Can a Bayesian look at fine-tuning make “design” less compelling, and do Grim Reaper-style infinity puzzles really show that an infinite past is impossible?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Friction speaks with Graham Oppy about two big clusters of issues: a Bayesian way of framing fine-tuning arguments, and how (if at all) Benardete/“Grim Reaper” style paradoxes support causal or temporal finitism. On fine-tuning, Friction sketches a strategy that starts from probabilistic constraints—roughly, that “design” shouldn’t get a higher prior than non-design, and that life-permittingness/fine-tuning isn’t (or needn’t be) more expected on design than on non-design—so that updating on a life-permitting universe won’t, by itself, drive you toward design. Oppy presses on how the hypothesis space is being carved up and what background assumptions are doing the work, noting that fine-tuning defenders often treat “design” as a family of more specific hypotheses—some of which might assign high likelihood to fine-tuning (the “more batter on the design side” idea). A related thread Oppy raises is an “inscrutability” worry: given a designer’s vast option space, it may be hard to say what fine-tuning should even be likely on design, which complicates the likelihood comparisons that fine-tuning arguments rely on. The conversation also touches on how conditioning on extremely specific facts about “these exact parameters” can generate counterintuitive results about what should have been expected a priori, and Oppy connects this to “many-gods” style worries familiar from Pascal’s Wager debates.
In the second half, Friction and Oppy turn to Benardete-style setups: infinite sequences of would-be interveners arranged at times approaching a limit, which can make it seem like an outcome must occur even though no particular intervener is ever the one who triggers it. Friction outlines a common finitist dialectic: if an infinite past/regress would allow a Grim Reaper scenario (often via a “patchwork” recombination principle), and if Grim Reaper scenarios are impossible, then infinite pasts/regresses are impossible too. Oppy focuses much of his skepticism on the linking step—especially the idea that you can “piece together” regions from different possible worlds to build the paradox—because the relevant dispositions and actions don’t obviously survive that kind of cut-and-paste. He also emphasizes that there are plenty of coherent infinite-sequence stories that don’t generate contradiction (he offers simple toggle-style examples), which undercuts the claim that infinity as such forces paradox. And a recurring diagnosis is that many paradox presentations under-specify what happens at the crucial infinite-limit case—so the sense of impossibility may come from an incomplete story rather than a genuine contradiction.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:18 - Bayesian fine-tuning argument
02:30 - Design vs. non-design hypotheses
03:52 - Two probability constraints
05:17 - Oppy’s first reaction
07:24 - Conditional probabilities questioned
10:11 - Does design predict life?
11:16 - Purely a priori reasoning
15:16 - Causation vs. design
16:36 - Probability
19:54 - Background
22:33 - Simplicity
27:41 - Skeptical theism and fine-tuning
28:22 - Life-permitting vs. fine-tuned
31:39 - Comparing specific hypotheses
37:55 - Simplicity and divine complexity
39:28 - Necessary beings and the universe
43:30 - Intuitions and priors
46:52 - Stalking-horse objection
49:52 - Background knowledge and updating
51:34 - Double-dipping concern
55:44 - Grim reapers
1:01:41 - Patchwork principle
1:10:54 - Thomson’s lamp analogy
1:14:33 - Toe-regrowing variant
1:22:12 - Lewis and patchwork
1:23:41 - Intrinsic powers
1:26:27 - Conclusion
