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27. Natural Reality / E. Cosmology / 9. Fine-Tuned Universe

[constants of nature having fruitful values]

2 ideas
Maybe the universe is fine-tuned because it had to be, despite plans by God or Nature? [Heil]
     Full Idea: Maybe the universe is fine-tuned as it is, not because things happened to fall out as they did during and immediately after the Big Bang, or because God so ordained it, but because God or the Big Bang had no choice.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 08.09)
     A reaction: You'd be hard put to so why it had to be fine-tuned, so this seems to be a nice speculation. Unverifiable but wholly meaningful. Maybe the stuff fine-tunes itself, by mutual interaction. Or it is the result of natural selection (Lee Smolin).
If a cosmic theory relies a great deal on fine-tuning basic values, it is probably wrong [Hesketh]
     Full Idea: If a theory has to rely on excessive 'fine-tuning', a series of extremely unlikely events in order to produce the universe we see around us, then it is extremely unlikely that this theory is correct.
     From: Gavin Hesketh (The Particle Zoo [2016], 10)
     A reaction: He says the Standard Model has 26 parameters which are only known by experiment, rather than by theory. So instead of saying '...so there is a God', we should say '...so our theory isn't very good'.