I think it's still worth it for philosophers to explore what we should conclude if the fine-tuning problem turns out to be real, while leaving that question to the physicists. I think it would be overstating your point to say that fine-tuning has been debunked, so as long as it seems like it could be an issue then we mgiht as well look at what the ramifications would be. It's in that spirit that the philosophical debate is engaging and worthwhile.
Meanwhile, I find Carroll's arguments a little underwhelming, a bit like special pleading. Sure. We can't predict exactly what would happen in other universes. And we wouldn't have been able to predict life from first principles. But I think it's quite plausible that life is impossible in a universe where everything immediately collapses into black holes, or every particle gets immediately separated from every other particle, etc. I'm not going to put much weight on arguments from models of exotic chemistry or whatever, but these sorts of gross properties of other universes are persuasive. My understanding is that in a lot of the explorations of what would happen in various alternate universes, not only life but any sort of complexity at all seems to be impossible because of such gross properties.
But, sure, I'd give some reasonable credence to the idea that fine-tuning is a pseudo-problem, and life is maybe more robust than we realise. But I put more credence on it being a real problem. That's because I'm already predisposed for other reasons to believe in a multiverse where the laws of physics vary, and so, thinking anthropically, I don't have any strong expectations about how robust we should expect life to be -- meaning that I am unsurprised by evidence of fine-tuning. So if it looks at first glance like life is not robust, then I'm going to say it's probably the case that life is not robust. The fine-tuning problem can be resolved by appeal to a multiverse.
Very open to correction if a consensus builds against the idea.
I'm actually not so sure even about the case of a universe that expands extremely fast or collapses immediately (consider, for example: What happens after the collapse? The Big Crunch isn't necessarily the end of time). But if we do accept that life in those universes would be impossible, it still doesn't prove the FTA unless the FTA proponents can actually point to a constant that has to be finely-tuned to prevent this. Usually, they say the cosmological constant is finely tuned, but this is wrong. It could be much larger than its current value (multiple orders of magnitude larger, I think) without causing the universe to expand too quickly for stars to form, and it could be zero or even negative without the universe collapsing back in on itself. People who say it's finely tuned for life are misunderstanding the vacuum catastrophe, an open problem in physics that almost certainly has a normal physical explanation.
Yeah, I'll stay out of the high-level physics disagreements because those are for physicists to argue about and I'm not a physicist. But it seems to me that there are plenty of physicists who think there is a fine-tuning problem. I'll keep my mind open on that. I'm more interested in what the philosophical consequences would be if there were a fine-tuning problem, and I don't think we have to wait until a scientific consensus emerges to think about that. I suppose I disagree with you that any such problem "almost certainly has a normal physical explanation", because this presupposes that there isn't a multiverse and an anthropic explanation, which possibility seems not unreasonable to me.
Fewer than 5% of philosophers of physics believe in cosmological fine-tuning. I'm not sure we have any better data on how widespread belief in the fine-tuning problem, but that does not seem like "plenty of physicists."
My point in that note that you're referencing was that people working on the problem should put more effort into understanding the science behind the FTA because that might help. You don't need to make arguments about physics. You should just try to understand what mainstream physicists think about the issue. There are links to accessible sources in my article.
That survey link really does not seem to support your position. It seems to me to support mine. We must be talking past each other.
You're saying fewer than 5%, so I think you can only mean the 4.76% who lean against design. But that doesn't mean everybody else agrees there is no fine-tuning, where, to me, fine-tuning does not necessarily connote design, but the idea that life is not robust to small changes in the constants. The position you seem to be arguing for is that there is no fine-tuning problem, because as far as we know life could be a pretty robust phenomenon. As far as I can tell, that position is a minority of 26.19%. Most other positions I would class as granting that life is not robust.
As you noted yourself, design grants it (4.76%). Multiverse (19.05%) certainly grants it too -- that is what the multiverse is supposed to explain. Brute fact (35.71%) grants it -- that is what they are accepting as a brute fact. I'll agree with you that "too unclear" and "no fact of the matter" do not grant it.
Anyway, based on this survey, I'm happy to stick by my statement that there seem to be plenty of physicists (and philosophers of physics) who think that there is a fine-tuning problem, at least in the sense that I mean it -- perhaps they don't think it is a 'problem', or perhaps they don't want to call it "fine-tuning", but they're not denying that life seems not to be robust to small changes in the physical constants.
The poll isn't ideal, but I don't think that you can conclude that people who respond anything other than "the universe was designed" believe that there is a fine-tuning problem. Multiverse and brute fact are compatible with many possible views on the fine-tuning problem.
Take multiverse for example (I would have picked this answer). I already accept that people who pick “multiverse” would not necessarily want to accept the description of the question as a “fine-tuning problem”. Some people thing “fine-tuning” connotes a tuner. Some people think it isn’t a problem. The position I’m staking out is that anyone who picks “multiverse” grants that it seems that life is not robust to changes in the physical constants, and they explain this by appealing to a multiverse. Why else would they answer “multiverse”?
They may already believe in a multiverse for other reasons also (I do). But to pick it in this poll implies not only that they believe in a multiverse, but specifically that they think that it is relevant to this question. Or at least, that would be my interpretation. If that interpretation is correct, then why posit a multiverse as an explanation unless you grant that there is an explanandum? And what is the explanandum if not that life appears not to be robust to small changes in the physical constants?
Yes indeed, all sorts of questions about the FTA are quite natural and the theory provides answers to none of them. That's because the theory is so vague that it doesn't generalize to any novel sets of problems the way good scientific theories do. As I say in the article:
"Many questions about the theory are natural, and it provides no satisfying answers. Why would God value life so much that he would fine-tune a universe so that it could arise? Why did God choose the particular physics of this universe when others would presumably have been possible for an all-powerful being? If the universe is fine-tuned for life, why are so much of the earth and the universe apparently uninhabitable? The FTA provides no principled, scientific grounds for answering these questions."
This is another great takedown of the fine tuning argument as it is commonly presented. Chemistry and biology are emergent phenomena that cannot be predicted from physics. And our current understanding of physics is itself very tentative. We have a number of speculative theories like string theory but we can’t test them with our current technology (as I understand it). A couple of books to check out are The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch . These books give a good insight into emergent phenomena and physics beyond the Standard Model (which views matter as being quark based).
If you read one of those books, probably try Fabric Of Reality by David Deutsch. It's a lot more geared to a lay person. Penrose is trying to teach 4 semesters of physics and 4 semesters of math!!
…awaiting the atlantic finally releasing their expose on the auto-tuning of the universe w/ post-modern malone…joking aside I appreciate you sharing this with me…I was unaware with FTA and you do a thorough job here catching us up to speed and providing compelling analysis throughout…i am a simple man so simple thoughts scrolled through my brain as I dove through this…mostly a lot of wonder about our human obsessions with life’s hows and whys…if we had an answer we would call it a lie…if we never get one nothing changes…in a world of infinite possibility i am so flummoxed by our want to create finity…
The problem is that you don't discuss any of the specific instances of fine-tuning or explain why among physicists who have studied the topic there's a broad consensus that it's real (at least in the sense that if constants were tweaked no life could arise). Take, for instance, the cosmological constant which governs the expansion rate of the universe. If it were a bit weaker, everything would immediately collapse in on itself after less than a millionth of a second. If it were stronger, everything would immediately fly apart. Even though it's hard to know the precise parameters under which life could arise, it's very easy to see some parameters under which life couldn't arise--for instance, if everything flew apart after a millisecond!
Now, regarding many of the other instances of fine-tuning, I don't understand the physics as well, but many of them would utterly vitiate any possibility of complex chemistry. If, say, the Higgs mass were different, nothing beyond Hydrogen could come to exist (it's possible that I'm misremembering and really you could get a few other things like Helium but in any case, only the very top of the periodic table).
Now, while you could perhaps write a very interesting bit of science fiction in which life arises out of floating clouds of hydrogen gas, it's not remotely plausible. If you think it is, you should petition SETI to look for life in clouds of gas!
Regarding the point about carbon, I don't know if carbon is needed for life to form. But I don't think it matters. So long as carbon is even plausibly one of the viable ways for God to make life, but the probability of carbon arising under naturalism is very near 0, carbon based life would be evidence for theism.
The examples that Fred Adams gives are, to the best of my knowledge, not the examples that the most sophisticated fine-tuning proponents give.
I hadn't actually realized that you commented on my article, BB, or I would have replied sooner. (I got no notification of your comment. Why not?) I see no reason to believe that there is a consensus that fine-tuning is real among physicists who have studied it. The majority of physicists who have written about the FTA seem to reject it. Haven't they studied it?
"Take, for instance, the cosmological constant which governs the expansion rate of the universe. If it were a bit weaker, everything would immediately collapse in on itself after less than a millionth of a second. If it were stronger, everything would immediately fly apart."
This is just the sort of thing that Carroll is saying that we can't know with confidence. Your opinion about it doesn't amount to much because you're not a physicist. I know you have some physicists on your side, but they have never addressed Carroll's objection.
Carroll does not think that we can't know if things would fly apart if the cosmological constant was weaker or stronger. This is a trivial calculation (I'm told) that is not disputed. Find me one place where Carroll disputes the calculation.
//The majority of physicists who have written about the FTA seem to reject it. Haven't they studied it?//
They reject it being a good argument for God. Some, like Hossenfelder, reject it for what are basically philosophical reasons. But the physics--that constants fall in a narrow range needed for the formation of complex structures--isn't really disputed.
Carroll says that we can't predict what universes would eventually emerge if we changed physical constants. Sure, things might fly apart, but what would happen after that? I don't think you can claim to have an intelligent opinion on that question because you aren't a physicist. Let Luke Barnes or some other fine-tuner physicist publicly call Carroll out on that point and see what the response would be.
You have to ask yourself why the fine-tuners haven't answered Carroll already, since he has been making the "unimaginable alternate universes" critique since 2012. Why have fine-tuners never addressed this critique? See pp. 6-7 of this article. https://philpapers.org/archive/CARDTU-2.pdf
I mentioned the work of Fred C. Adams on the production of carbon. Basically, his point is that the physics behind fine-tuning is low-quality and biased. The fine-tuners argue that changing physical constants would prevent carbon from being formed in one way, but they don't tell you that the same changes would make it possible for carbon to form in another way. Maybe they don't tell you that because they're not very good at physics, or maybe it's because they're religious fanatics who don't want people to know the truth. If you want to get into that point, I've referenced Adams' scholarly work on the subject in footnote 6.
Here’s what Adams says in the Nautilus article I link to:
“Suppose nuclear physics did change by enough to neutralize the carbon resonance. Among the possible changes of this magnitude, about half would have the side effect of making beryllium stable, so the loss of the resonance would become irrelevant. In such alternate universes, carbon would be produced in the more logical manner of adding together alpha particles one at a time. Helium could fuse into beryllium, which could then react with additional alpha particles to make carbon. There is no fine-tuning problem after all.”
I think that if physicists don't tell us their view of the unimaginable alternate universes argument, we don't know what their view of it is. If they don't make the argument themselves, maybe it's because they thought other arguments were more important, or maybe they just didn't think of that line of critique against fine-tuning.
Are these proofs of God not a little dishonest since the supernatural nature of God would render proof impossible? Are the honest answers to the question 'Do you believe in God? ' not along the lines of:
(i) I have faith. I do not require proof.
(ii) Because it makes my life, and other lives, better. I don't feel any need for a proof.
What non-question-begging reason is there for thinking that “proof is impossible “ for supernatural entities?
I’m assuming you mean “strong evidence “ by “proof”, else the point being made is trivial, since very few things anyone believes can be proven with mathematical certainty.
Hi. I would define supernatural as ‘not capable of being understood by natural means’ which would rule out finding strong evidence for it via natural means. I don’t know what non-question-begging means (and googled explanations, and the usages of the term, are confusing). I welcome your thoughts but my point was more that such proofs are not useful - no one will turn from being an atheist by such a proof and no one will give up a belief if they can’t find such a proof. I think that’s because people know intuitively that God is not something to believe only because you can prove it. Rather it’s a matter of faith.
Nice post.
I think it's still worth it for philosophers to explore what we should conclude if the fine-tuning problem turns out to be real, while leaving that question to the physicists. I think it would be overstating your point to say that fine-tuning has been debunked, so as long as it seems like it could be an issue then we mgiht as well look at what the ramifications would be. It's in that spirit that the philosophical debate is engaging and worthwhile.
Meanwhile, I find Carroll's arguments a little underwhelming, a bit like special pleading. Sure. We can't predict exactly what would happen in other universes. And we wouldn't have been able to predict life from first principles. But I think it's quite plausible that life is impossible in a universe where everything immediately collapses into black holes, or every particle gets immediately separated from every other particle, etc. I'm not going to put much weight on arguments from models of exotic chemistry or whatever, but these sorts of gross properties of other universes are persuasive. My understanding is that in a lot of the explorations of what would happen in various alternate universes, not only life but any sort of complexity at all seems to be impossible because of such gross properties.
But, sure, I'd give some reasonable credence to the idea that fine-tuning is a pseudo-problem, and life is maybe more robust than we realise. But I put more credence on it being a real problem. That's because I'm already predisposed for other reasons to believe in a multiverse where the laws of physics vary, and so, thinking anthropically, I don't have any strong expectations about how robust we should expect life to be -- meaning that I am unsurprised by evidence of fine-tuning. So if it looks at first glance like life is not robust, then I'm going to say it's probably the case that life is not robust. The fine-tuning problem can be resolved by appeal to a multiverse.
Very open to correction if a consensus builds against the idea.
I'm actually not so sure even about the case of a universe that expands extremely fast or collapses immediately (consider, for example: What happens after the collapse? The Big Crunch isn't necessarily the end of time). But if we do accept that life in those universes would be impossible, it still doesn't prove the FTA unless the FTA proponents can actually point to a constant that has to be finely-tuned to prevent this. Usually, they say the cosmological constant is finely tuned, but this is wrong. It could be much larger than its current value (multiple orders of magnitude larger, I think) without causing the universe to expand too quickly for stars to form, and it could be zero or even negative without the universe collapsing back in on itself. People who say it's finely tuned for life are misunderstanding the vacuum catastrophe, an open problem in physics that almost certainly has a normal physical explanation.
Yes, you're right abut the cosmological constant, which is convered in this article by Fred Adams: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03928
Yeah, I'll stay out of the high-level physics disagreements because those are for physicists to argue about and I'm not a physicist. But it seems to me that there are plenty of physicists who think there is a fine-tuning problem. I'll keep my mind open on that. I'm more interested in what the philosophical consequences would be if there were a fine-tuning problem, and I don't think we have to wait until a scientific consensus emerges to think about that. I suppose I disagree with you that any such problem "almost certainly has a normal physical explanation", because this presupposes that there isn't a multiverse and an anthropic explanation, which possibility seems not unreasonable to me.
Fewer than 5% of philosophers of physics believe in cosmological fine-tuning. I'm not sure we have any better data on how widespread belief in the fine-tuning problem, but that does not seem like "plenty of physicists."
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5018?aos=5680
Of course, you may have valid philosophical things to say about the FTA. Here is quite a good philosophical critique of the argument: https://joerjames3.substack.com/p/applying-hume-on-miracles-to-the?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
My point in that note that you're referencing was that people working on the problem should put more effort into understanding the science behind the FTA because that might help. You don't need to make arguments about physics. You should just try to understand what mainstream physicists think about the issue. There are links to accessible sources in my article.
That survey link really does not seem to support your position. It seems to me to support mine. We must be talking past each other.
You're saying fewer than 5%, so I think you can only mean the 4.76% who lean against design. But that doesn't mean everybody else agrees there is no fine-tuning, where, to me, fine-tuning does not necessarily connote design, but the idea that life is not robust to small changes in the constants. The position you seem to be arguing for is that there is no fine-tuning problem, because as far as we know life could be a pretty robust phenomenon. As far as I can tell, that position is a minority of 26.19%. Most other positions I would class as granting that life is not robust.
As you noted yourself, design grants it (4.76%). Multiverse (19.05%) certainly grants it too -- that is what the multiverse is supposed to explain. Brute fact (35.71%) grants it -- that is what they are accepting as a brute fact. I'll agree with you that "too unclear" and "no fact of the matter" do not grant it.
Anyway, based on this survey, I'm happy to stick by my statement that there seem to be plenty of physicists (and philosophers of physics) who think that there is a fine-tuning problem, at least in the sense that I mean it -- perhaps they don't think it is a 'problem', or perhaps they don't want to call it "fine-tuning", but they're not denying that life seems not to be robust to small changes in the physical constants.
The poll isn't ideal, but I don't think that you can conclude that people who respond anything other than "the universe was designed" believe that there is a fine-tuning problem. Multiverse and brute fact are compatible with many possible views on the fine-tuning problem.
OK, so what do you have in mind?
Take multiverse for example (I would have picked this answer). I already accept that people who pick “multiverse” would not necessarily want to accept the description of the question as a “fine-tuning problem”. Some people thing “fine-tuning” connotes a tuner. Some people think it isn’t a problem. The position I’m staking out is that anyone who picks “multiverse” grants that it seems that life is not robust to changes in the physical constants, and they explain this by appealing to a multiverse. Why else would they answer “multiverse”?
They may already believe in a multiverse for other reasons also (I do). But to pick it in this poll implies not only that they believe in a multiverse, but specifically that they think that it is relevant to this question. Or at least, that would be my interpretation. If that interpretation is correct, then why posit a multiverse as an explanation unless you grant that there is an explanandum? And what is the explanandum if not that life appears not to be robust to small changes in the physical constants?
If one conceded the FTA why is God the designer rather than a clutch of cosmic elves say?
Yes indeed, all sorts of questions about the FTA are quite natural and the theory provides answers to none of them. That's because the theory is so vague that it doesn't generalize to any novel sets of problems the way good scientific theories do. As I say in the article:
"Many questions about the theory are natural, and it provides no satisfying answers. Why would God value life so much that he would fine-tune a universe so that it could arise? Why did God choose the particular physics of this universe when others would presumably have been possible for an all-powerful being? If the universe is fine-tuned for life, why are so much of the earth and the universe apparently uninhabitable? The FTA provides no principled, scientific grounds for answering these questions."
This is another great takedown of the fine tuning argument as it is commonly presented. Chemistry and biology are emergent phenomena that cannot be predicted from physics. And our current understanding of physics is itself very tentative. We have a number of speculative theories like string theory but we can’t test them with our current technology (as I understand it). A couple of books to check out are The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch . These books give a good insight into emergent phenomena and physics beyond the Standard Model (which views matter as being quark based).
If I get further into this topic, I might read those books. I had no idea that there was a non-quark-based theory of physics!
It's more than just quarks.. I was just trying to be brief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
If you read one of those books, probably try Fabric Of Reality by David Deutsch. It's a lot more geared to a lay person. Penrose is trying to teach 4 semesters of physics and 4 semesters of math!!
great article. Seems better and more scientifically informed than anything I wrote!
…awaiting the atlantic finally releasing their expose on the auto-tuning of the universe w/ post-modern malone…joking aside I appreciate you sharing this with me…I was unaware with FTA and you do a thorough job here catching us up to speed and providing compelling analysis throughout…i am a simple man so simple thoughts scrolled through my brain as I dove through this…mostly a lot of wonder about our human obsessions with life’s hows and whys…if we had an answer we would call it a lie…if we never get one nothing changes…in a world of infinite possibility i am so flummoxed by our want to create finity…
The auto-tuning of the universe might be the grand unified theory that physicists have been looking for!
The problem is that you don't discuss any of the specific instances of fine-tuning or explain why among physicists who have studied the topic there's a broad consensus that it's real (at least in the sense that if constants were tweaked no life could arise). Take, for instance, the cosmological constant which governs the expansion rate of the universe. If it were a bit weaker, everything would immediately collapse in on itself after less than a millionth of a second. If it were stronger, everything would immediately fly apart. Even though it's hard to know the precise parameters under which life could arise, it's very easy to see some parameters under which life couldn't arise--for instance, if everything flew apart after a millisecond!
Now, regarding many of the other instances of fine-tuning, I don't understand the physics as well, but many of them would utterly vitiate any possibility of complex chemistry. If, say, the Higgs mass were different, nothing beyond Hydrogen could come to exist (it's possible that I'm misremembering and really you could get a few other things like Helium but in any case, only the very top of the periodic table).
Now, while you could perhaps write a very interesting bit of science fiction in which life arises out of floating clouds of hydrogen gas, it's not remotely plausible. If you think it is, you should petition SETI to look for life in clouds of gas!
Regarding the point about carbon, I don't know if carbon is needed for life to form. But I don't think it matters. So long as carbon is even plausibly one of the viable ways for God to make life, but the probability of carbon arising under naturalism is very near 0, carbon based life would be evidence for theism.
The examples that Fred Adams gives are, to the best of my knowledge, not the examples that the most sophisticated fine-tuning proponents give.
I hadn't actually realized that you commented on my article, BB, or I would have replied sooner. (I got no notification of your comment. Why not?) I see no reason to believe that there is a consensus that fine-tuning is real among physicists who have studied it. The majority of physicists who have written about the FTA seem to reject it. Haven't they studied it?
"Take, for instance, the cosmological constant which governs the expansion rate of the universe. If it were a bit weaker, everything would immediately collapse in on itself after less than a millionth of a second. If it were stronger, everything would immediately fly apart."
This is just the sort of thing that Carroll is saying that we can't know with confidence. Your opinion about it doesn't amount to much because you're not a physicist. I know you have some physicists on your side, but they have never addressed Carroll's objection.
Carroll does not think that we can't know if things would fly apart if the cosmological constant was weaker or stronger. This is a trivial calculation (I'm told) that is not disputed. Find me one place where Carroll disputes the calculation.
//The majority of physicists who have written about the FTA seem to reject it. Haven't they studied it?//
They reject it being a good argument for God. Some, like Hossenfelder, reject it for what are basically philosophical reasons. But the physics--that constants fall in a narrow range needed for the formation of complex structures--isn't really disputed.
Carroll says that we can't predict what universes would eventually emerge if we changed physical constants. Sure, things might fly apart, but what would happen after that? I don't think you can claim to have an intelligent opinion on that question because you aren't a physicist. Let Luke Barnes or some other fine-tuner physicist publicly call Carroll out on that point and see what the response would be.
You have to ask yourself why the fine-tuners haven't answered Carroll already, since he has been making the "unimaginable alternate universes" critique since 2012. Why have fine-tuners never addressed this critique? See pp. 6-7 of this article. https://philpapers.org/archive/CARDTU-2.pdf
I mentioned the work of Fred C. Adams on the production of carbon. Basically, his point is that the physics behind fine-tuning is low-quality and biased. The fine-tuners argue that changing physical constants would prevent carbon from being formed in one way, but they don't tell you that the same changes would make it possible for carbon to form in another way. Maybe they don't tell you that because they're not very good at physics, or maybe it's because they're religious fanatics who don't want people to know the truth. If you want to get into that point, I've referenced Adams' scholarly work on the subject in footnote 6.
Here’s what Adams says in the Nautilus article I link to:
“Suppose nuclear physics did change by enough to neutralize the carbon resonance. Among the possible changes of this magnitude, about half would have the side effect of making beryllium stable, so the loss of the resonance would become irrelevant. In such alternate universes, carbon would be produced in the more logical manner of adding together alpha particles one at a time. Helium could fuse into beryllium, which could then react with additional alpha particles to make carbon. There is no fine-tuning problem after all.”
I think that if physicists don't tell us their view of the unimaginable alternate universes argument, we don't know what their view of it is. If they don't make the argument themselves, maybe it's because they thought other arguments were more important, or maybe they just didn't think of that line of critique against fine-tuning.
Are these proofs of God not a little dishonest since the supernatural nature of God would render proof impossible? Are the honest answers to the question 'Do you believe in God? ' not along the lines of:
(i) I have faith. I do not require proof.
(ii) Because it makes my life, and other lives, better. I don't feel any need for a proof.
And then ignore the atheists.
You're right, proofs of God would seem to be blasphemous for Christians, as God has commanded them to have faith.
What non-question-begging reason is there for thinking that “proof is impossible “ for supernatural entities?
I’m assuming you mean “strong evidence “ by “proof”, else the point being made is trivial, since very few things anyone believes can be proven with mathematical certainty.
Hi. I would define supernatural as ‘not capable of being understood by natural means’ which would rule out finding strong evidence for it via natural means. I don’t know what non-question-begging means (and googled explanations, and the usages of the term, are confusing). I welcome your thoughts but my point was more that such proofs are not useful - no one will turn from being an atheist by such a proof and no one will give up a belief if they can’t find such a proof. I think that’s because people know intuitively that God is not something to believe only because you can prove it. Rather it’s a matter of faith.