Universal Perfection

And what would it take to convince you that it can? Nothing?In fact, the physics behind how this can happen is understood. There are lots of details of course, but there is clearly nothing stopping it from happening. What do you think does?Mike, you are entitled to your beliefs. Just understand that they have no science behind them at all. None, zip,nada. From a scientific persprective you are simply wrong! You're inability to accept something because you both don't like it and because you haven't put an once of real effort into understanding it means nothing outside of your tightly bounded view of the world.Believe what you will. Do not think for a minute that you can make any claims about what science teaches us about the world around us.

I think this point has been made before but let me try again.What if the conditions here were not "just right"? The answer is easy: we would not be here. The question doesn't mean very much since if we can ask it the conditions are "just right". There isn't any other possible answer.In addtion, we don't yet know enough to have any idea of whether there is any other possibility. It could be that the universe didn't have any other way to be.Let's see if a Theory of Everything tells us about what can happen and what must happen. I hope to live long enough to see some real results in that area.

As Rei notes, you card shuffling analogy is off base. For one thing, in the analogy we are told that the machine ARE able to draw any cards at random. As I pointed out we don't yet know if any other possible universe can exist. We don't know how much room there is to wiggle the physical constants.Secondly, we have forgotten someones comment that the universe isn't fine tuned for us. We are fine tuned to it! There is a difference there. This is about what Rei is saying.

/* NosyNed */ I don't happen to understand what is the problem with a particular way of noting who is saying what. It is better that it be there than not.

A couple of points if I may:1) You are being too restrictive in what you include in the "emperical evidence". The chemical properites of silicon is, for example, additional emperical evidence. However, I haven't seen you (crash) post any references to either experiments or calculations to say that some life like properties are possible. Nor has DNA posted anything to exclude the possibility.2)Crash The undecidability of your dichotomy is evidence for our view and a damning counterstroke against yours. [/qs] I don't think this is doing any more than demonstrating it is undecidable with the present information. No one wins this arguement, there isn't enough data to settle it.

That's right Mr Jack. That is one thing that is true. Even the archaea are LAWKI. We are all cousins .The step to being able to talk about anything else is a big challenge.

How is this underhanded? Is what Crash quoted not a quote of yours?