Here's the tweet:
Thinking on the fine tuning argument, and substance dualism is an undercutting defeater of the idea the universe is fine tuned for life.
— Counter Apologist (@CounterApologis) August 24, 2014
"@CounterApologis: Thinking on the fine tuning argument, and substance dualism is an undercutting defeater of the idea the universe is fine tuned for life."
I can't claim to be the origin of this kind of thinking. It just kind of follows from the "Fallacy of Understated Evidence" That you can read about via Jeff Lowder's blog, where he largely draws from Philosopher of Religion Paul Draper. If anyone reading this also follows Justin Schieber of Reasonable Doubts, then this kind of argument will be familiar.
There's a few things to consider up front:
Substance Dualism - The idea that the "mind" is separate from the "brain", but that they interact with eachother at least while we're in our physical forms. Theism entails that "mind" can indeed exist without a physical "brain", at least for the theist's god anyway.
The Interaction Problem - Substance dualism faces a defeater, at least for those of us who allow science to influence our metaphysics, in the interaction problem. The problem is that we know there is corresponding brain activity for every conscious thought (and unconscious ones as well), and we know causal physical effects on the brain (alcohol, drugs, anti-depressants, etc) have causal effects on the "mind".
The problem is that there seems to be no way for a non-phyiscal mind to interact with a very physical brain. We can be fairly certain of this given what we know about physical objects from one of our best physical theories (Quantum Field Theory). The full argument for this is in an awesome video by Sean Carroll, but basically we can detect all sorts of physical energy fields, quite a lot of them. In fact we're so good at it we've been able to map out the kinds of fields we know we can't detect yet. The problem for dualists is that any field strong enough to interact with the stuff in our brains to cause the kinds of effects we see are in the range we can detect. The only fields we can't detect are the ones that are too weak to have any kind of effect on our brains to cause the physical effects we do see (they're either too weak or they work over such short distances to have their effects be meaningful at even the neuron level).
Effectively, to maintain the Substance Dualism position, theists are forced to appeal to some kind of miraculous interface that otherwise defies the laws of physics as we understand them (and they've proven to be immensely successful at predicting things).
Forget how silly it may seem to require a miracle (or a set of supernatural-laws) every time any person has a thought, let's just go with the "Miraculous Interface" solution to the interaction problem.
Back to Fine Tuning
There are two major objections to the fine tuning argument that I think are relevant here (this isn't to say that there aren't other objections). I think they follow into one another once we consider the Miraculous Interface solution to dualism.
The first objection to the fine tuning problem is that we have no idea what other kinds of life could exist. Changes to the constants we find in nature (if they are indeed ultimately constants) could indeed result in another kind of "life" that we are simply unaware of being able to exist in the vaious combinations of nature.
One theistic response to this is that the fine tuning argument is not about life simpliciter. It's trying to talk about specific kinds of life, namely ones like us. It does no good to say that other forms of life like bateria or other microscopic forms of life could exist, it needs to be something akin to a human being.
But what exactly does this mean? Does the fine tuning argument stay that the universe if finely tuned to produce a bipedal species that has all of the contingent properties that make up a human being? I don't really think so, I think it's appealing to the fact that human beings have mental lives.
If that's the case, then the problem here is two fold, the first is the other major objection to the fine tuning argument:
The second objection is that the universe certainly doesn't appear to be finely tuned for life. In the immense amount of the universe that we have now observed, Earth is the only place we've found that has any life on it at all. This makes the percentage of the universe that is hospitible to "our kind of life" is somewhere well below the 1% range.
The third problem is that given the "Miraculous Interface" between physical forms and "the mind/soul", there's nothing that would prevent "other forms of life" from being just as morally significant as we humans, or really from having as active a mental life as we do now. To be honest, I'm not even sure if the physical form would even have to qualify as "living" or "biological", the miraculous interface could provide consciousness to almost anything that has a limited life-span at the macro level (ie. stars, etc). This hinges on the simple fact that given substance dualism and the miraculous interface, there is nothing specific about our kind of brain that is really required for a mental life.
This robs the fine tuning of predicting much of anything, since given substance dualism any physical universe that has life would appear finely tuned for the kind of physical entity that the "miraculous interface" attached itself to in order for the mind to appear. It seems to me that this fact undercuts any appeals to the fact that constants in nature must be "finely tuned" in order for beings with a mental life to appear.
