As for the odds of our planet having a limited zone that can support intelligent life being "astronomical," funny you should use that word. There are billions of planets out there. If we are one in a billion, there's your odds.
But yes, it's useless to argue. If you want to see patterns, you'll see them, just like people looking up at the stars saw constellations, or clouds that look like bunny rabbits.
Always looking for a way out? Conceding a universe of billions of suns and billions of orbital bodies in defined orbits due to gravity and momentum (billions of a patterns), and in the light of which order collisions are manifest as an aberration (yet even though these bodies are also in a pattern) rather than your slo-mo explosion, and yet now you are looking for a sophisticated design, as if a highway system is an explosion since accidents and trash happens. If you want to see patterns, you'll see them, just like people looking up at the stars saw constellations, or clouds that look like bunny rabbits.
Amazing: as shown you, far greater researchers and far greater intellects - even secular no less - affirm that The order of the universe is not an assumption; it’s an observed fact...This fact cannot but elicit feelings of reverence and awe,” ( Sagan) "We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly," (Einstein), the fact that the universe is able to support life depends delicately on various of its fundamental characteristics, notably on the form of the laws of nature, on the values of some constants of nature, and on aspects of the universe’s conditions in its very early stages." (stanford.edu), _ The Universe Really Is Fine-Tuned, And Our Existence Is The Proof ,
but some unbeliever on a pro-God forum relegates such as being like those who see clouds that look like bunny rabbits.
“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.” - Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy) Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times, p. B9.
“Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word ‘miraculous’ without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.” - George Ellis (British astrophysicist) Ellis, G.F.R. 1993. The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments. The Anthropic Principle, F. Bertola and U.Curi, ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 30
“We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.” - John O’Keefe (astronomer at NASA) Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 200.
“As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” - Professor Freeman J. of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.” - Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry in, "Physics Today" 25, pp. 23-28
“The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. - - Dr. Paul Davies, esteemed author and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Adelaide University.
“...how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.” - Professor Steven Weinberg (Nobel Laureate in High Energy Physics [a field of science that deals with the very early universe], writing in the journal “Scientific American”.)
16O has exactly the right nuclear energy level either to prevent all the carbon from turning into oxygen or to facilitate sufficient production of 16O for life. Fred Hoyle, who discovered these coincidences in 1953, concluded that “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” - Hoyle, Fred. “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20. (1982), p.16 (for more of these coincidences click here)
“If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.” - Christian de Duve. “A Guided Tour of the Living Cell” (Nobel laureate and organic chemist)
“...The capacity of DNA to store information vastly exceeds that of any other known system: it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram. The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet…could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written…” - Dr. Michael Denton (Australian microbiologist)More (from this Jewish collection).
But if all you see is some patterns then you are no better off then those who see clouds that look like bunny rabbits.
...and I immediately thought of this:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Job 38:1-2