The Existence of God is More Probable than Not

PRO: "My opponent says that the Universe is not fine-tuned. However, he can believe that, but the consensus amongst majority of Physicists is quite different. Physicist Paul Davies has asserted that "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned' for life".This is not a valid argument because:a) This is an argument ad populom (fallacy). Because a majority believes it, does not make it true.[1]b) There is no such broad agreement among my physicist friends. For PRO and Paul Davies to make such claim, one should have at least do some poll among physicists. PRO: "I would agree with my opponent who also says that this is no coincidence at all. There must be a reason for why the Universe is so finely-tuned."This is a false dichotomy (fallacy). [2] PRO claims that, either the existence of life in the universe is a coincidence, or there is a reason for the existence of life (and that reason is "God"). Well, it could be that it is not a coincidence (outcome of a random experiment) and there may simply be no reason. We like to have reasons for everything, but there is no guarantee that there always is a reason.CON (me):"We do not know whether these constants are independent of nature."PRO's rebuttal: "My opponent couldn’t be farther from the truth. That’s arguing from ignorance and is quite frankly nonsense. It’s a mathematical fact that the constants are independent of nature. According to the current standard model of particle physics, there are over 25 freely adjustable parameters with an additional parameter."How many free parameters are there? 26? more than 26? Physicists don't seem to have a definite answer. The number of parameters seems to be ever increasing. On the other hand, IF a unified theory is found, then the physical constants of the standard model will be explained from the unified theory, and so they wouldn't be free anymore. from [3] (emphasis added):"It is impossible to say when these problems will be overcome. They may be solved in a preprint put out tomorrow by some young theorist. They may not be solved by 2050, or even 2150. But when they are solved, even though we cannot do experiments at 1016 GeV or look into higher dimensions, we will not have any trouble in recognizing the truth of the fundamental unified theory. The test will be whether the theory successfully accounts for the measured values of the physical constants of the Standard Model, along with whatever other effects beyond the Standard Model may have been discovered by then."Whenever we have empirical discoveries, we find new physical constant (for example the mass of a new particle). On the other hand, unification of various theories in physics has the effect that we find relations among the physical constants we have found so far. The idea, that there might be relations among the dimensionless constants is far from crazy.I am not arguing from ignorance. I am not saying that the universe is not fine-tuned, because there is no proof that the nature's constants are independent. I am just saying that there is no proof that the universe is fine-tuned, because there is no proof that the nature's constants are independent. The universe may or may not be fine-tuned. I am not convinced that it is.Regarding the multiverses, I did not understand what PRO meant with "simple" universe.Let me explain it in simple terms what my vision is on multi-verses and fine-tuning.Suppose that we have a physical theory that depend on some dimensionless parameters. For simplicity,let us assume we have 1 parameter in our theory, which we call t. (or t could be a vector of several parameters)CASE A: U(t) is only logically consistent for 1 value t. Then there really is no fine-tuning. We cannot choose t freely.CASE B: U(t) is logically consistent for several or even infinite values of t. For simplicity, let us assume that U(t)is consistent for all values of t. This is what I would call a multi-verse. By Occam's razor, we indeed would prefer not to have a multi-verse. But if we have independent physical constants, we must have a multi-verse.We have infinitely many (possible) universes. For only few values of t, the universe U(t) can support life. Now every universe U(t) exists as a theory. But which universes exist in reality? A universe exists in reality if it can be observed by us. But if a universe can be observed, it MUST support life, because we are alive. So logically we conclude, that every universe that exists in reality, MUST support life. So in other words, the probability that a real universe supports life is 1!PRO: "Now what my opponent is affirming here is actually the Weak anthropic principle. Basically it’s saying “Well high improbabilities happen all the time, so we shouldn't’t be surprised by the high improbability of finely-tuned constants.” "Yes, my argument is a version of the Anthropic Principle, but I would not formulate it with probability. Rather, probability in this context does not make much sense. You can only talk about probability when you have experiments where you know the probabilities.Let me talk a bit about probability. For this kind of reasoning one needs conditional probability. [4]If A is an event, then I denote the probability that A happens by p(A). The complement of A is denoted by Ac.So A happens if and only if Ac does not happen. So p(A)+p(Ac)=1.If B is another event, then the probabilitythat A happens, given that B happened is denoted by p(A|B). The probability that we are interested in is p(A|B), where A="God Exists", Ac="God does not exist" and B="the universe supports life"So the argument of fine-tuning says: p(B|Ac) is small: if God doesn't exist, the chance that the universe supports life is smallp(B|A) is large: if God does exist, then the chance that the universe supports life is large (perhaps even 1).Then it concludes, p(A|B) is large (>50%). Given that the universe supports life, the probability that God exists is more than 50%.This conclusion is wrong. One needs additional assumptions to make the conclusion. I am running out of time, so I will explain this in more detail next time , as well as explain why Leslie's firing squad is not a good analogy for the fine tuning argument.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org...[2] http://en.wikipedia.org...[3] http://www.math.vt.edu...[4] http://en.wikipedia.org...