by any stretch of the imagination,” says Donoghue. It seems to have been a fairly advanced microorganism, the product of a long period of evolution and growing complexity."

DAVID: All we can predict is complexity al the way back.

I agree. The very first cells would have been complex. How does that come to mean that they contained instructions for the whole of evolution etc.?