Junk DNA: goodbye!: Review article (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 17:20 (3540 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: First, my argument was not the anthropic principle, as that is based on the existence of the humans that observe it (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human"). My argument had nothing to do with life, and I intentionally went through and tried to remove all references to life from the points listed. -Brandon Carter himself apparently said the term anthropic was a misnomer. I deliberately put ‘life' in brackets, but the term is applied both to life and to the cosmos. Dawkins devotes two chapters to it, claiming that it is an alternative to design, and laughing at the fact that theists use the same principle to justify their faith - all as I have described in my post, and as you describe below:
 
TONY: However, "if the universe (and life) was not as it is, it would either not exist or it would not be as it is" is not the argument at all. It would be better stated as "If the parameters of physics were not as they are, the universe could not exist. Period." Not that it could not exist in it's current state, it simply could not exist.-You wrote that the universe is fine tuned “for the universe as we know it to even exist”. I see no difference between “as we know it” and “in its current state”. If the parameters of physics were not as they are, they would be different, and so we might have a different universe. Nobody knows what is possible because we have nothing to compare our universe to, and so both sides insist that because the universe is as it is, it has to be as it is, and somehow that supports their case. I still see this “if” as a dead end.
 
TONY: I've never denied that believing in God was a leap of faith, but a person of reason is lead to the edge of that chasm by reason and careful consideration of the facts. I would love for someone to show me the proof of dark matter or dark energy outside of what is needed to balance an equation on paper, or even the proof of evolution outside of speculative fairy tales with minimal substance (that need constant revision, I might add, when the data does not fit the theory).-There are two chasms. A person of reason will agree that there is no evidence that chance can create life. A person of reason will agree that there is no evidence of a vast, eternal, sourceless, superintelligent mind/power/being that somehow knew from nothing how to create a universe and life. A person of reason can then decide to leap towards chance, or leap towards God, and fill the gaps in his/her knowledge with all kinds of unprovable theories. Or a person of reason can decide not to leap at all.