To me, this very paradox is a combination of two self-evident observations (or, one could say, conscious reflections) that are like a multiplication of factors leading one to believe in the Designer.
On the one hand, it is astounding how unfriendly the universe is, and on the other, it is (thankfully) amazing how hospitable Earth is. The one makes the other all the more wondrous by contrast.
The one makes the other all the more wondrous by contrast.
So true.
For another example of not only the burden of proof being upon the scientist, but also upon the theorist who conjectures the more improbable seeming construct: suppose someone really gets "out of his head," successfully unanthropic enough to come up with a thoroughgoing theory-set for a system of natural life that doesn't match up to any kind of life we've observed on Earth, and thus bring down the odds against life on some other planet (or something else). Wouldn't it remain that he has to either observe it, or somehow confirm it by experiment, in order to "make science" out of it. Then of course, how did it get here?
Bump for AG's & Rach's "ya don't just get complex order from crude disorder (to say nothing about uniformity, to say nothing about nothing)" observation via information theory.
(Meanwhile, of course, we have the functions of human empiricism, conceptualization, and imagination when dealing with the entirity of human experience, telling us much more than this about the Intelligent Designer.)
No one commented much on my lil' ol' examination of human imagination, after I happened to be able to show that it wasn't teleological. I suppose that it is much too anthropic. (But more so than finding a human skeleton or human DNA and relating it to other creatures?) But I suppose that it is still much too non-physical and subjective. (But even when it is subjective to say "I will only consider what is objective, regardless of having experienced things beyond my objective comprehension?") Can someone tell me how it would fit comfortably into a universally mindless evolutionary model, that evolution is biased to build in its latest stages a creature that is so preoccupied of mind, and... irrational? (I would say extra-rational.)
Can someone tell me why it fits the strictly naturalistic evolutionary model that such an imaginative life form as man seems to be an eventuality, when the creatures lower on the evolutionary pile survive and thrive so well, in part because they are so simple and uncluttered (with such things as mammallian diseases, behavioral disorders, and the ingenuity to create things that kill us)? Survival of the what, now?
But, why even ask these things, when there is no theory of origins that has been scientifically demonstrated?