RE: Dear Resident Theists
August 29, 2015 at 6:33 am
(This post was last modified: August 29, 2015 at 8:20 am by Homeless Nutter.)
(August 29, 2015 at 12:51 am)Ronkonkoma Wrote: [...]
Thus, less than 1 chance in 10282(million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion) exists that even one such life-support body would occur anywhere in the universe.
No, that's not even remotely correct. You - or whoever came up with this questionable line of reasoning - are assuming that life could only occur under one particular set of conditions - the one that resulted in ours. There's no good reason to conclude that, as we currently only have one data-point.
Sure - if you "tweak" the parameters of our physics one at a time - life becomes impossible beyond a very small margin. However - if you were able to adjust any/all parameters at the same time - you'd find that one form of life, or another could exist on a huge range of possible worlds, of which ours is just a point on the spectrum - the only one we can access right now.
Let's try a simple analogy - imagine a container, measuring 10cm x 10cm x 10cm. It can hold exactly 1 liter of water. What you're proposing is that this is the only set of dimensions that can hold that much liquid, since adjusting any of the dimensions even by a little would result in a greater/smaller volume. So, for example 10cm x 10cm x 9.9cm, or 10.5cm x 10cm x 10cm - and so forth - would not hold exactly 1 liter anymore. Therefore - to you - the container appears highly improbable and "fine-tuned" for this particular purpose.
But, of course - the container could be made in an infinite range of dimensions and still have the same 1 liter volume, just as long as any change to one if the dimensions is accompanied by a proportionate adjustment to one or more of the others. So 5cm x 10cm x 20cm, 100cm x 10cm x 1cm - and so on - all result in the desired volume.
Therefore probability of existence of a container holding exactly 1l is orders of magnitude greater than if we were to assume that only one shape is possible. In the same way - but on an infinitely greater scale of complexity - the probability of existence of life-supporting planet in a life-supporting universe is orders of magnitude greater than what you're suggesting. It's just that life can be very different than ours.
And even if the odds are against existence of life - infinitely improbable events happen all the time. That's because there are a lot more things happening in the universe than what our ape brains can even begin to imagine.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw