No, it is thoroughly illogical. It simply fills the void of knowledge which we don't currently have with something that cannot ever be explained.
I think we've beat this one to death. You continually use the word "illogical" for any idea you don't like. To me,
logical means founded on logic. The Cosmological argument is founded on inductive logic. That's all there is to it. Your objection is nothing to do with logic, so I think you need to choose a different terminology.
..."apparent fine-tuning" or things we don't understand yet. I don't accept the premise that ignorance validates the existence of the supernatural.
This is in danger of turning into a "science of the gaps" argument. You cannot counter the Cosmological argument by saying "we just haven't discovered enough yet". It is an argument
in principal. There is no possibility,
even in principal, that you can come up with a scientific explanation of the universe that
explains itself. That is an example -- to use your favourite term -- of a thoroughly illogical argument.
Nevertheless, I take your point about apparent fine tuning as one that is worth pursuing further. I think the average person has little appreciation of the extent of such tuning involved in our existence. Therefore the assumption that science will readily provide a solution seems disturbingly dogmatic and "faith-based" to me. This is not the sort of happy accident whereby we live on a planet at the right distance from a star in the right region of a galaxy, with a plethora of other accidents that favour our existence (although those chemical and environmental conditions are all interesting too and have been extensively written about).
No, it is a question of more fundamental universal parameters. The expansion rate of the universe, for instance, has to be tuned to one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ... otherwise we would get rapid recollapse or runaway expansion. Either way there could be no interesting structure in the universe. The existence of atoms (and pretty much everything else) depends on something that scientists call the
fine structure constant -- a number that crops up in many fundamental relationships in physics. A different value for the fine structure constant would mean no possibility of nuclear fusion, no possibility of most of the chemical elements, and a host of other negative implications for the world as we know it.
Many similar arguments can be made. Do actual real scientists take your blasé attitude of sweeping all this under the rug of "things we don't understand yet"? No, they most certainly do not. The fine tuning of the cosmic expansion has been referred to as "
a remarkably precise and totally unexpected relation". The namesake of this thread, Steven Hawking, said of the fundamental constants that "
the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life". Physicists Robert H Dicke and Fred Hoyle have written about it. Freeman Dyson said: "
The more I examine the universe, and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the Universe in some sense must have known we were coming". Richard Feynman wrote of the fine structure constant:
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
I could go on, but I've already quoted some of the great thinkers in theoretical physics. Now, I could finish with a rhetorical flourish and say that scientists are stumped by the fine-tuning problem and have nowhere left to run. But I don't really think that Feynman, an atheist, was seriously talking about the "hand of God", or that Hawking who cited God in order to sell books actually believed in him/it. And seeing as I am a big fan of science myself, and fully accept that methodological naturalism (the philosophical assumption that a scientific explanation exists) is the right way to approach it, let's see where scientists think we should be headed. But since we are talking about
arguments in principle we won't get too hung up on particular theories.
Inflation theory might conceivably explain the cosmic expansion rate. But it introduces additional fine tuning of its own. The problem is simply replaced by whatever it is that causes the false vacuum decay to roll over at a particular energy level into the regular residual expansion that we observe. And this is a general problem with any conceivable scientific theory. It is simply illogical and implausible to posit that there could be an ultimate explanation that requires no arbitrary parameters to be put in "by hand". Science cannot produce such a thing, even
in principle.
Realising this, some scientists have turned to another general approach. Building on the success of biological evolutionary theories in explaining how apparent design can arise by random chance, they posit that the universe we inhabit is just one among an ensemble of many possible ones, each of which has a possibility of existing. There are a number of different theories in this class, but they equally suffer from a number of general problems. The first is that there is simply no evidence that any such theory is real. In fact, a number of impertinent scientists have cried foul -- they point out that all such speculation is in the realm of the metaphysical, and that scientists have abandoned the scientific principle by engaging in it.
A second problem is that the supposed multiverse is
not akin to the fitness landscape within which biological evolution occurs. In fact, biological evolution is the furthest thing imaginable from a random process. Darwin's theory of evolution contains within it three essential principles. It is a theory of
common descent by
random mutation and
natural selection. The random mutation part is ... random. The rest is not. Common descent requires continuity of existence, and natural selection similarly requires that advantageous traits can be preferentially conserved and propagated. Multiverse theories, by and large, involve universes that are completely causally isolated. You can't "evolve" a universe with just the right properties, it has to genuinely be a completely random throw of the dice. (There is one exception that I know of, which is Lee Smolin's theory of fecund universes which evolve inside black holes and are subject to a sort of natural selection, but this is beset by its own theoretical problems). The fine tuning in our own universe is such that even entirely profligate schemes like "eternal inflation" don't produce it in any sensible time frame (as Alan Guth acknowledges).
And thirdly, after all that, multiverse theories
still don't solve the problem. Because they still need their own rules and fine tuning about how the ensemble is produced in the first place.
I think we have become too arrogant because of the advances in technology to think that science has the answers to everything. Its funny that the most scientific illiterate people can be the most strident in their beliefs that science holds the answer to everything.
I agree. Without wanting to cast aspersions, my experience is that many people who bang on about "sky fairies" and "celestial teapots" are irrational dogmatists who have difficulty following a logical argument and are not very well schooled in science.
