Hi, Howard
While I have some respect for your thesis because it protects science from
meddling by people who are theists first and scientists perhaps not at all,
I disagree with it. I don't think that the "giftedness" of the Universe
requires that kind of explanation. If it did, then surely the creator of it
would *also* require that kind of explanation: How is it that there just
*happens* to be a God who can create universes, etc.? Why is there a God
rather than nothing at all? Surely this can't be chance, can it? The need
to regress to yet *another* creator to create creator is obvious.
At some point, something must simply *be*, and must simply have the basic
properties needed to produce the next level closer to where *we* are. I see
no reason nor value in going beyond some sort of basic, dumb "stuff" that
has one or two basic attributes that allow it, from time to time, at least,
to form at least one "universe" that can, somewhere within itself, support
the evolution of life.
*Any* universe must have causal order (that's part of what it *is* for
something actually to exist and have an identity). It may be rare that a
Big Bang cycle (or whatever) supports life, but, for us to be here, it only
has to happen once. Whether the capacity to support life (or molecules,
etc.) is universal or extremely rare, the intelligent beings in any
universe are likely, at least early on, to see their "universe" as all
there is or ever has been. This will possibly give them an extremely biased
statistical sample, to say the least, just as the visibility of existing
life on Earth is a biased sample with respect to the entire range of
genetic variations that might now exist if every genotype could somehow be
saved and replicated as if it was in a viable organism.
In short, although we just don't know, we don't really gain anything by
positing further-removed causes that themselves would then need even more
remarkable explanatory causes.
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