Here is the argument that Carrier tries to defeat in a debate with Wanchick:
Knowability and Discoverability
Additionally, many things within the universe indicate a God-like designer. Scholars have documented that our universe is not only fine-tuned for sentient life, but also for scientific discovery and knowability.[13] The universe is structured in just the right way to allow the study of natural laws and phenomena, greatly adding to our scientific knowledge. Such features make sense if God wants us to discover and enjoy creation; but why would these features exist on naturalism?
Beauty
Collins notes that "beauty is widely recognized by physicists as being an important characteristic of the laws of nature, one which has served as a highly selective guide to discovering the fundamental laws of nature in the twentieth century."[14] Moreover, the laws of nature (and many things in nature) exhibit simplicity, harmony, and elegance. It wouldn't be surprising for a creator to make such a universe, but, again, why would this be so if naturalism is true?
Here is what Carrier says:
Knowability and Discoverability
Additionally, many things within the universe indicate a God-like designer. Scholars have documented that our universe is not only fine-tuned for sentient life, but also for scientific discovery and knowability.[13] The universe is structured in just the right way to allow the study of natural laws and phenomena, greatly adding to our scientific knowledge. Such features make sense if God wants us to discover and enjoy creation; but why would these features exist on naturalism?
Beauty
Collins notes that "beauty is widely recognized by physicists as being an important characteristic of the laws of nature, one which has served as a highly selective guide to discovering the fundamental laws of nature in the twentieth century."[14] Moreover, the laws of nature (and many things in nature) exhibit simplicity, harmony, and elegance. It wouldn't be surprising for a creator to make such a universe, but, again, why would this be so if naturalism is true?
Here is what Carrier says:
Despite Wanchick's amazement, I cannot imagine any possible universe in which intelligent life-forms could evolve which would be incapable of being understood by those life-forms, so I see nothing here that needs to be explained.[16] And in spite of Wanchick's claim that God has made it easy to understand, the universe actually operates contrary to human common sense (consider relativity theory and quantum mechanics) and understanding it requires extremely advanced mathematical and conceptual background knowledge that most human beings will never attain. Far from being easy, the universe has been particularly difficult to understand, so no claim that it has been "finely tuned" to be understood has merit. The same holds for the idea that "beauty" is a valid criterion for true physical theories. What scientists call "beautiful" and "elegant" is in fact nightmarishly complicated to everyone else, and reflects a learned appreciation, not an innate truth-detector. As I explain elsewhere:
Far from a "beautiful and convenient" chemistry of four elements, we discovered in the end an incredibly ugly, messy, and inconvenient Periodic Table of over ninety elements and counting (never mind the mind-boggling complexity of the Standard Model of particle physics); far from the "beautiful and convenient" planetary theory of Copernicus, the paths and velocities of the planets are so ugly and inconvenient that we need supercomputers to handle the messy intersection of Newtonian, Keplerian, Einsteinian, Thermodynamic, and Chaotic effects.[17]
RESPONSE: Notice how Carrier fails to appreciate the point Wanchick is trying to make, that it is less surprising on theism than on naturalism for the universe to be intelligible, to have the right kinds of creatures in the right place at the right time in the universe's existence with the right amount of technology and intelligence to mathematically model a mathematically intelligible universe. It simply doesn't matter what Carrier can imagine or not imagine (we have no idea what a universe operating on different laws of nature would be like anyway). Moreover, notice that Carrier creates a straw-man of the argument by recasting it to say that scientific discovery should be easy, convenient, and an innate ability where the original argument, and the actual evidence we have, is that the universe is intelligible (with effort) and all the rest, and the question is which hypothesis makes this observation less surprising; atheism or theism. Attached below are some quotes from actual authorities on the matter, the last of which actually adds support to theism precisely in virtue of the effort that is required to mathematically model the universe in scientific theories, and adds a further expectation about fundamental reality on Christian theism over naturalism, namely, that it is relational (rather than atomistic), which it is.
Far from a "beautiful and convenient" chemistry of four elements, we discovered in the end an incredibly ugly, messy, and inconvenient Periodic Table of over ninety elements and counting (never mind the mind-boggling complexity of the Standard Model of particle physics); far from the "beautiful and convenient" planetary theory of Copernicus, the paths and velocities of the planets are so ugly and inconvenient that we need supercomputers to handle the messy intersection of Newtonian, Keplerian, Einsteinian, Thermodynamic, and Chaotic effects.[17]
RESPONSE: Notice how Carrier fails to appreciate the point Wanchick is trying to make, that it is less surprising on theism than on naturalism for the universe to be intelligible, to have the right kinds of creatures in the right place at the right time in the universe's existence with the right amount of technology and intelligence to mathematically model a mathematically intelligible universe. It simply doesn't matter what Carrier can imagine or not imagine (we have no idea what a universe operating on different laws of nature would be like anyway). Moreover, notice that Carrier creates a straw-man of the argument by recasting it to say that scientific discovery should be easy, convenient, and an innate ability where the original argument, and the actual evidence we have, is that the universe is intelligible (with effort) and all the rest, and the question is which hypothesis makes this observation less surprising; atheism or theism. Attached below are some quotes from actual authorities on the matter, the last of which actually adds support to theism precisely in virtue of the effort that is required to mathematically model the universe in scientific theories, and adds a further expectation about fundamental reality on Christian theism over naturalism, namely, that it is relational (rather than atomistic), which it is.
| john_polkinghorne_paul_davies_vs_tiny_richard_carrier.docx |
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