In reply to deepsoup:
> And what I'm describing as staggeringly unlikely is first that there was the advent of life (which as Jon points out may be totally extraordinary or very run of the mill, we have no idea)
It's only unlikely if we insist that the purely 'dice-throwing' picture is the correct one. We don't know this at all. And there seems to be quite a logical tension between the idea that it could be both 'very run of the mill' and 'staggeringly unlikely' at the same time.
> but also that some billions of years after that event, after an immensely long and complex process of evolution and extinction there arose large numbers of a very particular kind of argumentative ape, recognisably "us".
[[I still love Professor Wheeler's famous, esoteric comment that 'a human being is an atom's way of looking at itself.']]
> Go back in time and make a much, much smaller change than the absence of the Moon. Let's say a mere 66 million years ago that the Chicxulub Asteroid missed. Would we be here now? Not bloody likely. Call me "religious" if you like.
But wouldn't those collisions or near misses be quite likely either way, given the statistics I mentioned earlier? With, presumably, near misses millions of times more likely than collisions?
And, don't we have to be a bit careful in thinking that the old, essentially sterile, dice-throwing picture is correct? An idea that's already been undermined in quite a few ways by quantum physics. [Late at night - sterile isn't quite the word I'm looking for
] There could be 'other things' going on that we don't understand yet, and we can't even rule out the idea that the universe may be 'purposive' in a Kantian sense.