I think it's worth pointing out just how dramatic the probabilities being discussed in the fine-tuning argument really are. As John Hawthorne and Yoaav Isaacs point out:
We should emphasize just how small we take the life-permitting parameter values to be according to the physically respectable measures. “Small” here doesn’t mean “1 in 10,000” or “1 in 1,000,000”. It means the kind of fraction that one would resort to exponents to describe, as in “1 in 10 to the 120.” The kind of package that we have in mind tells us that only a fantastically small range is life-permitting.
What kind of evidential weight does this have? Well, suppose that the probability of FT given theism is 1 in 10. Now, suppose that the probability of FT given naturalism is 1 in 1,000 (which, given the probabilities mentioned above, is being very generous). This gives us a likelihood ratio of 100, which, as Hawthorne and Isaacs note, "is sufficient to take someone who antecedently thought that the probability of God’s existence was just under 10 percent to thinking that the probability of God’s existence is just over 90 percent." This is very strong evidence, even if one takes theism to have an extremely low prior probability (in this case, 0.1 as compared to naturalism's 0.9).
No comments:
Post a Comment