We are informed: Odds of our existence not infinitely small after all

Ethan Siegel: In order for you to exist, a great many unlikely events needed to unfold in exactly the way that they did.

That’s not as obvious as you think it is, Ethan. There may very well be nothing ‘unlikely’ about any of those events, providing they were under the strict control of a Creator.

E.Siegel: …. the Universe itself must have unfolded in such a way as to make all of this possible. Yet there's one thing we can be sure of in this entire series of unlikely events, occurring one after the other: nothing that occurred at any point had an infinitesimal likelihood.

Ethan, I take it that you assume the universe to be entirely physical. If so, consider the possibility that there was no way for the universe to produce life without external intelligent input. In that case events did take place with an ‘infinitesimal likelihood’ within a physical context. Origenes

Siegel attempt to marshall Bayesianism to make his case that vanishingly small odds make no difference. But, of course, it isn’t the odds of single events that we must consider, but the odds of complex patterns, not always dependent on each other.

Odd. I read Siegel's piece as being specifically about the odds of complex patterns. His point is simply that when one combines different events, each with probability >0, the probability of them all is >0. I think he is implicitly assuming conditional independence (there have to be some assumptions about the probabilities for his argument to be mathematically sound, but there are a few ways of setting this up). Bob O'H

I'd love to see a card shark sit down to a Poker game with these folks and see how long they hold onto their view of probabilities as the shark somehow manages to draw royal flush after royal flush. "Hey, the existence of that fifth royal flush in a row, like our existence, disproves the possibility that the odds against it were infinitely small. Care for another hand?" Phinehas

Hey! Circular reasoning! Well, there was a pretty large divergence that looked like a tangent locally; but, globally, it came back to sit on the a priori in the end; so maybe what we're witnessing is elliptical reasoning? So, if you accept their special plea against the structure of the metaphysical, they can then upgrade their effectively zero probability to not just a non-zero probability, but a probability of one. Sophi...Science! The materialist side of the Anthropic Principle is pretty much the Chapter 13 of materialist metaphysics. LocalMinimum