Here’s the original comment from Martin.
I thought this was a pretty good objection, and I said so. Well, Martin submitted it as a question to Bill, and Bill replied.
Here is his question to Dr. Craig, which is similar to what he asked before:
I’ve been thinking about the fine tuning argument, and while I like it and think it carries some weight, something about it bothers me. It seems to suffer from “life chauvinism.”
In a poker hand a royal flush has intrinsic value and thus being dealt that hand is highly improbable and quite amazing. But that’s because the rules of the game define a royal flush as having value before the hand is dealt.
What is the justification for asserting that life is the royal flush?
Life could be defined as an “amazing and improbable phenomenon” X1. Singing gas could be defined as “amazing and improbable phenomenon” X2. Rainbow planets with rings of fire could be X3. And so on.
Each phenomena is equally improbable and can only come about by a certain setting of the universal constants. Why assert that X1 has intrinsic value? Couldn’t X2 “complain” that we are being phenomenonists by claiming that X1 is best?
It just seems to me that the rules about royal flushes are being made up only after the hand has been dealt.
Martin
And you can read Dr. Craig’s reply here. He starts by saying this “This is a very good question, Martin, about which I’d like to think more. But here are some preliminary reflections.”
I like this response because I actually had to study Bayes Theorem for my machine learning classes in grad school. So this was good because I actually get to use computer science for something useful for a change. (By the way, my New Zealand readers, I used the Weka machine learning software library).
Wow! We have the smartest commenters. Just last week that woman who I like was asking me about divine aseity. Like I know what to say about that. Well, I did say something to her that seemed to make sense to her, but she still has more questions. That’s Bill’s current area of research, you know.
On Guard
By the way, I know some of you have no idea who Bill Craig is, and I am afraid I will have to smite you with my foam bat for this grave infraction. But there is a way out. You can read chapter 1 of Bill Craig’s new book “On Guard” right here on his web site. It’s an introduction to apologetics from the top Christian apologist of all time. And if you like it, you can order it and read the whole thing. It’s dirt cheap on Amazon.com.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I think Martin is looking at this the wrong way. It’s not the statistical improbability that makes a royal flush valuable. The real value comes in the sorting of “information” that is contained on the cards. To get a royal flush, you randomly draw from a pool of variables and get something that appears to be sorted.
The value comes from the potential for information on the cards. Keep in mind, the designs on the cards are not arbitrary – there are matching suits as well as consecutive numbers. This is important because if the deck contained all clubs, then a royal flush would lose its meaning. The same is true for the building blocks of life.
What makes a royal flush impressive is that it requires two independent variables to sort themselves together randomly. This kind of sorting has “information content”, because an identifiable pattern is created.
Now, imagine if a dealer randomly dealt around a table and the order was: 2-clubs, 3-clubs, 4-clubs, 5-clubs, 6-clubs, 7-clubs, 8-clubs, 9-clubs, 10-clubs, Jack-clubs, Queen-clubs, King-clubs, Ace-clubs. That would be a truly amazing occurrence if it was random, because it not only sorted independent variables, but it sorted them in a meaningful order!
In the case of most royal flushes, we have to sort them into order after they’ve been dealt. But if nobody was there to sort them, then like Martin said, the royal flush would be meaningless. The basic proteins that form life are the same way; they must be sorted in order for them to have meaning. But lucky for us, they came sorted exactly the way they needed to be! This is what leads to the “fine-tuning” argument.
Let’s go a step further and imagine there was some intrinsic power in those variables that enabled cards to come to life if you were dealt a royal flush. That would be similar to the mysterious life-giving power of DNA, but on a much smaller scale.
To make thing more difficult, the cards can only come to life if they are sorted randomly into the exact order they need to be in. This is how things work in the real world. You can’t take all the elements contained in an amoeba, throw them into a pot and call it an amoeba. Instead, the amoeba needs to form naturally, sorting the independent variables in exactly the right order. For that to happen, variables need to be finely-tuned.
I’ve heard Ken Miller (a prominent opponent of intelligent design) make the same argument that Martin is making. Unfortunately, this argument only works if you ignore the elephant in the room…information. Information is almost never random. This is especially true for life. The most basic living organisms require VOLUMES of 3-dimensional information. That information must be precisely ordered or it will not create life. Furthermore, atheists cannot look to “natural selection” for help with this sorting. There is no natural mechanism that is capable of sorting sort single-celled organisms into existence, let alone sorting the building blocks of life. That kind of sorting is purely supernatural.
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Interesting question and an excellent preliminary reply from Dr. Craig. Jake’s comment is also very helpful. [applauds :)]
On a computer science note, WK, i would be interested to hear your views on the theological implications of Neural Networks and Complex Systems (we touched on these in my studies) – particularly with regard to the soul and the centre of consciousness. While the focus was never on the theological in class, it did pose a number of questions at the time, which I never fully resolved. Probably belongs in another post… :)
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