Beware of the Anthropic Principle. Even liberals fall for it.

[immoderate]

One of the reasons theists give for a belief in some sort of creator or designer is a variation of the anthropic principle. Generally, that means that the universe has very particular properties that allow for the development of intelligent life. It is pointed out that if there were the most minuscule variation in the forces that are fundamental to existence, then conditions would not exist that allow for life as we know it. The probabilities that such a universe would come about by chance is so minuscule, that it is inferred (by some) that there must be some sort of design force behind it.

This argument is compelling to all sorts of religious practitioners, not just fundamentalists. Adherents, from liberal Christians, to deists, to pantheists are aware of the intricacy and complexity of existence, and are thereby informed of the intentions of the creator. There are all sorts of numbers thrown around by the apologists, which add some weight to their arguments, particularly since most people are baffled by numbers and can’t challenge them.

I received a handout recently which espoused the following statistics: The odds of the universe existing as it does is 1 in 10,000,000,000¹²⁴ (Donald Page) and the odds of the proteins necessary for life to come about by chance are 1 in 10^41,000 (Stephen Meyer.) These are impressively large numbers, and it is not even necessary to dispute them, because this is really misdirection.

Consider an analogy, admittedly not proof of anything, but illustrative. The odds of winning the lottery are infinitesimally small. If you win the lottery, I mean the jackpot, you will perceive it as a miracle. Perhaps you will credit some supreme being or providence with having favored you. You point at the sky. You fall to your knees with thanks. You might give half to some religious institution because they helped you. BUT, if someone else wins the lottery – no big deal. Someone always wins the lottery. You don’t notice when it’s someone else. It’s only a miracle when it’s ME!

If the universe wasn’t like it is, it would be like something else, and we wouldn’t care, mainly because we wouldn’t exist. That’s the fallacy of the anthropic principle. If we weren’t here, there would be no one to ask the question. That’s in time as well as space. In astronomical terms, there is only a limited slice of time in which this universe is hospitable to life as we know it, only as long as the stars are on the main sequence. Take into account the small amount of space in the universe that actually would support life, and the inefficiencies call into question the competence of the designer.

In short, the “miracle of existence” is not evidence of a creator.

--imm

[ElboRuum]

1. Soooooo....

Is something motivating this, or did you just feel the need to post a PSA for the philosophically minded?

[immoderate]

4. Wow! You're good!

After a life of relative innocence, I've recently spent some time with Christians. By Christians, I don't mean those good ol' Irish and Italian and black Pentcostal types I grew up with, (On edit add: in my heavily Jewish neighborhood) who never had religion on their minds. I mean fundamentalist Christians who will gather in "study groups" and watch video tracts from such as "The Truth Project," which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Focus on the Family. So I recently was invited to one of these, and watched a video titled "Science" and was totally shocked at what I saw.

Some of the video centered on Stephen Meyer, and his book "Signature in the Cell" was brought up as a guide. I noticed that Meyer's book had many rave reviews, though it had been withheld from skeptics and critics.

Anyway, I felt like I stumbled into a cargo cult. I was shocked and amazed that 21^st Century Americans could hold such primitive views. Anyway, though debunked soundly in Dover, I have found many, including religious liberals, who find this view plausible.

Stick around. I think I'll catch some flack here. :)

--imm

[vixengrl]

2. It's, well, relative--

humans aren't privy to the workings of a universe that we *don't* inhabit, so we naturally have a bias for the one we live in. In other words, one might like to link the narrative up as a series of "begats" until the universe produced us. We were "meant to be".

But as a "multi-worlds" kind of girl, I don't mind speculating about all the minor variations that would've produced universes that didn't produce us. The conditions of the universe we live in only support our existence in certain conditions--true. Those conditions happen, and could "unhappen". In terms of the speculated duration of our universe so far--we're a blink--not the focus, of the Eternal Eye. And there doesn't seem to be anything personal about that.

[DeSwiss]

3. Been here, heard that, and it's a bunch of mush.

While I agree in "limited principle" with the theory, all scientists have the same problem: they're all limited to using the terms and conditions of what we know about "our" science and nothing else beyond this can be considered. Of course the same terms and conditions about the things that we do know about now, were once beyond our comprehension as well. And were just as roundly chided or ignored.

We call a hydrogen atom a hydrogen atom. It doesn't make it a hydrogen atom. It only makes it easy for all of us to all agree upon what an hydrogen is. We have little idea what a hydrogen atom is in the 4th dimension. Or the 5th. Or the 6th. We presume it's the same. But we can't know.

I dislike discussing (or trying to discuss) such a complex issue online because I don't type near as well as is needed to do so very well (and w/o having to cuss my fumbling fingers). Nor as fast either, in order to be able to say all the things I should on the subject. However, this quote by Martin Rees is probably the best one that I've heard which succinctly encapsulates what's important about it. And the link to this video is the best one I've seen as an explanation on this topic that I can think of:

"From our present knowledge, the most complex things we know about our ourselves. In particular our brains. What's remarkable is that atoms have assembled into entities that are somehow able to ponder their origins." - Sir Martin Rees, Cosmologist (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7044753105944203252&ei=ItKMSrGjLaWaqAK93aHBBg&q=what+we+don%27t+know&hl=en&client=firefox-a">What We Still Don't Know)

[Warpy]

5. The key phrase here is "as we know it."

We are highly unlikely to find bipedal intelligent apes anywhere else, although given the sheer number of star systems in the universe, just about anything is possible.

Experiments with "primordial ooze" and electrical energy did produce proteins including DNA and RNA. The shock about those experiments was that the compounds were produced within days, some within hours, instead of taking years.

Most planets that are not incinerators or near absolute zero deep freezes probably have the conditions to produce life at some point in their time span. Whether that life is sustained long enough in sufficient variation to produce what we consider intelligence is another matter.

The existence of life here or elsewhere is not by itself proof of any sort of miracle. The miracle will come if we visit other worlds and manage to recognize it elsewhere. It's likely to be that different from life here.

[immoderate]

6. There are a few versions of the anthropic principle.

The "weak" anthropic principle basically calls for self awareness, an observer. The strong version specifies carbon based life. There are some variations on these, depending on philosopher.

I'm not familiar with the experiments you refer to. I know the Miller experiments produced amino acids, the so-called building blocks of proteins, from primordial "soup," but not the proteins themselves. Is there more information?

Personally, I think that life is the universe's way of taking a short cut to equilibrium. And I agree with you that it's no proof of a miracle.

--imm

[uberllama42]

7. Wow, those numbers are bogus. Especially the first one.

What possible data could Donald Page have used to calculate the chances of the universe coming out the way it did? Put aside his assumption that if the world was not designed by an intelligent creator, then all its properties must have been the result of random chance. How does he know the probability associated with any of the variables in his scenario?

Fine, let's say that a one percent change in the mass of the electron would make life impossible (or whatever criteria it is that he sets out). Even assuming that it's possible in theory for an electron to have had a different mass, what if the possible range of masses forms a normal distribution with a standard deviation of one millionth of one percent of the expected value? What if there is a range of possibilities, but that range is much smaller than one percent? Maybe the chance that an electron would have only 99 percent of its actual mass is astronomically low. That clown has no idea.

All of that ignores the possibility that there is some single reason why all those numbers came out the way they did. Just as there may be a god out there, as yet undetected or even fundamentally beyond our comprehension, there may be some principle at play that we don't yet know about or one we never could know about. What if the universe has some property that governs the way the Big Bang happened, leading inevitably to the constants (speed of light, gravitation, etc.) that we observe? All of that might work together on a very basic level that we don't understand. It might be that the probability of those numbers coming out the way they are is 1. We have no way of knowing. Anyone who claims to know the "chance" of the universe being the way it is is talking out his ass.

[lazarus]

8. it's 100%

Because it exists.

[uberllama42]

10. I should say, "what the chance was before the fact that it would turn out they way it did"

Of course, the chance of an event that happened having happened is 1.

[immoderate]

9. I didn't dispute those numbers in my OP but...

I'm agreed that they are "pulled" out of somewhere. The reason that I don't dispute them is because, as an adherent of "Fermi math" I judge them to be "reasonable." Not valid, or accurate, but the result of a chain of assumptions whose errors tend to cancel each other out when the calculations get long enough. I recall that along the same lines, Fred Hoyle calculated the odds that a tornado could tear through a junk yard and assemble a Boeing 747, for much the same reason.

My point in the post was that those numbers are the red herring. It's the odds of a particular outcome, which begs the question (whatever that means.)

--imm

[Jim__]

11. I think "beware of" is the wrong phrase.

A better phrase may be "be careful with." The Anthropic Principle does raise some valid questions; as do questions about the origin of life. Some of these may not be considered scientific questions just yet because they are not testable. The testability of these questions may change in the future. Difficult questions, even currently unanswerable questions, can help us to learn about the universe and ourselves. We should never be afraid (beware) of such questions.

The Antrhopic Principle was first raised by an astrophysicist, Brandon Carter. From wikipedia:

The phrase "anthropic principle" first appeared in Brandon Carter's contribution to a 1973 Kraków symposium honouring Copernicus's 500th birthday. Carter, a theoretical astrophysicist, articulated the Anthropic Principle in reaction to the Copernican Principle, which states that humans do not occupy a privileged position in the Universe. As Carter said: "Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent."<10> Specifically, Carter disagreed with using the Copernican principle to justify the Perfect Cosmological Principle, which states that all large regions and times in the universe must be statistically identical. The latter principle underlay the steady-state theory, which had recently been falsified by the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This discovery was unequivocal evidence that the universe has changed radically over time (for example, via the Big Bang).

Carter defined two forms of the Anthropic Principle, a "weak" one which referred only to anthropic selection of privileged spacetime locations in the universe, and a more controversial "strong" form which addressed the values of the fundamental constants of physics.

[dmallind]

12. Well stated. Some thoughts...

The anthropic principle is quite simply backwards. It's very easy to imagine (and given the size of the universe quite possibly true) some sentient methane-breathing silicon based life form saying "gosh just imagine if our planet were just a little bit warmer than -100 degrees or had just a little bit more of that poisonous oxygen in the atmosophere life could never have existed!" (it's less likely that he would use English and the Celsius scale but hey). OF COURSE the constants and conditions are ideal for us to inhabit because we evolved in those conditions. The Douglas Adams puddle thing comes to mind.

But probabilities can quickly get the uninitiated going down the wrong hole. I was at a bar last night with about 100 people. The local catchment area for this bar has a population of about 125000 people. I overheard a couple discussing their hometown of 150 miles away or so, so obviously non-locals were present too. It was clear they had not been there before, as they had to ask where the bathroom was.

The odds of those 100 people and ONLY those 100 people being in that bar at the same time as me, taken a priori, would be staggeringly huge. Consider all the other possible options each person had to spend their time. Consider all the people who could have decided to go to that bar but went to the movies or an Italian restaurant instead. Consider all the travellers along the nearby busy interstate who thought about stopping but who didn't (or did). But it happened, and it happens every night, in every large gathering place in the nation.

[rd_kent]

13. .