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Why There Is Something: The Anthropic Principle and Improbable Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Jonathan Katz
Jonathan Katz
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

The Anthropic Principle, in use by physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists, is currently under consideration by philosophers. This principle, in its various forms, appeals to man's existence as a constraint on our determination of natural laws and natural constants, as a principle of prediction, and, in its strongest form, as a principle of explanation which sanctions an argument for the universe being a product of design. What I shall endeavour to show here is (1) how this principle, in its various forms, is used in furthering our understanding of cosmology, and (2) why this principle cannot be used as a principle of explanation.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 111 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1988

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References

1 See, e.g., J. Leslie, “The Scientific Weight of Anthropic and Teleological Principles”, Gale, G., “Whither Cosmology: Anthropic, Anthropocentric, Teleological?”, in Rescher, N., ed., Current Issues in Teleology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 102–110, 111–119.Google Scholar

2 Carter, B., “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology”, in Longair, M. S., ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 291CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Dicke, R. H., “Dirac's Cosmology and Mach's Principle”, Nature 192 (11 4, 1961), 440–441CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dirac's response immediately following.

3 Carter, , “Large Number Coincidences”, 294.Google Scholar

4 Barrow, J. D., “Anthropic Definitions”, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 24 (1983), 149.Google Scholar

5 Gale, G., “The Anthropic Principle”, Scientific American 245 (12, 1981), 168 (my emphasis).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Hawking, S., “The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times”, in Longair, M. S., ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 285–286.Google Scholar

7 Gale, , “The Anthropic Principle”, 157Google Scholar, citing Dicke.

8 Barrow, “Anthropic Definitions”, 147ff.

9 Carter, , “Large Number Coincidences”, 295Google Scholar; while on 296 he remarks that our making “an even more general kind of prediction…” allows us to “…attempt to explain in this way…”.

10 Leslie, , “The Scientific Weight”, 21.Google Scholar

11 Hume, too, argues against the necessity of postulating a first cause to account for the apparent order in the universe. Such an “explanation”, he claims, is superfluous at best. As Hume puts it, “It is only to say that such is the nature of material objects…”. Hume, D., Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part 4.Google Scholar

12 This may depend both on the odds relative to the prior probabilities and on the “confidence level” we wish to achieve. E.g., six aces in succession on a die is more in need of an explanation than six heads tossed with a fair coin because of either (1) the deviation from the a priori statistical distribution, or (2) the assessment of the inductive grounds for the belief that this series is “typical”, or both. These are, of course, quite different criteria. See Venn, John, The Logic of Chance (3d ed.; New York: Chelsea, 1888)Google Scholar, Chapter 14, §§4, 5, and 6.

13 Included in these ratios might well be the fact that given × amount of mass we should then expect an expansion speed of y. This “internal ” explanation short-circuits the cosmologists' need for an explanation; the amount of mass gets explained by what we would expect, given such-and-such expansion speed.

14 Leslie, , “The Scientific Weight”, 6.Google Scholar

15 Sometimes the prejudice is expressed this way: rather than broaden our conception of explanation to include this extreme possibility (of irreducible indeterminism), we should maintain our previous explanatory standards and admit that we have no (complete) explanation (in Q. M.).

16 Leslie, , “The Scientific Weight”, 18.Google Scholar

17 Gale, , “The Anthropic Principle”, 154.Google Scholar