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To: PatrickHenry
I've never been attracted to the "Weak Anthropic Principle. It's true that life has developed in the universe, and that we evolved here on earth, but to say that the universe was required to have conditions which make this possible is a bit of a stretch.

As I understand it, this is a bit of an overstatement of the WAP. Rather, I think that this:

Rather, our existence is possible because it is compatible with the universe. The universe was not made to be compatible with us.

...is very close to what the WAP actually is. IOW, what you say you agree with is really just a restatement of the WAP - I don't think you're really disagreeing with it much at all. Or, to put it another way, would you find this description more attractive?

The idea that we must observe that the universe contains properties compatible with the existence of an observer because if it did not, no one would be here to observe it, is called the anthropic principle or the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). The WAP is significant in that it makes the improbability of any one universe (i.e. our own) irrelevant. We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.

52 posted on 05/23/2002 10:40:00 AM PDT by general_re
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To: general_re; PatrickHenry
We only have the one example of a unverse. It's hard to say what might have been different another time. Very hard.
55 posted on 05/23/2002 11:07:37 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: general_re
Or, to put it another way, would you find this description more attractive?
The idea that we must observe that the universe contains properties compatible with the existence of an observer because if it did not, no one would be here to observe it, is called the anthropic principle or the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). The WAP is significant in that it makes the improbability of any one universe (i.e. our own) irrelevant. We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.

Perhaps I was thinking of the "Strong Anthropic Principle." What you described doesn't trouble me one bit. If indeed, we somehow discovered that we were not compatible with the universe, this would be evidence of something miraculous at work.

57 posted on 05/23/2002 11:15:34 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
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