MIDSOUTH PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE

and Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

The University of Memphis

February 22-23, 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS

The thirty-second annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, February 22-23, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome.

Submission are due by January 7, 2008

The Philosophy Club at USA, Mobile met last night to discuss two chapters of Dawkins's The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).  It was brought up that Dawkins's rebuttal of the Fine Tuning Argument for god's existence was too quick.  For those of you unfamiliar with Chater 4, in it he uses the "Anthropic Principle" to help explain away the argument.  It doesn't matter how small the number of life-conducive planets there are in the universe, "we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it" (p. 136).

It was argued that this doesn't address versions of the Fine Tuning Argument that begin not from improbabilities about the liklihood of life turning up here but, instead, begin from facts about the physical constants--weak force, strong force, electromagnetic force, and gravity.  These are "tuned" in such a way that any minor change in any one of them would make life ("as we know it"?) almost impossible--matter might not even clump together.  To help motivate why the values of the forces need explanation one attendee brought up van Inwagen's straw-drawing example.  I'll paraphrase the characterization of it (I believe it is in van Inwagen's Metaphysics, which I haven't read):

Say you were presented with a billion straws all stacked up next to one another and were asked to choose the shortest straw (there is only one).  If you choose it, you will go on.  If you do not (999,999,999:1 against), then you will die before you are even aware of your choice.  So, you choose and, lo and behold, you choose the shortest straw.  The question: Why did you choose that one?  It was such an unlikely event that it calls out for explanation.  By analogy, the constants could have been lots of values, so why are they the values they are instead of one of the many other combinations not suitable for life?  This cries out for explanation.