Senior Expert
Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,377
USofA
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With the same argument you could "prove" that no one would ever win in a lottery due to the improbability of this.
Please expand on this. My birth statement is factual: if my mom and dad hadn't procreated, I would not be alive, yet these is no mystery to my existence or how I came to be. However, your universal birth statement is not factual: if the constants do not align correctly, we have no way of knowing that in fact CB life won't again exist at some point in time in the past or future. But I have no idea where your lottery statement fits in.
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There are millions of lottery tickets issued, thus the probability of someone winning is a hundred percent.
Absolutely not...the probability of someone winning is not 100%...We see empirical evidence of this all the time: Tickets can get lost and people may not know they win and thus never claim their prize. As a matter of fact, this causes the jackpot to increase and leads to much joy and fanfare in the US.
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Were there only one ticket ever issued, winning would certainly require some further explanation - at least for a curious scientist.
Assuming I don't lose the winning ticket, this is an example of pulling a mystery out of circular logic...One winning ticket is issued, I have that ticket, so I win. What further explanation is needed?
A curious scientist with only one data point would hardly spend any time musing on how that one data point came to be...they would just accept that this is all they can get for the time being and move on. Remember that scientists are not numerologist...we use numbers as a tool, not as a divining method...if we see "42" come out of our calculations, we don't instantly scream "OMG, Douglas Adams was right! How did he know??" nor if we see 666 do we scream "The devil!! the devil!!". Likewise, realizing that the constants of nature are balanced (for now) so that we can live is just a fact and inspires no more scientific curiosity than wondering why DOG spelled backwards is GOD.
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The same applies to the universe.
I assume that in your analogy, the tickets are the universe. If that's the case (and again, I'm working with a core mis-understanding of what you are trying to say with your lottery analogy), then you are saying that if one million universes are issued, teh probability of life existing on one of them is 100% (where life=winning) since we are alive. But by using the lottery, you have skewed the analogy to state that only one universe can have life and the others can't (since in a lottery, only one person wins). But it is certainly possible that in this galactic lottery, everyone is a winner (CB or non-CB life is everywhere) and since we only know that we are the winner (and don't know the other winners), we feel like something special is going on.
Another way to interpret your analogy is that the tickets are the constants in nature. In this case, the millions of lottery tickets represent the millions of possibilities for these constants to combine. But as above, you are working with the assumption that only one ticket wins (our ticket; our constants) and that the other tickets are losers. Again we don't know that this is anything special since we have no way of stating that other non-CB life doesn't exist nor that other unknown physical processes won't again lead to the conditions necessary for CB life.
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BTW I like the rock images, too.
In their case, one would never question that some concrete physical process or at worst, just "coincidence" enabled them to balance, yet when people are confronted with balance on a cosmic scale, there "obviously" must be something non-physical to it.
Ultimitely, these questions remain in the realm of philosophy and meta-physics and thus everyone's opinion is as good as the other, but they do not cross over into the realm of science.
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