Prof. Nikk Effingham: Simulations all the way up: An atheist’s response to the fine tuning argument

Event details

This paper is a mash-up of two debates: the debate about whether we live in a simulation and the fine tuning argument. The paper aims itself at those atheists who find the fine tuning argument to be worrying/compelling. Merely being in a simulation does nothing to relieve the pressures of the fine tuning argument, since we can apply the same reasoning to the (mainly unknown) details of the non-simulated ‘top level’ universe. But, if it was logically possible for there to be an infinite chain of simulations then there would be no ‘top level’ universe. This paper argues that it’s dialectically appropriate to believe in this possibility and then argues that the reasoning of the fine-tuning argument gives the atheist good reason to assign a high posterior credence to that possibility.