You have more patience than I do: if I was in such a debate and got muted like that, I would refuse to move on to any other point. Which probably isn't the most strategic move, but by gum my temper would not allow anything else. Good on you for having a cool head!
I once spoke with someone vaguely sympathetic to TJump on the matter of the importance of prediction for theories. They were not half as hardcore, so I asked for a paper describing their view on the matter. They sent me a paper by Roger White (03) which defended strong predictionism. In the paper, it said that strong predictionism is unfairly strawmanned as super-strong predictionism, the view that the fact that a theory predicted rather than accommodated a datum is evidence in itself for the theory. He said that “it is not clear that anyone has explicitly endorsed this thesis” (I figure Lakatos did though). After reading that part, I replied to the person who sent it to me that TJump was, in fact, a Super-Duper Strong Predictionist, which is two standard deviations more extreme than the strawman-which-no-one-has-ever-explicitly-endorsed strong predictionism. My interlocutor found that to be quite agreeable. I think the name should stick
Is there an n such that it is unreasonable to reject theism on the basis of holding to a super predictionism that is n standard deviations beyond average predictionism?
For example, if n = 1 you are just being a bit obstinate in your skepticism, but if n = 3 you belong in a madhouse?
Uh, many theists are strong predictionists (including Roger White), so I don’t think strong predictionism gives you justification to reject Theism. I also don’t think strong predictionism is itself very reasonable. But I wouldn’t say you’re a lunatic for being a strong predictionist or even a super strong predictionist. But Super-duper strong predictionism is past the threshold for crazy. So, I don’t know if this answers your question, but super strong < n < super duper strong
I think you are describing super-duper strong predictionism. Strong predictionism does NOT say that a hypothesis having predicted the data is direct evidence for the hypothesis: it is only indirect evidence. Super-strong predictionism says that it is direct evidence.
Neither give ANY reason to believe that the best hypothesis is going to be one which makes predictions. It only says that predictions can be some additional evidence for a hypothesis.
Yeah, pretty much. There are also plenty of cases where accommodation is vastly superior to prediction, such as when it comes to routing out data fraud. Obviously Alice isn’t doing as good of a job defending the FTA as someone like Jason Waller or Robin Collins, but if no other theory reasonably accommodates this data (which Waller argues that a multiverse has a good shot at), then it’s the best game in town. Few philosophers of science take seriously the idea that a theory which fully explains the data is in any way inferior to a theory which partially explains the data, but predicted it
So a strong and super-strong predictionist can hold to a hypothesis that makes no predictions? And this is true even if a competing hypothesis does make predictions? Something about the choice of name of this epistemology seems off
Probably 1? Most Christians I know (myself included) have experienced things that are predicted by Christianity. Spiritual experiences, answers to prayer, the Christian life being a satisfying one, etc.
Ya, it seems it would be difficult for even the hardest skeptical predictionist to remain an atheist under 1. Not that I would fault him either way, but I think atheism would be rare. II think 2 & 3 could probably easily go either way
The great mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan credited his discoveries to the goddess Namagiri revealing them to him in dreams. So I think we can safely lay atheism to rest at this point.
Someday, I am going to discover the true theory of everything, but I will claim that all of the laws of physics were caused to be true, and everything in the universe caused to exist, by a square circle in my pocket (they were created in a puff of logic via the principle of explosion). I will do it all just to mess with TJump.
Also, given that many early physicists were theists and incorporated God into their theories (e.g., believing that God created the natural laws or set in motion the initial conditions of the universe), isn't TJump obligated to believe in God under his epistemology?
How do you test for the existence of a thing without specifying its properties? Properties that can be tested for. So that you can locate the thing in the real world via detection of a thing with those properties. So you specify a property if a god as perfection. Show me how you test for that.
We know that humans exist. Julius Ceasars is a human. But we don't know that gods exist even though there are in general things that exist. None of the things that we know exist are Gods or leprechauns. The analogy to Julius Ceasar fails.
Were there any novel testable predictions made on the assumption that dinosaurs once existed?
Did our discoveries about dinosaurs lead to any accurate predictions?
I'm genuinely curious. I don't recall reading something that said "because we learned about dinosaurs, we were able to accurately predict X", but maybe something like that is out there? If it is out there, I'd love to hear about it. If knowing about dinosaurs never enabled testable accurate predictions, that strikes me as a pretty conclusive counterargument to T Jump's epistemology.
You can do it epistemically by refusing to learn any modern biology, focusing on learning all about dinosaurs first, and then using dinosaurology to predict what current animals should look like, what genes they should have, ancestral paths, etc.
> Tom claimed in defense of it that it’s widely accepted in the sciences, but this isn’t true—science is methodologically naturalist in that it tends to only consider natural explanations of events, but scientists don’t have some well-worked out epistemology for examining supernatural explanations. It simply isn’t their field of expertise.
They do have a well-worked out epistemology for examining supernatural explanations, it's called science. They use this to rule out supernatural explanations because they are all extraordinarily bad at predicting or explaining anything. If scientists doing archaeology and paleontology had dug up the animals from Noah's ark and located the Garden of Eden, instead of what they actually did, this would be extremely strong scientific evidence for Judaism, just as digging up Pompeii and Roman-Egyptian tombs are very strong scientific evidence for the Roman Empire. If a double blind study on the power of prayer found that prayers specifically from Christians reduced cancer fatalities by 9%, this would be quite strong evidence for Christianity. Those things didn't happen, though, because those religions aren't true.
Sure, scientists can trivially rule out supernatural explanations that don’t fit the data. But that’s a bit different from what he’s discussing. You could conceivably have cases where a supernatural explanation seems to predict the evidence better than any natural explanation - for example, a miracle claim with tons of corroborating evidence. In those cases, you need to know something about the prior probability of a supernatural explanation to decide whether to accept it or not, given however much evidence there is. The standard methods of science don’t deal with the prior probabilities of supernatural explanations. So you need to do philosophy to get a handle on those cases.
> Second, as explained before, it would rule out believing in dark matter. Dark matter is a new kind of thing, not composed of existing stuff. It’s believed in because it explains existing data, not because it made advanced experimental predictions.
I think this is only true if you don't count new astronomical observations as "advanced experimental predictions", even though we didn't know what the results would be before taking the observation. There have certainly been new observations supporting dark matter theories taken after the formulation of the theory, in some cases explicitly taken to test the theory.
Particle dark matter could also interact with normal matter via the weak force (maybe the strong force), and might be detectable in Higgs boson style experiments.
Perhaps the most reasonable approach would be to grant TJump a "Sane Hypothetical Epistemology"--a work in progress--without requiring too much set-in-stone explicitness. The position below seems sane enough to me:
1. It is reasonable to be confident that you exist and can make predictions
2. It is reasonable to be confident that Julius Ceasar existed in some form substantially similar to the historical record while acknowledging some details might be false
3. It is reasonable to be confident in established scientific theories while acknowledging new data can overthrow these theories
4. It is reasonable to be confident that there exists a Sane Hypothetical Epistemology (SHE) such that:
A. SHE affirms the reasonability and confidence of the first three points,
B. SHE requires strong predictions for this reasonability and confidence,
C. SHE does not always require strong predictions to the same degree and in the same way for each type of thing, and
D. SHE allows reasonable confidence that God does not exist
I suspect that you (and TJump) would accept the first three points as they are, but that you may have issues with #4. It was presented without proof, so of course it could be rejected without proof. But if you could in fact refute 4, then that might move TJump somewhat
You’re making a somewhat strong philosophical claim about the existence of dark matter. Is it consistent with the evidence? Sure. Would it be surprising if physicists found evidence against it? Not really. It’s definitely not as well supported as many other scientific theories.
It's definitely not as well supported as other theories in physics, but the fact that it's considered very likely (even if not certain) means that you can use explanation of existing data to support the existence of a new kind of thing not made of previously known stuff. That's all that's needed to refute TJump's claim that you can't use that kind of argument at all.
But it’s not good to the same degree that natural selection or quantum mechanics is good. The main thing going for it that it explains inconsistencies in what they expected to find and the fact that it’s impervious to any measurement is questionable. I’m certainly not an expert but “undetectable particles that make our theories work” is the kind of thing you would expect if there was something fundamentally missing.
When is it "reasonable" to "believe" in "God"? Not to pull a Jordan Peterson, here, but there's probably a lot to unpack. We could go through an example:
1. Matter and energy behave in very specific and precise ways, according to our models
2. If matter and energy didn't behave in these specific and precise ways, there would be no universe
3. This specificity and precision are much better explained by God than by chance, necessity, etc ("bare nature")
It probably isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world to believe in the "God" that follows from that, if you leave it at that, which is really just a placeholder word for "idunno". But what if, eg, that's all you got, and yet you believe in a personal, interactive God? For example, a God who answers your prayers. You pray. Sometimes things work out, you say God answered "Yes". Sometimes they don't, so "No". Fair enough, I guess, probably no need for the Psyche Ward. However, we can get crazier and crazier with the sort of God we come up with, where eventually, for all practical purposes, we're being unreasonable if we believe.
And, on the other end of the spectrum, suppose we reject the God of that mini-FTA outright. Are we being unreasonable? Well, in some sense, there's probably no such thing as matter, particles, energy, force, etc. Reality is what she is, and those are just constructs we impose upon her. For all we know, our reality could've been utterly different, and our physics could've have been truly exotic/alien. Maybe it wouldn't even have close analogs of things like matter, particles, energy, force, etc.
A finely tuned model doesn't seem to necessitate that the thing being modeled is finely tuned.
Maybe there are other beings in our own universe who have physics entirely different from our own. Maybe it seems more finely tuned, maybe less. Whatever. At the end of the day (at least the end of yesterday), it doesn’t seem unreasonable to reject either the mini-FTA or any others I've seen
Attempting to do things that one thinks has a chance of interacting with God is instrumentally rational, under Pascal's wager. Prayer plausibly falls into this category.
>"For all we know, our reality could've been utterly different, and our physics could've have been truly exotic/alien. Maybe it wouldn't even have close analogs of things like matter, particles, energy, force, etc."
Conceding this helps the fine-tuning argument. If the world could have been very different, but we are in a world that seems unusually well suited for us, then that would be evidence towards theories that account for that. You might argue that that's not conclusive, but it is evidence.
Ya, but what I'm saying is that space, time, matter, energy, etc, aren't reality "in and of itself". They are just elements of model we impose upon reality. Those elements of the model do seem "fine tuned", in the sense that if you tweak them ecer slightly, our model falls apart. But that doesn't mean that if reality were tweaked then reality would fall apart. Perhaps the tweaked reality would get along just fine, and the inhabitants would come up with models that didn't have anything like space, time, matter, energy, etc. Perhaps even in our untweaked reality there are aliens that perceive the world in such a radically different way that their physics has utterly nothing familiar to us
>"Ya, but what I'm saying is that space, time, matter, energy, etc, aren't reality "in and of itself". They are just elements of model we impose upon reality."
>"Perhaps even in our untweaked reality there are aliens that perceive the world in such a radically different way that their physics has utterly nothing familiar to us"
The models, though, seem uncommonly good at predicting reality, and much of it seems pretty fundamental to how reality works. At least, as best we know, the world behaves remarkably similar to how it would if those things existed. Now, I don't know quite what "exist" means, or how to identify what reality is in itself beyond what we can gather from empirical and rational data. Any future model will have to have the current models as limiting cases. The concepts are powerful and so we use them; it seems extremely unlikely. These tools are useful because they can collapse incredibly complex systems into a straightforward set of a few important factors. It seems like the importance of those factors is not arbitrary—there's no way that there will be anything that will represent the world with the same clarity without being able to talk about space, or light, or whatever.
>"But that doesn't mean that if reality were tweaked then reality would fall apart. Perhaps the tweaked reality would get along just fine, and the inhabitants would come up with models that didn't have anything like space, time, matter, energy, etc."
I read this as the assertion that life is common in the parameter space of physics, with randomly chosen values. Do you have reason to think this, when in many cases, under current models, we have reason to think that it wouldn't allow for complex lifelike structures to arise? I suppose the fine-tuning argument here is one to that effect, but then that's a concession that the argument works, just not that it works sufficiently to demonstrate that God exists. Which is fine, of course, just be aware of that.
I don't know what to make of the FTA, honestly. I would say it's strong intuition of design, but we've all always had that intuition, anyway. Some people have said atheism is the default position, but I disagree and think theism is. That is, unless you've been raised to be an atheist, you probably have to work at it.
That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to reject the FTA. We know so little about reality, itself, and our own physics that it's a pretty tall order to speculate about the space of possible realities, the types of physics that might describe them, and whether sentience would emerge.
Imagine a box of marbles were tumbling down a hill, and we were microbial physicists living inside. We might derive, eg, a model about angels flapping their wings pushing the marbles around and think to ourselves "Wow, look at these equations, if these angles had a millionth of a millimeter shorter wingspan, these marbles would all come crashing down!". It would be remarkable if we even perceived our reality as marbles moving around in 3D space, at all. We might instead perceive "space" as a 2D plane, or maybe something super exotic like a n-dimrnsional Klein Bottle, assuming we represented reality as having space, at all
I knew that he was a bit of a cliché internet atheist, but I didn't think it was that bad.
Muting you is particularly ridiculous.
You have more patience than I do: if I was in such a debate and got muted like that, I would refuse to move on to any other point. Which probably isn't the most strategic move, but by gum my temper would not allow anything else. Good on you for having a cool head!
I once spoke with someone vaguely sympathetic to TJump on the matter of the importance of prediction for theories. They were not half as hardcore, so I asked for a paper describing their view on the matter. They sent me a paper by Roger White (03) which defended strong predictionism. In the paper, it said that strong predictionism is unfairly strawmanned as super-strong predictionism, the view that the fact that a theory predicted rather than accommodated a datum is evidence in itself for the theory. He said that “it is not clear that anyone has explicitly endorsed this thesis” (I figure Lakatos did though). After reading that part, I replied to the person who sent it to me that TJump was, in fact, a Super-Duper Strong Predictionist, which is two standard deviations more extreme than the strawman-which-no-one-has-ever-explicitly-endorsed strong predictionism. My interlocutor found that to be quite agreeable. I think the name should stick
Is there an n such that it is unreasonable to reject theism on the basis of holding to a super predictionism that is n standard deviations beyond average predictionism?
For example, if n = 1 you are just being a bit obstinate in your skepticism, but if n = 3 you belong in a madhouse?
Uh, many theists are strong predictionists (including Roger White), so I don’t think strong predictionism gives you justification to reject Theism. I also don’t think strong predictionism is itself very reasonable. But I wouldn’t say you’re a lunatic for being a strong predictionist or even a super strong predictionist. But Super-duper strong predictionism is past the threshold for crazy. So, I don’t know if this answers your question, but super strong < n < super duper strong
What might strong predictionism "look like" in a theist?
1. "Theism makes predictions that I have experienced"
2. "Theism makes predictions that have been experienced, but just not by me"
3. "Theism makes predictions, but even though it's extremely implausible that anyone has experienced these predictions, I'm still holding out"
I think you are describing super-duper strong predictionism. Strong predictionism does NOT say that a hypothesis having predicted the data is direct evidence for the hypothesis: it is only indirect evidence. Super-strong predictionism says that it is direct evidence.
Neither give ANY reason to believe that the best hypothesis is going to be one which makes predictions. It only says that predictions can be some additional evidence for a hypothesis.
It's like, something's gotta give, here, right? If we're talking about an Almighty God, we can't just carry on like this:
Alice: "Well, sir, the earliest known parameters of the universe were such and such, and so God is your best explanation"
Bod: "God's my best explanation? How'd he do it?"
Alice: "How TF should I know...he's God, maybe he waved a wand"
Bob: "OK, well, is he still waving the goddamned thing? Is he still doing anything that can be predicted or detected?"
Alice: "No...but what difference does it make, it's not like we're knuckle-dragging super-duper strong predictionists, right?"
Bob: "So...we have no idea what God even is, how he did this, or where he is now...but he's the best explanation you got for me?"
Alice: "It's an open and shut case. FTA FTW. What can I say, it's why y'all pay me the big bucks"
Bob: "Are you even qualified to do this job??"
Alice: "I mean, you hired me, and so me being qualified is the best theory to accommodate that data"
Yeah, pretty much. There are also plenty of cases where accommodation is vastly superior to prediction, such as when it comes to routing out data fraud. Obviously Alice isn’t doing as good of a job defending the FTA as someone like Jason Waller or Robin Collins, but if no other theory reasonably accommodates this data (which Waller argues that a multiverse has a good shot at), then it’s the best game in town. Few philosophers of science take seriously the idea that a theory which fully explains the data is in any way inferior to a theory which partially explains the data, but predicted it
So a strong and super-strong predictionist can hold to a hypothesis that makes no predictions? And this is true even if a competing hypothesis does make predictions? Something about the choice of name of this epistemology seems off
Probably 1? Most Christians I know (myself included) have experienced things that are predicted by Christianity. Spiritual experiences, answers to prayer, the Christian life being a satisfying one, etc.
Ya, it seems it would be difficult for even the hardest skeptical predictionist to remain an atheist under 1. Not that I would fault him either way, but I think atheism would be rare. II think 2 & 3 could probably easily go either way
The great mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan credited his discoveries to the goddess Namagiri revealing them to him in dreams. So I think we can safely lay atheism to rest at this point.
True dat, but Ramanujan didn't say Namagiri was woven into his theories, themselves, he just said she helped him discover them. Jury's still out imo
Hardly means she's real. I've seen it written that everyone you encounter in dreams are aspects of yourself.
Sorry, I don't make the rules of epistemology.
Someday, I am going to discover the true theory of everything, but I will claim that all of the laws of physics were caused to be true, and everything in the universe caused to exist, by a square circle in my pocket (they were created in a puff of logic via the principle of explosion). I will do it all just to mess with TJump.
Also, given that many early physicists were theists and incorporated God into their theories (e.g., believing that God created the natural laws or set in motion the initial conditions of the universe), isn't TJump obligated to believe in God under his epistemology?
Sounds like some of the sophistry seen at UncommonDissent in the early oughts. I’m sure I contributed some myself.
Good times.
I'm leaving this link that may be helpful for those who want to clear their confusion about evidence and importance of predictions: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/zpCiuR4T343j9WkcK/p/fhojYBGGiYAFcryHZ
How do you test for the existence of a thing without specifying its properties? Properties that can be tested for. So that you can locate the thing in the real world via detection of a thing with those properties. So you specify a property if a god as perfection. Show me how you test for that.
We know that humans exist. Julius Ceasars is a human. But we don't know that gods exist even though there are in general things that exist. None of the things that we know exist are Gods or leprechauns. The analogy to Julius Ceasar fails.
Were there any novel testable predictions made on the assumption that dinosaurs once existed?
Did our discoveries about dinosaurs lead to any accurate predictions?
I'm genuinely curious. I don't recall reading something that said "because we learned about dinosaurs, we were able to accurately predict X", but maybe something like that is out there? If it is out there, I'd love to hear about it. If knowing about dinosaurs never enabled testable accurate predictions, that strikes me as a pretty conclusive counterargument to T Jump's epistemology.
You can do it epistemically by refusing to learn any modern biology, focusing on learning all about dinosaurs first, and then using dinosaurology to predict what current animals should look like, what genes they should have, ancestral paths, etc.
> Tom claimed in defense of it that it’s widely accepted in the sciences, but this isn’t true—science is methodologically naturalist in that it tends to only consider natural explanations of events, but scientists don’t have some well-worked out epistemology for examining supernatural explanations. It simply isn’t their field of expertise.
They do have a well-worked out epistemology for examining supernatural explanations, it's called science. They use this to rule out supernatural explanations because they are all extraordinarily bad at predicting or explaining anything. If scientists doing archaeology and paleontology had dug up the animals from Noah's ark and located the Garden of Eden, instead of what they actually did, this would be extremely strong scientific evidence for Judaism, just as digging up Pompeii and Roman-Egyptian tombs are very strong scientific evidence for the Roman Empire. If a double blind study on the power of prayer found that prayers specifically from Christians reduced cancer fatalities by 9%, this would be quite strong evidence for Christianity. Those things didn't happen, though, because those religions aren't true.
Sure, scientists can trivially rule out supernatural explanations that don’t fit the data. But that’s a bit different from what he’s discussing. You could conceivably have cases where a supernatural explanation seems to predict the evidence better than any natural explanation - for example, a miracle claim with tons of corroborating evidence. In those cases, you need to know something about the prior probability of a supernatural explanation to decide whether to accept it or not, given however much evidence there is. The standard methods of science don’t deal with the prior probabilities of supernatural explanations. So you need to do philosophy to get a handle on those cases.
> Second, as explained before, it would rule out believing in dark matter. Dark matter is a new kind of thing, not composed of existing stuff. It’s believed in because it explains existing data, not because it made advanced experimental predictions.
I think this is only true if you don't count new astronomical observations as "advanced experimental predictions", even though we didn't know what the results would be before taking the observation. There have certainly been new observations supporting dark matter theories taken after the formulation of the theory, in some cases explicitly taken to test the theory.
Particle dark matter could also interact with normal matter via the weak force (maybe the strong force), and might be detectable in Higgs boson style experiments.
Perhaps the most reasonable approach would be to grant TJump a "Sane Hypothetical Epistemology"--a work in progress--without requiring too much set-in-stone explicitness. The position below seems sane enough to me:
1. It is reasonable to be confident that you exist and can make predictions
2. It is reasonable to be confident that Julius Ceasar existed in some form substantially similar to the historical record while acknowledging some details might be false
3. It is reasonable to be confident in established scientific theories while acknowledging new data can overthrow these theories
4. It is reasonable to be confident that there exists a Sane Hypothetical Epistemology (SHE) such that:
A. SHE affirms the reasonability and confidence of the first three points,
B. SHE requires strong predictions for this reasonability and confidence,
C. SHE does not always require strong predictions to the same degree and in the same way for each type of thing, and
D. SHE allows reasonable confidence that God does not exist
I suspect that you (and TJump) would accept the first three points as they are, but that you may have issues with #4. It was presented without proof, so of course it could be rejected without proof. But if you could in fact refute 4, then that might move TJump somewhat
You’re making a somewhat strong philosophical claim about the existence of dark matter. Is it consistent with the evidence? Sure. Would it be surprising if physicists found evidence against it? Not really. It’s definitely not as well supported as many other scientific theories.
It's definitely not as well supported as other theories in physics, but the fact that it's considered very likely (even if not certain) means that you can use explanation of existing data to support the existence of a new kind of thing not made of previously known stuff. That's all that's needed to refute TJump's claim that you can't use that kind of argument at all.
I think the evidence is good which is why it's widely accepted.
But it’s not good to the same degree that natural selection or quantum mechanics is good. The main thing going for it that it explains inconsistencies in what they expected to find and the fact that it’s impervious to any measurement is questionable. I’m certainly not an expert but “undetectable particles that make our theories work” is the kind of thing you would expect if there was something fundamentally missing.
That's true. But it's still a helpful example to illustrate the principled point.
When is it "reasonable" to "believe" in "God"? Not to pull a Jordan Peterson, here, but there's probably a lot to unpack. We could go through an example:
1. Matter and energy behave in very specific and precise ways, according to our models
2. If matter and energy didn't behave in these specific and precise ways, there would be no universe
3. This specificity and precision are much better explained by God than by chance, necessity, etc ("bare nature")
It probably isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world to believe in the "God" that follows from that, if you leave it at that, which is really just a placeholder word for "idunno". But what if, eg, that's all you got, and yet you believe in a personal, interactive God? For example, a God who answers your prayers. You pray. Sometimes things work out, you say God answered "Yes". Sometimes they don't, so "No". Fair enough, I guess, probably no need for the Psyche Ward. However, we can get crazier and crazier with the sort of God we come up with, where eventually, for all practical purposes, we're being unreasonable if we believe.
And, on the other end of the spectrum, suppose we reject the God of that mini-FTA outright. Are we being unreasonable? Well, in some sense, there's probably no such thing as matter, particles, energy, force, etc. Reality is what she is, and those are just constructs we impose upon her. For all we know, our reality could've been utterly different, and our physics could've have been truly exotic/alien. Maybe it wouldn't even have close analogs of things like matter, particles, energy, force, etc.
A finely tuned model doesn't seem to necessitate that the thing being modeled is finely tuned.
Maybe there are other beings in our own universe who have physics entirely different from our own. Maybe it seems more finely tuned, maybe less. Whatever. At the end of the day (at least the end of yesterday), it doesn’t seem unreasonable to reject either the mini-FTA or any others I've seen
Attempting to do things that one thinks has a chance of interacting with God is instrumentally rational, under Pascal's wager. Prayer plausibly falls into this category.
>"For all we know, our reality could've been utterly different, and our physics could've have been truly exotic/alien. Maybe it wouldn't even have close analogs of things like matter, particles, energy, force, etc."
Conceding this helps the fine-tuning argument. If the world could have been very different, but we are in a world that seems unusually well suited for us, then that would be evidence towards theories that account for that. You might argue that that's not conclusive, but it is evidence.
Ya, but what I'm saying is that space, time, matter, energy, etc, aren't reality "in and of itself". They are just elements of model we impose upon reality. Those elements of the model do seem "fine tuned", in the sense that if you tweak them ecer slightly, our model falls apart. But that doesn't mean that if reality were tweaked then reality would fall apart. Perhaps the tweaked reality would get along just fine, and the inhabitants would come up with models that didn't have anything like space, time, matter, energy, etc. Perhaps even in our untweaked reality there are aliens that perceive the world in such a radically different way that their physics has utterly nothing familiar to us
>"Ya, but what I'm saying is that space, time, matter, energy, etc, aren't reality "in and of itself". They are just elements of model we impose upon reality."
>"Perhaps even in our untweaked reality there are aliens that perceive the world in such a radically different way that their physics has utterly nothing familiar to us"
The models, though, seem uncommonly good at predicting reality, and much of it seems pretty fundamental to how reality works. At least, as best we know, the world behaves remarkably similar to how it would if those things existed. Now, I don't know quite what "exist" means, or how to identify what reality is in itself beyond what we can gather from empirical and rational data. Any future model will have to have the current models as limiting cases. The concepts are powerful and so we use them; it seems extremely unlikely. These tools are useful because they can collapse incredibly complex systems into a straightforward set of a few important factors. It seems like the importance of those factors is not arbitrary—there's no way that there will be anything that will represent the world with the same clarity without being able to talk about space, or light, or whatever.
>"But that doesn't mean that if reality were tweaked then reality would fall apart. Perhaps the tweaked reality would get along just fine, and the inhabitants would come up with models that didn't have anything like space, time, matter, energy, etc."
I read this as the assertion that life is common in the parameter space of physics, with randomly chosen values. Do you have reason to think this, when in many cases, under current models, we have reason to think that it wouldn't allow for complex lifelike structures to arise? I suppose the fine-tuning argument here is one to that effect, but then that's a concession that the argument works, just not that it works sufficiently to demonstrate that God exists. Which is fine, of course, just be aware of that.
I don't know what to make of the FTA, honestly. I would say it's strong intuition of design, but we've all always had that intuition, anyway. Some people have said atheism is the default position, but I disagree and think theism is. That is, unless you've been raised to be an atheist, you probably have to work at it.
That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to reject the FTA. We know so little about reality, itself, and our own physics that it's a pretty tall order to speculate about the space of possible realities, the types of physics that might describe them, and whether sentience would emerge.
Imagine a box of marbles were tumbling down a hill, and we were microbial physicists living inside. We might derive, eg, a model about angels flapping their wings pushing the marbles around and think to ourselves "Wow, look at these equations, if these angles had a millionth of a millimeter shorter wingspan, these marbles would all come crashing down!". It would be remarkable if we even perceived our reality as marbles moving around in 3D space, at all. We might instead perceive "space" as a 2D plane, or maybe something super exotic like a n-dimrnsional Klein Bottle, assuming we represented reality as having space, at all