I’ve heard it argued that the fact that life exists on earth, despite all the odds against it, proves a divine hand. But we are here, just as someone somewhere will eventually win the PowerBall. If we weren’t here, the question simply wouldn’t be asked, (at least not by earthlings,) but that wouldn’t prove that a divine being was absent.
I’m not explaining myself very well, I’m afraid. I am not interested in a religious discussion in the least - just with whether or not this is faulty logic, and if so, if it has a name.
I don’t know that this one has a particular name, but if you lay out a normal deck of cards and a reversed-color deck of cards end to end, the probability of getting the arrangement you did is far lower than whatever number you might have in mind for the probability of life arising on earth. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
That is, the logical fallacy isn’t survivorship bias; but the fact that, if we didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be here to discuss the absolute craziness of our existence, is something like survivorship bias.
No, the anthropic principle is the argument that the existence of life proves the existence of God, not the logical fallacy that is embodied by that argument, which is what the OP is seeking. A quick look at several sites that explain logical fallacies doesn’t reveal anything that closely matches this case.
I’d call it Pangloss’ fallacy, referring to Voltaire’s Candide, in which that character remarks that God obviously gave us noses so that we would have something on which to rest our spectacles. (Of course, Pangloss is guilty of many other fallacies.)
Not according to Wikipedia, or any other source I’m familiar with, it’s not. In brief, from that site:
The three primary versions of the principle, as stated by Barrow and Tipler (1986), are:
* Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."
* Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP): "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."
* Final Anthropic Principle (FAP): "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."
No mention of God in the entire page. Now the SAP proponents are pretty much all ID proponents, true, but the AP itself contains no such supposition.
The problem lies in the begged question in your first sentence “despite all the odds against it”. We simply do not know what the odds were, for or against. As others have mentioned the name for the concept is the Anthropic Principle and you can get an excellent summary of it here .
As it’s essentially a truism the logic is unassailable - the universe must be such as to support life, since we are here. The question it triggers is, how likely was that? If it was very likely, then there is nothing to be explained. If very unlikely, then there is explaining to do: a creator is one explanation, an infinity of universes another.
Correct. The OP is describing something closer to Intelligent Design*, and it is indeed faulty logic. That discipline, if it could be called one, is full of logical fallacies. Take your pick.
*But it appears the OP has mixed parts of ID with TAP.
The Anthropic Principle is not a fallacy in itself - it is simply a statement that any scientific theory must account for conditions which accomodate life. I suggest that the fallacy in this case is simply erroneous a posteriori reasoning: that because a certain combination is vastly unlikely, it could not occur even given a vast number of attempts.
I might just as well walk past several cars having different number plates and remark that that sequence is impossible since it is so unlikely.
“When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable.” --John Allen Paulos
Rarity by itself shouldn’t necessarily be evidence of anything.
Argument from design makes the argument that the huge odds are proof in some intentional design.
According to the Anthropic Principle, we are entitled to infer facts about the universe and its laws from the undisputed fact that we (we anthropoi, we human beings) are here to do the inferring and observing.
IIRC, the anthropic principle isn’t a fallacy, is it?
Regardless, I’ve never heard a name for the reasoning described in the OP. While there may be many co-morbidities, so to speak, the reasoning itself is more a misunderstanding of probability & statistics than it is a classic fallacy.
One needs to distinguish between the probability of a particular unusual event happening and any unusual event happening. The odds of something unusual happening is very high; however, the odds of a particular unusual event happening is very low. When we comb through past events, we will find unusual ones with high frequency and that is to be expected.
Reasoning backwards from the existence of an unusual event becomes problematic because we can’t tell if it happened because of some intervention, or if it happened because if it was the one long-shot to obtain out of a million possible long-shots that could have occured.
As an example, if each person in the country flipped a coin ten times, odds are quite a few people will get ten heads in a row even though the odds of a particular person getting ten heads in a row are very low. This doesn’t imply that those doing the flipping were masters of slight of hand, or that they channelled divine intervention.
So if it is true that the probability of life occuring on Earth is very low, the fact that it did occur is not a sign of intervention for the same reason that a great run of rolls at craps is not a sign of intervention. Unusual things happen. That’s life.
According to the Anthropic Principle, we are entitled to infer facts about the universe and its laws from the undisputed fact that we (we anthropoi, we human beings) are here to do the inferring and observing.
Argument from design makes the argument that the huge odds are proof in some intentional design. This begs the question, because it assumes something was designed.
The argument from design is one of the “proofs” for the existence of God. In its basic form, this argument infers from the intelligent order and created beauty of the universe that there is an intelligent Designer and Creator of the universe. The argument has been criticized for begging the question: it assumes the universe is designed in order to prove that it is the work of a designer.
In its most basic form, it sounds like a misapplied concept of conditional probabilities. Certainly, the odds that perfect conditions would exist for life to arise may be astronomically small. But the odds of an intelligent being wondering about its existence given that such a being exists are much much more likely.
It’s like the odds of flipping n coins in a row as heads are 1:2[sup]n[/sup], but the odds of flipping n heads in a row given n-1 are still 1:1
The argument that life is exceedingly unlikely to form on any given planet, and that there must therefore have been some a priori reason to cause it to form on this planet, is a case of the logical error known as selection bias. Our sample size is restricted by one of the very properties we hope to study in our sample.
This comes up often in astronomy: As another example, if you classify the stars seen in the night sky, you’ll find that a great many of them are giants, but none are red dwarfs. One might infer from this that giants are much more common than red dwarfs, but this is incorrect. The reason we see more giants than dwarfs is that the giants are much brighter and easier to see.
The Anthropic Principle, in its weakest form, is simply a recognition of the fact that any statement about factors favorable to life or to intelligent life is subject to a selection bias.