Evidence · Case 09 · Atheism
The anthropic reply and the firing-squad response (John Leslie)
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Of course we observe a life-permitting universe. If it were not life-permitting we would not exist to observe anything, so no designer is needed, or so the objection goes. But as the philosopher John Leslie illustrated: imagine fifty trained marksmen fire at you and every one misses. Saying “I could not have observed it otherwise” is true, yet it does nothing to explain why they all missed. Observer selection explains why we see what we see, not why the tuning is there to be seen.
Sources
- Simon Friederich, “Fine-Tuning,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on anthropic reasoning and Leslie’s firing-squad analogy (opens in a new tab)
John Leslie, Universes (Routledge, 1989)
Objections & responses
- The firing squad analogy assumes we know the marksmen intended to hit you and that missing is improbable. For the constants we know neither. Doesn’t the analogy import the design conclusion into the setup?
The analogy isolates one point: I could not have observed otherwise does not explain why the improbable thing happened. That point holds regardless of whether the marksmen were aiming. The critic is right that the improbability of the constants is the disputed premise, which is the normalizability problem again. The firing squad answers the anthropic dismissal; it does not answer the probability question, and it should not be asked to.