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(More customer reviews)Vic Stenger is an experimental physicist who, since retiring, has turned his attention to metaphysics. He has written eight books, six of which are on the general theme of the misuse of science to support religion, alternative medicine, and other superstitions. The "fine tuning" of the title refers to the idea that values of various physical quantities could not be even slightly different than they are in our universe and still permit life to exist. Some religionists have seized on this idea as evidence that a creator god "fine tuned" those values just for us. And even many agnostic and atheist scientists have been impressed by the fine tuning of some parameters like the cosmological constant.
Stenger examines each of the fine tuned parameters that have been touted as essential to a life-friendly universe. He brings to bear a sweeping knowledge of physics and explains why each claim of fine-tuning is either entirely misconceived or is not nearly so "fine" as claimed. You can learn quite of bit of physics reading this book and even better you can learn to think like a physicist. The presentation can be followed by anyone who took high-school physics, but Stenger also includes some mathematical exposition that requires calculus to fully appreciate. Here the reader needs to watch out for some typos in the equations. If they look wrong or confusing, check online. The physics and mathematics is all standard stuff and easily checked. If you have Stenger's purely physics book, "The Comprehensible Cosmos" take a look in it.
In looking over reviews of Stenger's other books, I see that he is criticized for not proving that God doesn't exist or that some fad or superstition is false. I expect this book will draw the same criticism. This is a misunderstanding of what he is doing. He doesn't propose to prove that a creator God doesn't exist. In fact he has said that the god of deism, a creator who doesn't meddle in his creation, is a possible god. What he does prove is there is no evidence for a creator god; and specifically in this book, no evidence of fine tuning. Everything about the universe looks as one might expect if the universe arose by natural processes out of nothing.
Stenger briefly considers the idea of a multiverse, the idea that any natural process producing our universe would, absent some special principle, also produce arbitrarily many other universes. This would answer the question as to why the universe is fine-tuned for life: the answer being that of course life occurs in those universes friendly to life. Although Stenger doesn't reject the multiverse idea, he considers it unnecessary for answering the fine-tuning argument because he has shown there is no fine-tuning. Furthermore, he notes that the Bayesian inference argument of Mike Ikeda and Bill Jeffery shows that any observation that the universe is fine-tuned could only count as evidence *against* a god.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that my name appears in the acknowledgements of this book.
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