Interfaith Dialogue: Hamza Tzortzis and William Lane Craig

Hamza Tzortzis just tweeted about his response to The God Delusion. I'd missed it before now. While reading it some of the quotes and statistics he used seemed familiar. In this post I'll be comparing Hamza's article to one by William Lane Craig, entitled Does God Exist? (Free registration required.)

*Update June 2012: Two years after publication, Hamza has updated his article to reflect the sources and has modified the description to list it as a compilation. This is a positive step. A link to my followup article has been added to the end of this post.*

For copyright reasons I won't reproduce both articles in their entirety. Let's start after Hamza's preliminary note:

Hamza Tzortzis: "The existence of a life permitting universe is due to conditions that must have been fined-tuned to a degree that is literally incalculable. Take the following examples:"

William Lane Craig: "The existence of intelligent life depends upon a conspiracy of initial conditions which must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable."

Hamza Tzortzis: "The Strength of Gravity & the Atomic Weak Force: Physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10¹⁰⁰ would have prevented a life permitting universe."

William Lane Craig: "For example, the physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10¹⁰⁰ would have prevented a life-permitting universe."

Hamza Tzortzis: "Big Bang’s Low Entropy Condition: Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10¹⁰. Penrose comments, “I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 10¹⁰.”"

William Lane Craig: "Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang's low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10^{10^(123)}.  Penrose comments, "I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 10^{10^(123)}.""

It's worth noting the difference in figures - William Lane Craig quotes Penrose correctly, Hamza accidentally drops ^123, leaving Penrose describing the relatively paltry figure of ten billion as unknown in discussions of physics.

Hamza Tzortzis: Volume of the phase space of possible universes: Roger Penrose of Oxford University states “In order to produce a universe resembling the one in which we live, the Creator would have to aim for an absurdly tiny volume of the phase space of possible universes” Now, how tiny is this volume? According to Penrose the volume of the phase space would be 1/10 to the power of X which is 10¹²³. This is smaller than the ratio of a Proton! This precision is much, much greater than the precision that would be required to hit an individual proton if the entire universe were a dartboard!

At this point I couldn't find any references in William Lane Craig's article. There's a drop in quality - take the sentence "This is smaller than the ratio of a Proton!". The ratio of a proton to what? What's X in the above quote? How does Hamza know the size of the universe, as opposed to the visible universe? I had a look in another of Craig's works, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology:

William Lane Craig: "According to Roger Penrose, one of Britain's leading theoretical physicists, “In order to produce a universe resembling the one in which we live, the Creator would have to aim for an absurdly tiny volume of the phase space of possible universes” (Penrose 1989, p.343). How tiny is this volume? According to Penrose, if we let x = 10¹²³, the volume of phase space would be 1/10^x of the entire volume (1989, p.343). This is vastly smaller than the ratio of the volume of a proton - which is about 10^-45m³ - to the entire volume of the visible universe, which is approximately 10⁸⁴m³. Thus, this precision is much, much greater than the precision that would be required to hit an individual proton if the entire visible universe were a dartboard!"

Another match, much clearer and consistent with how physics is normally described. To be honest it seems Hamza didn't follow the argument.

Hamza Tzortzis: "There is just no physical reason why these constants and quantities should have the values they do. As P. C. W. Davies states:
“Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn’t follow that the physical universe itself is unique…the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions…there is nothing in present ideas about ‘laws of initial conditions’ remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it…it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise.”

William Lane Craig: There is just no physical reason why these constants and quantities should have the values they do. As P. C. W. Davies states,
"Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn't follow that the physical universe itself is unique. . . . the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions. . . . There is nothing in present ideas about 'laws of initial conditions' remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it. . . .  it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise."

The similarities need no commentary. I'll end the comparison with a final quote from Hamza:

Hamza Tzortzis: "Specified probability [sic] is a probability that also conforms to an independent pattern. To illustrate this, imagine you have a monkey in a room for twenty-four hours, typing a way on your laptop. In the morning you enter the room and you see, “O Romeo, O Romeo, where art thou O Romeo? Deny thy father and deny thy name…” ... in this case not only have you seen the improbability of typing intelligible English words – but they also conform to the independent pattern of English grammar!"

Specified complexity, and this time it's a concept borrowed from the Christian Creationist William Dembski. I'm not his biggest fan. Still, how probable is it that we find so many matches between these two apologists?

As mentioned at the start of this article, Hamza has updated his piece to reflect the Christian apologists that influence his views. There's a full followup here.