Rosio Pavoris

I’ve been hearing arguments like these a lot (you might not have been, depending on the types of people you hang with): the various physical constants (or other factors in our environment; the people I’m around tend cite the constants, YMMV) are all such that their values are ideal for the existence of life. The odds of these constants having these values are breathtakingly small, ergo, the universe must have been created by God.

I both like and am discouraged by this line of reasoning.
I like it because it’s dead simple to refute, and I get to quote Douglas Adams while doing it. I’m discouraged by it, because it’s dead simple to refute, and anyone capable of knowing what a physical constant is should be able to figure this out on his own.

The Douglas Adams quote, then. Or rather, Richard Dawkins quoting Douglas Adams.

[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

The actual quote goes on for a bit, but this is the bit that applies here.

Life as we know it arose in this universe, on this planet. Isn’t it to be expected that this universe and this planet are supremely suited to have life as we know it develop in and on it, then?
If they were different, a different kind of life would develop (and if they also developed intelligence [but not too much of it], they’d be asking the same question, no doubt), or none at all (in which case they wouldn’t even know, obviously).
This isn’t an argument for the existence of God. It’s an exercise in common sense, and a demonstration of your lack of it.

(I seem to link to Wikipedia a lot. Maybe I should write an extension to the WordPress parser that just converts, say, Richard Dawkins to <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins”>Richard Dawkins</a>. That shouldn’t be too hard to do.)