[User23]

The anthropic principle has equal explanatory power to “because it did.” Making up a story about a cosmic crow shitting out the universe has equal explanatory power and it at least offers a reason.

And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here!

Also you failed to explain why the universe is organized such that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of potential configurations such that you’re here to say it did. Why was there a quantum field to be in a vacuum state to begin with? Or whatever the leading explanation for the beginning of the “lol so random” cosmology is.

Remedial indeed.

[titzer]

The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was chosen.

The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some things, because they could as well as been randomly chosen and we'd still be here all the same with absolutely no why whatsoever.

[heavenlyblue]

> The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique.

It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.

[titzer]

> requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created

Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic string. Evolution is a selective tuning process; it works (figuratively) by rolling all the dice at once and keeping the dice that do match the magic string and then re-rolling the rest[1].

[1] Of course that's not how evolution actually works. It works by selecting very tiny slightly different versions of things in a biased way. Those biased versions of things just happen to be things that can make more of themselves, and so the system automatically selects for things that good at self-replicating and surviving. Evolution doesn't jump all over the place with infinite improbabilities, it is actually a very systematic and even somewhat predictable exploration of the fitness landscape.

[mrguyorama]

>Also you failed to explain why

Simply: Reality doesn't have "why"s. Reality has forces and fields or equivalent systems.

[User23]

Where did forces and fields or equivalent systems come from?

If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence of contemplation altogether.

I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it were.