the anthropic principle, explained by a kid

I think I used to sound this smug and self-assured when I was that age. I was a creationist through part of high school. The above kid, in talking about how "fine-tuned" the universe is (we should note that he's obviously memorized a script), is essentially articulating what is called the anthropic principle—the idea that the universe is "tuned" in exactly the right way for life to exist, a set of circumstances so improbable that it's more likely the result of conscious intention than of random forces. The anthropic principle subdivides into strong and weak forms. The AI god explains this fairly well:

Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): Proposed by Brandon Carter, this argues that our location (time and place) in the universe is restricted by the need for observers to exist. It implies that we shouldn't be surprised to find the universe is "just right" for us, because if it weren't, we wouldn't be here.
Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP): This suggests that the universe must have properties that make life inevitable, arguing that life is not just a fortunate accident.

The weak anthropic principle sounds a lot like the argument against my constant griping that people in Korea seem programmed to get in my way whenever I'm walking anywhere. Here are a couple of examples of what I see all the time: I'm walking in a crowd, and the Korean in front of me just stops for no apparent reason or does a U-turn for no apparent reason; it's 2:00 in the morning, and I'm about to cross a bike path when, out of nowhere, a bike whizzes by and forces me to wait before I cross. Thwarted yet again! Or if I'm walking on a pedestrian path next to a bike path, at least one oncoming cyclist will obnoxiously swerve onto the pedestrian path. This sort of shit happens to me so often that I've begun to think Koreans are programmed to deliberately get in my way. Another example: On a wide path, a Korean walking toward me (imagine that I'm walking on what is to me the right side of the road/path/whatever) will swerve, for no apparent reason, until he's almost brushing by me. This happens to me a lot on subway platforms. Why? Because Koreans are social and love human contact? Because the guy is deliberately being annoying? So the counterargument to my observations and pet theories is this: You need to be there to observe and experience these things, so if people are "deliberately getting in your way" or "deliberately thwarting you," it's in part because YOU happen to be there! So in a way, you're partially the cause of your own problems! That's a cousin of the weak anthropic principle.

Of course, things like the anthropic principle and intelligent design aren't evidence that it's the Christian God who has done all of this. Maybe it's a gigantic, Men in Black-style alien who created our cosmos. The kid is also making the hermeneutical faux pas of treating the Bible as a scientific text, spelling out cosmology long before modern science ever did. I'd argue that this sort of genre mistake will only lead one down a path of self-delusion, and that a sacred text like the Bible has value as a way of reckoning with axiology and possibly certain other types of philosophy; it has little value as a scientific text or as a reliable historical text.

Another thing to note is that, if the probability of my meeting Korean cyclists on an otherwise-empty path is vanishingly small, and yet these meetings keep happening without the aid of divine intervention (i.e., naturalistically), then why should we take the anthropic principle as anything other than a law of nature, i.e., simply a function of how matter behaves? Why involve God at all? Maybe there's just some mathematical rule that explains the situation.

And why would a religious viewpoint that already takes nature-violating miracles for granted even want to take the "scientific" route, anyway? Bizarre. You can't argue science out of one side of your mouth while quoting scripture out of the other side. If your purpose is to persuade atheists, citing scripture isn't going to help you at all, no matter how well that tactic plays with the home crowd. You have to speak your opponent's language to persuade him.

Anyway, the kid seems pretty smart. I'll be curious to see how his views evolve over time. A lot of those religiously motivated This can't just be coincidence! arguments usually stem from a lack of understanding of deep time, which is a factor in how random processes can lead to successful self-organization, which in turn ratchets upward toward increasing complexity and sophistication, but always within thermodynamic constraints, i.e., never violating physics.