HRG

How do we know that these things did not HAVE to happen ? If there exists only one universe, this means that there is a law of nature which states that the famous constants have the observed values.

I think you confuse "an event did not have to happen within the universe" with "the universe did not have to happen".

Who said that those constants can vary continously ? And if so, who said that the probability measure cannot give positive weight to a single point ?
The need for a probability measure on the set of "all possible universe" should give you room to pause. Who said that the range of parameters consistent with life as we know it has only small measure ? Remember that a reparametrisation - an exchange of constants with a different, but equivalent set - can blow up any small patch to enormous size, and vice versa. There is no such thing as a natural probability measure on a connected space *).
Since you make a probability argument, you need a plausible estimate for the probability of the existence of a sufficiently powerful designer which is suitably motivated to design exactly the universe that we observe. The designer becomes the preferable hypothesis only if this estimated probability is larger.

I am looking forward to your estimate.

But the mud puddle will wonder again and again why the pothole it fills has exactly its shape .....

Regards,
HRG.

*) Unless you can argue for instance that the set of all possible universes is a compact group. Good luck

fishbulb

Apart from the fact that I don't think energy is measured in ppb, I think you grossly overestimate the precariousness of life.

It is a tautology that if things were different, they wouldn't be like they are now. But look at what we have. We have a Universe which has existed for about 15 billion years and has been relatively stable for most of that time. But astronomers generally believe that the evidence suggests that this period of high stability will come to an end and the universe will, one way or the other, die. If things had been a little different, perhaps the Unverse would have had a shorter life expectency. But perhaps it would be much longer. We didn't have this conversation three billion years ago because we couldn't have, and we won't have it several billion years from now because we won't be able to. Of all the times and places in the universe, this is the only one we know of were this conversation is possible.

For all we know, a billion, billion, billion universes have come and gone, and this is the only one that has ever been stable enough and had the right conditions to support life. We do know that, if you do something enough times, even the most improbable result will inevitably happen.

We have a planet that supports life, and has done so for about 3.5 billion of its 4.5 billion years in existence. But this has hardly been a stable and peaceful 3.5 billion years; there have been many mass extinctions and brutal contests for survival. Moreover, the Sun is middle aged, and in another several billion years, Earth will no longer be able to support life at all, at least not in a form with which we are familiar.

The life that exists on this planet is well-enough adapted to continue existing; those life forms that cease to be sufficiently well-adapted become extinct and exist no more. There is no good reason to assume that humanity will continue to exist a million or even ten thousand years from now. Even a century from now, it is possible, though perhaps highly unlikely, that dramatic events--perhaps of our own making and perhaps not--will have driven us to extinction.

If things had been a little different, perhaps humans on Earth would not be contemplating the meaning of life, but perhaps dolphin-like creatures on Venus would be. If things had been a lot different, perhaps the Universe would have been devoid of life. Or perhaps life would have been oozing out of every pore.



The widespread appearance of life over the whole planet within a short (geologically speaking) time frame suggests that conditions at the time were highly conducive to the creation of life. If an event has a high probability of success or a large number of trials are conducted, the odds of success are very high. For example, if there is a 1 in 100 million chance of life forming whenever a certain set of conditions is met, and these conditions happened on 1 billion separate occassions during that time period, then we would expect life to form an average of 10 times. The chance of no life forming at all (of all one billion trials failing) is extremely low.


It is hardly coincidental that we exist as a result of the processes that led to our existence; it is an inevitability. If things had gone another way, we wouldn't have existed and we wouldn't be talking about the nature of the Universe. Dolphins don't do it; squirrels don't do it; hydras and amoebae don't do it. No one is discussing the meaning of life on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Neptune. Most star systems, it seems, have no intelligent life forms discussing the meaning of life.

It is highly improbable that, if you buy a lottery ticket, you will win the jackpot. But not only do people win lotteries, they do so on a daily basis. Only one winning combination is drawn, out of tens or even hundreds of millions of potential combinations. The chance of your ticket matching that combination is miniscule. But the chance of someone having a matching ticket is quite good. And, given enough time, the chance of it happening to someone twice is also very good.

We "won" the cosmological "lottery." It seems to be as simple as that. There are perhaps an infinite number of potential intelligent life forms that never came into existence because conditions were never exactly right for them. They could have been every bit as smart, spiritual, and special as us. But they "lost" and so they never came to exist. Since they never existed, they never sat around pondering the probability of their coming to exist. We "won" but some of us mistake this as evidence that the universe was for some reason especially created in order to be habitable by us. Maybe it was; no one can disprove the creator hypothesis because it is not falsifiable. But it seems to me that there is not one shred of evidence that there was a creator, or that one was ever needed.