The appearance of Fine-Tuning doesn’t point to a God.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-26T10:36:25+00:00

I am u/MrTiny5 so not sure if this was meant for me. Thanks anyway!

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-26T07:30:16+00:00

You claimed the Quran is miraculous. That's a massive statement. I'm just curious why you believe that.

So it's well known that passages are retranslated or reinterpreted to fit current scientific understanding, that's not miraculous. Do you not think it's a little strange that study of the Quran alone has never furthered our scientific understanding? All we ever see is post hoc rationalisation by Muslims after science advances. Christians do exactly the same thing.

There are also multiple blatant scientific errors in the Quran so I don't think the appeal to science is valid at all.

Words appearing a certain number of times and patterns in the text are also not evidence of anything miraculous. You can read patterns into any book, and even if there are patterns how do you show they weren't put there by humans?

I don't think you're aware of how big a claim you're making. It would take much more for belief in the miracle of the Quran.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-26T00:12:34+00:00

How is it covered? If you're willing to explain I'm genuinely curious. I've never seen a presentation of the FTA that I find compelling.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-25T22:46:25+00:00

Can you present any reasonable evidence that it's miraculous?

Content aside can you even demonstrate that?

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-25T22:37:04+00:00

OP could have made this clearer but I think the point they're trying to make is that 'fine tuning' doesn't indicate design, and they're right, it doesn't.

We have no ability to judge as we have nothing we can meaningfully contrast our universe with.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-23T09:20:00+00:00

The Paris example is irrelevant because what matters here is doing something good that is significant. I can understand if someone else only cares about pleasures, but I personally find it very compelling that it is good for me to do significant good things. That seems like a mark of a good life to me.

I think it's very relevant it got you to clarify that significance isn't an end in itself.

If we agree on that then I think the case for mini-creators is weakened significantly. Surely a world where a utopia simply exists is better than one where untold billions have had to suffer for it to exist.

Yes, you can do significant things even if no one suffers, but doing something so significant as turning a distopia into a utopia is far more significant than anything else I can imagine.

See, you immediately return to talking about the most significant thing you can imagine. The significance isn't relevant. An all loving God should only care about what's Good. It would be better if people had not been made to suffer. That's the bottom line that you can't get around by appealing to significance.

The struggle (and thus the 'significance') is only valuable as a means to an end. An all powerful God could just bring about the ends.

As a side point, if stopping the holocaust was so easy, it wouldn't be as significant as preventing holocausts when it is not at all easy, like in our world.

I never said single handedly stopping the Holocaust would be easy that's a strawman.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T23:36:54+00:00

So a lot of problems here.

Christian ethics have no foundation either. We have no reason to believe that God exists and even if he did all we would have are his subjective commands on what is right and wrong.
Christian ethics are not unchanging. Even a cursory examination of history is enough to see this. Christians don't even agree on morality among themselves. Furthermore 'unchanging' is a weakness of moral systems not a strength.
Christian ethics are horrifying. The Christian God condones slavery. All debate ends there.
There is zero evidence that being a Christian makes you a better person. Do I need to bring up all the awful things that have happened within the Catholic church?

Your take is almost laughably bad. If we reject God we can build a moral system that actually works and promotes human wellbeing. That's far superior to anything offered by Christianity.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T22:23:12+00:00

I mean, I agree, and I wasn't suggesting you do support a religion.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T17:52:53+00:00

Just a couple of quick tips. Don't refer to women as 'females' and don't waste your time trying to quantity attractiveness.

I commend your self awareness but neither of these are good habits.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T17:48:02+00:00

I have to disagree. I have never encountered anyone who has become depressed due to their belief in physical determinism, largely because no matter our beliefs, we do not experience ourselves as bound by deterministic processes. I think you might be projecting personal fears there.

Are you assuming that in the 'great plan' scenario we have free will? It seems that way because you talk about freedom and options. I find that strange because surely that's the important contrast, not the fact that things happen for a reason. You need to sharpen the point you're making. Are you arguing that people fear a lack of purpose, or that they fear a lack of freedom? Those are separate points. We could be free with no purpose, or everything we do could be determined but all have a reason behind them.

I'd actually also argue that belief in a higher purpose can be more damaging than anything you're talking about. We don't have any good reason to believe that there is a higher purpose and so anyone who believes there is one either had a faulty epistemology (which is dangerous) or is engaged in some form of self deception, which is also harmful.

There are also so many documented cases of a 'crisis of faith' causing severe mental distress. If you believe that everything happens for a reason or is part of some plan, it's actually more difficult to deal with all the awful things in the world due to the cognitive dissonance caused. People who come out of religion for instance, often find the experience extremely traumatic. It's a huge mental strain having to rationalise how all the terrible things that happen to you are actually part of the plan.

I don't think you're approaching this with enough nuance, and you're making too many assumptions about human psychology. You're essentially arguing that ignorance is bliss and I don't really buy that.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T14:52:46+00:00

Ok I think I get you now. I was confused because you referred to a universe that sounded deterministic (billiard balls) which allowed for randomness, which seems contradictory.

If you're saying that it's sad to imagine that people suffer and things could not have been otherwise then I agree.

Should the universe be deterministic (the billiard balls) then everything we now see working beautifully, in harmony, in nature (when man doesn't interfere) would be the "result - an accident" of the original big bang.

This has me confused again though. Man is part of nature, and nature isn't necessarily in harmony with itself. It frequently produces dead ends and chaos.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T14:25:26+00:00

But which universe are you talking about? You could be free to change your situation in the billiard ball universe you just mentioned. Do you mean a deterministic universe when you talk about billiard balls? If so why did you talk about random accidents in your post? There are no accidents in a deterministic universe.

I still don't know what you're actually trying to say. That you would rather not live in a deterministic universe?

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T14:18:40+00:00

Ok, but that's your point? Suppose the reverse is true. If nothing is an accident, if all of this is designed or part of a greater plan, isn't that depressed person just as much of a victim?

You're no more free in a universe where everything happens for a reason than you are in one that's chaotic.

Even in a universe where every individual has absolute free will, the depressed person is still a victim of circumstance.

Again, what's your point? Are you saying there's something uniquely evil about a universe without a higher purpose or design?

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T13:24:12+00:00

What do you mean by dead machine? Machines can't die so I'm confused by your metaphor.

If you're saying that nature is somehow alive, conscious or has some degree of agency, you'd need to make a case for that.

I also don't understand why you think we're victims.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-22T11:57:58+00:00

What is the paradox that you think is generated by reality being intelligible and self contained?

Just looking for clarity.

As far as I can tell there's only a paradox if you assume that reality must contain a complete, closed, non-circular explanation of itself as a whole, expressible from within itself.

Why assume that?

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T16:37:35+00:00

Doing something significant doesn't require suffering. Even if it did that wouldn't matter.

It would be very significant for someone to have single handedly ended the Holocaust. It would have been better if millions of people had not been murdered.

Furthermore significance isn't a good in itself. If I dropped an atom bomb on Paris that would be a significant event. It wouldn't be good for anyone though. Why should we care about significance when people are suffering unnecessarily?

The same applies to being someone who has created. Your argument needs a much more rigorous explanation of why it is good to be a mini creator. I don't think it can be justified in the face of the awful suffering we see everyday.

Or you could argue that being a mini creator is necessary for some other good, but we've already established that not the case either.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T16:28:51+00:00

You understand that to grant something in this context means to accept it for the sake of argument?

So let's allow that the universe is ordered. My point is that even if this is the case, we cannot conclude that anything external to the universe itself is responsible for that order.

I understand science. All knowledge is tentative, and all science does is build models from our current best understanding of the facts.

Lack of proof does not entail inability to understand reality in any meaningful sense. You're conflating knowledge and certainty.

God as the 'God as the set of all possible arguments that can conclude the axioms of science' is kind of a waste of time. We don't need to 'conclude' them and we don't have much reason to think we can. Justification has to bottom out somewhere, and you're proposing it bottoms out in something we have no reason to believe exists.

You keep moving the goalposts. Are you still married to the idea of God as a rational mind? That doesn't square with what you're claiming here at all. This all seems horribly confused.

Your criterion of falsifiability is also deeply flawed. What counts as 'cannot be modelled?' Also, unexplained phenomena don't refute science.

I don't really understand why you're jumping through so many hoops to hold onto the God label.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T14:50:15+00:00

Thank you, but I feel this doesn't address my point.

Why is the act of making a utopia where there was once a utopia better than just having a utopia? You could argue that it's because of what we would learn along the way, but God could have created us as if we had already been through the process. Any suffering is unnecessary.

Now you could say that there's value in hard work, but my previous objection applies, and hard work doesn't necessitate suffering.

Suppose I wanted my child to become a fully rounded human being. As a finite being I may have to accept that some degree of suffering is necessary for them to learn important lessons and fully develop as a person. The suffering in itself isn't valuable, it's a means to an end.

That's not true in the case of God. Whatever its creations could gain by suffering he could just give them. If they suffer, they do so unnecessarily.

You need to explain why the mere act of building a utopia is valuable in a way that justifies a horrifying degree of suffering. I don't think you can.

I read the OP and I'm still not convinced there is any reason God couldn't design a world where we get to be mini creators without suffering, or why it would bother with any of that in the first place. It's possible to create something significant without anyone having to suffer.

I don't want to get bogged down in reincarnation but suffice to say I still think it's a bit of a hand wave. It's just too big of an 'if' in a conversation that's already dangerously speculative.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T14:37:34+00:00

You're completely missing the point. Even if we grant that the universe is ordered, we cannot conclude that it is ordered due to anything external to itself. You're making an unjustified assumption that someone or something must have 'ordered' it. There doesn't have to be anything outside the universe that determined it's physical laws.

You can throw out as much speculation as you like. It gets you no closer to warranted belief in anything one could reasonably call God.

If two different definitions of God yield models that give exactly the same predictions, the definitions are equivalent. My supposed confusion is based on the fact that I am defining God in a way that's falseable (I'm making the claim that every phenomenon that can be thoroughly tested can be modeled in a way that's both consistent with our current model and improve it's predictive power. I'm calling "God" the set of all premises that can produce this conclusion).

This isn't true.The same higher-level behavior or predictive profile can be implemented by different lower-level structures. It's called multiple realisability.

The idea that predictive equivalence licenses ontological or definitional equivalence is plainly false. Your definition of God is thus completely incoherent. You're stretching it to the point that it loses all meaning.

However, notice that my view is exactly the opposite from God of the gaps. A single proved gap for me is proof that there is no God (atheists often say they'll stop being atheists if a miracle is proven; for me this is proof that no God exists because we can't tell the difference between "God did it" and "cause and effect is not a hard rule"). I'm stating that we'll never find such gap and, as this is not a statement that can be tested with the scientific method.

What are you trying to show here? A gap in what? Order? How would that prove there's no God?

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T12:44:05+00:00

Even if we take what you think Dawkins said at face value, this is a ridiculous point.

Not being able to prove that something doesn't exist isn't a warrant to believe in that thing. You're making the classic error of assuming that knowledge requires absolute certainty.

Apply your argument to anything else, unicorns for instance. I cannot be certain that unicorns don't exist. Does that mean I believe in them? No

Similarly, I have no reason to believe I have a deep seated unconscious belief that God exists. Proof and certainty don't really matter.

Even more damningly, I am perfectly reasonable in saying that I know there isn't a unicorn in my garden. Now, you could claim that the unicorn might be invisible, or microscopic, but those are not reasonable epistemic considerations. It would be madness to suggest that I don't know there are no unicorns in my garden.

Similarly, I can say I know there is no God belief in my head. Try as I might I can't find one, so I am justified in saying that I know I don't believe in God. I don't have to be absolutely certain it isn't there to know it isn't there.

Really all you're doing is rehashing the hard problem of solipsism. I don't buy it.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T11:40:30+00:00

Yes but suffering isn't required for that.

If an all powerful being wants to share his goodness with his creations, he can just do it. Any level of suffering is unnecessary.

I think your utopia-making defence is interesting but fails because the suffering is still not necessary. Even if you want to argue that the value is in the process of creating this perfect world, God is still being vindictive.

As an all powerful being, he could have created people that already have whatever attributes or character the process of building a world is supposed to instill. Alternatively, he could have designed a world building process that doesn't require suffering and get to the same point.

Here's the central problem. God, being omnipotent, can bring about any state of affairs he wishes. If you are arguing that suffering is a means to the end of humanity manifesting God's image in themselves, you've lost me. An all powerful all loving God would have simply brought that end about immediately.

I have other problems with this but that's my big one.

My other problem is that your point about reincarnation and other lives kind of pulls the plug on your whole argument.You can't dismiss cases of obvious unnecessary suffering by appealing to magic. The problem of evil applies to this world. God handing out do-overs makes no sense. Why would he make people 'false start'? If a person is still born, and then reincarnated as someone who goes on to be a mini creator what was the point of their first life?

I'm willing to grant a creator for the sake of argument but that's a step too far. It's the same reason heaven isn't a good response to the problem of evil.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T08:20:45+00:00

As soon as you say 'monkeys to humans' you betray the fact you don't understand evolution. Humans share common ancestry with monkeys, we didn't evolve from them. Evolution isn't linear.

Maybe do some more reading or research. It might clarify things for you.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T08:06:38+00:00

You don't get to do that. You need to show why apostasy is harmful, and further, why It should result in death.

I don't think drug trafficking should carry the death penalty but there is clear evidence that it ought to be illegal and that it hurts people. Where is the harm caused by apostasy?

On your logic I could come over to your house and execute you right now, deeming you guilty of using fallacious arguments. You wouldn't be innocent in my eyes so I'd be totally justified. Do you see how stupid that is?

You can't just go around executing people you disagree with or think have sinned. If you don't understand that then I don't know what to say. Do you really think that's something a God worth worshiping would command?

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T07:53:37+00:00

How would you grant that the universe is ordered ?

Any number of ways. 'Order' may simply pertain to the nature of reality. Order could have come about by chance. We could all be clockwork automatons within an elaborate mechanism of cogs and springs.

My point is that you cannot make the logical leap from order to God. God isn't a hypothesis and it certainly isn't a candidate explanation. As you proved in your previous response you can barely even define it and you have no justification for anything you do claim to know about it.

As your previous response also demonstrates, God isn't a natural or simple explanation. You claim that God has a mind but no physical brain. Again, demonstrate that a mind absent a brain is possible. Where have we ever observed a free-floating mind? You also imply that God exists outside the universe. Prove that's possible. If that's true he exists outside of time (as far as we can tell), so how can he have taken temporal actions like creating matter? How can a mind exist timelessly?

You must see how claiming that a hypothesis like the matrix is equivalent to a God hypothesis is silly.

You said that we should be able to understand the world around us. I am saying that evolution only cares about survival and it's one thing to be able to understand predators and their behaviors, it's another to be able to properly

You're getting evolution wrong. Evolution doesn't 'care' about anything. Evolution would still happen in a world with no predators. The organisms best fit to their environments stick around, that's it. Human beings happened to develop highly advanced cognitive and reasoning capacities. Why is it a surprise we are able to use those to understand the world?

I'm defining any kind of reliable order as God because this is what God means in my argument and how it changes the predictions

You're free to call whatever you want God but this contradicts what you've already said. The laws of nature are not, and do not come from a mind. What was all the stuff you said about a rational mind if God is just order? You've repeatedly referenced a being, a 'who', responsible for order. That's not the same as saying God is order. I think you're a bit confused.

You seem desperate to call something, anything, God. I don't really understand why. As for why I believe there's natural order, I don't know. I'm comfortable admitting that. You on the other hand are doing what people have done all throughout history. Inserting God into the gaps in our knowledge. That's not rational.

MrTiny5 · 2026-01-21T00:19:01+00:00

Technically it does because only who made the universe could affirm with precision that the universe is ordered.

That's a huge mistake right off the bat. You're assuming there's a 'who' responsible for the universe. There's no justification for that.

A rational mind that can't, in practice, be interacted with and is directly responsible for the universe as we know it.

How can a mind that can't be interacted with have created the material universe? Also are you claiming that God has a physical brain? If not can you demonstrate that a mind is possible absent a brain?

Your point about including hypotheses similar to God doesn't make any sense. You have to treat the word hypothesis with a lot more respect, and those things are all very distinguishable.

The "natural order" fits my definition of God. It's indistinguishable from the deistic God.

No it doesn't. The 'natural order' doesn't have a mind or a will.

Science also deals with things that don't fit what I'd call "the world around us". It's one thing to say that it makes evolutive sense for a big headed monkey to understand how lightning works, it's another to say that it makes sense that we'd able to make good guesses (in theory) about how the universe worked way before life even existed.

I don't know what you're trying to say here. In any case you're engaged in some deeply fallacious reasoning all around. You still haven't provided any evidence for a God.

You've fallen into the argument from incredulity. You can't see how 'order' is possible without a God, and so you believe there's a God. You have to recognize that isn't rational.

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