| otislotus said:
what takes more faith to believe? |
We know that our universe supports life because we're here to ask this kind of question. Therefore, the probability of our universe being the kind of universe that supports life is 100%. This is known as the 'anthropic principle' which says that since we're here, our universe must necessarily have constants and laws of physics that allow life. At the moment we know of only one universe, and that universe does support life. The probability then of any universe being able to support life is currently 100% until such time as we are certain that other universes exist. If I show you one side of a coin, you have no way of knowing if the probability of flipping a 'heads' is 100% or 50%. You don't know if both sides are 'heads' until you either look, or flip the coin and get a 'tails'.
The point I'm making is that the 'probability of a universe supporting life' you have quoted is a guess, nothing more. It is based on string theories and an estimated number of possible universes. Even if it is correct, there is still nothing for our universe to 'overcome'. Suppose your odds of winning the lottery are 1 in a million. It's unlikely you will win, but if 100 million people play the lottery, the odds of someone winning are high. The probability of a universe being the kind of universe that can support life might be small, but if you have a lot of possible universes then the probability that one of them will support life could be high. And, by the anthropic principle, we'd be living in that universe because in the others we wouldn't survive!
None of our scientific theories suggest that life got here 'by accident'. What we think is that there must be lots of planets on which conditions for life are met. We now have evidence of hundreds of solar systems besides our own, which suggests there could be lots of planets out there similar to the earth.
We don't know how life got started but we think over millions, even billions of years, some chemical or physical mechanism managed to produce self-replicating molecules and, eventually, the first single-celled organisms. Now this could be very, very, very improbable and still have happened. If there are a billion planets out there like earth, and the odds of life arising in this manner are one in a billion, then we'd expect one planet to have life. And here we are, asking the questions!
In other words, given the number of stars and the number of possible planets, the odds of life forming could be incredibly tiny and yet we'd still expect life to arise somewhere. Again, there's nothing to 'overcome' ... if we have a large number of universes or a large number of planets then the odds of one planet and one universe having life are not improbable.
Hey look, I can copy and paste aswell! Knowing the mathematics that made the guy arrive at that probability would also be nice.
