A Study of the Atheistic Argument from Scale Focusing on the Narrative of Travis Dumsday

The theistic argument for an intelligent and purposeful designer, in addition to receiving critiques from great philosophers such as Hume and Kant, was influenced by Darwin's theory that explains life based on a single cell, which itself is the product of explicit natural material processes. In response, theists point out the fact that the evolution of life was not inevitable, and that it was much more likely that the physical constants and initial conditions of the universe could be preventing life. Accordingly, one of the most important arguments for theism is formed, the Fine Tuning Argument (FTA). However, atheists make two basic criticisms of the theistic teleological explanation of the life-accepting universe. First, life is not, in principle, an “improbable” phenomenon that needs to be explained, and life can emerge and evolve in any other world with different laws, physical constants, or initial conditions. Second, life in our universe is a very “rare” phenomenon and has a very small scale in relation to the space-time dimensions of the universe and therefore, it cannot be considered as the ultimate goal of an intelligent designer. The present article discusses the second claim. The question is, if God is the Designer and the Creator of the universe and has considered life, and especially human life, as the goal and purpose of creation and its jewel, why did he create life (and human life) so late to the beginning of the universe, and in a very small part of it? This issue against theism, which is based on scientific evidence of the dimensions of life in the world, can be found in many atheistic writings; however, it was first formulated explicitly by the English atheist philosopher Nicholas Everitt and was titled "The Argument from Scale” (AS) in his book The Non-Existence of God. The present article, while describing the original argument and its variant narratives, focuses on a narrative rewritten by the Canadian theist philosopher Travis Dumsday, called the “Delayed Life Argument” (DLA). Dumsday himself thinks that the Delayed Life Rrgument is an independent argument from the Argument from Scale, a claim which I will reject. In this article, I defend two claims: First, any atheistic argument based on the dimensions of life in the world can be considered as an argument against the Fine Tuning Argument (FTA), because the Fine Tuning Argument is, in principle, vulnerable to any evidence of the rarity of life in the world. Second, despite Dumsday’s claim, the Argument from Scale is not independent of the argument from the Delayed Life Argument and can be reduced to it. Thus the theists’ answers to the Delayed Life Argument can also be presented against the Argument from Scale. Meanwhile, I present an idea based on scientific evidence and theoretical reflections of modern cosmology, to question the underlying assumption of the Argument from Scale. It can be shown that we humans have a privileged position in the universe, both spatially and temporally according to some interpretation of the new cosmological evidence and theories.

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