The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Apollo]

The reason we take these structures into consideration to further build predictive models to hypothesize that whole universe would like this (with abundance of structures) and NOT predominantly empty space is because “design“ is an anthropomorphic notion and we have to use the same anthropomorphic principle to build the predictive model to verify if universe is rife with structures or not.

Can you clarify this point further? And as an aside, how does your view of emptiness fit with the Lawrence Krauss notion that nothing is not nothing?

What I am saying is that humans when they see water they predict that there will be other life form around (animals, fish, plant life) as they have seen such pattern before where usually water means presence of others who use that water.

When humans see a “clockwork” solar system with repeated and reliable cycles of sun rising and setting they perceive that as design and predict that this is common. That can also predict that this not common but what are the basis of such prediction unless you’re trying to contort a previous prediction to fit the later observation. So the prediction that there will be more matter than not in the universe is more anthropomorphically likely than not.

As far “nothing“ is concerned it’s also an anthropomorphic notion that we usually use to describe world at our macro level (at the non-quantum level—the level where reality has taken shape after the underlying quantum fields interactions. The atomic, the molecular, and bigger level). So when we say “there is nothing in the room”, we are assuming a level that is even bigger than molecules and mean things like furniture etc but technically there is air in the room or space in the room with vacuum energy. Point is, there is no such thing as nothing if you consider quantum level too as part of conversation but most of the time we are only talking about macro level so nothing makes certain sense to us in that context.

But in objective reality, quantum fluctuations happen all the time even in “nothingness”. But that is not the level at which design arguments made so are not considered. If you do take those into consideration then it becomes even more less design centric because quantum level nature is probabilistic and does not follow same design patterns we see at classic/macro level..