A fatal logical flaw in anthropic principle design arguments

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 101-110

  Fulmer, Gilbert ^a  

^a TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52549109863     PISSN: 00207047     EISSN: 15728684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1017599008013     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. A useful survey of some of these variations is M. A Corey's God and the New Cosmology: The Anthropic Design Argument (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), esp. pp. 1-9. On the term "Anthropic Principle" Corey notes, ". . . [I]t could be argued that the cosmological evidence that has been recruited in support of the Anthropic Principle can properly be said . . . to support only a Biocentric Principle, and not any type of Anthropic Principle per se" (p. 7). The evidence, he is saying, supports only a universe designed to produce life; but I would stress that life in universes with different laws would not necessarily have to take just the same biochemical form as it does in this one. Under different laws, for example, carbon-based DNA might be replaced by something wholly different that served the same function for life forms in that universe.
2. Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 199; emphasis added.
3. The facts about the universe which are claimed by various anthropic principle theorists to be fine tuned are very numerous. Corey, op. cit., ch. 4, cites a number of them, including but not limited to: the origin of matter, the prevalence of matter over antimatter, the total amount of matter in the universe, dark matter, the time frame for galaxy formation, the "roughness" of the universe, the size of the universe, the temperature of nuclear stability, deuterium in star formation, the ratio of protons to neutrons, the charge of electrons and protons, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the gravitational constant, and the value of the strong nuclear force.
4. John Leslie, "The Prerequisites For Life in Our Universe," in G. V. Coyne, S. J., M. Heller, and J. Zycinski, eds., Proceedings of the [1987] Cracow Conference (Specola Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, 1988), p. 248. Lmphasis original. It should be noted that Leslie uses the term "Anthropic Principle" in a very different sense from that used here; in his sense the Principle apparently refers to the idea that only a universe suitable for life could be observed by living beings (p. 230). In this usage the "Anthropic Principle" runs counter to the teleological argument which Leslie provisionally supports.
5. William Lane Craig, in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 268.
6. M. A. Corey, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, op. cit., p. 106.
7. Robert M. Augros and George N. Stanciu, The New Story of Science (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 69-70.
8. John Leslie, The New Story of Science, op. cit., p. 238.
9. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 395.
10. The Flamingo's Smile, Ibid., p. 313.
11. Stephen Grover, "Cosmological Fecundity," Inquiry (Oslo, Norway), v. 41 no. 3 (Sept. 1998), p. 277.
12. Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) quoted, Corey, op. cit., p. 61; italics supplied.
13. Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe, op. cit., p. 175; emphasis added.
14. John Leslie, The Accidental Universe, op. cit., pp. 249-250.
15. We should keep in mind that the Universe we live in is, to all appearances, not very well suited for life at all. As physical cosmologists are fond of saying, the Universe is three-quarters hydrogen and one-quarter helium - with traces of everything else! And, of course, even on the most optimistic estimates of life throughout the Universe, it makes up only a vanishingly small portion of those traces.
16. For the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have been speaking as though supporters of the APDA must regard all natural laws and constants as candidates for replacement; that is, that none of them are logically necessary. Strictly speaking, the APDA could be developed on the supposition that all but one or a very few laws and constants are logically necessary. In this case the argument would be that in the few areas where alternatives were possible, just those most favorable to life were chosen; my criticism would then be blunted because the wide-scale alterations I envisage would not be possible after all: only the slight changes usually considered by the APDA would, in fact, be possible. But this line is not promising for the APDA: first, its proponents always insist that it gains enormous strength from the very fact that so very many different lines of argument converage: so many constants are so exactly adapted to life. Therefore this defense would require supporters to abandon all but one or a very few of the numerous "coincidences" that are cited, and would thus greatly weaken the overall claim of the APDA. Second, nothing in the APDA literature ever suggests that any laws or constants might be necessary; rather, everything in the discussion suggests that none is.