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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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The anthropic principle simply says that the probability of every "explanation" (particular sequence of events through which life came to be?) we need to consider in determining the most likely one is its probability conditioned on our existence, since our existence is a given. What this does is countering arguments that actually are along the lines of "abiogenesis is unlikely, therefore the existence of a creator must be likely, since probabilities sum to 1", because there is no requirement for the absolute probability to sum to 1. If there is a 10^-8 probability of a creator god and a 10^-6 probability of abiogenesis (whatever even is the sample space; call it "multiverse hypothesis" if you need to reify it by imagining 10^8 different universes of which one has a creator god and about 100 have abiogenesis occurring), the anthropic principle simply states that if you find yourself alive, there is nothing to "explain" about the ~10^-6 probability of this having happened at all. Honestly, maybe I've been brainwashed by probability theory too much, but it's hard for me to even imagine what there is to be confused by - whenever you are dealt a hand in a game of cards, do you feel the need to explain the fantastically unlikely event that just unfolded before you? What exactly do you consider an explanation, anyway?

Or a falling man who prays for a parachute and is saved when one spontaneously materializes out of thin air needn't explain this miracle because, had it not occurred, he wouldn't be alive to consider candidate explanations.

He will still need to explain his memories of existing before he started to skydive (and everyone else's cultural and individual memory of there having been life before it).

Maybe the chance fighter jet is just… even more unlikely than that? Based on what? The fact that there are many more optimally arranged parts involved in a fighter jet?

Fighter jets are huge. Even ignoring the far greater fluidity of organic soup compared to fighter jet parts, an agglomeration of raw materials for as many potential fighter jets as there were for potential basic amino acid replicators in the organic soup on Earth's surface they presumably arose on would rapidly collapse into a black hole.

Maybe, but if that’s actually true, why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?

Because our eyes and hands are far better suited for arranging hunks of metal than they are for arranging molecules. Forget fighter jets - artificial diamonds at least as of a few decades ago still were smaller and less pretty than their natural counterpart, but nature has never wrought a single steel knife of the type we've had for centuries. Do you consider this an argument for divine creation of diamonds?

If we were to turn out to live in the "Made-by-Jesus" world, I would have no problem updating in favour of Christianity, although the question of course would remain somewhat open because I'd have to ask if there was some way the Jesus crowd could have put that string there (or knocked me out cold and locked me up in their Jesus-affirming VRMMO), or if maybe there was some connection between that string being there and the words "made", "by" and "Jesus" coming to mean what they do in modern English to begin with.

To be clear, the anthropic principle says that there's nothing to explain if we're in a multiverse.

That's much less clear for a one-shot.

Re: cards, wouldn't you suspect the dealer, if you got a royal flush in poker, or a full suit in bridge? For an ordinary hand, yes, the event is unlikely, but it's not unlikely in an interesting way such that any other hypotheses are privileged enough to overcome their prior lower probability.

It seems pretty clear to me that our existence raises the probability of the "multiverse" hypothesis and the "God" hypothesis relative to a hypothetical observerless universe.

Even a single universe still contains quintillions of planets, in which potential abiogenesis would take place almost completely independently, so I'm not sure it would be correct to consider a single universe a single chance for the emergence of life.

Right, the abiogenesis isn't a single chance. The relevant part is cosmic fine-tuning, like fine-tuning of the physical constants to exactly what they need to be. That seems to be something where we have to go universe by universe instead of bucket of chemicals by bucket of chemicals.