Not a compelling argument for a divine creation given that there are quite probably trillions of planets in the universe.
Even worse, if this Universe was supposedly "finely tuned for life", then the alleged designer really sucks at his job.
If the Universe is allegedly "tuned" for life, why is 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999993+% (*) of it entirely hostile to life (due to hard vacuum, temperature, etc.), and only a vanishingly small percentage of it inhabitable? Wouldn't someone "designing" a habitat for life manage a much better livable portion than this? If that's "designed for life", someone did a truly crappy job of designing. That's more like the kind of results you'd expect by accident. If someone was tasked with designing a biohabitat for a space station or a zoo and did the job such that only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000007% of its volume was actually suitable for anything to live in it, we wouldn't call that any kind of "intelligent design", and we'd immediately fire him.
Surely an allegedly ominipotent designer could come up with a design that minimized pointlessly wasted space. Even the naive notion of ancient man was a vastly more efficient design -- a lone Earth surrounded by nearby crystalline spheres studded with useful objects, like providing warmth from a small nearby Sun, light from a nearby small Moon, and little lights called stars and planets visible at night useful for navigation and telling the seasons. Now *that's* "tuned for life, as everything in it is dedicated to supporting the creatures in the habitat, without mindboggling amounts of wasted space and material.
Finally, anyone makes the "wow this is a really unlikely configuration for a universe, it must have been chosen that way" is revealing a gross logical fallacy -- unless they can determine how many other configurations this universe *could* have had, and over what range of physical constants (and good luck with *that* one), they really don't know whether this universe was likely or unlikely. For all they know, this is the only kind of physical universe that's actually possible in the first place. Furthermore, the "gosh, look how many constants work out well" argument is based on a similar ignorance -- how, exactly, have they determined that the various physical constants are all "free" to vary independently? For all they know, there's only *one* variable which necessarily determines the values of all the rest. Etc. etc. The folks making these goofy arguments are presuming far too much about things they really don't have a clue about yet. Until we actually understand how universes are generated, we have no grounds whatsoever for making any conclusions about how "likely" our variety might be. It's just philosophical masturbation by people who ought to know better, but then folks straining for "evidence" of deities often feel compelled in that direction anyway, no matter how shaky the ground.
Footnote: The volume of the portion of the Earth suitable for life is (very generously) the region up to five miles below the sea level to five miles above it. The Earth is 8000 miles in diameter. This means that the region of the Earth suitable for life is at most 2x109 cubic miles. The known Universe is 1x1033 light years in volume. There are roughly 7x1022 stars in it. Even under the most generous (and wildly unrealistic) scenario of every star having an Earthlike planet circling it, this means that the inhabitable fraction of the Universe is 2E10 mi^3 * 7E22 / 1E33 ly^3 / 2E38 mi^3/ly^3 = 7x10-39, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000007%. And if the Earth happens to be the only inhabitable planet after all, add twenty-two more zeros to that figure.
[Thunderous applause, with angels singing in the background.]
How can we prove it exists at all? It could all be a delusion.
That was beautiful.
A few more numbers and comments excerpted from Gerald Schroeders website.
And yet you expect them to understand exponents!?
I have yet to see on these threads any creationist or Trinitarian who can get as far as 3 without trouble. Hmm, three is one, yet one is three. And, there is not a single reference in the Bible to any "3" to support religious dogma.
It is odd to see references to "Judeo-Christian" values based on 10 Commandments. Judeo values emphasize 1 (one). And Judeo ancient texts say there are 613 commandments. 6.13 x 10^2 commandments. Hellbender and the like are very selective as to which commandments they choose to accept.
And yet the probability of life appearing on Earth in very short order after the initial "global warming" is 1. Very curious.
You seem to be doing just what atheists assume theists do: assuming that God is anthropomorphic, that he cares about things like "wasting space." We worry about space because we have little of it which is capable of supporting life here on earth. Why should God care how much of the billions of cubic light-years of space he allocates to life? Maybe, as theists have always said, "His ways are not our ways." Maybe He didn't want habitable planets close enough that their civilizations could reach and annihilate each other (not saying that's why, but it's conceivable, and the kind of thing a sci-fi author might think up). Maybe the habitable planets have to be far enough from stars that they are not destroyed by supernova explosions, deadly radiation, black holes, etc. etc. There are many conceivable reasons why more space might not be allocated to life, and no reason for believing that mere quantity of life had to be important. As you might say, you are making assumptions about things we don't know enough about yet.
"The folks making these goofy arguments are presuming far too much about things they really don't have a clue about yet"...."folks straining for "evidence" of deities often feel compelled in that direction anyway, no matter how shaky the ground."
It's not creationists, I.Ders, or people who started out trying to support "deities" who came up with the arguments about the fundamental physical constants being very critical for life. It's physicists, astrophysicists, cosmologists, etc. Maybe you think all theoretical physics is "philosophical masturbation?" Thank goodness for the oh-so-superior intellects of the atheists, who can save us from these "goofy" cosmologists and their anthropic principle! I bet those guys are all really a bunch of crypto-creationists, anyway, right?
Scientists usually don't like to spend much time considering hypotheses which can't be tested. Minor changes in physical constants would make for a universe which couldn't have intelligent life, like scientists; so such universes could not be witnessed, described, or comprehended by anyone. In effect, they are unknowable to us.
There is absolutely no evidence, in our rather extensive modern knowledge of physics, that variables like the charge on the electron, the mass of the electron, Planck's constant, the gravitational constant, etc. are dependent on each other, or that 'there's only *one* variable which necessarily determines the values of all the rest."
So I think it might be you who is the one "straining for evidence" of your particular worldview.