Quote:
Originally Posted by Seaver
The fact that our planet is the perfect distance, happened to get hit by a meteor to create a moon which prevents the large wobbles that throw the planet in to chaos and kept a very dense core to prevent our atmosphere from being stripped like on Mars... etc etc etc.
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Sorry. Okay, so the cosmological argument.
The way evolution works is that the traits with more survivability tend to be carried on and become the norm. If we were farther from the sun, humans as we know them today probably would be here, but there's no reason to assume that life in some form wouldn't, in fact I'd say it's a safe bet based on what we know of evolution. Look at the water bear (tardigrade). If a life form can survive temperatures as high as 151 °C (424 K) and as low as –200 °C (70 K), can survive pressures as low as a complete vacuum and as high as 1200 atmospheres, can survive a decade in a dehydrated state, and can take normally lethal doses of gamma rays... it seems silly to me to suggest that if such things were different there couldn't be life.
The true weakness of the cosmological argument is really quite simple: we have no way of determining the likelihood of the way things are because we cannot test it against the way things aren't. We cannot assume the status quo is in any way unlikely until it can be compared to other possible outcomes. We don't have data on other possible outcomes, therefore it's at best premature to make even a guess as to how "fine tuned" the universe is.