Help. Typo in title. The word should be "Cosmos."
Miracle of Being placemarker.
The fact that there is anything at all still astounds me.
The anthropic principle is explained in the legend of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It is related to the discovery by most of us at age 3 that we are in one particular body and no other. Are we each our body? No, we are in our body. Where were we before our body came into being; where will we be after our body craps out? There is probably nothing here for science to work with; the anthropic principle is not a theory, not a law. I would like to see if the anthropic principle is an empirical a priori idea like God, man, cosmos, and causality.
We are very lucky to live in a universe so carefully arranged that it is possible for us to exist!
ATHEIST: Yep, we sure are lucky!
THEIST: Yep, God sure arranged it carefully!
There is really no other productive argument which can be made along these lines.
bump
Ultimately, the "anthropic principle" is uninteresting and proves nothing. It amounts to the simple observation that if we were not here, we would not be here. It leaves utterly untouched the necessity of a creative power that is itself uncreated, the impossibility that every being is contingent on some other being.
How one arrives at the multiverse is another matter, but there are possible mechanisms for that.
Mumble mumble. Haha! More BS.
I understand a neutron star is always around 1.5 times the mass of the sun (although I've seen estimates of between 1 and 2 solar masses). If it gets much more massive than that, a black hole results. So if Smolin's hypothetical neutron star of 1.6 times the sun's mass existed, or whatever the theoretical limit actually is ... a whole lot of stuff would have to be re-thunk.
given the following:
I believe that in a universe in which its causality could be traced unquestionably to God our ability to act freely wouldn't exist. However that unquestionable proof of God would work, I think it would have to manifest itself in a completely rigid deterministic link to the Creator.
- God created the universe. God's creation was good and perfect.
- God has given us freewill. The ability to determine our own destiny.
This would be imperfect in that the requirement of freewill would be negated. So I'm suggesting that perhaps the disjoint between the set of all knowable things arrived at by faith and those arrived at through the scientific method is a necessary one.
And furthermore this particular topic, one of origins, exists at a nexus between faith and science. So by necessity, I don't believe we will ever find a scientific proof of God or divine creation on our own. The proof must exist but it will have to be bestowed from outside this system (thinking of our universe as a control volume).
This idea is as embarrassing as the "Gaia" hypothesis.
Quite bizarrely on the one hand, Lee objects to the non-falsifiability of the anthropic principle (Indeed a valid objection--as readers of evolution threads know, I am a sort of hyper-Popperian in that I insist that not only should scientific theories in the small sense be falsifable, but that the applicability of the formalisms on which they are based be falsifiable.). On the other hand, he proposes the unfalsifiable theory that black-holes spawn other universes--another universe is by definition impossible to observe, and thus its existence or non-existence is unfalsifiable. (I also object very strongly to the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics both on Popperian grounds and on the basis of Occam's Razor.) Limiting the discussion to the physical universe in which we find ourselves, which for reasons of observability is a necessity if one proposes to pursue emperical science, he replaces the unobservable, unfalsifiable Divine First Cause with an equally unobservable, unfalsifiable First-Cause-as-a-black-hole-in-another-universe.
The other day, I was dealt the K, J, 9 and 4 of Spades, the Q, 10, 8 of Hearts, the 7, and 4 of Diamonds, and the A, 7, 5 and 2 of Clubs. The probability of getting such a hand is exactly the same as of getting all Clubs. The Anthropic Principle is equivalent to saying that my outcome was so unlikely that the deck must have been stacked.
Someone (PH, your or VR, maybe) called it the "Fallacy of Retrospective Astonishment." Acceptance of the Anthropic Principle means assuming that the universe is completely deterministic (otherwise, something different may have occured, he said Candidely).
BTTT
As far as I can tell nothing exists except chocolate cake
The truely wise morn neither the living nor the dead. There has never been a time when we did not exist - nor will there ever be.
"Let us assume that Laz is incredibly handsome, well dressed, wealthy, extraordinarily smart, and gifted."
See? I, too, can start an argument with a baseless premise!
Living reproducing universes? How else could they naturally select? What a crock.
One unignorable sticking point in cosmology which is always ignored is that either all mass has existed forever or that all mass sprang spontaneously from eternal energy.
Who's this "we", if "life plays no essential role in the logic"?