The Synthropic Principle - Part 1

A few decades back, some scientific philosophers put together something called "The Anthropic Principle". It's a philosophical hand-wave to explain why there logically is no need for God, and therefore there is no God. Data Scientists and Statisticians could look at it as a sort of mega-version of Bayes Theorem, and it's phrased about like this:

1) Assume that life arises in a universe with a particular set of universal constants and conditions.

2) That universe must therefore have a set of constants and conditions that are conducive to life existing.

3) Therefore the perfection of those constants and conditions with regard to the formation of life is unremarkable... or there would be no one to remark on them.

Now, there's nothing fallacious about that particular set of sentences.

However, the philosophers then continue ...

4) Therefore, there is no need for a god to explain the perfection of the constants with regard to creating life.

...which, again, is unobjectionable on its face, although there are some unexamined embedded assumptions that we'll get to in a moment.

It's the next jump that is arbitrary, silly and unwarranted.

5) Therefore, since the existence of a god is not required, by Occam's razor, the existence of any gods is disproven.

In fact, Occam's Razor doesn't work that way. Neither does Bayes' Theorem.

In order to use Occam's razor in this case, one would have to measure the likelihood of a universe being created or arising in some arbitrary method, compared to the likelihood of a universe being created by something that could be called a "god". Bayes' Theorem would refer to those estimates as "prior probabilities".

Where would one get scientific numbers for those measurements?

Nowhere.

They don't exist.

Any measurement assigned to these two items by a human being at our current level of knowledge is entirely arbitrary, and is entirely based on personal metaphysical belief.... whether the person calls themselves a "Christian" or calls themselves a "Scientist". (Note the capitals to denote the name of each respective religion.)

There is no data whatsoever about how hard it is to create a universe, or what percentage of thus created universes would have universal constants and conditions conducive for evolving life. At the time of the invention of the Anthropic Principle, there was no data about whether any type of beings *CAN* create universes, or whether, if they then did so, how many they would make, or what the purposes of those universes would be, or what percentage of those universes they made would be life-bearing versus non-life-bearing.

It was all made up.

That's the Anthropic Principle, in a nutshell.

"We want to disprove any specialness and any existence of god(s), and therefore we will make unexamined assumptions that support our circular reasoning."

All of which would not be subject to any further analysis, if it weren't for one historical accident.

We humans are at the point RIGHT NOW where we can, and do, create universes.

Which leads directly to what I call the Synthropic Principle.

By direct extension of the methods of the Anthropic Principle, it is pretty much certain that we are currently in a simulation, and that it was created by something that it would not be wrong to call "a god".

You want to know why?

Read part two.