Science - Victor J. Stenger - The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning (2011)

You know that stupid thing that comes up on your ignorant relative's Facebook statues where they assert that if the Earth were ten feet closer to the sun we would all burn up? And then you try to explain to them that our orbit isn't a perfect circle and we often drift both closer and farther from the sun throughout the year, and then they accuse you of either not taking a joke or picking on them? (Unless they are truly lost, which is when they say, "Duh! How else would we have summer or winter? Stupid!")

That Facebook argument has taken form.

It is this book.

I told Steve (Sorry Steve!) That The Name of the Wind was going to be the next book I read, but I decided to get this one done and over with. I don't really know the circumstances it entered our library. Most of the science books in our possession (and we have quite a few) are Bryan's, and this one is definitely no exception. It's primarily his because it has been sitting on his nightstand for as long as we've had nightstands, and by the bed before that. It always frustrated me that he wasn't making any progress on it, but he said that it was a snorefest and riddled with too-hard math. I'm here to tell you that he is 100% not wrong when it comes to that.

I don't have any problems with you believing what you want, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else, physically or emotionally. I'm an atheist. I come from Christian stock. I married into a Jewish family. One of my best friends is Catholic. I don't care. Don't proselytize, don't hurt anyone, and I don't care. I will admit that I get frustrated by some of the ladies in group therapy that talk about praying and mantras and reiki, but I don't care, really. My frustration stems from them wasting our valuable time with their bullshit. But I don't go around arguing with people.

This guy not only doesn't believe in a higher power, but he is dedicated to proving that believing, and specifically believing that science has proven the existence of one, is bullshit. Whatever. That's fine.

Apparently, the idea surrounding "science has found God" is that the numbers in physics have been "fine-tuned" by some designer entity to make our universe perfect for life to grow. This book is intending to disprove all of that.

Unfortunately, it is very dull.

What could be an infinitely interesting book is bogged down with all of the math and none of the explanation of what a lot of the holy math even means. He gets so caught up in his equations and constants that the layman's mind reels, and when Stenger finally comes up for air, ages after the reader has already pantingly done so, he speaks in vague terms that he asserts are proved by the math, repeats word-for-word assertions made in the preface, and claims we will understand better in a later chapter.

The whole thing flows more like a textbook that a book for the regular populace. That isn't because it's a science book. There are plenty of science books that still have the ability to hold the interest of the reader. But not this one.

Did some supernatural entity fine-tune the numbers in our physics models for life? Probably not. Would life have been able to form without fine-tuning? Probably. Is there any life to speak of between the covers of this tome?

Absolutely not.

2.5/10

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