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Comment by kghose | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

I can find nothing unnatural about the existence of a single universe with particular constants that give rise to life that then studies the universe. There is nothing in this that leads inevitably to the conclusion someone has been rolling the dice many times until this came about.

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It sounds like you're thinking of the "strong anthropic principle" where the constants have to be set so as to produce life at some point in the future. It leaves the question as to how that worked unless you cite devine intervention. I find the multiverse idea easier to believe.

Most large religions today require not a weak or strong anthropic principle, but a "doubly strong" one, so that not only the initial constants of the Universe and the subsequent random events leading to intelligent life on Earth are somehow fine-tuned, but also various historical events after intelligence emerged. Which events would depend on which particular religion, e.g. parting the Red Sea for Christianity, the revelations to Mohammed for Islam, etc.

This is exactly the way I think about it too. it doesn't seem reasonable to assume vastly more complicated universal structure based on nothing more than our own existence.

The funny thing is that the Antrophic principle believes in some kind of 'true randomness' in this way - even if it is just about the constants for the otherwise deterministic universe :-)

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