I was going to do a line by line rebuttal. I decided I had better things to do that to address this guy.
I wrote mine before reading the follow-up posts. I feel it's are somewhat repetitive of what has already been said, but will post it regardless, in the hope that someone will find the slightly more in-depth approach helpful.
This might be due to chance, to physical need, or to design. Chance is a very bad explanation.
Why? "We just don't know" doesn't translate to "we can eliminate X as a possibility".
Some advocate a Multiverse. But to have just one life permitting universe, you need 1 to 10^500 attempts to get it done.
By the same token, "we just don't know" kind of hurts the credibility of any odds being estimated.
Also, if the multiverse hypothesis is correct, 10^500 attempts is a ridiculously low number.
Also, you're defining "life" as "life as we know it", disregarding the possibility of other forms arising in different environments whether or not governed by other natural laws. Emergent complexity and all that.
Beside this, the Multiverse argument does not explain away God.
It has yet to be shown that there is anything to explain away, but considering the multiverse hypothesis resulted from some problems with more traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics and never was intended to have anything whatsoever to do with (a) god(s), your assessment - while true - is somewhat out-of-place.
If the multiverse hypothesis has been presented to you as a way to explain away god I strongly urge you to read up on the thought processes behind its inception.
A mechanism needs to be in place to trigger these multiverses.
Why?
Also, what can we say about this mechanism you posit, and on what grounds?
It could not be by physical need, since if so, why are there many planets, which are not life permitting, but our is ?
You lost me. Sorry, I'm already somewhat beyond sober, which may quite easily be deduced from my doomed attempt at quasi-victorian eloquence. Care to clear that up for me?
Our earth/solar/moon system is a very strong evidence. Our solar system is embedded at the right position in our galaxy, neither too close, nor too far from the center of the galaxy.
See the puddle analogy.
It's no more surprising that life should arise in a system more likely to give rise to life than it would be to find a block of ice in the arctic. If the laws of nature didn't allow for or even favor such an arrangement, we would not find it; and even so we only find it locally. It does not mean that the arctic regions were deliberately created for ice to exist there.
No ice inside a neutron star, no life outside the habitable zones. This is the reason why the various searches for exoplanetery life don't just sweep random areas of sky but concentrate on environments similar to what is known to support life.
Its also the only location, which alouds us to explore the universe, In a other location, and we would not see more than stellar clouds.
First, what you mean is our galaxy, not the universe. Which by itself disqualifies you from making such a statement.
Second, stellar clouds are a damn fine place to start exploring.
Third, there is - judging from actual data - a substantial number of planets sharing the same advantages you highlight. In this galaxy alone, I mean. (Just as a random reminder of how humongous our run-of-the-mill galaxy is: click
here. It's just so awe-inspiring that I get to call something so spectacular completely ordinary.)
Fourth, what are you using as a comparison? How can you tell there is no better place to take a look? We could easily jump a few hundred light-years and still have very much the same seat, so to speak. You're also completely disregarding the time factor.
Fifth, why is this even a consideration? You have jumped from "perfectly suited for life" to "perfectly suited for scientific exploration" without showing they have anything to do with each other. Am I to assume that you have proven the existence of a machinator to your own satisfaction with the former statement and are now using it as a premise for the second? Or are you using it as a second supporting argument?
Sixth, if a designer put us in the perfect place for exploration one might think providing a little more computational power and a more sensitive as well as diverse sensory apparatus to the hapless explorers might also fit its general motivation. Unlike your statement that we are in the perfect place, my statement that our sensory apparatus and thinking powers are severely limited can be substantiated by simple comparisons.
Seventh, (again with the puddle analogy) the core of galaxies is way more regularly bathed in deadly radiation because novae and other high-energy events are more likely to occur there.
There's probably an "eight" etc, but I have a new game system to shop for and being hardware noob I really have to put more thought into it than into this reply.
The earth has the right distance from the sun, and so has the moon from the earth.
Define "right". If you mean the habitable zone, it's quite broad and several exoplanets within habitable zones have already been discovered. It's no surprise that should billions of planets exist on stellar orbits that some of them would by random chance be within the habitable zone - and we already have evidence that this is indeed the case.
As for the moon, well ... am I to assume that it did not have the "right" orbit back when it was much closer to the Earth? Did it have the "right" orbit when it did not orbit Earth at all, presumably intelligently timed just so that it would crash into the Earth before life formed? Also, you do know that orbits are by definition unstable, right? A change in direction (including rotation) is accompanied by a loss of energy in the form of gravitational waves; in the case of our moon, this effect is overpowered by a combination of the moon's tidal influence on Earth's oceans and the planet's rotational energy - the moon will eventually be ejected into space.
Not that that will matter one bit when Earth's core "decides" to suspend the production of a magnetic field for a few millenia or - eventually - when the sun will become a bloated red giant.
Am I to assume the creator perfectly fine-tuned the universe so we could exist on the tiniest speck of rock for a limited time frame? For, if we were to escape the boundaries of our small stellar system, eventually the universe will become an inhospitable place in its entirety.
The size of the moon, and the earth, is the right one. Our planet has the needed minerals, and water. It has the right atmosphere, and a ozon protecting mantle.
Puddle again.
Also, if our planet were 10% more or less massive, life would still be
easily possible. Even complex contemporary animals could survive with only minor changes under a constant 0.9 or 1.1G. Life can and already has existed with a different atmosphere on this very planet. There's also life using chemosynthesis, independently from the atmosphere or sunlight. Minerals are abundant thanks to our sunny neighborhood fusion reactors, H2O and O2 even more so; both being among the top ten most abundant molecules in the entire universe. Ozone is generated everywhere O2 is hit by radiation. Or electricity. Or a magnetic field. In fact, you're producing it everytime you switch on your computer or microwave.
You're presenting the necessary environmental factors as much more restrictive than they are. (I will also note that you have not yet mentioned one natural constant yet. Just hoping to clear up some possible confusion regarding the term "constant".)
Also worthy of note is that the area around a star called the habitable zone is only one possible locale where we expect liquid water. Other influences, such as natural fission processes or tidal forces can keep water liquid just as well.
Jupiter attracts all asteroids , avoiding these to fall to the earth, and make life impossible.
And current research suggests that this is quite within the typical topography of stellar systems. In other words, there are droves of other systems with a very similar arrangement of smaller rocky planets in closer orbits, and gas giants beyond - in this galaxy alone.
The solar gas giants are good for us, no question, but the moons' cratered surface is witness enough that they aren't doing their jobs perfectly - as are the many craters on Earth and ample evidence for quite a handful of extinction-level events in the strata to boot.
That is again somewhat less than what I would expect from a capable designer of the universe intent on giving us a special seat.
I see you have inadvertedly neglected to mention our basically non-existent defense against radiation from supernovae.
The earths magnetic field protects us from the deadly rays of the sun.
It does nothing to protect us from radiation. That's what the atmosphere does - and it could do so if it was pure methane with no ozone layer whatsoever. I think you're referring to the charged particles that are part of solar wind.
The long-term danger to life in its entirety in losing a planetary magnetic field is not so much the alpha and beta radiation but the eventual loss of atmosphere and water due to atmospheric particles being accelerated beyond escape velocity by collision with incoming high-velocity particles. Still, chemosynthesis-based ecosystems would remain.
Beside this, volcano activities, earth quakes, the size of the crust of the earth, and more over 70 different paramenters must be just right.
No. Life doesn't need eartquake or volcanic activities. It could easily exist on a planet with thinner or thicker crusts. What you're presenting is some factors influencing the
really constitutive factors in our limited locality. For instance, I have already mentioned that the energy to maintain liquid water need not be radiation; it could be tidal forces. Which, incidentally, also can cause earthquakes and volcanic activity.
To believe, all these are just right by chance, needs a big leap of faith. This is indeed maibe the strongest argument for theism.
Seems somewhat lackluster.
Before I continue, just let me say that however convincing that argument might be against conventional theories, it does in no way therefore strengthen the theistic position. "You're wrong" doesn't mean "I'm right" unless the positions argued are a valid dichotomy. "It wasn't chance" doesn't justify the conclusion that a sentient entity did it, much less a specific one.
Your position implicitly denies the possibility of other forms of life, casually ignores that it itself suffers from the exact same problem it's attributing to the opposing side (that being a lack of data), completely ignores the current data sets suggesting that our system is in no way unique, completely ignores that - give or take an insignificant speck of nigh-nothingness - the entire universe is almost instantly lethal to life as we know it, and - for some reason I have been never able to fathom - treats humans as a sort of anchor point to which the rest of the universe must refer.
It seems to me the universe is better-suited, by positively mind-boggling orders of magnitude, for the existence of stars, planets, nebulae, black holes, etc than it is for life, let alone human beings. Hell, even ants, cockroaches, sardines, plankton, etc.
In closing, I will note that basically the exact same arguments can be applied with only minimal flexibility to the content of the sites linked to.
