<<However, the anthropic principle makes little sense as well. It seems to me that it is just as great an improbability to hypothesize an intelligent actor which chose the set of circumstances resulting in humans as for those circumstances to arise by chance. All it does is push the question back a step.>> I think the anthropic principle (weak version) makes little sense ONLY if you start from the idea that humans were supposed to arise or were somehow predestined to be here. If you instead accept that nothing predestined our existence, then the a.p. not only makes sense, it's just "common sense". The universe had to be formed with some set of circumstances or other. If it were formed with a set of circumstances that made intelligent life impossible, then there would be no intelligent beings here wondering about why they exist. It's just like human history. Set the world back to the year 1001, and then tell me what the probability is that 1000 years hence there would be a person named Doug O'Neal with a Ph.D. in astronomy sitting in front of a computer in a state called Pennsylvania in a country called the United States of America. Not very great. But history had to turn out SOME way. If it had turned out some other way (any of the practically infinite circumstances that would have caused one of my ancestors to die before having children, or a couple never to meet), Doug O'Neal wouldn't be sitting here pondering life's questions; some other person who in our time line does not exist might be. I have no problem with that. Scale it up to the entire history of life on Earth, you get the weak anthropic principle. Doug
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