Francis Collins has a new book due out soon. Jerry Coyne has already covered it more interestingly than I can here, but this quote from Collins really got me.
The conclusion is astounding: if any of these [physical constants] were to vary by even the tiniest degree, a universe capable of sustaining any imaginable form of life would be impossible.
Having just read Victor Stenger’s New Atheism, I find Collins all the more annoying for bringing up this point. The fine-tuning argument is terrible enough just for the fact that it often takes the form of “But how is everything so well adapted to life?!”, but all of its creationist forms are awful. In Collins’ version, he’s assuming that the variance would be done to only one physical constant. In reality, physical constants are almost always dependent upon each other; the changing of one would mean the changing of them all. Collins’ argument is, then, incoherent.
Filed under: News, Religions | Tagged: Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith, Francis Collins, Jerry Coyne, New Atheism, Victor Stenger | 16 Comments »
For the Sake of Science 