William E. Harris writes:
In an article called, Beyond Physics (Scientific American, Aug. 1998, page 20), renowned scientists contemplated the evidence for God.
I've uploaded a
copy of the article.
As the caption beneath the unfortunately missing picture asks, was our universe custom made, or were we just lucky?
The odds of winning the lottery are very small. The winner considers himself extraordinarily lucky. He thinks it almost miraculous that he should have won. Yet the odds of someone somewhere winning are very high. While it *does* occasionally happen that no one wins, it doesn't happen often.
Or consider the likelihood that you'll have a son, that your son will have a son, that that son will have a son, and so forth forward for a thousand generations. What are the odds? Pretty tiny, right?
But guess what? You yourself are the product of thousands and thousands of generations of sons begetting sons. You yourself are the winner in a lottery of unimaginably tiny odds. And guess what's even more amazing. There are around 3 billion other similar winners on the planet with you!!!
So don't read too much into the anthropic principle. At heart it's an argument from lack of knowledge of both the universe and statistics.
--Percy
[This message has been edited by Percipient, 07-14-2002]