What is so improbable about a fine-tuned universe for life

[PyramidHead]

Improbability is not a matter of picking one sample out of a bucket of many possible samples, as you rightly indicate with your example here. Improbability is when there is a coincidence between a random selection like that and another, independently designated thing. For example, there is nothing improbable about a random 6-digit number generator producing the number 360958. As you say, it has to produce some number, and 360958 is no less likely than any other. But if you had been given a slip of paper with the number 360958 written on it, and then watched as the generator randomly produced exactly that number, you would have witnessed something staggeringly improbable: not the generation of the number per se, but the generation of the same number that had just been independently designated as THIS number. This is why it's improbable that my lottery number will be the winner, but not improbable at all that SOME lottery number will be the winner. The improbability is at the intersection between specific and random selection.

Applying this reasoning to the universe, your take about life is correct. In a population of randomly and arbitrarily varying universes, if there is a chance that one combination of variables will yield conditions appropriate for life, such a universe will eventually emerge from the "random universe generator". So, the existence of life per se is thus not improbable. But a problem remains. There is something about this universe that, from your perspective, is independently designated: your presence in it. Even if SOME universe capable of supporting life were statistically inevitable, it's still staggeringly improbable that it should be THIS one, the universe YOU currently inhabit.

If you think there is nothing improbable about your existence in a universe capable of supporting life because you wouldn't be here to notice if you didn't exist, consider the analogy of Russian roulette. If you were given a revolver and a bullet and told to play Russian roulette, you would probably have serious doubts about your survival. If somebody told you that in all the adjacent rooms of this building, there are hundreds of other people playing the same game of Russian roulette, you wouldn't feel any better about YOUR odds. That is, just because the odds of SOME person surviving the game are good because there are many players, that fact doesn't make YOUR survival any more likely. Of course, the only way you'd exist to notice the outcome would be if you beat the odds and survived. But that doesn't make it any better for you, since there is still the same uncomfortable chance that you would in fact be one of those unlucky dead people.

Essentially, you must accept that your presence in a universe capable of supporting luck is explained by a happenstance convergence between (a) what the "random number generator" of this universe's initial conditions happens to produce in the way of intelligent life and (b) the specific conditions that needed to be met so that you would exist. There was never any guarantee that those conditions, which you might represent as a string of numbers like 360958, would ever be produced by the universe at the right time and place to bring you into being. Moreover, there is no justification for why your existence should even be possible at all, that it should be conditional on ANY "number" the universe might spit out. Yet, here you are, and the hypothesis that your existence depended on a specific set of biological specifications being satisfied at a specific place and time says you're basically luckier than a person who has won the lottery thousands of times in a row.

The alternative hypothesis, which resolves this improbability, is that the conditions for your existence are not so strict. You would have been one of the organisms produced by ANY universe capable of supporting life, even if its history went differently from this one. It's not improbable that you were the thousand-times lottery winner, because you have all the tickets. Any winner is you by definition.

I don't think this is the main issue. I am quite sure that the improbability they speak of stops at life/humans and not any particular human. But I still don't see how my existence is a coincidence if there is only this universe.

In your example, a number was chosen before it was picked. What or who chose me to see if I will exist in the universe?

Don't focus too much on that aspect of it, as it's just one way to independently designate something. You could also choose a number after it was picked but before it was revealed, and the same would be true. Or it could be "chosen" by another, separate random number generator, not deliberately (imagine the odds of two independent generators producing 360958 simultaneously!). The important part is that there is a coincidence between two things that didn't need to be associated with one another, and could have easily gone many other ways in which they weren't associated.

In the case of existence, we have two apparently unconnected chance events: the emergence of a universe that can support life and the emergence within that universe of a being that is you. A universe that can support life, on its own, is perhaps rare but as you say, it might be expected to emerge eventually in a large enough sample set. But if your existence is restricted to exactly the person you are now, including your whole history before now and all the details of your biological and genetic makeup, you only had one shot at coming into being. In hindsight, it looks like a carefully coordinated dance, where one misstep would have resulted in somebody else being here instead of you. If there are only a few possible universes capable of supporting life, then there are only a few chances of getting the conditions that enable your unique self to be part of it.

And, anyone who is not me, then, should be amazed by the odds of themselves coming into the universe.

Exactly. It would have been vastly more likely that one of them should be sitting in your place right now. If you win the lottery, the same kind of thing happens: on the one hand, it's true that anybody who won would have been amazed at their luck, but that doesn't make it any less amazing (from your perspective) that YOU were in fact the winner. From your perspective, there was an improbable coincidence between the number that the machine spit out and the designation of that same number as YOURS. It had to be SOME person's number--that could have happened in lots of ways. But for it to be your number, it could have only happened in one way, and that's what makes it improbable.

Every lottery winner can rightly regard their experience as improbable from their own perspective while simultaneously agreeing that it is not improbable from an outside perspective that somebody would win the lottery eventually. Neither perspective is more "true" or "objective"; they are saying different things and are both accurate.

 

[PyramidHead]

I could rephrase it like this.

Lottery winner: nothing is improbable about the lottery machine spitting out a number that corresponds to a winning lottery ticket, but it's very unlikely that the number would be any number that I pick.

Conscious being: nothing is improbable about the multiverse spitting out a universe that supports life, but it's very unlikely that the life it supports will contain me.


The reasoning behind each statement is also similar.

Lottery winner: there are zillions of possible ways that the lottery machine could spit out a winning number that wasn't mine, but only one way that it could produce the number that was mine. If even one number had been different, someone else would be the winner and not me. And while it would certainly be lucky for them, from an external perspective it would just be a case of somebody winning the lottery.

Conscious being: there are tons of ways a universe friendly to life could generate conscious beings, but only one way that it could produce one that would be me. If even one base pair or historical event had been different, someone else would be here and not me. And while it would certainly be lucky for them, from an external perspective it would just be a case of some conscious being emerging in the universe.


The inference to the question of my subjective identity would be something like this.

Lottery winner: If somebody told me that the only way I could be standing here right now is if I won the lottery a thousand times in a row, I would have to reject that hypothesis in favor of one that didn't make it so improbable, since I clearly observe that I'm standing here right now.

Conscious being: If somebody told me that the only way I could be standing here right now is if the universe happened to produce exactly the conscious organism that is uniquely me, I would have to reject that hypothesis in favor of one that didn't make it so improbable, since I clearly observe that I'm standing here right now.


And finally...

Lottery winner: The only way that I could accept that my standing here was the result of winning the lottery a thousand times is if I had all the lottery tickets, since then, no matter what number was picked I would have been the winner.

Conscious being: The only way that I could accept that my standing here was the result of the universe producing a conscious organism is if any conscious organism would have been me, since then, no matter what genetic makeup or historical event had occurred, I would have been what emerged.


Of course, that last part doesn't make any sense by itself, because you're still left with the question "if anything that emerged would have been me, then why wouldn't anything that emerges in the future continue to be me, and why isn't everything that emerges also me?" And that, I believe, is the inescapable conclusion of the probability argument we are discussing here. For something to be you, all it has to be is a conscious being of the sort that a life-friendly universe (no matter how rare) tends to produce.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I am having a problem wrapping my head around why our universe is so improbable.

For simplicity, if there were, say, a billion possible universes that could have existed and each one is different in some way, then of course the one universe that appears had the one in a billion chance of existing.

I believe that I am wrong because after hours or research, I find my argument aligning with the general public while the scientists all seem to be in agreement and are publicly stating that this universe is too unlikely to exist. The odds are something like 1 in 10^125 or something wild like that.

They claim that it is so unlikely that it warrants an explanation like a multiverse where all the other universes exist too making ours not so improbable (response to the anthropic principle).

The life that exists now exists because it's adapted to the universe that we have. It's a bit like rolling 100 000 dice and then trying to roll 100 000 dice again and be amazed how that first sequence could arise and how improbable it was. Life wasn't the goal with the universe. Life is like the mold in the back of your fridge. It's just there. And like we've learned from many Star Trek episodes, theoretically self replicating molecules can take many forms, as can intelligence.

 

[Peez]

And I didn't say that you didn't - only that your choice of source Seriously lowers your credibility. Which you could recover by providing links to genuinely reputable sources, such as scientific journals, showing that your claim has merit.

I am not interested in hand-holding. Find it yourself.

Claims made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. You have provided no evidence that the universe is 'fine tuned for life', or that "reputable" scientists think so, or that the universe as it is is 'unlikely', or that there are not infinite universes anyhow. In short, all you have is your own expression of surprise that what exists actually exists.

Peez

 

[Treedbear]

I am having a problem wrapping my head around why our universe is so improbable.

For simplicity, if there were, say, a billion possible universes that could have existed and each one is different in some way, then of course the one universe that appears had the one in a billion chance of existing.

I believe that I am wrong because after hours or research, I find my argument aligning with the general public while the scientists all seem to be in agreement and are publicly stating that this universe is too unlikely to exist. The odds are something like 1 in 10^125 or something wild like that.

They claim that it is so unlikely that it warrants an explanation like a multiverse where all the other universes exist too making ours not so improbable (response to the anthropic principle).

No matter what kind of universe there might be conditions always tend towards an equilibrium. One thing balancing against another. Out of this interplay complexity can arise and therefore quite possibly life (if you even think that's objectively important, and however you decide to define it). And that's the flaw in the FTA hypothesis. It's implicitly teleological. Personally, I view the multiverse solution as a copout to the inability or unwillingness to recognize this. It's people insisting that one result must be life in some form and at some non-specific point in time. For that reason it's as equally subjective as arguing that it's fine tuned for you or I, as an individual, to exist. To find the truth and to resolve the paradox you need to think more objectively than that.

 

[Wiploc]

Hard to imagine life could begin in a universe with no atoms or even a universe where G was so weak that stars or planets wouldn't form.

And yet, Christians regularly imagine that a living god happened in such a formless universe.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Don't focus too much on that aspect of it, as it's just one way to independently designate something. You could also choose a number after it was picked but before it was revealed, and the same would be true. Or it could be "chosen" by another, separate random number generator, not deliberately (imagine the odds of two independent generators producing 360958 simultaneously!). The important part is that there is a coincidence between two things that didn't need to be associated with one another, and could have easily gone many other ways in which they weren't associated.

In the case of existence, we have two apparently unconnected chance events: the emergence of a universe that can support life and the emergence within that universe of a being that is you. A universe that can support life, on its own, is perhaps rare but as you say, it might be expected to emerge eventually in a large enough sample set. But if your existence is restricted to exactly the person you are now, including your whole history before now and all the details of your biological and genetic makeup, you only had one shot at coming into being. In hindsight, it looks like a carefully coordinated dance, where one misstep would have resulted in somebody else being here instead of you. If there are only a few possible universes capable of supporting life, then there are only a few chances of getting the conditions that enable your unique self to be part of it.

And, anyone who is not me, then, should be amazed by the odds of themselves coming into the universe.

Exactly. It would have been vastly more likely that one of them should be sitting in your place right now. If you win the lottery, the same kind of thing happens: on the one hand, it's true that anybody who won would have been amazed at their luck, but that doesn't make it any less amazing (from your perspective) that YOU were in fact the winner. From your perspective, there was an improbable coincidence between the number that the machine spit out and the designation of that same number as YOURS. It had to be SOME person's number--that could have happened in lots of ways. But for it to be your number, it could have only happened in one way, and that's what makes it improbable.

Every lottery winner can rightly regard their experience as improbable from their own perspective while simultaneously agreeing that it is not improbable from an outside perspective that somebody would win the lottery eventually. Neither perspective is more "true" or "objective"; they are saying different things and are both accurate.

What seems true is that any normal human being is experiencing being himself. So, here, we can say that everyone who buys a ticket wins the lottery. There's nothing unlikely or coincidental about being yourself. It seems to be similar in terms of odds as the odds that the Eiffel Tower should be where it is rather than somewhere else. Once it exists, it has to be somewhere.

I guess this idea of an unlikely coincidence in being oneself is implicitly premised on the idea that the mind and the body not only are two distinct substances but that your mind has it's own identity independently of that of the body, which makes the coincidence of the two identities like winning two different lotteries at the same time.

Any scientist really believes that?
EB

 

[ryan]

I could rephrase it like this.

Lottery winner: nothing is improbable about the lottery machine spitting out a number that corresponds to a winning lottery ticket, but it's very unlikely that the number would be any number that I pick.

Conscious being: nothing is improbable about the multiverse spitting out a universe that supports life, but it's very unlikely that the life it supports will contain me.


The reasoning behind each statement is also similar.

Lottery winner: there are zillions of possible ways that the lottery machine could spit out a winning number that wasn't mine, but only one way that it could produce the number that was mine. If even one number had been different, someone else would be the winner and not me. And while it would certainly be lucky for them, from an external perspective it would just be a case of somebody winning the lottery.

Conscious being: there are tons of ways a universe friendly to life could generate conscious beings, but only one way that it could produce one that would be me. If even one base pair or historical event had been different, someone else would be here and not me. And while it would certainly be lucky for them, from an external perspective it would just be a case of some conscious being emerging in the universe.


The inference to the question of my subjective identity would be something like this.

Lottery winner: If somebody told me that the only way I could be standing here right now is if I won the lottery a thousand times in a row, I would have to reject that hypothesis in favor of one that didn't make it so improbable, since I clearly observe that I'm standing here right now.

Conscious being: If somebody told me that the only way I could be standing here right now is if the universe happened to produce exactly the conscious organism that is uniquely me, I would have to reject that hypothesis in favor of one that didn't make it so improbable, since I clearly observe that I'm standing here right now.


And finally...

Lottery winner: The only way that I could accept that my standing here was the result of winning the lottery a thousand times is if I had all the lottery tickets, since then, no matter what number was picked I would have been the winner.

Conscious being: The only way that I could accept that my standing here was the result of the universe producing a conscious organism is if any conscious organism would have been me, since then, no matter what genetic makeup or historical event had occurred, I would have been what emerged.


Of course, that last part doesn't make any sense by itself, because you're still left with the question "if anything that emerged would have been me, then why wouldn't anything that emerges in the future continue to be me, and why isn't everything that emerges also me?" And that, I believe, is the inescapable conclusion of the probability argument we are discussing here. For something to be you, all it has to be is a conscious being of the sort that a life-friendly universe (no matter how rare) tends to produce.

I am still not convinced. Here is an analogy that I think suits this exactly.

Imagine you have 2 million sided dice. One of them is rolled first and the other is rolled second. The first die rolls on 775 and the second lands on 50000. People/me looks at the dice and ask in hindsight what the chances were of them landing this way.

The first die is analogous to the universe allowing life and the second die is analogous to me existing.

I just can't see how there is any coincidence here. Maybe there is a coincidence if someone had these numbers in mind before they were rolled, but nobody was thinking about a universe with life before it happened and nobody was thinking of me before I came to be.

 

[ryan]

And I didn't say that you didn't - only that your choice of source Seriously lowers your credibility. Which you could recover by providing links to genuinely reputable sources, such as scientific journals, showing that your claim has merit.

I am not interested in hand-holding. Find it yourself.

Claims made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. You have provided no evidence that the universe is 'fine tuned for life', or that "reputable" scientists think so, or that the universe as it is is 'unlikely', or that there are not infinite universes anyhow. In short, all you have is your own expression of surprise that what exists actually exists.

Peez

I am not interested in explaining where cosmology is at. It would be like asking a question that includes e=mc^2 as part of the question. If someone doesn't believe that e=mc^2, I do not want to go over it.

 

[PyramidHead]

Don't focus too much on that aspect of it, as it's just one way to independently designate something. You could also choose a number after it was picked but before it was revealed, and the same would be true. Or it could be "chosen" by another, separate random number generator, not deliberately (imagine the odds of two independent generators producing 360958 simultaneously!). The important part is that there is a coincidence between two things that didn't need to be associated with one another, and could have easily gone many other ways in which they weren't associated.

In the case of existence, we have two apparently unconnected chance events: the emergence of a universe that can support life and the emergence within that universe of a being that is you. A universe that can support life, on its own, is perhaps rare but as you say, it might be expected to emerge eventually in a large enough sample set. But if your existence is restricted to exactly the person you are now, including your whole history before now and all the details of your biological and genetic makeup, you only had one shot at coming into being. In hindsight, it looks like a carefully coordinated dance, where one misstep would have resulted in somebody else being here instead of you. If there are only a few possible universes capable of supporting life, then there are only a few chances of getting the conditions that enable your unique self to be part of it.

And, anyone who is not me, then, should be amazed by the odds of themselves coming into the universe.

Exactly. It would have been vastly more likely that one of them should be sitting in your place right now. If you win the lottery, the same kind of thing happens: on the one hand, it's true that anybody who won would have been amazed at their luck, but that doesn't make it any less amazing (from your perspective) that YOU were in fact the winner. From your perspective, there was an improbable coincidence between the number that the machine spit out and the designation of that same number as YOURS. It had to be SOME person's number--that could have happened in lots of ways. But for it to be your number, it could have only happened in one way, and that's what makes it improbable.

Every lottery winner can rightly regard their experience as improbable from their own perspective while simultaneously agreeing that it is not improbable from an outside perspective that somebody would win the lottery eventually. Neither perspective is more "true" or "objective"; they are saying different things and are both accurate.

What seems true is that any normal human being is experiencing being himself. So, here, we can say that everyone who buys a ticket wins the lottery.

Not quite. The improbable part is not that I experience being myself instead of experiencing being someone else (whatever that might mean), since as you say, by definition every human experiences him/herself. But how was it that you came to experience yourself, and not instead experience nothing whatsoever, having never existed?

There's nothing unlikely or coincidental about being yourself. It seems to be similar in terms of odds as the odds that the Eiffel Tower should be where it is rather than somewhere else. Once it exists, it has to be somewhere.

The odds are more like the odds of the Eiffel Tower existing rather than not at all, and the necessary conditions for there being an Eiffel Tower are so stringent that any change in the detailed history of France (or the universe itself) prior to its existence would have prevented it from being built. I mean, that's the ordinary view of your existence, rather than that of the Eiffel Tower, right? We could imagine the Eiffel Tower being itself with a slightly different shape, a different material used in part of its construction, or as you say, a different location. But under the prevailing idea of existence, your conception was not so flexible. Had the circumstances of your parents' copulation taken place seconds before or after they actually did, everything would have been totally different; whoever was born as a result would be someone you'd counterfactually regard as a brother or sister if they existed today, and not you. From your perspective, any being that could have existed simultaneously alongside you, with slight variations in its physical composition and history, couldn't be you, otherwise it wouldn't be possible for you and this being to exist at the same time. That makes your existence conditions rather slimmer than the country of France deciding to build a structure roughly of the size and shape that we might call the Eiffel Tower at some point in its history.

The view I embrace, though, says that being you isn't a matter of having a certain physical composition and history, it just depends on having a first-person perspective like the one you have right now.

 

[Speakpigeon]

One way to understand the idea is that there's no known reason that would explain that we should be in a universe producing life rather than in another not producing life. However, a scientist computing the odds of a universe producing life will necessarily be himself in a universe producing life. So, I guess the idea is merely a way to justify looking for reasons. There's no rationale behind the idea but you can take it as a theoretical framework to justify looking beyond the birth of our universe. Some scientists seems to be reduced to do metaphysics. Well, nothing new.
EB

 

[PyramidHead]

I am still not convinced. Here is an analogy that I think suits this exactly.

Imagine you have 2 million sided dice. One of them is rolled first and the other is rolled second. The first die rolls on 775 and the second lands on 50000. People/me looks at the dice and ask in hindsight what the chances were of them landing this way.

The first die is analogous to the universe allowing life and the second die is analogous to me existing.

I just can't see how there is any coincidence here. Maybe there is a coincidence if someone had these numbers in mind before they were rolled, but nobody was thinking about a universe with life before it happened and nobody was thinking of me before I came to be.

Nobody has to be thinking of it, but it has to be the case that one specific number and no other represents you coming into existence. Look at it this way: for you, Ryan, to have been born exactly when and how you were, a lot of things had to go the way they did. For one thing, every one of your ancestors had to be born exactly when and how they were born. And at the last step of this chain, your parents had to copulate in the way they did, resulting in the sperm with your DNA fertilizing your mother's egg just how it did. Nobody planned that out ahead of time in their head, and I'm not saying they did. All I'm saying is that this is a specific set of constraints that, in hindsight, you probably believe had to be satisfied otherwise you wouldn't be here.

Now, consider all of those things that must have gone as they did, and assign this version of events (this timeline, let's say) the number 50,000. If your dad had been slightly late coming home from work the night you were conceived, that timeline would have a different number, say 50,001. And so on for all the variations on whatever happened in the universe that would have affected your odds of being born.

(Given the number of ways things could have gone differently, the die being rolled would have to have many trillions of sides, not just 2 million.)

None of this had to be arranged in advance or picked out by an intelligent being. Yet another analogy might be the monkey at a typewriter banging away. We know, since we're literate, what has to happen for the monkey to write a full complicated sentence from start to finish without messing up. First he has to hit this letter, then that letter, then a space, then... you get it. The monkey doesn't know it, and even if there were no intelligent beings anywhere in the universe, it would still be just as unlikely for the monkey to hit that specific combination of keys in that order, right?

The point here is that the ordinary view of personhood is asking you to accept that you exist because a monkey typed out a complete complex sentence by accident. The words in the sentence weren't predicted in advance by anyone, but here and now looking back at what was typed, we can recognize that it's a proper English sentence with multiple clauses, the right grammar, etc. If the monkey had banged on the keys even a little differently at any point, it would be gibberish. Or, in another unlikely scenario, it might be a different sentence. But your being born was dependent on it making this specific sentence. Do you see the improbability involved now, and how it's a matter of hindsight and not imagining something ahead of time?

 

[bilby]

Claims made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. You have provided no evidence that the universe is 'fine tuned for life', or that "reputable" scientists think so, or that the universe as it is is 'unlikely', or that there are not infinite universes anyhow. In short, all you have is your own expression of surprise that what exists actually exists.

Peez

I am not interested in explaining where cosmology is at. It would be like asking a question that includes e=mc^2 as part of the question. If someone doesn't believe that e=mc^2, I do not want to go over it.

You don't have to go over it. Just provide a link to Einstein's paper. It's very easy to find and link to a source that shows that E=mc², and if you don't already have any such sources, then you are guilty of believing witout evidence that that relationship between energy and mass exists.

If your positions are based on unfounded belief, then they are unjustified (even if they are, coincidentally, true).

 

[ryan]

I am still not convinced. Here is an analogy that I think suits this exactly.

Imagine you have 2 million sided dice. One of them is rolled first and the other is rolled second. The first die rolls on 775 and the second lands on 50000. People/me looks at the dice and ask in hindsight what the chances were of them landing this way.

The first die is analogous to the universe allowing life and the second die is analogous to me existing.

I just can't see how there is any coincidence here. Maybe there is a coincidence if someone had these numbers in mind before they were rolled, but nobody was thinking about a universe with life before it happened and nobody was thinking of me before I came to be.

Nobody has to be thinking of it, but it has to be the case that one specific number and no other represents you coming into existence. Look at it this way: for you, Ryan, to have been born exactly when and how you were, a lot of things had to go the way they did. For one thing, every one of your ancestors had to be born exactly when and how they were born. And at the last step of this chain, your parents had to copulate in the way they did, resulting in the sperm with your DNA fertilizing your mother's egg just how it did. Nobody planned that out ahead of time in their head, and I'm not saying they did. All I'm saying is that this is a specific set of constraints that, in hindsight, you probably believe had to be satisfied otherwise you wouldn't be here.

Now, consider all of those things that must have gone as they did, and assign this version of events (this timeline, let's say) the number 50,000. If your dad had been slightly late coming home from work the night you were conceived, that timeline would have a different number, say 50,001. And so on for all the variations on whatever happened in the universe that would have affected your odds of being born.

(Given the number of ways things could have gone differently, the die being rolled would have to have many trillions of sides, not just 2 million.)

None of this had to be arranged in advance or picked out by an intelligent being. Yet another analogy might be the monkey at a typewriter banging away. We know, since we're literate, what has to happen for the monkey to write a full complicated sentence from start to finish without messing up. First he has to hit this letter, then that letter, then a space, then... you get it. The monkey doesn't know it, and even if there were no intelligent beings anywhere in the universe, it would still be just as unlikely for the monkey to hit that specific combination of keys in that order, right?

This seems to mean that everything is a wild coincidence. For my lamp to be where it is a large number of things had to go exactly a certain way. It would seem like almost everything is a coincidence.

The point here is that the ordinary view of personhood is asking you to accept that you exist because a monkey typed out a complete complex sentence by accident. The words in the sentence weren't predicted in advance by anyone, but here and now looking back at what was typed, we can recognize that it's a proper English sentence with multiple clauses, the right grammar, etc. If the monkey had banged on the keys even a little differently at any point, it would be gibberish. Or, in another unlikely scenario, it might be a different sentence. But your being born was dependent on it making this specific sentence. Do you see the improbability involved now, and how it's a matter of hindsight and not imagining something ahead of time?

No I just don't. For your example, there must be something or someone in the past to start with information (like the likelyhood of my future existence) and then there needs to be a match in the future using certain parameters.

After the die has been rolled and observed the probability becomes one, not 1/6.

 

[steve_bank]

It is improbable Ryan will ever find his way out of his eternal quest for answers to unanswerable questions. As the saying goes it is the journey that counts.

Why am I here?
Is my future presdermuined or is their a choice?
If I make a choice was the choice already predetermined?
How did the universe began and will it end?
Will the Los Angeles Lakers win annoyer championship in my lifetime?

These and other mysteries that have plagued human thought since the beginning.

 

[Wiploc]

And I didn't say that you didn't - only that your choice of source Seriously lowers your credibility. Which you could recover by providing links to genuinely reputable sources, such as scientific journals, showing that your claim has merit.

I am not interested in hand-holding. Find it yourself.

So you really were citing You Tube as your authority. That's hilarious.

 

[DBT]

We are here by the very token that we live in a Universe that allows life to evolve. Otherwise we would not be here to talk about it. How this Universe came to be the way it is, probably determined in the first microseconds of the BB, is simply not understood.

 

[Lion IRC]

Isn't fine tuning one of the creationist arguments in line with Intelligent Design? Or a variation of the watchmaker argument for ID? It all fits together so well it must have been designed and could not have just happened.


There are credentialed creationist scientists who write books and make videos without bring explicitly religious.

Right now things point to a universe fine-tuned for life.

Yes, that's right.
Secular science is what has provided the evidence which suggests the existence of precision "laws of physics". All the scientific evidence for fine tuning can (if you wish) be seen thru the lens of a religiously neutral explanation for why the universe is the way it is.
A finely tuned universe need not entail any God/god.

You can be an atheist and still accept that there are transcendent laws of fine tuning (and mathematics) which exist, for some reason other than the fiat of a transcendent Law Maker.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

After the die has been rolled and observed the probability becomes one, not 1/6.

Ya, but the same would be true with universes. If, as you say in the OP, there is a multiverse and the odds of having a universe which is able to support life within it is something like 1/10^125, if you have 10^34502384234234234535342 universes within that multiverse, then you're going to have a whole lot of universes which are able to support life and after any of them start existing, the probability of it being able to support life is then one.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Right now things point to a universe fine-tuned for life.

Yes, that's right.

No, it isn't. Physicist Victor Stenger put it best:

The universe is not fine-tuned to life; life is fine-tuned to the universe.