If it can be, how can the "Absence of Evidence" be "Evidence of Absence?".

Peg is incorrect.From: Ethical storm brews over embryonic stem cell lines | New Scientist(this is only a popular science mag and may be behind a pay wall)Here are some excerpts from this:

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"You hear people say our universe is fine-tuned for life, that stars are rare and couldn't form if certain things were different," he says. "The truth is, no one has done the calculations." Adams has now rectified that situation and found that it is not unusual for stars to form that can support life.

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Claims of fine-tuning have generally been based on what happens when you vary a single characteristic of the universe, say the strength of gravity, while holding all others constant. That, says Adams, is too artificial a scenario to tell you anything about whether there are other universes that can support life. "The right way to do the problem is to start from scratch," he says. "You have to turn all the knobs and find out what happens."

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About a quarter of the resulting universes turned out to be populated by energy-generating stars. "You can change alpha or the gravitational constant by a factor of 100 and stars still form," Adams says, suggesting that stars can exist in universes in which at least some fundamental constants are wildly different than in our universe.

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And though some universes were filled with things we might not usually think of as stars - radiating black holes or bodies formed of dark matter - they all gave out enough energy to power some form of life, and lasted long enough for life to evolve.

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This has, apparently, been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Your quotes are not backed up by anything at all. The work I referred you to is not simply speculations. They have actually worked on the issue and calculated the results.In the article they do comment that no one seems have done the calculations before. If that is correct then anything that you supply are "simply philosophical speculations".ABE
In addition, I think you'll find that Hawking is saying "seem" to be fine-tuned while also pointing out that it is entirely possible that no tuning at all is possible. The constants may have to be that way. If you assume the constants are tunable you are partially assuming what you are trying to demonstrate.Davis may very well have said what you are quoting. His philosophy would, I think, lead him to support such an idea. But if he does without demonstrating it then he is, indeed, merely speculating unlike those that I referred you to.Edited by NosyNed, : added a bit

Yes, you have yet to mention that any of them have done anything other than speculate. In fact, Hawking makes clear he is speculating and also speculates that there may be no fine tuning possible at all because there may be no tuning possible at all. But we don't know (yet). It would be interesting to know where he published them. You should also note that the previously referenced work points out that varying one "constant" at a time isn't the only possibility and if your friend George did that then he didn't demonstrate that the other work is wrong at all.