Let's Carry on Carriering Part I

 

This series has been triggered by my last post where I commented on a blog-post by evangelical atheist Richard Carrier.

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The cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the Kalem argument and the like are all arguments for the existence of God. I'm afraid to say that in spite of being a speculative theist myself I've found these arguments flawed and unconvincing; see for example here where I criticize the fine-tuning argument or here where I criticize the Kalem argument. There are I submit no "proofs" for God's existence, for like so many objects which we believe to exist, we only do so on the basis of the evidence provided by the sparse sampling of our experience and then attempt to abduct a sense-making narrative around those experiences. All significant objects are usually far too large (& often far too complex) for this sampling to be anywhere near exhaustive or logically obliging. However, an ability to predict in advance the evidential samples these objects throw up does enhance their probability. No surprise then that evidence of God is going to be very partial and debatable; although that's not to say individuals can't have an epiphany which supports a strong intuitively held faith - but of course that's not readily shareable and classifies as subjective & anecdotal evidence. In this series of posts I look into the article I've linked to below by vociferous evangelical atheist Ricard Carrier who, not surprisingly, has little patience with those aforementioned  arguments for God....

The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists • Richard Carrier Blogs

I will not here be mounting a defense (or critique) of those rather precarious traditional arguments for God's existence. Instead, I'm confining my terms of reference to a critique of the anti-god arguments used by Richard Carrier.

Firstly, let me register a point of agreement with the introduction to Richard's post:

Richard: I want to make perfectly clear from the start that what I am doing here is not what Krauss and others are doing, which they have been rightly criticized by theologians for as missing the point. That a multiverse is inevitable given an initial state of nothing is not because of quantum cosmological calculations showing it’s not just possible but actually likely that a complex universe or even a multiverse would spontaneously arise from any arbitrarily tiny bubble of absolute vacuum. Like the He-Gao-Cai thesis: “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe from Nothing,” Physical Review D 89 (2014). Because that still presupposes the existence of the vacuum, the bubble. They are starting from the assumption that some quantum of space-time exists, and obeys certain laws of physics. That’s still pretty impressive, one must admit. But theists will complain that we then have to explain how that quantum of space-time came about. Why was it there at all? Why does it obey those laws of physics? The theologian’s idea of nothing means absolutely nothing. Not even physics or tiny empty spaces. Hence, missing the point.

My Comment: Yes, I agree, something-for-nothing-physics actually presumes something; at the very least certain laws of physics. I touched on this subject in this post where atheist physicist Sean Carroll makes similar comments. Richard goes on to consider some of the eternal multiverse theories that have arisen out of quantum theory and inflationary ideas. These are still at the speculative and hypothetical stage, so I won't consider these. At this juncture our own universe is the only one for which we have overwhelming evidence.

Richard then considers the problem of "nothing". Let me say at the start that I'm sympathetic to Richard's general idea that the concept of "nothing" is likely to be either incoherent or logically contradictory; after all we are clearly faced with a cosmos of something on a huge scale and this suggests to me that with regard to ultimate origins something somewhere has a necessary existence or aseity.

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Richard: Proposition 1: That which is logically impossible can never exist or happen......It’s really hard to fathom what one could even mean by saying logical contradictions can obtain in the real world, that the logically impossible is still nevertheless possible. And most theists really won’t go there. After all, they love the ontological argument, which argues that that which is logically necessary, necessarily exists. They try to get a god to be one of those things. That never works. But still. Finding such a proof is a Holy Grail of theology.

My Comment:  In my view the ontological argument advanced by Anslem is a wordy smoke and mirrors "proof" of the necessity of God's existence. I'd accept however that if God does exist then presumably his nonexistence is a contradiction, that is, his existence is a logical necessity. But my guess is that proving God's existence to be a logical necessity involves infinities and is therefore beyond finite human understanding (Hence Heb 11:6). If that is the case, then the logical necessity of God's ontology cannot be humanly understood, but rather God's existence can only be apprehended through experiential evidence. So, as far as humans are concerned God's existence is derived from a synthesis of experience and not fancied logical truisms. (That's not say that there is no ontological argument for God's existence, but I suspect it is beyond finite human thought)

Now having admitted the dubiousness of those one-liner (or at most a few lines) logical proofs of God existence here's an interesting irony: We find that in his article Richard himself, like many a theist, is also on a quest for one-liner logical necessity, but not the logical necessity of God (a concept he clearly abhors) but instead one-liner proofs of the logical necessity of an insentient cosmos.  This is the holy grail of atheism.

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Richard: Nevertheless, the very notion that logically necessary things necessarily exist, necessarily entails logically impossible things never exist. Because one of the things that necessarily exists, is the absence of logically impossible things. Otherwise, we could not in fact say logically necessary things necessarily exist. Because that is claiming it’s logically impossible they could “not” exist; but we just admitted logically impossible things can happen! If the logically impossible can actually happen, then it’s possible logically necessary things don’t exist. Down goes the ontological argument.

There are actually good reasons to conclude the logically impossible cannot exist (in any meaningfully relevant sense), but I won’t go further into that here (see Sense and Goodness without God, index, “contradiction, nature of,” and my remarks on the point in response to Reppert). I’ll just say that the following argument is for people who are unwilling or honestly unable to deny this proposition.

My Comment: The foregoing is just back up for Richard's proposition 1 which states that logically impossible things can't exist. Let's not dispute this! As I think we will eventually see there's a lot of argumentative momentum and energy in Richard's reasoning that is going to prove very useful indeed. 

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·      Richard: Proposition 2: The most nothingly state of nothing that can ever obtain, is a state of affairs of zero size lacking all properties and contents, except that which is logically necessary.

This actually follows from Proposition 1, combined with the basic meaning of “absolutely nothing.” The most “nothing” nothing you can ever have, is by removing every possible thing that can be removed, until there is nothing left. Which thus includes any quanta of space or time, as well as laws of physics, particles, and so on. But since you can’t “remove” logically necessary things, or have a logically impossible state of affairs, it is logically impossible for any state of nothing to lack that whose existence or occurrence is logically necessary. Which in turn means it is logically impossible for any state of nothing to behave in a logically contradictory way. Because logical contradictions can never obtain. They therefore cannot happen. So they cannot govern what a “nothing” would do.

That gets us down to the most “nothing” nothing that could ever have obtained, by removing things until there are no more things we can remove without creating a logical contradiction. We can remove all durations of time, until time is a dimensionless point, representing “zero” amount of time. That’s what “no time exists” means. We can remove all height and width and depth, until space is a dimensionless point, representing “zero” amount of space, in every direction. We can remove all matter and energy. So, there are no particles, no contents. And we can remove all rules, properties, and laws of physics. Except anything we can prove is logically necessary. If removing something entails a logical contradiction, we can’t remove it. We are stuck with it. There can never have been a state of being that lacked it.

Which means if you still think that’s not “nothing,” but still something (namely, the presence of every logically necessary thing, and the absence of every logical impossibility), then you are admitting that nothing is logically impossible. 

My Comment:  Nice one Richard, I agree! But now just look at the following (With my emphases)....

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Richard: ...And down goes any argument you may have that requires the universe to have come from nothing without a god around. Because “nothing” can never have existed: it’s logically impossible. Therefore we no longer need gods to explain why there is something. That there would be something is logically necessary. By your own admission.

I suspect theists won’t go there. And those who do, will have to abandon their argument that without god we can’t explain why there is something and not nothing. Because they will have just conceded it is logically necessarily the case that there will be something, even without gods. The rest will bite the bullet and admit that yes, when they say that in the absence of gods there once must have been a state of nothing (from which nothing, they will insist, could have come), they can only mean the “nothing” I just described: the logically possible nothing; the one that still isn’t totally nothing, because it still must contain every logical necessity. But, they will be happy to note, it contains nothing else. No contents. No quantities of spacetime. No rules. At least that much of nothing is logically possible. It therefore may once have been the state of things.

My Comment:  I'll be coming back to these last two paragraphs in a bit, especially the bits I've emphasised. Richard goes on to qualify the foregoing with some physics patter telling us that of course we don't actually know from either empirical science or logic whether or not the cosmos is past eternal. But as he himself is aware that doesn't affect the main thrust of his argument, which is to simply set a lower limit on "nothing"; Viz: "nothing" so called is logically obliged to contain all that is logically true. No disagreement with that from my point of view! But what about this: It is logically necessarily the case that there will be something, even without gods ???

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He concludes this section on proposition 2 with the following:

Richard: But here we are just working out what must necessarily be the case if there was ever a state of total nothing, the most empty nothing logically possible. And that means such a nothing-state will be a hypersphere of zero size in all dimensions, with no contents, and governed by no rules or laws, except the laws of logical necessity. Which is at least a plausible hypothesis. We can ask what predicted observations that hypothesis entails, and how well that accords with what we see. So this is what we shall mean by the word Nothing (capitalized) heretofore.

My Comment:  Yes, it's a plausible hypothesis and I'm inclined to go along with it. But in stating the foregoing Richard has overlooked the obvious.... 

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Requoting parts of what I've already quoted above....

Richard: ...And down goes any argument you may have that requires the universe to have come from nothing without a god around. Because “nothing” can never have existed: it’s logically impossible. Therefore we no longer need gods to explain why there is something. That there would be something is logically necessary. By your own admission.

I suspect theists won’t go there. And those who do, will have to abandon their argument that without god we can’t explain why there is something and not nothing. Because they will have just conceded it is logically necessarily the case that there will be something, even without gods. 

My Comment: OK, so once all mere logical possible contingencies have been removed and we are reduced to entities or entities that are logical truisms  (that is, their non-existence would be a contradiction) how do we know that among those logically obliged objects we are not left with that dreaded unmentionable entity - and dare I say it ...... an entity which is both a logical truism (in a way we perhaps can't comprehend) and is actually sentient? After all, whatever the inadequacies and failures of the so-called ontological argument, the first cause argument, the fine-tuning argument and what have you (And I'm the first to be critical of them) it is at least clear that no theistic creationist is actually saying things come out of absolutely nothing because their starting point is God and such an entity (which is presumably logically necessary) can hardly be classified as nothing.

So, in the next parts of this series I'll be looking at what Richard is telling us about that much-loathed a priori theistic creative dynamic (which theology usually tells us has aseity) and comparing it with the insentient a priori creative dynamic he is proposing. 

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Reflections and Speculations

Ex-nihilo creation is in actual fact a relative thing: In one sense even I can create something from nothing in the commonsense use of the word "nothing". If I start with say either a blank canvass, or a blank computer memory or even blank neurons in my mind, my cognitive processes can fill these featureless media with wonderful patterns, thoughts and stories. It's well within the trammels of natural language use to say that I've created those patterns from nothing but my own cognition and will. So, on this permissible common linguistic usage I've created something from nothing and yet at the same time it has not come from absolutely nothing because I'm creator. It all depends on what you mean by "nothing". But there is one big difference to this kind of creation and the lower-limit "nothing" that Richard is talking about: Viz: Human creators are mere logical contingences, patterns and configurations of particles that can be extinguished; they are not logical truisms. Nevertheless, human creativity can be used as a suggestive metaphor for the kind of creativity we are envisaging that might be the prerogative of a priori sentient deity. 

There is a human intuition derived from our experience of the macroscopic world that identity is bound up with hypostatic identity; that is, identity is bound up with identity of substance. Hence for example when a human dies and their remains return to the earth we might ask where has the humanity gone? Some might answer (and I've heard this sort of thing at woodland inhumations and cremations) that the deceased humanity is now part of the surrounding nature. But is this claim anything other than a comforting sentiment? Because for me human identity derives from its configurations and the patterns of behavior it imprints on the material medium. Humanity is not a hypostatic identity; human uniqueness derives from its dynamic configurational form and the patterns in space and time it impresses on the medium of matter.

It's true that in many macroscopic connections hyperstatic identity can be defined; that is, we can follow through the hypostasis as it changes in form from configuration to configuration. But at the microscopic level the hypostatic model fails. The indistinguishability of quantum particles leads to quantum statistics where interchangeability of fundamental particles is a meaningless concept and must be canceled from the apparently logically possible combinations/permutations. (See the appendix 1 in this document)

We are actually familiar with this kind of indistinguishability even in some macroscopic cases: For example, computer bits: To talk of swapping the values of two bits set to "1" is a meaningless notion. But you can change and move an identified binary pattern impressed on a computer memory. In this context identity is found in pattern and configuration and not in hypostasis.  

This model suggests to me that if a sentient entity of some sort is the logical truism after one has eliminated all mere logically possible contingencies, then the mind of this entity is the cognitive medium on which the logically possible contingent pattens and configurations are reified, developed, changed and perhaps even destroyed. But of course, it is a highly debatable and contentious point that a fundamental sentient cognitive medium is the irreducible logical kernel upon which those ephemeral created patterns are reified. That a hard-core logical reduction leaves behind this divine medium when all mere logically possible art has been removed is likely to go down like a feather sandwich with the Richard Carriers of this world. But we know what St Paul thinks. In Acts17:24ff we read:

24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Carry on Carriering

I think that question should read: "Does Quantum Physics
 Create the multiverse?"

I thought I'd more or less finished looking into Richard Carrier's thinking but I must admit I'm very tempted by this post of his...

Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco • Richard Carrier Blogs

...where he writes this:

 What I showed is that once you actually allow for there to be nothing—nothing whatsoever—then a quasi-infinite multiverse is the inevitable, in fact unstoppable outcome. Because removing all barriers to what there can be or what can happen entails allowing all potential outcomes an equal chance at being realized (given only a single constraint: that logically contradictory states have a zero probability of coming to pass). There is nothing there to prevent that, nothing around to keep “nothing” a stable absence of everything. “Nothing” is, by its own defining properties, unstable.

This belief that somehow Probability/randomness furnishes us with an invisible creative dynamic I've come across before. I need to look into this particular instance of it in more detail, but in the meantime, here is a footnote I wrote on the question in part IV of my Carry-on Carriering series:

That's not how probability works. Probability isn't a dynamic capable of generating something from nothing: it is about the level of observer information. Moreover, the physics of probability is about describing random patterns and not about the "instability of nothing". Probability and randomness are in no way an argument for the impossibility of "nothing"; trying to use them to generate aseity is well beyond their scope of usage. 

I've seen similar misinterpretations of the Uncertainty Relationship: As Richard is doing here, the principles of probability and randomness are glorified by raising them to the level of a kind of transcendent god-like dynamic or propensity capable of at least creating randomness from nothing. They don't see randomness as being only the mathematical description of a class pattern we meet in the universe rather than being a transcendent creative dynamic.

Another point: The principle of equal a priori probabilities concerns human information levels. That in itself isn't a sufficient condition that automatically translate into reified patterns of randomness.

Richard isn't going to get this one past me! My view is that the descriptive mathematical devices we use to delineate the cosmos are meaningless without a material instantiation, but some thinkers have raised these mathematical principles to the level of a transcendent invisible but mindless "god" creator. ("mindless" and yet ironically randomness is the most complex mathematical object of all!) This kind of notion formation may be what's happening in Richard Carrier's head. I think I need to look into it a bit further if I get time. 

However, there are plenty of authorities and principalities out there that are drawing my attention just at the moment and so that may be as far as I get on that one - we'll see. 

And while I'm here on the subject of authorities and principalities, I'll mention this article on the North American ID (NAID) website "Evolution News"

 The Fine-Tuning Argument by Elimination | Evolution News

In my view the NAID community put too much emphasis on the fine-tuning argument in exactly the opposite kind of way Richard Carrier was doing. Moreover, as can be seen from the above NAID article they perpetuate the "Physical Necessity" vs "Chance" dichotomy - something I suspect that is also part of the intuitions of Richard Carrier.  "Physical Necessity" and "Chance" are in fact the opposite ends of a sliding spectrum of platonic possibility; in the absolute sense of the word neither are strictly "necessary"; both are in fact possible contingencies. But more about all that another time. 

Examining Mr. R. Carrier's use of Bayesianism. Part IV

A gross theological caricature

(See here for Part I, Part II and Part III)

In part IV of this series, I'm continuing to comment on the following post by a Mr. Richard Carrier:

Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist • Richard Carrier Blogs 

As Richard stares out at our strange cosmos and considers the question of theism and whether or not a cosmos like our's would have been produced by the kind of God conceived by most theists, this is what he thinks:

It cannot be predicted that this [Universe] is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God

I would certainly question Richard's second sentence here: What kind of universe/cosmos would I have predicted if there was no God? As we saw in the previous parts I certainly wouldn't have predicted our own remarkable universe in all its organized complexity, it's surprising organized contingencies and above all an organization which gives it a very strong propensity to generate life....... especially that propensity to generate complex organic objects! After all, only in recent history have humans started to master systems capable of generating other systems.  Why wouldn't I have predicted all this in the absence of God? .... because the evidence of our experience is that organization of all types, both simple and complex, are associated with the activity of human (and animal) intelligence. Therefore, when I see a cosmos so organized that we can distill out of it those highly succinct mathematical laws of physics, laws which are crucial for the generation & maintenance of life, my intuitions turn to thoughts of an a priori intelligence being active. Moreover, the fact is that the laws we distill from cosmic organization can never have the property of Aseity (that is of self-explanation). This is because these laws are mathematically descriptive devices destined to always leave us with a hard core of irreducible, incompressible and enigmatic contingent information; those laws are therefore logically incapable of delivering the logical necessity of Aseity. Some atheists at least do understand this. Take for example atheists Galen Strawson and Sean Carroll: Both appear to understand that all probing human inquiry into the form and pattern of the cosmos must eventually bottom out with unexplainable brute fact: Aseity is beyond the reach of conventional descriptive science.  This is a mathematical truism. See the following links for more details...

Quantum Non-Linearity: Galen Strawson on "Why is there something?" (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

There have been some who have tried to get round all this by suggesting that somehow quantum mechanics can be used to redefine nothing in such a way that it tells us how it is possible to get something from nothing: But this line of thought is achieved by mere empty linguistic tricks: One can use the same tricks to claim that this simply amounts to a redefinition of something! (See footnote *2)

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And yet I'm inclined to agree with Richard's first sentence in the quote above:  I don't think I could have predicted that the kind of God I think I know would have created the specifics of our universe, not only because of its strange impersonal and dispassionate vastness but also because of the much closer to home, well aired and time-honored conundrums around suffering and evil. Yes, I might have predicted a highly organized universe, but organization covers a multitude of possibilities, and it seems a multitude of sins. So, I do have some sympathy with honest atheists on this point. (But types like Richard don't want sympathy & measured opinions; they want abject submission to their thinking; his attitudes match those of the hardened fundamentalists of Biblical literalism).

Moreover, based on our experience of intelligent activity in this world (which by & large is human and animal) we have to admit that not only does intelligent activity have an immense space of creative options open to it making anticipation of specific activity in the absence of evidence all but impossible, but also that intelligent activity has a fair measure of inscrutability. For example, the ancient stone circles we see dotted around Europe entail a high level of organization both in their configuration and the logistics of their construction and yet as to their purpose we have to resort to hypothesis and speculation. Furthermore, coming from a vacuum of evidence I could not have predicted from first principles that early cultures (probably as a consequence of that time honoured search for cosmic meaning & purpose) would build stone circles. Because of the huge variety open to intelligent behavior I can't move from an evidential vacuum to stone circles. But the reverse is possible: Given the evidence of stone circles I can link that to known aspects of the human psyche, a psyche I share. This means we have at least some inkling of the motives driving the human organization of inanimate objects and therefore have a chance of interpreting the meaning of this activity; in this case that the stone circles probably represent a culture's attempt to engage with the numinous and seek to give shape, meaning, and purpose to the universe; I personally think I understand that mystical endeavor. 

Likewise, as we look out onto the cosmos itself, we observe high levels of organization in a pattern we couldn't predict even if we knew beforehand that a creating deity was behind it. But conversely, if we are sufficiently primed theists, we at least stand a chance of getting a purchase on cosmic purposes via theological hypothesis and speculation. But if we reject God's attempt at self-revelation and we reject the necessity of the epistemic bootstrap of faith (See Hebrews 11:3&6), we will remain as much in the dark about Divine purposes as we are about those enigmatic stone circles. For it is possible in my view to come up with at least a hypothesized framework as to the meaning of the cosmos. 

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But now I ask myself this: What would I have predicted if there is no God of any sort? My first intuitive response to that question would be absolute empty nothingness; but this is patently not the case: Our conscious perceptions tell us that the universe exists and therefore we do have an evidential handle on this question. In fact, as I said in Part III of this series, if the evidence was that the universe is completely random (That is, a Big-R superverse), I would interpret that as evidence of the absence of the God I think I know. As Sherlock Holmes observed in the story of The Cardboard Box where he was commenting on a particularly tragic case of crime...

“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

(See the introduction to my book on Disorder and Randomness where I first used this quote)

But whilst I'd agree that our intuitions suggest that Big-R points to atheism, the reverse isn't true: Viz: Given atheism I wouldn't have been able to predict a Big-R universe: The consequences of the absence of God are just as inscrutable as God himself. In any case a prediction of Big-R isn't a straightforward deduction from the absence of God. Let me explain...

Firstly, in a Big-R universe I wouldn't exist to perceive anything and neither would anyone else. Being an idealist where I regard conscious cognition and perception as an important underwriter of reality, I would therefore question the coherence and intelligibility of Big-R notions.

Secondly, randomness represents the very opposite of a logical truism; A logical truism, once understood, has zero surprisal value and therefore no information, whereas randomness has maximum surprisal value and maximum information. If you are looking for the logical necessity of explanatory completeness or aseity you won't find it in randomness. The existence of randomness entails maximum contingency and maximum mystery. It is first and foremost the very opposite of a logical truism, the very opposite of "necessity".  It therefore explains nothing in the sense of explanatory completeness; rather it just leaves us with a conundrum as to who or what is managing to generate the most complex pattern of all, a pattern that requires a maximum of computational effort. 

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In the following quote we find Richard continuing to dig even deeper into the hole he is already in....

RICHARD: Thus, Fine Tuning is not a “peculiar” thing for us to observe. It is not distinctive of God-made universes; it is, rather, distinctive of godless universes. It is literally the only thing we could ever observe—unless God existed and made the universe. Because only then could the universe possibly have been made conducive to life without the Fine Tuning of our peculiar fundamental constants. Hence God-made worlds will tend to not be Fine Tuned.

MY COMMENT:  As we saw in Part III, so-called "fine tuning" is just a small facet of a much bigger story of a remarkable order which has facilitated the human project of distilling out of the pattern of that order some remarkably elegant mathematical forms which from my standpoint have a very divine feel about them. They look to be the very epitome of an incredibly intelligent design. And let me repeat, further "explanation" of these forms can never deliver aseity but could only ever be a further enhancement of the succinctness of their form; but increasing mathematical succinctness can't go on until one has nothing left to compress; an incompressible kernel of contingency will always remain using mathematics as we know it. 

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Richard Carrier has a very low view of our Cosmos. In spite of its exceptional and highly stable order, an order strongly conducive to the emergence and maintenance of life Richard still courts the Big-R hypothesis, the random bizarro universe that can be used to explain away anything. Take a look at the following...

RICHARD: This is a crucial realization. Fine Tuning of our observed fundamental constants is only necessary when a God is not doing the designing; it is only necessary when observers only evolve through billions of years of gradual cellular scaffolding, and life at all arises only by chance chemical mixing, and only after billions of years of the meandering random mixing of chemicals across a vast universe billions of light-years in size filled with random lifeless junk, which is almost everywhere lethal to life, and only hospitable to it in tiny specks of the chance arrangement of randomly mixed conditions. Only those conditions require Fine Tuning. Quite simply put: only Godless universes have to be Finely Tuned.

Which means when you observe a universe like ours (old, huge, deadly, and producing life only in the most awkward of ways and rarest of places), you can expect it to have been Finely Tuned by chance accident, not intelligent design. Intelligent design would more likely make a universe as large and old as needed to contain the life it was made for, and would create life directly (not employ billions of years of cellular scaffolding), and imbue the world with only those laws of physics needed to maintain it to its purpose (no weird fundamental constants, no weird fundamental particles). It would not produce a universe almost entirely hostile to life. There would be no lethal radiation-filled vacuum. No dead worlds or lifeless moons. Stars would not be uninhabitable monstrosities. Black holes would never exist.

MY COMMENT: And again: Chance fine tuning is a very bad argument for atheism; it neglects that the values of the "fine-tuned" variables only make sense in the context of the highly organizing effect of a set of remarkable laws and which together with those laws constitute pre-conditions which considerably enhances the chance of life. As I've said above, because of the huge space of possibilities open to intelligence and on top of that intelligence's inscrutability it is difficult to anticipate in advance what intelligence will do. But the reverse is an easier path. Given the works of intelligence we, as intelligences ourselves, can work backwards with a chance of interpreting the purpose of its works. To my mind all those dead worlds are the evidence of a search, reject and select computation, a declarative procedure that may well use teleological constraints.

The emphasis on fine tuning in Richard's quote above completely misses the plot; namely, that what is actually being fine-tuned is a remarkable cosmic computation machine of immense dimensions. And yet according to Richard's theology God simply doesn't do things like this; instead, God does things without logic and without sequence; it is ironic that Biblical literalists often think in a very similar way. But contrary to this kind of thinking is the evidence of our experience of the way intelligence works: Viz: It works using an experimental search, reject and select activity; the cosmos appears to be a tableau of intelligent activity, a tableau of creative activity.

And while I'm here a note to self: Here's a speculation for me to think about. The fine-tuning constants could have many, many non-zero decimal places after the decimal point. Therefore, if ordinary parallel processing rather than expanding parallelism is the search space method being used to develop the cosmos, the fine-tuning constants could be a sneaky way of feeding information, a priori, into cosmic evolution, thereby speeding the search up. 

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Epilogue

In Part III I introduced the idea that the cosmos can be thought of as a fantastically large computation, a computation which is expressible in a very abstracted form as an equation relating the information content of the created configuration to a function of two variables: 1) The starting information and 2) the minimum possible number of computational steps. This equation looks something like this: 

I = S + Log T

Equation 1

Where I is the information content of the configuration created, and S is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration using a minimum number of execution steps of T. See here where I give more details on this relation.  (See also here). For a parallel computation the time taken for the computation will be proportional to T, but if as I feel is entirely plausible for our universe expanding parallelism is somehow being employed, the computation is achieved much faster. 

As we saw in Part III according to the theology of Richard Carrier, God, if he existed, would just do stuff abracadabra style; that is Richard takes it for granted that T ~ 0 and that creation has no sequential duration; in his theology God just does his stuff by downloading reified brute fact via his mighty magic commands. As we saw this is also the theology of the Biblical literalists (See footnote *1 below for the theology of the North American ID community). 

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As I have said so often; there is a sense in which the elegant & succinct mathematical forms distilled from the high organisation of the cosmos "explain" absolutely nothing in the deepest sense of the word. Explanatory mathematical objects as we know them are less an act of explanation than that of compressed descriptions; as such they can never break the explanatory completeness barrier and deliver aseity. 

Our world is just one of the possible worlds that can be reified from the platonic realm. This fact is going to be hard to take for those who hanker after the secular notion that somehow the so-called material world can be so closed ended that it delivers an aseity of its own. Rather, it is just one of many possibilities that can be dragged out of the platonic world, reified and because of its organization, described with succinct "distilled" mathematical forms. It is in fact a work of art rather than a work of necessity; there is good art and bad art, but all is art, and art is but realized possibility. Our science gives us the pattern of the creation but not its fundamental origins; as many people have put it; the objects of science give us the "how" but not the "why?". But "why?" is only intelligible as a question in the context of an assumed a-priori sentience; in the context of this assumed conscious cognition the concepts of intention, goal and purpose have meaning. So, is our ravenous curiosity going to be satiated with answers that merely tell us about the "How"?  For some people at least that does seem to be the case. 

As we try to make sense of the cosmos we use a combination of induction, abduction and deduction: The generalizations of induction sometimes help prompt the production of theories but perhaps more often a theory is abducted with a giant intuitive leap of inspiration. Crucially, however, a theory arrived at by inspiration must then be tested via the predictions of deduction. This testing methodology has grown up around the relatively simple conceptual objects which control the physical regime, but it is a methodology that is far less effective when dealing with the inscrutabilities & complexities of the personal, the psychological, the sociological and above all the liminal world of the numinous. These phenomena are far too complex, erratic and full of exceptions to easily admit formal methods. The numinous in particular is the domain of anecdotal evidence, the domain of personal revelation. 

***

The evidence of our senses is that our cosmos is highly organized, and that this unique organization is such that it facilitates those descriptive conceptual devices and tokens we call the laws of physics which ride on top of and can be intellectually distilled from this order. That this order is being created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by an a priori intelligence is not an implausible proposition for many of us, even if for some it seems too large an epistemic step to make.  But I'll concede that it is not a proposition that can be formally tested like the relatively simple physical regime can be tested; testing such a complex entity is more akin to testing the partially veiled and complex world of sociology and human thought. So, although individuals may feel they have tested their faith anecdotally the anecdotes they tell won't convince everyone, least of all the evangelical atheists. But we do have this: Theism has the potential to at least make sense of the cosmos in terms of purpose and meaning whereas vanilla science, which only tells us the "how", cannot do this.  Moreover, as an idealist I would contend, that the reality of the particulate cosmos is unintelligible unless one first posits an a-priori up and running conscious cognition. Particulate matter only makes sense as the mathematical constructions of a conscious, thinking & perceiving sentience. For me Hebrews 11:3&6 is a necessary first principle of epistemology.

But of course, I can't expect an evangelical atheist like Richard to agree with any of this as it is very much dependent on personal anecdote rather than formal observational protocols. All I can advise is that people like Richard will just have to get out on their bikes and find some anecdotes of their own. As far as I'm concerned, all bets are still on!

***

Depending on how I feel I might complete this series by looking at Richard's tongue in cheek theology which he expresses in the picture that heads this post. Viz: God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his blood has enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it. I wonder where Richard got his grist to come up with that one? I just wonder. The guilty parties probably know who they are.

Footnotes

*1 On North American Intelligent Design (NAID): Although I'm fundamentally an Intelligent Creation person I must once again disown any intellectual sympathy with this community, especially so as they fall into the welcoming embrace of the far-right, merging Christianity with politics. 

I personally don't have any intellectual commitment to the engine driving evolutionary change as currently conceived and yet I would heavily criticize the line taken by the NAID community: They have entrenched themselves in a tribal culture which is married to a set of misleading conceptual cliches: Viz: anti-evolutionism, "blind natural forces", anti-junk-DNA, "chance vs necessity" and subliminal deism. (See here for more). The NAID community make a sharp distinction between so-called "blind natural forces" and intelligent activity. The consequence is that they have adopted an epistemic filter which makes hard going of the identification of the basics of the physical regime as a work of hyper-intelligence; thus, in a sense chiming with Richard Carrier's view that the physical regime is a product of mindless blind Kaos; how utterly ironic!

If we assume that the cosmos is created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by the Divine will, then immediately the NAID category of "blind natural forces" becomes problematical. This is because in the context of intelligent creationism those forces can hardly be classified as blind and natural; in fact, the cosmos as the reification of artistic possibility rather than of necessity is highly unnatural. Although the NAID community are by and large like myself old cosmos creationists they nevertheless have subliminally taken on board the category of God as a super-duper conjurer creating stuff instantaneously as fully formed configurations, stuff that just springs into existence like a rabbit out of a hat. If this statement of their views is caricatured and unfair they had better tell me why it is. 

The particularly North American notion of God as a magician appears to be associated with the view that somehow the T term in equation 1 classifies as a "natural force" and therefore we must have T ~ 0. For them admitting T >> 0 is an intolerable bogy that is shockingly close to admitting some kind of evolution; to them it is the evil thin end of the "natural forces" wedge of secularization.  But in my opinion for the Everywhere and Everywhen God T is just as much a divine creation as is S. 

*2 Footnote: Falling into the linguistic trap of "nothing":

Richard tells us this: 

Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco • Richard Carrier Blogs

 What I showed is that once you actually allow for there to be nothing—nothing whatsoever—then a quasi-infinite multiverse is the inevitable, in fact unstoppable outcome. Because removing all barriers to what there can be or what can happen entails allowing all potential outcomes an equal chance at being realized (given only a single constraint: that logically contradictory states have a zero probability of coming to pass). There is nothing there to prevent that, nothing around to keep “nothing” a stable absence of everything. “Nothing” is, by its own defining properties, unstable.

That's not how probability works. Probability isn't a dynamic capable of generating something from nothing: it is about the level of observer information. Moreover, the physics of probability is about describing random patterns and not about the "instability of nothing". Probability and randomness are in no way an argument for the impossibility of "nothing"; trying to use them to generate aseity is well beyond their scope of usage. 

I've seen similar misinterpretations of the Uncertainty Relationship: As Richard is doing here, the principles of probability and randomness are glorified by raising them to the level of a kind of transcendent god-like dynamic or propensity capable of at least creating randomness from nothing. They don't see randomness as being only the mathematical description of a class pattern we meet in the universe rather than being a transcendent creative dynamic.

Another point: The principle of equal a priori probabilities concerns human information levels. That in itself isn't a sufficient condition that automatically translate into reified patterns of randomness.

Examining Mr. R. Carrier's use of Bayesianism. Part III

My apologies for having to display this theology!

This is Part III of my series where I'm looking at the following post by a Mr. Richard Carrier...

Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist • Richard Carrier Blogs

See here for the other parts: Part I & Part II. In the last part of this series, we left Richard wanting to take cognizance of all the evidence relevant to the question of the origin of the creation's "fine-tuning" constants.....

***

RICHARD: The real problem here is that this leaves out pertinent evidence. Because we are here testing two competing hypotheses to explain observations: either (A) chance accident produced that alignment of constants or (B) someone or something intelligently selected them.

MY COMMENT: As we saw in part II this statement of the problem isn't coherent; the big question about so-called fine-tuning isn't just confined to a few constants, but a highly improbable physical regime (calculated unconditionally) governed by unique organizing principles of which the so-called fine-tuning constants are just one aspect. Richard should be asking if these principles are a chance accident, and if so that takes us into the question of whether there is an infinite sea of randomness out there of which our highly organized universe is but a very, very tiny corner of chance occurrence. But as we saw in the last part there is no evidence for our observable cosmos being an unimaginably tiny part in a random superverse, what you might call the "Big R" hypothesis.

Anyway, here's Richard's conclusion to his question and it is clear that his theological assumptions as to how "gods" are supposed to work drive this conclusion (my emphases)....

***

RICHARD: So when we bring all the pertinent evidence back in, the evidence indicates support not for Theory B (intelligent design), but for Theory A (chance accident). Fine Tuning is therefore evidence against intelligent design. It could never be evidence for it, because gods don’t need fundamental constants at all, much less all the weird ones we have. No intelligent agent needs quarks or electrons or electromagnetism or even gravity—things can just behave as commanded or designed: where things need to fall, they just fall; where stars need to shine, they just shine; where things need to stick together, they just stick together. One might respond that, still, it is possible an intelligent engineer would choose all these weird and unnecessary ways to create and sustain life. But that is fully accounted for here. What matters is not whether it’s possible. What matters is how probable it is. 

Because: If (a) we exist and (b) God did not design the universe, then (c) we should expect to observe several things, and lo and behold, those are exactly the things we observe; yet we do not expect to observe those things if God did design the universe. By definition that which is expected on x is probable on x; that which is unexpected on x is improbable on x. So if the evidence is probable if God does not exist and improbable if God exists, then that evidence argues against God, not for God.

Hence what matters is not what’s possible. What matters is its relative probability. In the case of Theory A, the probability of all these observations (the vast age, the vast size, the vast quantity of lifeless content, the vast lethality of the universe; and the bizarrely long, meandering, particular way life arose and developed into observers asking these questions) is essentially 100%. And you can’t get “more” than 100%. It’s as likely as likely can ever be. These observations are therefore maximally probable on Theory A. By contrast, none of these observations are at all expected on any plausible theory of intelligent design. Indeed, they are on Theory B predicted not to be observed.

MY COMMENT: In the above I have no issue with the core idea of conditional probabilities; namely that the probability of an outcome can be considerably enhanced if the conditions x or evidence x implies that it is a favored outcome.  Where the issue lies is with Richard's rather subjective assessment of what constitutes favourable evidence and/or conditions for his atheism. Take a look at the following......

In my short monograph on Forster's and Marston's (F&M) application of Bayes theorem to the question of God's existence I interpreted their use of probabilities in frequentist terms (itself a debatable maneuver) using this Venn diagram: 

Here the overwhelming number of cases favouring a habitable cosmos represented by "H" are found among the cases where there is an intelligent creator represented by the area "G".  If one is to accept this diagram (debatable!) it is then a trivial Bayesian calculation to show that given conditions/evidences "H" then it implies that the probability of God is almost unity. 

Now let's do the same for Richard's take on the situation. Interpreted in frequentist terms, he's saying this:

Richard's view is that our cosmos, with its huge volume of space-time sterile to life, can barely be claimed to be habitable and moreover to him the cosmos seems all very random; hence for Richard our cosmos lies somewhere in the region above labelled with "R".  According to Ricard, then, our cosmos is hardly the sort of affair that an intelligent and wise designer would create and therefore in his assessment region R has a very small overlap with region G. So, given this assumption of his, it then trivially follows that conditions/evidence labeled by "R" imply atheism with a probability of all but 100%. 

Clearly then F&M and Richard draw opposite conclusions from the evidence of the cosmos.  And it's not as if F&M, although Christians, are out and out antievolutionists after the manner of the right-wing North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community.  But let me say this: As we saw in Part II Richard seems to have underestimated the miracle of organization that is our observable cosmos and over emphasizes the role of randomness. I see the habitability of the cosmos, evolution or no evolution, as a very big deal indeed and not just a fluke of unadulterated randomness; I see Richard's vision of a bizarro "Big-R" superverse as not only hopelessly meaningless, but also lacking evidence. So, although I have to admit to feeling rather insecure about the use of Bayes to God, whether I was atheist or theist, I'm probably more on the side of F&M than I am that of Mr. Richard Carrier. 

As we will see below Richard's argument is based on his a priori theological conceptions and what he thinks (wrongly as it turns out) the way engineers who create stuff should work (my emphases):

***

RICHARD: Intelligent engineers aiming to create life don’t make the laboratory for it vastly larger and older and more deadly than is required for the project. Indeed, unless those engineers intend to convince that life that they don’t exist, they don’t set up its habitat to look exactly like a habitat no one set up. This is the least likely way they would make a universe. But set that point aside. The conclusion already sufficiently follows from the first point: there is no reason to expect God to have made the universe this way. It cannot be predicted that this is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God. So no matter what you try to propose, you can never get that probability to be 100% if there was a God. You can propose all sorts of excuses, all sorts of “maybes,” but you will never be able to prove those proposals to be 100% certain to be true. There will always be some significant probability that those “excuses” simply aren’t true, that God simply doesn’t have your imagined motives or limitations. And indeed, when there is no evidence for or against any one such motive or limitation, its probability simply is 50%. It’s as likely as not.

MY COMMENT: Well, OK I can accept that Richard should draw parallels between divine creation and what he thinks human engineers do in the act of creation. After all, human engineering is something we have experience of; where else do we get our evidence from? We can only use our experience, and any intuitions based on that experience to probe the question of a divine intelligent designer and creator.

But when Richard says above that the kind of universe we see is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God. is that actually true? 

As I've already said in Part II the cosmos, whether current theories of evolution are correct or not, is a remarkable piece of work that is far, far from the "Big-R" that Richard gives every impression he thinks it is; it is in fact a highly organized system of surprising contingencies, organized contingencies of very low statistical weight and therefore of very low unconditional probability. So, unless we are rather taken with Richard's Bizarro Big-R superverse concept, the observable cosmos is a most singular and arresting piece of construction.  But just how was it created if it is not part of a Big-R superverse? Let's see....

***

Some years ago I was reading a book by a rather foolish fundamentalist Biblical literalist and I read these lines: 

.. the Bible teaches that the stars were created in an instant of time at the verbal command of God (Psalm 33:9). It is an awesome thought that God needed only to speak a word and billions upon billions of stars instantly appeared." (p15)

"... God supernaturally and instantaneously created the stars on the fourth day of creation" (p24)

"When we read of God's supernatural and instantaneous method of creation we must stand in awe of Him." (p34)

"When we consider God speaking the vast Universe of stars into existence, we can do nothing but stand in awe of Him"

This Biblical literalist is quite sure he knows the vital property distinguishing "natural" processes from "supernatural" action - it is of course that creators create their creations instantaneously by means of the pronouncement of suitable magic words. In commenting on Proverbs 8:27-30 where we read about God invoking wisdom as the craftsman of creation he concludes "God did not use evolution because a craftsman carries out instantaneous and deliberate actions whereas evolution involves a long random process" (p31). However, there are two glaring errors here: 1) Craftsmen don't create instantaneously. 2) To call evolution "random" is a gross misrepresentation. This literalist is captive to a false dichotomy: Viz: He contrasts what he believes to be the very random processes of evolution with what he feels are the instantaneous and deliberate acts of the craftsman. The irony is that Richard's views in terms of the concepts he employs aren't a lot different: As we've seen he is impressed by the notion of a Big-R universe. Moreover, take a look at the following which I've already quoted from Richard in a previous section of this post....

No intelligent agent needs quarks or electrons or electromagnetism or even gravity—things can just behave as commanded or designed: where things need to fall, they just fall; where stars need to shine, they just shine; where things need to stick together, they just stick together.

That is, in the mindset of both our Biblical literalist and Richard Carrier divine creation should entail no underlying logic, no process and no history; things just happen just-like-that, abracadabra style. Basically, the caricature of divine creation conceived by both Richard and our Biblical literalist is that the act of creation is brute magic.  Richard and our literalist just can't conceive that God might use the resources of time and space (humanly speaking huge amounts of them) as a demonstration of the process and computational cost needed to create life. For them God is a magician who merely commands stuff into existence and Richard's theological notions in terms of concepts employed doesn't look to be a great advancement on the Biblical literalist.

We cannot but help notice that our Biblical literalist is as laughably wrong as anyone can be about the actions of a craftsman; those actions are certainly not instantaneous; if they were we might justifiably accuse the craftsmen of being magicians in league with Devil. In fact, in some ways the work of the craftsman resembles the inconceivably more sophisticated work in the womb; that is, a stage-by-stage process moving incrementally closer to an end product as time progresses. These stages proceed against a background of inherent dependencies, e.g. a craftsman can't make a silver candlestick until some silver has been smelted and an embryo can't develop without a union of the appropriate genetic components not to mention the underlying organic chemistry fundamental to all living things. Of course, it is easy to claim that an omniscient omnipotence could create in one grand slam instantaneous act a fully mature human, but the sequential dependencies I talk of here are conceptually fundamental. A silver candlestick depends on the existence of silver but silver is not obliged to exist in the form of a silver candlestick. Likewise, humans depend on a prerequisite organic chemistry which itself depends on more fundamental conditions such as the construction of atoms. There is a forced logical sequence here that we cannot escape from whether we believe in instantaneous creation or not. If God instantaneously created a mature object that would not detract from the fact that the object itself may have inherent sequences of logical dependencies.

Some concept of sequence, then, is built into things no matter how they are arrived at. But the sequencing we see in embryo growth and artifact construction is much stronger than this "dependency" sequencing. Both processes pass through a series of stages separated by increments. Each stage is usually a little closer to the final product; although this is not necessarily true in the case of the craftsmen art where sometimes a search for solutions means backtracking may occur. But the fundamental aspect of both is the incremental separation between stages. The end product is the result of an accumulation of these incremental changes. The common theme is that of a quasi-continuity of change; you pass from one state to another through a series of intermediate states, thereby forming an incremental sequence of change. I would not, however, want to use the generic term "gradualism" here because some processes like, say, an explosion, is both incremental and yet very rapid. The key notion is one of at least an approximate continuity of change in as much as successive stages are only separated by relatively small displacements.

But we must take our faulting of both Richard and our Biblical literalist yet another stage further. As we know the process of designing is also a "search" process, an experimental trial and error endeavor that in some cases has definite goals in mind and in other cases involves chance discoveries that are perceived to have utility and only then are selected to become part of the technological tool kit. There is also the complex cognitive thought process occurring in the mind of the designer, which although not visible are all part of the experimentalism as ideas are mulled over in the mind and either rejected or selected for realized reification in material technology. 

All these factors combine to give us an exponentially branching network which constitutes a potentially huge search space making the space-time of the observable cosmos look like a very tiny place indeed. But the search space is considerably reduced if the creator is primed with an informational head start; that is, if the creator has useful a priori knowledge. The form of the equation which relates the information content of the configurations created as a function of starting information and the minimum possible number of computational search steps looks something like this: 

I = S + Log T

Equation 1

Where I is the information content of a configuration arrived at, S is the minimum length of the algorithm/knowledge needed to generate the configuration using a minimum number of linear execution steps of T. See here where I give more details on this relation.  (See also here).  This relation tells us that a creative agent/process can take a lot less time if that agent has a large amount of primal starter information S. But assuming a parallel processing paradigm then when S is lacking content information in I is generated only very slowly with Log of the number of execution steps T. 

It is a strong theological intuition that a proper concept of God entails an omniscient being and therefore One who has a full quota of S and hence has little need of the generation steps T. I guess that it is this intuition which influences our fundamentalist and Richard both of whom are quite sure that when it comes to creation brute omni-power means that God can just do stuff all but instantaneously and doesn't need any process with a history behind it; that is T ~ 0.  But of course, that's not true of human designers for which the cognitive process of design and creation entails thought, sequence, experiment, and the trial-and-error search for good information all of which is, above all, a process with a history. In that sense both Richard and our literalist fundie have got it so wrong about designers; designers search. test, reject & select, backtrack, correct, and develop; they don't just do stuff instantaneously but rather leave behind a history of research & development; history, and plenty of it, is implicit in all human artifacts. 

***

As we know our own universe displays a history; it is an object which has developed and didn't spring into existence "just like that". It is this history which biblical literalists are committed to denying with great scientific difficulty. Of course, Richard, like myself, believes in cosmic history, but he's trying to push past us the theological notion that theists should all be like Biblical literalists and postulate T ~ 0 where God stuff just falls into place at command; he is asking me to accept that creation should have little or no algorithmic logic and history behind it and he is also asking me to accept that a cosmos with logic and a long history is evidence that God doesn't exist. Moreover, as we've seen he gives the impression that he's positing a "Big R" superverse. But that, as we've also seen, has little or no evidence going for it and can be justifiably called a bizarro universe as it can be used to explain anything. And while on the subject of bizarro explanations: To me, the concept of the abracadabra God, a concept shared by Biblical literalists, also qualifies as a bizarro God because just about anything goes; see for example my "Beyond Our Ken" series. In fact, it may be that much of Richard's theological concepts stem from his experience with the North American Intelligent Design community and fundamentalist organisations like Answers in Genesis.

For myself the Big R supervesre is as unlikely as the abracadabra God. Neither notions have evidence in their favour; Big-R predicts instabilities in the organisation of the cosmos, instabilities we don't observe, and abracadabra predicts a universe without a logical history, a universe Beyond our Ken.

It is clear our universe has a history of development and this is particularly evident with life and geology, although may I say that I'm not committed to any particular engine/mechanism of evolution. However, I would tentatively submit the idea that the size of the creation is a divine revelation to humankind of the computational costs of a universe such as ours, a universe which is so obviously specialized for developing and supporting life. Another speculative notion which I would like to submit is that our universe may well use expanding parallelism and teleological constraints in order to generate life; this would get rid of the "slow" Log T term in equation 1 above, an equation which pertains to vanilla parallel processing. However, all that is very speculative, and the last thing I want to do is to be like Richard and our foolish literalist fundie who have made their minds up and think everyone else should follow suite, or else be called nasty names by them and their followers. 

Lastly let me comment on this quote from Richard: 

Intelligent engineers aiming to create life don’t make the laboratory for it vastly larger and older and more deadly than is required for the project...etc etc,

That may well be true. But the minimum space-time dimensions of a cognitive "laboratory" depend entirely on:

a) the initial knowledge of the engineers, that is the value of S, and 

b) the configurational complexity of the task in hand which dictates the minimum value of T given S. 

So, if the level of providence the Good Lord has provisioned our universe with measured in terms of its initial algorithmic complexity (S) and the time and space set aside for cosmic development (T), then the incredible sophistication and complexity of life very likely dictates the large space-time dimensions of our cosmos.  From where I stand the cosmos looks very much like an ingenious piece of computational engineering built around equation 1 above. It certainly isn't a tiny piece of an immense Big-R cosmos, or something created last Thursday with a built-in bogus maturity (The omphalos hypothesis).

In part IV I will continue to examine Mr. Richard Carrier's theological assumptions.