rationalskepticism.org

Shrunk wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:This universe is just one where life is feasible in some tiny spots here and there. A well designed universe that was designed for life would surely be more efficient. If I leave the surface of this earth for only 30 kilometers, I am sucking pretty much on vacuum. Pretty piss-poor design if you ask me. Most of THIS sun's energy is "wasted" on empty space, or dead worlds. Good design?? The universe is not eternal-good design????

amused can certainly speak for himself, but I think he's making a more subtle and reasonable point than this. He seems to be suggesting that there may be natural forces or factors that favour a dynamic, changing universe settling into a state that allows complex entities, such as living organisms, to arise. Much in the same way that evolution, though proceeding without a defined goal or impetus from a "designer", nonetheless is predisposed to give rise to certain biological structures that give the appearance of design.

If that's not his point, I'll gladly take credit for it. I don't think it's a position I would advocate myself, but it's one that I think is worthy of serious consideration, without just being dismisssed as covert theism.

Phillip Ball, in naturenews wrote:... “Quantum mechanics forbids a single history.” says Hertog ... in response to a problem raised by 'string theory', one of the best hopes for a theory of everything. String theory permits innumerable different kinds of universe, most of them very different from the one we inhabit. Some physicists suspect that an unknown factor will turn up that rules out most of these universes.
But Hawking and Hertog say that the countless 'alternative worlds' of string theory may actually have existed. We should picture the Universe in the first instants of the Big Bang as a superposition of all these possibilities, they say; like a projection of billions of movies played on top of one another.
This might sound odd, but it is precisely the view adopted by quantum theory. Think of a particle of light reaching our eye from a lamp. Common sense suggests that it simply travels in a straight line from the bulb to the eye. But to make correct predictions about the particle's behaviour, quantum mechanics must consider all other possible paths too, including ones in which, say, the photon bounces around the walls thousands of times before reaching us.
This summation of all paths, proposed in the 1960s by physicist Richard Feynman and others, is the only way to explain some of the bizarre properties of quantum particles, such as their apparent ability to be in two places at once. The key point is that not all paths contribute equally to the photon's behaviour: the straight-line trajectory dominates over the indirect ones.
Hertog argues that the same must be true of the path through time that took the Universe into its current state. We must regard it as a sum over all possible histories.