Horrible Horganism

John Horgan claims that Collins Whups Dawkins in TIME Debate!

David Van Biema, the TIME interviewer (who deserves a pat for good questions), asks both men to comment on the observation that “if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible.”

Dawkins responds that “maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.”

Collins, no fool, pounces: “This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.”

I hate to say this, but Collins is right. The multiverse theory is just as preposterous and lacking in evidence as divine creation. Dawkins is often denounced for his arrogance, bluntness, rudeness--in short, his style. When it comes to multiverses, substance, not style, is Dawkins’s problem. Incredibly, Dawkins’s defense of multiverses has allowed Collins--a Christian who believes in miracles, fer crissake--to score a rhetorical victory in a national forum.

In the actual TIME article Collins replies first to the question. He says,

When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event—namely our existence.

Dawkins replies to this by pointing out that there are two other possible explanations that don't require us to create a cop-out God. Dawkins says ...

People who believe in God conclude there must have been a devine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants the get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. ...

I think Dawkins has given a perfectly adequate response to the question. What it boils down to is we don't know why the universe is constructed as it is but there are some reasonable ideas that make the fine-tuning argument superfluous.

The fact that Collins thinks a God who built the universe is more probable than a multiverse is nonsense. The fact that Horgan thinks it's a valid response only proves that if you repeat an ancient superstition enough times it begins to sound reasonable, even to someone who should know better.