I'm finally getting around to reading the Dennett-Swinburne exchange that Matthew linked to a few weeks ago. One argument he makes along the way is a development of the fine-tuning argument for an intelligent designer even given the many-universes hypothesis. I've never seen this move made before. Does he argue this elsewhere, or is it a point anyone else has seen? Here is the relevant excerpt:
Some sort of multiverse theory might well be true. My point was that if there is a multiverse, it's a multiverse of a kind which will produce at least one universe which will produce humans. But it's logically possible that there might instead have been other quite different kinds of multiverse, or just one universe, not productive of humans. So why are the most general laws of the multiverse as they are? Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining.
Jeremy, Swinburne makes this point at length -- both with respect to "many universes" and "universe-generating mechanisms" -- in the second edition of _The Existence of God_ (2004), pp. 186-188.
If Dennett is right about all possible values being real, might this imply scepticism about induction?
What does he mean by all possible values being real? I can hear about five different theses being put that way:
1. No alien properties: Every property that could exist is in the actual world.
2. Necessitarianism: All possible ways things could go take place in the actual world. This is the only possible world.
3. I don't know a name for this view, but the Stoics held it. All possible arrangements of properties take place, but there are different possible ways they could have been chronologically ordered.
4. Any variable that admits of degrees has a set of properties of ways that variable can be filled in, but there are no possible properties for values for those variables that don't occur in the actual world. Maybe we could see this as no alien variable-values.
5. All possible things that are of value (in some sort of normative sense) occur in the actual world.
I don't suspect Dennett would mean any of these, though, at least if it's supposd to imply anything about problems with induction. I'm pretty sure he doesn't hold some of them anyway.