God, Cosmology, and the Silver Ghost

If you have not seen this debate, it is a good debate between a theist and an atheist regarding the role of God and cosmology. It is focused and high-level. Both debaters likely talked over the heads of the majority of audience members.

One point that struck me as odd was a comment about the fine-tuning argument. For those who do not know, fine-tuning is a term in physics, where certain constants and quantities that the universe has, had to fall within very narrow ranges in order to make life possible. For example, there are enough stars out there that every person could own two trillion of them. The density of these stars is over 1,000 tons per level teaspoon full. Yet, had the mass of the universe been a dime's mass more or less, life would not have been possible. And there are thousands of finely tuned constants and quantities.

Sean Carroll argued that theism is unlikely because the universe contains too much fine-tuning. This sound on the face of it, crazy. It's almost an argument that too much design is evidence of no design. There are also loads of counterexamples to this argument.

I present to you, the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.

The Silver Ghost: One of the most excessively fine-tuned cars ever made.

This car is contemporaneous with the Ford Model T. The engine, and indeed the whole car, was built to ridiculously precise specifications. It was massively over-engineered, capable of running 15,000 miles with almost no maintenance. Less than 8,000 of these were built, and many of them run just fine to this day. The car was finely tuned far beyond any car ever needed to be. In fact, the fine-tuning of this vehicle is beyond even what was useful. The fine tuning was well beyond even what would be useful in a car. After all, there is no real benefit to building a car that can last 100 years. Yet no one would argue that this excessive amount of fine-tuning provides any evidence that the car was not designed.