The fine-tuning argument for God's existence is a failure

org and the shrewd members therein. With brogdignagian exactitude, my opponent has let no jargon slip from his fingers as he presented his case for affirming a very strict skepticism. Meaning and substance, however, can often be missed when nomenclatures replace common vernacular, so I may need to reiterate some points for our less familiarized readers. So the new probability calculus that will be the center of our focus is: P(LPU|T & k') >> P(LPU|ASU & k') I think my opponent has done a great job of not caricaturing this position. Looking only at what we know (k'), it seems clear that the probability (P) of a life permitting universe (LPU) given theism (T) is greater than a life permitting universe given an atheistic single universe hypothesis (ASU). When we look at it from this light, my opponent agrees, that such a formulation is "stonking [sic] good confirmation of Theism. " But why look at it from this light? While my argument relies upon what we know, my opponent begins his case by considering what we do not know, or, as stated, what we do not have epistemic access to. This makes his use of "epistemic possibility" [1] relevant, because it is only useful when dealing with situations in which we are ignorant. The basic premise of his argument is that, since the region of the probability field that we have epistemic access to is much smaller in comparison to the region of the probability field that we do not have epistemic access to, all probability is inscrutable. That it is to say, we are far too presumptuous in thinking that fine-tuning confirms theism given everything that we do not know. Does this seem to be a powerful criticism? It fails for at least two reasons. When Arguments Prove Too Much My opponent's argument suffers from being too effective! What a bizarre criticism, right? How can an argument be too effective? First, his argument is not specific, insofar as there is nothing inherent in the argument that limits its application just to considerations of our universe and its probability. Basically, the probability region of anything we may seek to prove must consist of a larger area of known, quantifiable scenarios than of unknown, epistemologically inaccessible scenarios. Let us consider the existence of the external world. It is epistemically possible that I am merely a brain in a vat and all my feelings, thoughts and actions in and of an external world are illusory. Or, it is epistemically possible that none of my cognitive faculties actually yield true belief, subsequently leading me to believe that there is such thing as an external world. Or, there could exist a Cartesian demon whose sole purpose is to delude me. These scenarios could go on ad infinitum, and, because they can neither be known true or false by virtue of being epistemically inaccessible, they remain distinct epistemic possibilities. So even if the external world did exist, we haven't any good reasons for believing that it exists in the way that we perceive it. Because, according to my opponent, the likelihood of the external world existing or existing in a certain way is inscrutable - inasmuch as mostly all of the mass sum of the probability space is not within epistemic access and thus the occurrence of a scenario in which the external world actually exists in the way we actually perceive it is inscrutable. So it is not so much that my opponent's argument proves that fine-tuning arguments (FTA) fail, when, in actuality, it proves that all knowledge fails (save, I imagine, a single proposition). So it seems the crucial point is whether or not it is reasonable to limit our considerations to the epistemic field with which we have reliable insight. In other words, is it reasonable to consider only that which exists within our epistemically illuminated field? It seems only reasonable that we would only consider what we have epistemic access to when considering likelihood or else the likelihood of anything is inscrutable given the infinite space of epistemically possible yet necessarily unknown, epistemically inaccessible information. Epistemically Illuminated Range Instead, we should limit our comparison range to our epistemically illuminated range (EI) [2]. It seems practically common sense that we should only consider what is possible to consider when dealing with any sort of study, scientific or otherwise. But Rob Collins offers a helpful analogy. Collins likens our epistemic range to a dart board. We know, for instance, that the dart has fallen within our illuminated region because we are capable of observing it and making sense of it. Further, if we see that the dart has hit the bull's eye and the bull's eye is enormously small in comparison to our illuminated region, it would be strong evidence that the dart was aimed, even though we have no way of measuring or knowing the density of areas that exist out of our illuminated range. The hypothesis that the dart was aimed is clearly determined by the measured ratio of the Bull's eye in comparison to the ratio of our observed illuminated range. What we know is that no bull's eyes exist within our epistemically illuminated range, save the one. And, our illuminated range is by orders of magnitude larger than the observed bull's eye. Thus, we know that P(BI/A & k') >> P(BI/C & k'), where BI is the dart having hit the bull's eye, A stands for the aiming hypothesis and C stands for chance. My opponent wishes that we not restrict ourselves to the illuminated range but also consider all of the unilluminated portion. If this were the case, it is true that we could not get any sort of confirmation hypothesis to work, as the inference would be impossible to make given a possibly infinite space of unknown region. But, as I stated above, this actually makes any confirmation hypothesis impossible. However, even if the unilluminated region was rife with bull's eyes, it still seems rather improbable that the dart would hit the bull's eye that exists in an area where the width of the enitre observable region includes only that one bull's eye. So though we can give no exact confirmation formula because we don't have epistemic access to the unilluminated region, we can still assume the worst and see that the aiming hypothesis is preferred. What is k'? k' stands for our background knowledge. What we do not know is necessarily not part of our background knowledge as it is, by definition, not knowledge. So we need not consider the epistemically unilluminated region when considering P(LPU|T & k') >> P(LPU|ASU & k'). Our epistemically illuminated region, on the other hand, is part of our background knowledge and thus the above calculus avoids my opponent's criticism from the onset. Since k' includes both our epistemically illuminated range (EI) and fine-tuning (FT), and necessarily precludes the unilluminated portion, the problem stated by my opponent is illusory. Sources: (1) . http://en.wikipedia.org... (2) Collins, R (2009) The teleological argument: an exploration of he fine-tuning of the universe. In Craig W. L. , and Morland, J. P. (eds) The Blackwell Companion to Natural theology. Blackwell publishing; Oxford