Anthropic Principle

[otseng]

This topic is an offshoot from Does God exist or not? Since this topic is a huge area of debate, I'm making this have it's own thread.

So, the question of debate is...
Does the Anthropic Principle point to the existence of God?

First, let's give some definitions of the Anthropic Principle (AP).

Wikipedia:
"Any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with our existence as carbon-based human beings at this particular time and place in the universe."

Philosophy Pages:
"Belief that the existence of human life entails certain features of the physical world. In a minimal form, this view merely points out that we would not be here to observe natural phenomena were they not compatible with our existence. Stronger versions of the anthropic principle, however, seem to rely upon the idealistic notion that the universe could not exist without intelligent observers."

Augustine Fellowship:
"The observation that the universe has all the necessary and narrowly-defined characteristics to make man and his sustained existence possible. The view that the universe is conspicuously 'fine-tuned' for human existence. "

[otseng]

otseng wrote:

Therefore, the margin of error for us to exist is 1 in 447,225,917,218,507,401,284,016.

I suspect that it's inevitable that the universe would seem fine-tuned for us to exist, because the fact is that we exist. If it had been different, we would not exist and we wouldn't be able to claim it's fine-tuned. The reason why the argument from rarity is not very convincing to me is that, if I won the lottery tomorrow, it would probably seem to me that somehow "it was meant to be", since the chances are ridiculously low. However, that is no good reason to believe that I had been predestined to be a lottery winner. I would like to be able to say that the universe had been created for us, but I don't see any strong evidence for it.

Let's suppose that you and a friend go to Vegas. Your friend plays the Trilla Lotto Roulette Wheel. It has numbers from 1 to 1,000,000,000,000 on the wheel. One number is picked and if the ball falls on it, that person gets the TLRW jackpot. Your friend picks 324,892,198,393. The wheel is spun. And of all the luck, it lands on 324,892,198,393. What do you make of this? Perhaps it was meant for him to win. Or, it could have been setup for him to win.

Who ever said chemistry was boring?

I assume that's why your username is "Chem"?

I certainly do not see anything divine in the chemistry of carbon.

The point is that there is no other element that life can be based on. Life, if it exists elsewhere, must be based on carbon. Though silicon would be a far second option, it won't be as complex as organic life.

Isn't the Anthropic Principle sort of silly?

No, not silly at all. Rather, I find the arguments to be quite logical and compelling.

[Jose]

Isn't the Anthropic Principle sort of silly?

No, not silly at all. Rather, I find the arguments to be quite logical and compelling.

I don't mean to be disrespectful or flippant, but I really can't see any rationale for AP. If atomic particles can assemble into atoms, and if the atoms can assemble into molecules, and if the chemistry happens to result in life, and if the life is self-replicating but prone to occasional errors, then it is absolutely guaranteed that the life that exists is well-suited to the world that it is in. The degree of fit is a result of the universe in which life exists. This will be true for any self-repilcating type of chemistry in any type of universe that we could imagine. If there is no AP at all, it will still come out looking the same, because it cannot come out differently.

It is an interesting philosophical notion that there may have been some kind of design behind it, so that our type of life could appear...but there is absolutely no way even to test this idea, or to rule out the alternative expressed above. Even the name is embarrassing--suggesting that humans are so important that the universe should have arranged itself just for us. Why not call it the Quercus Principle, since the universe is ideally set up just for oak trees? ...or the AIDS Principle, since this pathogen arose after we did, and clearly is designed to use us as food? ...or the Duckweed Principle, since the pinnacle of evolution might be Duckweed (which has certainly undergone more generations since the beginning than we have)? I'd actually put my bet on oaks or duckweed, since eliminating us from the earth will have no deleterious effect on any other species, but eliminating the plants will wipe us out. Ecologically, they are the important ones, not us. We're merely parasites in the global ecology.

Changing topics a bit, it does no good to calculate probabilities here, just as it does no good to calculate probabilities for "complex specified information." Those calculations automatically assume that what exists now is, and always was, the "target" of creation/evolution. The calculations prove that if creation is correct, then it created what we now have. They also prove that if evolution is correct, then it had no goal and no target, exactly as the Theory of Evolution states. That is, the AP cannot rule out evolution. It can only rule out an incorrect caricature of it, which we already know is wrong.

[otseng]

If there is no AP at all, it will still come out looking the same, because it cannot come out differently.

Isn't this simply restating AP?

Regardless of whether we could've come out differently or not, the main problem is that we should not be here at all. Too many properties have to be just right in order for life anywhere to exist. I pointed out the "oldness/flatness" problem and just from that fact alone the odds of us being here is remote.

Some more quotes about AP:

"I am not a religious person, but I could say this universe is designed very well for the existence of life," said Heinz Oberhummer, astrophysicist at the University of Vienna, Austria.

"The basic forces in the universe are tailor-made for the production of ... carbon-based life," Mr. Oberhummer told Space.com.

"Imagine a universe-creating machine, with thousands of dials representing the gravitational constant, the charge on the electron, the mass of the proton, and so on," said Steve Meyer of Whitworth College. "Each dial has many possible settings, and even the slightest change would make a universe where life was impossible."

Source: Our "Tailor-made" Universe

[Jose]

If there is no AP at all, it will still come out looking the same, because it cannot come out differently.

Isn't this simply restating AP?

No. AP says, as you have said, that too many properties must be "just right" for life to exist, so the fact that life exists proves that the universe was designed for life. What I am saying, and what others have said about AP, is that if life comes about anywhere, it must, by definition, have the properties of the place in which it comes about. This is not from design, but because those are the only properties around.
Those are the properties that exist, so it must have those properties.

If I carve a marble out of a piece of jasper, was the jasper created specially for my marble? Or does the marble have the properties of the jasper because that's what I made it from?

Regardless of whether we could've come out differently or not, the main problem is that we should not be here at all. Too many properties have to be just right in order for life anywhere to exist. I pointed out the "oldness/flatness" problem and just from that fact alone the odds of us being here is remote.

As I said above, this is not "proof." It is an argument from incredulity. As I have pointed out elsewhere, because it is the fundamental error of ID, calculating the odds is wholly irrelevant. Calculating the odds is relevant only for the probability that the starting conditions were pre-destined to produce what now exists, and that normal chemistry achieved that pre-destination. There is no probability (other than 100%) that any starting conditions will result in something happening later. Life is what happened to occur, not pre-destined, not according to a plan, but simply as the something that eventually happened. It's the card-shuffling analogy: If I shuffle the cards, I will get a pattern at the end. Probability only matters if I state at the outset that one particular pattern is the one that I must obtain.

The Theory of Evolution does not claim there was pre-destination to produce humans, or even life. These probability calcuations--including AP--inherently assume that there was such pre-desitination. Therefore, they do not speak to the question of evolution.

Some more quotes about AP:

"I am not a religious person, but I could say this universe is designed very well for the existence of life," said Heinz Oberhummer, astrophysicist at the University of Vienna, Austria.

"The basic forces in the universe are tailor-made for the production of ... carbon-based life," Mr. Oberhummer told Space.com.

"Imagine a universe-creating machine, with thousands of dials representing the gravitational constant, the charge on the electron, the mass of the proton, and so on," said Steve Meyer of Whitworth College. "Each dial has many possible settings, and even the slightest change would make a universe where life was impossible."

Source: Our "Tailor-made" Universe

Many people can express their opinions. Still, their opinions carry no weight in this discussion. The quotes cannot provide proof of anything besides the fact that the person has an opinion. Meyer's is probably the least philosophical, but even though it is true, it is no proof of anything. It simply says "this is how things happen to be, and if they were different, then they'd be different."

[QED]

[Dilettante]

otseng wrote:

Let's suppose that you and a friend go to Vegas. Your friend plays the Trilla Lotto Roulette Wheel. It has numbers from 1 to 1,000,000,000,000 on the wheel. One number is picked and if the ball falls on it, that person gets the TLRW jackpot. Your friend picks 324,892,198,393. The wheel is spun. And of all the luck, it lands on 324,892,198,393. What do you make of this? Perhaps it was meant for him to win. Or, it could have been setup for him to win.

And it could also be just mere coincidence. Maybe next time my friend's cousin's girlfriend wins, and it will seem just as incredible. The hypothesis of design would be a lot more convincing to me if it could be used forward as well as backward. If, before the Roulette Wheel even starts to spin, you could tell me who it is designed to favor, if you could tell me why that person "was meant to win". There is a similar problem with astrology, it's not convincing because, among other things, if I give an astrologer the blow-by-blow story of my life, he should be able to tell my sign and birthdate without my having to tell him, but he can't do this.

[nikolayevich]

[Lotan]

The issue that rears its head here, is that to deny the odds, "models" and "postulations" are proffered as if they represent a good counterbalance to things which are known without doubt.

Deny what odds? What are you basing your calculation of the "odds" on? Regardless what they may be (and I doubt that you or anyone else has the information to know) the simple fact is that we do exist in this universe. Whether that is a sure thing or an incredible long shot makes no difference.

The plain and simple truth is that the odds are great. We ALL agree about that here.

I DON'T agree. Nor do I think that you can present a convincing argument that this must be the case. Besides, if there actually were a god, then our existence would be inevitable, wouldn't it?

[Jose]

The trouble with multiple universes is that we already know a lot about them from science fiction. The difficulty is figuring out how to traverse between them. Once we can, we'll know they exist. Until then, we have no idea. I suppose there's some branch of mathematical modeling that can create an abstract proof that they can, in principle, exist. Still, modeling isn't exact.

I always fall back on observation, and use the really-nerdy method of asking whether the data force us to this conclusion. This is what drives me to accept evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the current diversity of life. For the AP, I think about it thus:

1. The universe is built of particles and forces, whose origin is unknown. The BB only goes back to the point when the BB happened--and, as noted earlier, it may simply have been the explosion of a black hole that had sucked in the prior universe. We have no idea. Probably the particles and forces are the way they are because that's how they've always been.

2. For chemistry to occur in any system, it can't help but follow the rules of the particles and forces of that system. This is true whether the system was designed or not. If particles interact, it's chemistry. Particles can only interact in ways consistent with their properties.

3. If the chemistry becomes more complex, and self-replicating, and becomes life, then...well, the life does as the chemistry does: because it is built on the particles and forces of the universe it is in, it has the characteristics of those particles and forces.

Therefore, any self-replicating chemistry, in any universe, with any set of rules in that universe, will automatically follow the rules of its universe.

This is equivalent to the "design" arguments. Mutation and selection are guaranteed to produce organisms that fit their environments very well. They will, therefore, have the appearance of, but not the reality of, design. Similarly, the chemistry in a universe is guaranteed to have the properties of that universe, independent of design.

So, back to my nerdy logic. Because the above train of thought indicates that the appearance of design is guaranteed for anything of natural origin, we are not forced to conclude that it was designed. A natural explanation will suffice.

It occurs to me that this is simiilar to many of the other threads, in which the evidence for creation is observations that are consistent with it. Apparently, my brain is wired so that this type of reasoning is not enough. I am uncomfortable accepting an explanation that is merely consistent with the data. To accept an explanation, I must be forced to conclude that there is no other explanation that is nearly as satisfactory.

I guess I must also include a personal bias: I accept natural explanations before I accept supernatural ones. I suppose this is because I can see that there are natural processes going on in the world, and I can't see any reason that they would have suddenly changed at any time in the past. Therefore, it is necessary to determine how far the currently-observable natural processes can get us in explaining things, before we fall back on the supernatural. As it turns out, at this particular time (2005), there's one heck of a lot of information that allows us to provide natural explanations for just about everything. The Anthropic Principle is one of the casualties of this logic. The natural explanation will suffice. Consequently, there is no need to invoke supernatural intervention.

We can talk about it philosophically all we like, but to my mind, the bottom line is that there is no justification for inventing an AP. We don't need it to explain the way things are.

[QED]

The issue that rears its head here, is that to deny the odds, "models" and "postulations" are proffered as if they represent a good counterbalance to things which are known without doubt. That is, without doubt we know we require a certain mixture of atmosphere, certain gravitational force, certain this and that. These are known entities. To counter them sufficiently, unproven and sometimes unfounded examples are not so convincing.

Air-crash investigators are able to deduce the causes of accidents without actually witnessing them. The nature and distribution of wreckage allows them to work back to the actual event and establish to very high degrees of probability that which caused it. So it does not follow that we cannot gain knowledge beyond seemingly impenetrable boundaries.

Even if we rely solely on our observations of this universe and the laws that go with it, we can see that if it did have a stronger value for the gravitational constant, it would have collapsed back on itself before now. We know what happens when we throw a ball against a wall so it is not asking too much to expect a cosmic bounce. I think it is also worth pointing out that the notion of life-cycles for universes very much follows the pattern of nature that we see in everything else, although I freely admit that this sort of observation has limited scope in convincing everyone.