Continuing my response to Carrier.
Part Three
Barnes claims to have hundreds of science papers that refute what I say about the possibility space of universe construction, and Lowder thinks this is devastating, but Barnes does not cite a single paper that answers my point.
My comment was in response to the claim that the statement “the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range” has been “refuted by scientists”, not about what Carrier has to say about “universe construction”. The references are in my review paper.
Because we don’t know how many variables there are.
Carrier doesn’t – he still thinks that there are 6 fundamental constants of nature, but can’t say what they are. Actual physicists have no problem counting the free parameters of fundamental physics as we know it, which is what fine-tuning is all about.
We don’t know all the outcomes of varying them against each other.
We know enough, thanks to a few decades of scientific research. It is not an argument from ignorance – extensive calculations have been performed, which overwhelmingly support fine-tuning.
And, ironically for Barnes, we don’t have the transfinite mathematics to solve the problem.
This is probably a reference to “transfinite frequentism”, a term that, as we saw last time, Carrier invented.
In any case, we don’t need transfinite arithmetic here. Bayesian probability deals with free parameters with infinite ranges in physics all the time; fine-tuning is not a unique case. Many of the technical probability objections aimed at fine-tuning, such as those of the McGrews, would preclude a very wide range of applications of probability in physics.
I am not aware of any paper in cosmology that addresses these issues.
It’s called the “measure problem”. There are literally hundreds of papers on it, too. For example, here’s a relevant paper with over 100 citations: “Measure problem in cosmology“. Aguirre (2005), Tegmark (2005), Vilenkin (2006) and Olum (2012) are good places to start. The problem of infinities in cosmology (including in fine-tuning and the multiverse) is tricky, but few cosmologists believe that it is unsolvable.