Evidence · Case 08 · Science
Pure luck
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
On this view the constants just have the values they have, and we won an enormous cosmic lottery. There is nothing further to explain, because there is no deeper reason. This is a coherent position, and some thoughtful people hold it.
Sources
Simon Friederich, “Fine-Tuning,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Objections & responses
- Luck isn’t a refusal to explain; it’s the claim that there’s nothing to explain. Every particular outcome of a lottery is improbable, and nobody demands an explanation for which ticket won.
The lottery point is the standard one, and the firing-squad reply answers it. What needs explaining is not that some outcome occurred but that this specifically remarkable outcome did, the way a lottery won by the commissioner’s brother-in-law invites explanation even though every ticket was equally unlikely. A universe that permits chemistry is the brother-in-law outcome, not a random ticket. The deeper version of the objection, that the constants have no probability distribution at all, is the normalizability problem, and it is taken up under the Barnes exhibit.