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About the fine tuning argument (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by ChanchoManco@lemmy.zip to c/atheism@lemmy.world

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Hi, I come from a very Catholic family but never really believed in God. I slowly took distance from religion and now I'm exploring atheism.

Recently found a video about how the "fine tuning" argument was one of the more difficult for atheists to answer.

But thinking about it the argument is the same theists apply when they don't know the origin of something. Since the origins of humankind, we always filled the gaps of the unexplained with the supernatural, specially when there's an apparent order or improbability in this case.

Science might not know why the universe is like it is, but the improbability of it doesn't prove intelligent design.

Edit: Thanks for all the answers, very good points in the comments, and sorry I'm replying so late and didn't explain what the argument is:

The fine-tuned universe is the hypothesis that, because "life as we know it" could not exist if the constants of nature – such as the electron charge, the gravitational constant and others – had been even slightly different, the universe must be tuned specifically for life.[1][2][3][4] In practice, this hypothesis is formulated in terms of dimensionless physical constants.[5]

Taken from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe

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[–] Nefara@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

As others have said, it's on the religious to show that the thing they're attributing to god or gods could have no other possible reason or method or cause than a god. People over time have observed the world, nature and life to come up with some possible causes and mechanisms for how things work, and found plenty of answers that are mundane and banal and notably lacking in gods. Just about anyone who wants to look at the same thing closely can see the same evidence for simple, physical explanations, and make their own conclusions.

Imagine that you find a really big spider web in a high place. The religious are basically saying "that's proof Spiderman exists". They've read about Spiderman and know the traits of Spiderman and specifically look for ways they can make the physical world confirm the existence of Spiderman.

An atheist would look for the spider. Even if they had no luck finding it, they would build a hypothesis that, since every time we've looked in a spiderweb before, we've found a spider, there probably is a spider capable of climbing that high and building a web that big. Even if no one found the spider in the lifetimes of those hypothetical people, it still wouldn't mean that Spiderman made that web. There are just too many hypotheses that are much more likely based on our previous knowledge of the world.

Just about every time we've ever gone looking for reasons something happened or is the way it is, we've found an answer that doesn't involve any need for divine intervention.