I think I understand your point, HHTVL. Though I did elaborate on it somewhat, in the above [brackets]. I need to ask you: Does the bracketed material reflect your own view?
It seems to me that every single human being who has ever lived, or is now living, "believes" — has faith — in something. That statement seems to me to be both uncontroversial, and incontestable.
The point is: In what does any given person believe? And how closely does it dovetail with, or correspond with, the actual Reality that we commonly perceive, in which we actually exist?
In the end, I suppose this all has to do with the "quality" of our belief.
If a person has "faith" in the idea that we live in a random, chancy universe, I would describe that situation as a very "low-quality" belief. For it doesn't really explain anything.
Don't downgrade yourself and your cognitive powers. You and me and everybody else are denizens of the natural order. But we are more than just that. For as rational beings, we have access to an order that transcends the purely natural. Please do not give that short shrift.
I'm grateful for your reply, HHTVL. Thank you!
I'm willing to admit that I may be lagging behind where you are in thinking about this stuff. But to me, that question is unanswerable. What does "probability" mean without some idea of what "improbable" would look like? We live in a universe that operates according to certain physical laws, including those that permit life. In our experience, the probability that a universe will operate under those laws and constraints is 100%. By what extrinsic standard can we assign any other probability?
"Life would be impossible without carbon and yet because of the precise requirements for its existence, the carbon atom should be very rare."
And they are. According to this article about scientists using supercomputers to model the shape of the "Hoyle nucleus," only about 1 in 2,500 nuclei "relax" into their stable carbon-12 configuration. But there are lots of these nuclei being formed inside stars, and lots of star, and lots of times. So despite the low probabilit of any one collision producing a carbon-12 molecule, we nevertheless end up with lots and lots of carbon molecules.
I also acknowledge that I don't completely understand this whole resonance thing. But from what I've been rading, Overman overstates (see what I did there?) the case when he says "the resonance of the carbon nucleus is precisely the right resonance to enable the components to hold together rather than disperse. This resonance perfectly matches the combined resonance of..." The numbers I've seen suggest that "is close enough to work" is more accurate than "perfectly matches." I also can't find out whether a carbon nucleus has only this one resonance or multiple resonances--a couple of things I've read suggest the latter. If so, still more accurate would be "one of the carbon nucleus's resonances is close enough to that of the oxygen atom to enable them to hold together." (It's a little hard to tell exactly which process Overman is talking about--in your quote, he goes from talking about the collision of helium atoms to make carbon to some combination of carbon and oxygen atoms and then back to the helium atoms.)
It also seems to me that one could reverse the question: if a superintellect has been monkeying with physical laws in order to produce life, why rely on a process with only a 1/2,500 chance of success? Why involve a molecule that only lasts for 10^-17 seconds? I also don't follow this: "Reversing the observed process of dissipation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics requires a beginning and a very highly ordered beginning (one with low entropy). If the Big Bang is regarded as only a big, impressive accident, there is no explanation why the Big Bang produced a universe with such a high degree of order." First he says the universe's beginning must be highly ordered, then he says there's no reason the universe's beginning should produce a universe with a high degree of order. Those two statements sound like they contradict each other, to me.
It's also worth noting that Penrose's conclusion was that the universe continually expands,gets all swallowed up in black holes (maximum entropy), and then explodes again in another Big Bang. Apparently he thought that cyclical process was enough to explain the 1/10^300 probability he estimated.
Some of your questions put me in mind of someone standing in a city at the mouth of a river, marveling that the river happens to be right where the city needs it. I know that's a shallow analogy. But the physical laws and constants of the universe are what they are. We know they can happen because they have happened and do happen. If they didn't happen, we wouldn't be here to wonder about them. So I still doubt we can really answer the question of whether the universe--everything we can know and measure--was designed to be that way or just happens to be that way.
And yeah, just some more thoughts. Thanks for sticking with it.
Oh, and P.S. to Texas Songwriter: I started to reply to your thoughtful post as well, but I'm afraid I don't have enough time.
Yes, I believe so.
If a person has "faith" in the idea that we live in a random, chancy universe, I would describe that situation as a very "low-quality" belief. For it doesn't really explain anything.
But what if that's the truth? What if there really is no ultimate explanation? Note that I'm not claiming that's the case. But wouldn't that make it a high-quality belief, if it corresponded to actual Reality?
For as rational beings, we have access to an order that transcends the purely natural.
A long time ago I read a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind--you've probably heard of it--that postulated that ancient people (but recent enough to be recognizable) got input from the right hemispheres of their brains in the form of auditory hallucinations that they interpreted as messages from the gods. To them, in other words, it appeared to be access to an order that transcended the natural. But to us, with what we know about the brain, it has an entirely natural explanation. I'm not as confident as you that the access we think we have to transcendent orders (and yes, I've experienced it) are not natural phenomena we just don't have the knowledge to explain yet.