An introduction...
"In
1973, in a lecture to the International Astronomical Union in
Poland, the physicist and cosmologist Brandon Carter called
attention to something he called "the anthropic
principle"… Carter, of Cambridge University, pointed
out, "life had to be, in effect, "pre-planned"
from the very origin of the cosmos. In order to get life to
appear in the universe billions of years after the universe
began, you had to start planning very early--from the first
nanosecond of the universe's coming into being. The possibility
of producing life depended on everything's being "just
right" from the very start--everything from the values of
fundamental forces like electromagnetism and gravity, to the
relative masses of the various subatomic particles, to things
like the number of neutrino types at time 1 second, which the
universe has to "know" already at 10-43 second. The
slightest tinkering with a single one of scores of basic values
and relationships in nature would have resulted in a universe
very different from the one we inhabit--say, one with no stars
like our sun, or no stars, period. Far from being accidental,
life appeared to be the goal toward which the entire universe
from the very first moment of its existence had been
orchestrated, fine tuned."
Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence: the reconciliation of faith and
reason in a postsecular world (Rocklin: Prima Publishing, 1999),
pp 7-8.
