Presumably you think he does do a good job of explaining the conundrum, which says a lot.
So, in this exchange, Alex O’Connor, though a secularist, plays the part of performing a useful service by invoking the idea of fine-tuning—not because he believes in intelligent design, but because he dares to hold the priesthood of scientism to account. He presents the eerie precision of the universe’s physical constants as a challenge: if this isn’t the product of design, then where is the scientific explanation?
Enter Brian Greene, a
high priest of theoretical physics, who promptly
evades the question with the kind of metaphysical obfuscation masquerading as science that has become the hallmark of this new academic Gnosticism. Rather than engaging with the heart of the issue—
why the conditions for life are so mathematically improbable—Greene spins a fairy tale of
unseen universes and speculative equations. This is not science; it is a modern mythology for the credentialed class, who fear what the implications of fine-tuning might mean for their materialist dogma.
Greene has
no empirical foundation for his multiverse musings. What he offers is a cosmic sleight of hand, designed to distract the laity from recognizing that his religion of numbers and probabilities cannot escape the philosophical consequences of a universe ordered in such a way as to point beyond itself. O’Connor, likely without intending to, reveals that when confronted with real metaphysical questions, the modern physicist has nothing to offer but a
fog of jargon and
untestable theories. It’s not the theist who is retreating to faith here—it’s Greene.
Particularly telling is Greene’s attempt to
sidestep the fine-tuning problem by proposing that if we changed
many parameters of physics at once, rather than just one or two, we might still get a viable universe (notice how the camera suddenly zooms in on him when he starts speculating, to give some unwarranted legitimacy to his claims) .
This is not science. It is pure, undisciplined speculation. Greene provides
no evidence, no predictions, no concrete models to support this idea. He simply suggests that somewhere, in the vast unknown of imaginary parameter space, different physical laws could produce alternative forms of life.
This is a magician's misdirection. He wants his audience to marvel at theoretical possibilities while ignoring that they are, at present, untestable and entirely unconstrained.
There is no scientific model showing how multiple constant shifts could result in life-supporting physics; there is only the assumption that such a model
might exist.
Greene
shifts the burden of proof from explaining this universe to conjuring fantasies of others. But science is not supposed to be about what
might be true in a thousand invisible realities—it is about what
is, here and now. And on that ground, Greene offers
nothing but speculation dressed up in the vestments of physics.
