A quick defense of the anthropic principle

I have touched on the anthropic principle before; a concise metaphor occurred to me while watching a documentary on the formation of the solar system. (aside: did you know that all the water on Earth is believed to have accumulated from rocks displaced from the asteroid belt by Jupiter and hurled at Earth in the early solar system? Or that the moon was formed from the aftermath of a collision with some other nameless proto-planet? Crazy shit...)

Anyway...anthropic principle. Design arguments always seem so...anthropocentric. Narcissistic, even. They claim that the universe seems to be profoundly well-tuned exactly to support life. You start hearing the facts and it starts to sound compelling: tweak the weak nuclear force just a tiny bit, and atoms either collapse on themselves or fly apart. Tweak the gravitational force a bit, and the universe itself does the same thing. The universe has just enough mass, produced just enough carbon, etc. etc. etc.

But then you have to step back. Isn't this all a bit self-centered? Why are we so surprised? Let's use a simple metaphor: Imagine you just won the lottery. 6 numbers, each between 1 and 30. Right there are more than 400 million possible combinations, and YOU WON! Holy shit! How could this be?! 400 million possibilities and you got exactly the single combination that would win you a million dollars?! Surely it can't just be luck. That's so profoundly improbable, someone must have chosen you to win. God! God must have chosen you to win! There can't be any other explanation. God designed the game so that you won! How else could such a fantastically improbable event have come to pass?

See the logical fallacy yet? It feels very personal, but if you step back for a minute, something doesn't jive. Look at the lottery as a whole. Any single number, including the winning one, is highly improbable. But remember: there are millions upon millions of people playing, so _someone_ is going to win. And someone always does. There's always some excited woman with a bad hairdo who goes ballistic when they tell her she won. Every time. And indeed, that's the point: _someone is going to win_. The fact that the chance any single person is going to win is astronomically small doesn't change the fact that someone, somewhere, is going to win the lotto. It is a near certainty.

In fact, wouldn't it surprise you if you heard someone _hadn't_ won? It does happen every so often; they occasionally have to roll over the jackpot, which is when you get those really big lotto drawings. But what if the lotto went 10 times without a winner. Or 100. Wouldn't that freak you out way more than hearing some particular person had won?

Well, of course, the same analysis applies to the Design theory. I've said before that there's no reason to believe all arrangements of physical laws are equally probable, and hence the whole argument is relatively meaningless, but let's pretend for a second. What if bazillions of universes without the finely tuned physical constants existed before this one? Or what if there are other such universes existing in parallel to ours? Remember, a Design argument implicitly presupposes that all such universes are equally viable and, in some sense, equally probable, hence the excitement about being in the one where all the physical constants work out.

So, again, what about all those other universes? Well, there wouldn't be anyone there to see those other universes, now would there? They'd be lifeless voids, most of which would destroy themselves in short order. Not only would there be no life, there'd be no stars and perhaps no anything. Just a whole lot of nothing. Imagine it: a flotilla of parallel universes floating out there, dead. But remember: we know there's one combination of physical laws that does result in life. So somewhere out there, life crops up. On one of those myriad universes floating in that sea of nothingness, exactly the right combination of constants exist to foster life. Suddenly, that life wakes up. It looks around. Its eyes get wide, and it exclaims, "Holy shit! We won! God must really love us!"

Nope. Just probability. Combinatorics. Your little blue globe had to exist somewhere. We're happy for you and all, but it's just another lotto drawing. Someone had to win. And someone did. Yay. You want a cookie?