Atheism

5265 readers

4 users here now

Community Guide

Archive Today will help you look at paywalled content the way search engines see it.

Statement of Purpose

This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.

Acceptable

Honest questions or conversations.
Discussions on parenting or advice.
Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
Atheist memes. We can have fun!
News headlines relevant to atheism.

Unacceptable

Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.

Anything against site rules.
Illegal and/or NSFW material.
Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
Personal attacks or flaming.

Inadvisable

Self promotion or upvote farming.
Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.

Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.

Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.

 ~ /c/nostupidquestions

If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!

Connect with Atheists

Matrix: #atheism:envs.net

Help and Support Links

Streaming Media

This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.

Orgs, Blogs, Zines

Mainstream

Bibliography

Start here...

...proceed here.

Proselytize Religion

Convince an Atheist

From Reddit

As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world

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

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

The fine tuning argument is just the Texas sharpshooter fallacy dressed up in fancy language, requires either grossly misunderstanding or willfully misrepresenting the fact that it's using the conclusion to form the premise. The Earth isn't perfectly "tuned" for life to evolve on it. It's actually the other way around: Life evolved on Earth to fit the conditions here.

And, lots and lots of types of life on Earth died out over the aeons as conditions here changed, with new life having to evolve to fit the subsequent conditions. See, for instance, the oxygenation catastrophe. If god really had a plan for every beast of the land and fish of the sea to fill its niche from the beginning, why have so many of them already gone extinct?

Arguing about the apparent improbability of life developing on this planet is a silly notion coming from the point of view of life that's already developed and evolved on that same planet. People who insist on that should try doing so on one of the billions upon billions of other planets in the universe where life didn't develop instead. It's like trying to explain to someone who's already won the lottery that, acktshully, winning the lottery is totally mathematically impossible so therefore they didn't. The balance of their bank account notwithstanding.