
An artistic rendition of the anthropic principle, i.e. the supposition that humans occupy a privileged central position in the universe, because god made the constants that way, as opposed to Copernican principle, i.e. the supposition that humans do not occupy a privileged position in the universe. (Ѻ)

An artistic rendition of the anthropic principle, i.e. the supposition that humans occupy a privileged central position in the universe, because god made the constants that way, as opposed to Copernican principle, i.e. the supposition that humans do not occupy a privileged position in the universe. (Ѻ)

In science, anthropic principle, aka the "fine tuning argument", is an idea which posits that the universe possesses many of its extraordinary properties because they are necessary for the existence of life, according to which, based on this theory, humans are conceived to occupy a central place in the universe. [8]

Carter
In 1970, Australian theoretical physicist Brandon Carter, at the Clifford Memorial meeting in Princeton, introduced ideas, unpublished at that point, about what he called an “anthropic principle”, a general “reaction against exaggerated subservience to the Copernican principle”, namely the premise that “we must not assume gratuitously that we occupy a privileged central position in the universe, according to which, in the strong position extension of this logic, that “our position cannot be privileged in any sense.” Carter in opposition to this “dogma” as he calls it then, citing American physicist Robert Dicke (1961), then concludes that this is untenable because:

(a) Special favorable conditions (temperature, chemical environment, etc.) are prerequisite for our existence.
(b) The universe evolves and is by no means spatially homogeneous on a local scale.

Carter then defines his so-called anthropic principle as follows:

“What may be termed the anthropic principle [states] that what we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers. Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent.”

He then goes on to cite examples of what he calls “large number coincidences”, e.g. the supposed “coincidence” that all stars, whether red giants, white dwarfs, or neutron stars, etc., always have a mass equal in order of magnitude to the inverse of the gravitational coupling constant, etc. The long and the short of his argument, as people have taken it, being that these supposed or rather conceived-to-be formulaic “coincidences” are evidence that the universe, or rather the fundamental constants of the universe, were fine-tuned by God for humans. The so-called strong version of this anthropic principle, summarized by Paul Davies (1982), is the supposition: “The universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.” [1]

Davies
English physicist Paul Davies is one who has spent a considerable amount of time ruminating on the pros and cons of variants of the so-called anthropic principle. In the mid-1960s, as an undergraduate physics student, he read English astronomer Fred Hoyle’s 1957 science fiction novel The Black Cloud, in which a large cloud of gas from interstellar space arrived in the solar system, which was said to be ‘alive’. Davies was intrigued by this idea, in his own retrospect words: [3]

“How can a cloud be alive? I puzzled over this at length. Surely gas clouds just obey the laws of physics? How could they exhibit autonomous behavior, have thoughts, make choices? But, then, it occurred to me, all living things supposedly obey the laws of physics.”

Hoyle’s living cloud left Davies ‘baffled and vaguely disturbed’, leaving him questioning the ‘what exactly is life question’ and ‘when did it start?’ issue. Next, Davies’ PhD advisor (Michael Seaton or Sigurd Zienau) then gave him a copy of Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner’s 1961 essay “The Probability of the Existence of a Self-Reproducing Unit” which purported to prove that a physical system cannot make a transition from a nonliving state to a living state without contravening the laws of quantum physics, arguing to the effect, according to Davies, that ‘something funny must have gone on when life started.’ [4]

Davies supervisor then passed him Australian astrophysicist Brandon Carter’s circa 1970 paper on the ‘anthropic principle’ (a term he coined), which argues to affect that the laws of nuclear physics are fine-tuned to make carbon in stars, and hence predisposed to the development of life, and hence anthropocentric laws are made to favor the development of human life, in short. Davies then worked under Hoyle and with Carter for two years at Cambridge, from 1970 to 1972. During this period he chanced across a copy of Erwin Schrodinger’s famous 1944 booklet What is Life?, as we all have, which gave Davies the view that biological organisms can be explained by physics. This seems to have been Davies first indoctrination into the basics of the thermodynamics of life and his later circa 1980s gravitational entropy theory of life. In 1999, Davies, in fact, declared the second law to the "ultimate problem of biogenesis". In his 2003 The Origin of Life, Davies attempts to answer the question: [5]

“Is life written into the laws of nature, or just a bizarre accident, unique in the universe? How can a mix of non-living chemicals be transformed into something as complex as the living cell?

In 2006, Davies, in his The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?, pictured adjacent, in which he argues that the earth, with its so-called "bio-friendly" conditions habitable zone, was fine-tuned by accident, and found in one of many universes. [6]


American astronomer Neil Tyson ridiculing the “fine tuning argument” and “intelligent design”, by showing how many ways the universe is not suited for “life” (powered-CHNOPS+ geometries).

American astronomer Neil Tyson ridiculing the “fine tuning argument” and “intelligent design”, by showing how many ways the universe is not suited for “life” (powered-CHNOPS+ geometries).

Religion | Science
Religion and science reconcilers frequently invoke Carter’s anthropic principle, in a number of various guises, to argue, vicariously, that “God fine-tuned the universe or the constants of the universe for man!”, or some variant along these lines. (Ѻ)

In 1993, German chemist, philosopher, and geneticist Friedrich Cramer, in his “The Entropic Versus the Anthropic Principle: on the Self-Organization of Life”, pits up Clausius’ second law against Carter’s anthropic principle, concluding frankly that the notion of “self-organization” is nothing but something that lets the metaphysical into physics (see: ontic openings) and hence justifies the notion of creation by God. [2] The following is one recent example:

“The 2013 article ‘Does Our Solar System Exist in Region of the Universe that’s Just Right for Life?” (Ѻ), asks: ‘why does the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life? The logic behind this question, sometimes known as the anthropic principle, says that's why we are here today, able to study the universe and learn about its laws. But if any of these constants were slightly different, we could never have come in to exist in the first place.’ You will see that your own scientists are supporting me in saying that constants are environment dependent. And now I leave it your judgment if I am 200 years backdated.”
— Mirza Beg (2014), “Beg-Thims dialogue” (post #17), Sep 3

The gist of this argument, in short, is something along the lines of the assertion that the constants of the universe are designed, by God, to bring into existence intelligent observers, e.g. if “α” (alpha), the fine-structure constant:

$\alpha = \frac{k_\mathrm{e} e^2}{\hbar c}$

which encompasses a ratio of four fundamental physical constants, namely: e, the electric charge, ħ (h/2π ), the reduced Planck constant, ke, the Coulomb constant, and c the speed of light, to change by 4%, stellar fusion would not produce carbon, according to which, as English cosmologist John Barrow points out, carbon-based life would be impossible, i.e. if α were > 0.1, stellar fusion would be impossible and no place in the universe would be warm enough for life as we know it. [9]

Difficulties on theory
The central difficulty on theory with any and all types of anthropic principles, is that all variants of “anthropisms”, according to Ernst Haeckel (1895), are erroneous opinions: [10]

“What we may call 'anthropism' is that powerful and world-wide group of erroneous opinions which opposes the human organism to the whole of the rest of nature, and represents it to be the preordained end of the organic creation, an entity essentially distinct from it, a godlike being.”

In other words, to think that the universe is fine-tuned to make "carbon" (the intelligent element behind human brains) is no more tenable than the alternative assertion that the universe is fine tuned to make "silicon" (the intelligent element behind computer CPU brains), the latter being what might be referred to as "siliconism" or in this case an "silicon-ic principle", if one were to argue that the constants of the universe are fine tuned to make silicon-based life or correctly silicon-based animation (e.g. a robot), as life is something that does not exist (see: defunct theory of life). Both modes of reasoning are excursions into inanity.

The long and the short of the correct representation of the crux of the issue is that any when CHNOPS+ system of elements is in the so-called "habitable zone" around a medium sized star, powered animate intelligent behavior will tend to result, given enough rotation cycles of heat input, owing to a combination of the quantum electrodynamic animate properties of the carbon atom. In other words, using the silicon-based / carbon-based animation comparison, to call one type of animation, e.g. carbon-based, by the term "life" and another, e.g. silicon-based, as non-life, is but pure anthropism, plain and simple, and hence "erroneous" logic as Haeckel puts it, not to mention the secondary erroneous assertion that carbon-animation or humans are privileged types of atomic geometries.

References
1. Davies, Paul. (1982). The Accidental Universe (pg. 120). CUP Archive.
2. Cramer, Friedfrich. (1993).“The Entropic Versus the Anthropic Principle: on the Self-Organization of Life”, in: The Anthropic Principle: Proceedings of the Second Venice Conference on Cosmology and Philosophy (pgs. 117-27). Cambridge University Press.
3. Davies, Paul. (1999). The 5th Miracle: the Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (cloud, pg. 14). Orion Productions.
4. Wigner, Eugene. (1961). “The Probability of the Existence of a Self-Reproducing Unit”, in: The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays in to Michael Polanyi on his Seventieth Birthday, 11 March 1961 (ch. 19, pgs. 231-). Free Press.
5. Davies, Paul. (2003). The Origin of Life (abs). Penguin.
6. Davies, Paul. (2006). The Goldilocks Enigma: Why the Universe is Just Right For Life? Hoiughton Miflin Harcourt.
7. (a) Dicke, Robert H. (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle” (abs), Nature, 440-41.
(b) Carter, Brandon. (1973). “Larger Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principles in Cosmology”, Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, International Astronomical Union / Union Astronomique Internationale, 63:291-298.
(c) Brandon Carter – Wikipedia.
8. Bothamley, Jennifer. (2002). Dictionary of Theories: One Stop to more than 5,000 Theories (pg. 126). Visible Ink.
9. Barrow, John D. (2001). “Cosmology, Life, and the Anthropic Principle”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 950(1):139-53.
10. Haeckel, Ernst. (1895). The Riddle of the Universe: at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (translator: Joseph McCabe) (anthropism, pg. 11). Harper & Brothers, 1905.

Further reading
● Bertola, F. and Curi, Umberto. (1993). The Anthropic Principle (Clausius coined ‘heat death’ in 1865, pg. 69). Cambridge University Press.

External links
● Anthropic principle – Wikipedia.