(April 10, 2017 at 4:17 pm)Alex K Wrote: I don't agree entirely... I don't think that by far every set of conditions enables something deserving of that name, and varying the parameters of our universe as we understand them today only slightly can yield some very structureless universes in which there are neither stars, nor chemistry..
But didn't our own universe start in a state of perfect symmetry, in particular, gravity and electromagnetism were of equal strength? That symmetry, however, was unstable and, as the universe cooled, a spontaneous symmetry breaking resulted in the forces separating into the four basic kinds we experience at much lower energies today, and their strengths evolved to their current values. They were not fine-tuned. Stellar formation and, thus, life had to simply wait for the forces to separate sufficiently. That wait was actually a tiny fraction of a second.
And when you say stuff like "If one of the quark masses were not much larger, protons would decay and there would only be hydrogen gas. You can't tell me that would be an equally valid but different backdrop for some form of intelligence." I think you are jumping to conclusion because you vary a single parameter while assuming all the others remain fixed. Then you further proceed to calculate meaningless probabilities based on the erroneous assumption that all the parameters are independent. Is it not pretty reasonable to expect that changing one or more other parameters can often compensate for the one that is changed?
For instance back in 2001 physicist Anthony Aguirre examined the universes that result when six cosmological parameters are simultaneously varied by orders of magnitude, and found he could construct cosmologies in which stars, planets, and intelligent life can plausibly arise.
http://cds.cern.ch/record/503848/files/0106143.pdf
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
