The Anthropic Principle

In order to move ahead empirically, we got away from a priori thinking about the material universe. The Medievalists thought that since circles were perfect figures, the sun, moon and planets must move around the earth attached to circular crystalline spheres. We shudder now at the assumptions underlying that thinking. Astronomers reacted by assuming that there should be no presuppositions guiding science. There was no basis for thinking at there was any plan in the univese at all. Things were not made for something. Particularly, the moral and spiritual history of man, however supposed, should not be accepted as determining anything about the external universe.

Having decided that for the discoverer there should be no plan in the universe, we let the searchlight of investigation shine dispassionately on data, and, a couple of centuries into the process, we find that in fact there is organization and plan aplenty in the universe around us. It has taken great complexity to produce us. Having decided that we arrived here by natural processes of evolution, we then discover that in some odd fashion, nature seems to be structured or designed to produce life. If most of the fundamental constants of nature were other than we find them to be, the universe would not be able to generate life and so produce observers.

This general observation that the universe presents itself as being precisely structured so as produce ourselves who become its observers has become in very recent times described as The Anthropic Principle.

There is a broad acceptance that the observation seems in some very real way to be “true” about the universe we inhabit. How to deal with this has become one of the sticky conundrums of modern thought.

Suppose, for instance, that we assume that universe construction is totally haphazard, and that nature has been trying for infinite eons to create different scenarios, and that most universes are formless and dead. By hypothesis, we wouldn’t be around to see what those universes would be like, nor would any of our hypothetical cosmic cousins. For their universes wouldn’t have produced them. Such a supposition would be a bit mindboggling, but, no matter. We need to turn this in our minds’ hand as many ways as possible.

We have not yet figured out how to assimilate this thinking into our scientific and humane endeavors. If our project continues to be to understand our universe and our place in it, this area of thought seems important. Likely, the future of the race will depend, possibly critically, on the general way we understand the basic constitution of reality.

The ancients thought that order in the cosmos entailed cosmic mind. Philosophers reached that conclusion two to three thousand years ago. But, were they correct? Or were they wrong?

The thing we are certain of is that we have a broadly divergent idea what the universe is really like, and that the process of discovery is still alive and well.