Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?

[nogodsforme]

We live on a planet where 70% of it is better suited for fish and whales. Virtually every square foot of land is subject to some combination of earthquakes, volcanos, hurricanes, tornados, drought, desertification, untenable heat and/or humidity, cold, wind and now, as a bonus, pollution.

People can't stand each other, lots of animals are willing to eat us, diseases abound, we need ant spray and now bedbugs love us more than ever. Trees and rocks fall on our heads, sinkholes open under our homes, snakes and spiders bite us, cancer destroys us and birth defects are rampant.

And some of us are able to distort reality well enough to define the above as perfectly tuned.

Now if you are a subcutaneous parasitic worm, you might have a better argument. Let me know and I will edit my response.

All this means is that the universie is indeed perfectly tuned, just not for us. (And it's a cookbook!)

[Samothec]

hee hee...he said subcutaneous...hee hee   

And I thought I was bad for enjoying the begining of Law & Order SVU because they use the word "heinous" which of course sounds like "h" + body part.

EDIT: not commenting on the video yet because I haven't watched yet.

[Cyberia]

Mommy, what is planet earth made of?

Quesi......wayyyyy too much detail.


"The Earth is made of metal and rock, most of it is red-hot and melted.  The metal, mostly iron, is at the center." 

Then Google a pic of a steelworks factory pouring white-hot metal from those giant bowls.

"The middle-parts of Earth are MELTED ROCK...which is called lava or magma."

Then Google a pic of red-hot runny lava from a volcano.

"The very, very outside part is called the crust, and it is just cooled rock that floated to the top.  That's the WHOLE part we live on, and it is VERY thin."


"The sun is a huge ball of gas, bigger than all the planets put together.  The gas burns and the sun gets VERY VERY hot."

[Quesi]

Cyberia, you are right of course.  But brevity is not one of my skills, and her questions sometimes take me by surprise.  And then I ramble.

But she is a very bright girl, and she listens.  Once, when she was about 3 1/2 we were at the Hayden Planetarium, and I tried to get her to look at a depiction of the solar system. 

She waved her hand and dismissed me and said "I know ALL ABOUT the solar system already.  Venus, Mars, Saturn has rings, Jupiter is really big and Pluto isn't a planet anymore because it got too small."   

And she led me off to some exhibit that allowed her to push buttons or pull levers, and I decided that even if she didn't know quite everything there is to know about the solar system, she had somehow absorbed an impressive amount for a 3 year old. 

[caveat_imperator]

You guys don't know how hard I'm laughing my butt off right now! ^^
lol...

I thought that 'universe = one sentence' was pretty hilarious too. 

[Seppuku]

The Eddas state it very clearly, the Earth is made from Ymir. All this nonsense about iron and lava. Oh ho ho, you guys crack me up!

[joebbowers]

The universe being fine tuned for life doesn't mean those things.  It means the universe is "well organized", it has physical laws, the physical constants are just right for the universe to even exist (how unlikely is that?!), and other little things like ice being less dense than liquid water. 

You know, I'm not sure how theists seem to think that this argument works in their favor. We have a pretty clear understanding of how the universe works, and at no point is God or magic a requirement of it's function. I think if they really want a convincing argument they should find something that is impossible and cannot be explained by any scientific theories. Not just unlikely or improbable, I mean clearly, unambiguously, flat-Earth impossible.

[screwtape]

You know, I'm not sure how theists seem to think that this argument works in their favor. We have a pretty clear understanding of how the universe works, and at no point is God or magic a requirement of it's function. I think if they really want a convincing argument they should find something that is impossible and cannot be explained by any scientific theories. Not just unlikely or improbable, I mean clearly, unambiguously, flat-Earth impossible.

I agree.  However, there will always be something we do not know, always a gap in our knowledge in which their god can dwell.  They will always find a place for a god, however remote.  It is an act of the committed mind.  Look at any end times cult.  The whole Millerite movement should have ended when their end times predictions failed.  Yet, they didn't.  Instead they became the seventh day adventists and all their weird offshoots and permutations.

The human mind is not the highly evolved, rational thinking machine we would like to think it is.    We are slightly smarter than chimps.  But because and elite few of us can make nuclear submarines and plasma tvs, we delude ourselves into thinking we are all that smart.

[joebbowers]

Whenever a theist tries to use gaps in our knowledge to prove God, I simply ask what their great-great-great grandfather's name was.

Of course they say they don't know, to which I reply something like this, "Was his name God? Of course not. He did exist, you are proof of that, and he must have had a name. So you know there is an answer to the question, you just don't know it right now. You could do do some research or talk to your relatives to try to find the answer, but quite possibly you will never know. Science is always trying to further our understanding of the universe and they discover and learn more about it everyday. But some things may be lost to the mysteries of time, like your ancestor's name. You see, sometimes we don't know the answer to a question, and it's OK to admit that. What's not OK is to assume that 'God' is an acceptable fill-in-the-blank answer for anything you can't explain."