Also for the benefit of other readers, a little
background. Luke and I have had a brief
exchange in the comments section to A Doctor a Day – A Response which is
on the topic of Fine Tuning. I’ve
brought this out into an article, for the most part, because his latest
response quoted a chap called John F. Donoghue.
I know what you are all thinking, but it is not the urologist John
F. Donohue that we are talking about, but a different guy, with a “g”.
This particular John F. Donoghue, who writes about
the multiverse solution to the fine-tuning problem, is the self-same John
Donoghue whose name is on a list of people who have sought and been granted funding from the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). But when you look at his CV, in the section titled “Funding History”, he doesn’t
refer to the funding as coming from FQXi (as he had noted in the section
before) but rather he says that he got a small grant from the John Templeton
Foundation (JTF). Now, Donoghue
might mean that he got another, separate grant from JTF, but searching the JTF website
produces exactly one result – the grant from FQXi. Does that mean that FQXi is just a puppet
organisation of JTF (like the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)
is a puppet organisation of the Church of Scientology (CoS)) and that a grant
from FQXi is a grant from JTF in all but name?
Apparently not. You have to dig around a bit at the FQXi website
in order to find that the Institute is funded by a seed grant from the JTF, but
when you find the relevant page, it’s quite
revealing. There has been quite some
effort expended on pointing out that:
the Institute is seeking a broader base of donors – this is
mentioned a couple of times, first at the top of the page, where “to diversify
our funding base” is cited as the motivation, then towards the end where there is an indication that JTF has
“strongly encouraged” the Institute to seek additional donors. Interestingly, the copyright declaration on
the website’s lower banner is as of 2009, while the FAQ appears to have been
posted in June 2010, which is after the funding from JTF expired (in December
2009). The search for other donors does
not seem to have been successful, or those donating want to remain quiet about
it, and I’ve not yet been able to establish FQXi’s current source of funding.
the Institute
operates in accordance with its scientific charter – a charter that talks
of “deep or ‘ultimate’ nature of reality” with the word “ultimate” neatly
bracketed by quotation marks, or scare quotes as they are sometimes called,
unlike over at JTF where their mission is to act as “a catalyst for discoveries
relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality” and
“ultimate” remains an integral part of that mission.
But hang on a second. A condition of the JTF grant is that the activities of FQXi are
consistent with their scientific charter – that sounds a bit like
control to me, but perhaps it is just “influence”.
(Also, interestingly, the current
Scientific Director of FQXi has been involved with JTF over a longer period. He was overseeing a JTF funded program during
the Guillermo Gonzales affair – or possibly overseeing a JTF
funding program, the wording is a little unclear. But rest assured that Max Tegmark is not
religious, as he
himself declares, so I doubt that he is a JTF puppet.)
However, all that aside, the
John F. Donoghue quoted by Luke Barnes directly credits the Templeton
Foundation for his grant rather than the totally independent Foundational
Questions Institute which actually gave him the money. Why would he do that?
There are plenty of reasons why
a serious scientist would try to avoid an overly close association with JTF, much
as FQXi attempts to do in their FAQ, despite spending JTF money and much as JTF
itself attempts to avoid association with the Discovery Institute.
(The interested reader might want to look up some
comments on the Foundation by Sean Carroll, Peter Woit, Jerry Coyne and others - including possibly biased commentators
such as AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. It’s interesting to see that our old friend Vilenkin is also a recipient of FQXi
funding while Guth is on the Advisory Council.
There’s no sign of Borde though.
It might be worth noting that JTF is behind the
Templeton Prize for progress in religion which was, for more than a
decade (1999-2011), given to a scientist or academic who was somehow pro-religion
– to the bemusement of the 2000 recipient, Freeman Dyson, who describes himself
as a “practising Christian but not a believing Christian”.
While I am doing an aside, I’ll also slip in another
curiosity. How does one go from
“Foundational Questions Institute” to the acronym FQXi? There’s a FAQ entry on that too.
By a staggering coincidence “Xi” also appears in the name of a
scientific research society that was founded in 1886, Sigma Xi. One shouldn’t read too much into that, there
was already an institute with the potential acronym FQI – the Federal Quality
Institute – although that institute doesn’t seem to have staked its claim on
the acronym.)
I find the willingness, on the part of John F. Donoghue, to
be associated with JTF interesting, because it is akin to Luke Barnes’ equanimity
in the face of becoming the poster boy for certain types of god-bothering apologists. Both are slightly odd positions for a serious
physicist to take, but not so odd if the physicist in question is a
god-botherer himself. Perhaps Donoghue
and Luke are not actually in either the theistic or apologist camp, but when
one hears something quacking madly like a duck, one can be forgiven for
thinking that one is confronted with a duck.
-------------------------
I am led to pose a number of questions to Luke:
Why, given his statement
"I do not attempt to defend any conclusion based on the fine-tuning of the
universe for intelligent life", did Luke put so much effort into
responding to Victor Stenger's popular level book which directly addresses the
misuse of fine-tuning by theists, many of whom argue precisely that point?
Why, given the above, does Luke’s
paper, titled "The Fine-Tuning
of the Universe for Intelligent Life", include the term
"intelligent life" nineteen times and contain only one clear
statement that he is not attempting "to defend any conclusion based on the
fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life".
Why is that clear statement
placed in the abstract, as the second last sentence where it could easily have
been inserted as an afterthought (much as the very last sentence could have
been inserted as an afterthought), rather than being in the body of the paper?
And why, in that paper, does
Luke repeatedly misrepresent Stenger's argument?
For
example, Luke states that Stenger
"claims
that the universe is not fine-tuned."
While Stenger
himself states that he
"concluded that while
the precise form of life we find on Earth would not exist with slight changes
in these parameters, some form of life could have evolved over a parameter
range that is not infinitesimal, as often claimed"
and
"I agree that life, as
we know it on Earth, would not exist with a slight change in these
parameters."
Stenger clearly indicates that
he is arguing against non-technical claims that the universe is so finely tuned
that changing any single parameter
"by one part in 10^40 or
more would mean that no life of any kind was possible".
In the conclusion to his
response to Luke, Stenger clarifies that his
"intent was to
investigate the claim found in much theistic literature that carbon-based life,
as we know it, would be impossible if any one of thirty or so parameters of
physics and cosmology changed by an infinitesimal amount. Five of these are critical parameters for
which it is claimed no form of life would be possible without the posited
fine-tuning."
-------------------------
Luke posed a question regarding my use of the concepts
“strong fine-tuning” and “weak fine-tuning”.
The sort of vulnerability of the universe to
infinitesimal levels of change as mentioned above (a variation of one part in
10^40 would lead to no life whatsoever in this universe) is what I mean by
"strong fine-tuning”. Now it is
possible that "weak fine-tuning” is really what Luke is arguing for. As Stenger puts it:
The remaining parameters are also supposed to be
fine-tuned to many orders of magnitude. I show that they are at best
fine-tuned, if you want to call it that, to 10-20 percent. Barnes seems to want
me to reduce this to maybe 1-5 percent. But nowhere does he show that they
should be 10^-40. My essential point is, when all parameters are taken together
the region of parameter space that should allow some form of life to evolve is
not the infinitesimal point that the theist literature would want us to
believe.
So, you could say that Stenger is arguing against “strong
fine-tuning” (1:10000000000000000000000000000000000000000) and conceding “very
weak fine-tuning” (1:5 - 1:10) while Luke is arguing for “weak fine-tuning”
(1:20 – 1:100).
However, because Luke makes his arguments the way he
does, his efforts make him appear like an apologist or, at best, someone
writing for an audience of apologists. For an example, apologists in the vein
of WLC love to cry fallacy and will pepper their arguments with accusations of
"straw man", "equivocation" or "genetic
fallacy". Luke feeds right into
this fixation of theirs by making his very first section after the introduction
a smorgasbord of plump juicy fallacies.
Luke also fails, in his paper, to clearly indicate that
the claims of apologists with respect to fine-tuning are overblown, thus
allowing those apologists to interpret Luke’s work as supporting “strong
fine-tuning”. In fact, he follows the
standard apologist approach by presenting two “tidy explanations” (which he
graciously admits are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive), one which is
basically the anthropic principle and another which relies on a “transcendent,
personal creator”. Note, he doesn’t say
a “divine being” or “a god”, Luke uses a term which could have been lifted
directly from William Lane Craig or the Institute
for Creation Research or Lee Strobel’s “The Case for a Creator”.
And then Luke immediately deals with the anthropic
principle (AP) concluding with “Similarly, AP cannot explain why life and its
necessary conditions exist at all” while leaving the transcendent, personal
creator untouched.
Later in the paper, in section 5, The Multiverse, Luke quotes Stenger (my emphasis):
“Cosmologists have proposed a
very simple solution to the fine-tuning problem. Their current models strongly suggest that
ours is not the only universe but part of a multiverse containing an unlimited number
of individual universes extending an unlimited distance in all directions and
for an unlimited time in the past and future.
… Modern cosmological theories do indicate that ours is just one of an unlimited
number of universes, and theists can give no reason for ruling them out.”
[The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the
Universe is Not Designed for Us p22, p42]
Then he (Luke) goes on to assert
or imply that:
multiverse
hypotheses are not science
the “Boltzmann
multiverse is … definitively ruled out”
“we cannot
conclude that it survives the test of the principle of mediocrity” (where “it”
means “the predictions of an inflationary multiverse”)
a “cold big
bang” fails to imply that “cosmology need not be fine-tuned to be
life-permitting”, and
“any
multiverse proposal that creates more small universe domains than large ones”
die “the same death as the Boltzmann multiverse”.
Curiously enough, there is no
corresponding section addressing the tidy explanation that involves a
“transcendent, personal creator”.
-------------------------
So, is Luke Barnes a fifth columnist, a(n old-earth)
creationism inclined theist who has risen in the science community with the
intent of driving a theistic agenda? The
evidence is inconclusive since he could just be a bit clumsy or misguided, but
I would like to say in closing, speaking directly to Luke:
You, sir, quack very much like
a duck.
