Naturally Fine Tuned for Life - A Defence of Metaphysical Naturalism

In arriving at a belief in Spiritual Pantheism1, the question of the nature and existence of God is one with which I have sincerely engaged. While I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as Aleister Crowley in stating that “belief is the enemy of knowledge”, I would say that simply believing a proposition to be true can serve as a barrier to further investigation and knowledge acquisition. I fear that this can be the case when it comes to many of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, including the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) put forward by proponents of theism. In the case of the FTA, I also believe that the reasoning employed by proponents of theism is flawed and leads them to reject naturalistic explanations for the existence of the Universe, i.e. theses which say the natural universe was not created by God2 but either exists singly as a necessary or brute fact or exists as one universe among a multitude of universes in a Multiverse (MV). In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate the errors in logic made by theists first in positing that a life-permitting universe (LPU) is improbable under the naturalistic-single universe (NSU) hypothesis, and subsequently in arguing that the MV hypothesis commits what Ian Hacking (1987) referred to as “the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy”. First, I will attempt to demonstrate why an LPU is not improbable under the NSU. Second, I will attempt to demonstrate that if we ascribe a probability value to our LPU, we can directly infer either an MV or the existence of “Deeper Laws” (Barnes, 2020) from that probability value