Fine tuning: a discussion for the rest of us mortals

I'm really having trouble with understanding your argument, Mike. As far as I can see, however staggeringly unlikely the chances that a universe that is just like ours might exist, I can't see that this has any bearing whatsoever on whether there is an intelligent creator behind it. Universes like this might actually be ten a penny, springing into existence by themselves all the time, but our particular one was created by intelligence - or conversely, it might be so statistically improbable that you'd get a hernia just thinking about it, but ours arose naturalistically anyway.This message has been edited by Tusko, 11-19-2005 08:57 AM

Cheers Mike. If you don't want to get involved in this thread, that's fine. I'm interested in your point of view though, because its very different to mine, and I can't quite understand how you hold your point of view. That isn't to say that its right or wrong, its just really incompatible with mine. Other universes don't really have anything directly to do with what I was saying. I was wondering about deducing the likelyhood of our current universe, fine tuned for use to live, coming into being by naturalistic means.My point is that we just don't know if this universe is crazily unlikely to have arisen by naturalistic means(to the extent that there is only one universe) or alternatively, whether universes are pipping and popping into being every damn microsecond.We don't know if universes are common. We don't know if universes just like ours are the only ones where life can develop. There's a whole lot of things we don't know. To me, all these ifs and buts make it really hard to say that things look particularly engineered. Thats putting to one side the fact that if 8 dimentional Garffx-beings stood (hovered?) where we are now, they might think that things had been manipulated specially to have not 7, not 9 dimentions so they could exist. (Because what other life is there apart from 8 dimentional Garffx life?)Okay - lets stop talking about the possibility of multiple universes and just look at the only one that we know exists. The vast majority of the universe is utterly inhospitable for anything like life we would recognise. It is so mindbendingly huge that you would expect parts of it to be inhabitable for life like our own, wouldn't you? That is of course assuming that there is a God.

I like the idea of a universe riddled with life like a mangy dog. It would be fun if it was.On a completely tangential point, it strikes me that DNA can't be the only possible imperfect self-replicating molecule. I wonder how long it will be until we descover another on that can do a similar job.