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

The story so far I have argued that the fine tuning argument is a failure, as we lack epistemic access to say whether life permitting universes really are unlikely on Atheism: the fine tuning data only speaks of a vanishingly small sample of ways the universe conceivably could have 'turned out different', and that life permitting universes are rare in this sample provides no reason it should be rare in general. I cashed this all in Bayes. CON then deployed a variety of complaints against this reasoning, and I replied that his complaints were mistaken, CON has come back to say that his complaints still stand. Here, I'll show why he's wrong. Reductio The bayesian gloss is that P(LPU|ASU&k') is inscrutable, because we have no way of estimating the frequency of life permitting universes across all conceivable possibilities (such as alien physics, zillion-fold variation in all the constants, etc.) CON argues that this leads to external world scepticism: isn't P(EW|k') inscrutable too? If CON means the probability of getting an external world on the background information subtract an observation of a life permitting universe, he is likely right. But that is not what we should be interested in: we are not interested if our background subtract the observation of a life permitting universe can confirm an external world, but rather if an external world is confirmed on our background knowledge subtract our convictions there is indeed an external world. Providing there is a good argument against general scepticism, then P(EW|k-{EW}) will be pretty high. Theres a big literature on providing such arguments. So long as that case works (and CONs later case for EIR etc. doesn't) then no special pleading is going on when I assert P(EW|k-{EW}) to be high yet P(LPU|k'&ASU) to be low. So, again, there ain't no reductio here. CON goes on to say that, unless we include the EIR into background, all sorts of things become inscrutable. This is a mistaken understanding. So long as we have good reason to reject external world scepticism, we can use most of our background to 'winnow down' the space of possible worlds we need to consider when doing probability. So the possible worlds where the 20 sided dice comes up 1-20 dominate the possible world space, because wacky alternatives (landing 24, say) are unlikely given what we know about being in this universe and so on - these are remote possible worlds. But, as I noted at the start of the programme, subtract away the fact we exist, and all bets are off.{8} EIR: CON attempts to show that, regardless of how good our epistemic illumination is, we should only use possibilities illuminated by it when doing inference. Our examples perhaps show why this is misguided. Statistical significance: CON writes, "A sample group that is too small has failed to consider that which was possible to consider, namely a much larger group. A more relevant comparison would be where a statistical study examines everything that falls within their EIR but is determined to be insufficient for not considering all that was impossible for them to consider per it existing outside of their EIR. Statistical comparisons MUST consider only that which is within their EIR or else they could never do statistics." These remarks from CON suggest that if our data-collectors 'do their best' and collect all possible data, we could perform reasoning on this even if, in fact, our sample doesn't give us access to the larger group. This is wrong - if your sample isn't good enough, your sample isn't good enough. If you can't even possibly consider enough to get access to the larger group, then your larger group is not visible. That is rather the point of statistical significance. Skeptical Theism: I honestly have no idea what CON is saying here. However, the type of inaccessibility should not matter - so if goods beyond our ken are indeed beyond our ken, they lie outside our EIR so (according to CON) should be discarded, as we can only consider what it is possible to consider. Argument from sceptical hypothesis: Again, CON simply misunderstands how aSH works - it can't be 'waved away' by something about how it relies on Cartesianism. No one writing on it thinks you can 'answer aSH' by just pointing to the fact the epistemic possibilities are beyond easy access. That's the entire point of the argument! Dart boards and Red selection CON misunderstands the analogy, so I'll point him to my previous round rather than making further confusion myself. Conclusion CON is write that if the principles of subtraction, indifference, and 'EIR' are somehow fundamental to statistics, then my objections do not work. But applying EIR restriction amounts to refusing to consider the limits of our knowledge. Alas, this (and other heterodoxies from CON) are mistaken. Best wishes, Thrasymac {8} CONs love of the principle of indifference is bizarre. Because often we shouldn't be indifferent across known possibilities: consider a dice we know to be loaded, or a bag of balls with unequal numbers of white and black balls, etc. Indifference may be our initial presumption before any evidence changes our mind, but it is weird to say it is some fundamental tenet of probability theory to be used in all inference.