Ali Shukri Amin

Reddit reply in r/PhilosophyMemes: your mom is an anthropic principle — November 28, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

Original discussion: your mom is an anthropic principle.

1. I don't think you addressed my counterargument at all.

Assertion: God fine tuned the universe for life.
Objection: Angels and demons don't require the traditional environments neccesary for biological life, therefore fine-tuning is moot.
Counter-Argument: the FTA is about fine tuning the universe around the improbability of biological organic life, seeing as supernatural entities are beyond our empirical observations they are irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

The fact that theists assert omnipotence doesn't reduce the validity of the argument.

2. A random unintelligble blob is not a direct analogy. You cannot see some kind of intentional concentrated utility that indicates design in a blob. Theists argue that you can clearly see a kind of concentrated intentionality to nature that indicates a designer as opposed to randomness. Simply because it's not directly analogous to human design or we don't have examples of a truly random undesigned system doesn't mean the parallels can't be seen or an analogy drawn.

If you mean, "Can certain knowledge be drawn from this analogy?" From a philosophical perspective, probably not. But it can be taken as a reasonable component of the wider fine-tuning argument (which I don't find extremely compelling from a philosophical perspective, albeit not for the reasons you are presenting here. I think it is an aesthetic argument and has value there)

3. You can comprehend something in part and not in whole. God is not totally incomprehensible in part. Theists postulate that He is above our full comprehension due to his being unlimited and our minds being limited.

At this point your argument diverges into like 3 different things so I'm not sure what you want me to address. The FTA isn't designed to systematically prove God's existence, if that's what you're getting at? It's an argument for intelligent design of the universe without proving how or why.

4. I think you lost track of what we were discussing here. Remote random possibilities being actualized under an infinite set of runs.

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