Gigachad Earth v Chud Sun

Your environment (for this example planet, but can be extended to other things like universe in general) is quite unique when compared to an average environment, as it is capable of supporting your existence. Taking it at face value you might say that the odds of you being alive right here right now on a livable planet are really small and that you're #blessed, because you don't believe yourself to be unique in any way and as such expect to see the "average" slice of the universe- a barren wasteland- which you don't. The anthropic principle (at least in one of its formulations, there's strong vs weak and different people phrase it differently, and there are also legitimate arguments against it) states that actually it is all but certain that you find yourself alive and on a planet that supports you being alive, as you shouldn't expect to observe the average slice of the universe. Instead you should expect to see the average slice of the universe that is capable of supporting observers, ie you. In other words- you aren't observing the average part of the universe as one might assume, but instead what the average observer in said universe is observing.

You might say "no shit, it's obvious that I don't observe environments in which I cannot exist in the first place", but I want to solidify the point with an example:

Say you live on a discrete, 1-dimensional ribbon and you're measuring some local, binary quantity which can be either 1 or 0. Say there are two theories- one that predicts that your measurements should randomly return 1 or 0, and second that predicts you should only ever measure 1.

So you run your measurement, move one step forward, run it again and repeat so 10 times until you have a string of 10 results, which happen to be 1111111111. What conclusions can you draw from it? Without anthropic principle, one would say that this is evidence for theory 1, as the likelihood of getting 10 ones in a row is 0.5^10=very small under theory 1, but the chance of getting ten ones under theory two is 100%. However, the TRVE ANTHROPIC TRVTHER would make a different argument- since you are not looking at a "random" slice of the universe, you cannot just treat each result in this string as an independent probability. Instead, it is a conditional probability under the conditions that allow you to observe it. Perhaps life can only exist in the part of the universe where this thing you're measuring takes the value of 1. And then, to gauge the probabilities, instead of treating each observation as independent you work with the whole string and have to ask yourself- if you performed this measurement at every point in the universe (assumed infinite for this example) and got an infinitely long binary string, what is the probability that at some point it would contain the sequence 1111111111 which you measured. And then you realize that under both theories 1 and 2, given infinite string, the sequence 1111111111 appears infinitely many times, and as such both theories are equally likely and hence you haven't extracted any information from your experiments.

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It's like this meme

The conditions of the universe and our local environment are exceedingly improbable to have occurred.

the universe in some sense compelled to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it.[4][5] A form of the latter known as the participatory anthropic principle, articulated by John Archibald Wheeler, suggests on the basis of quantum mechanics that the universe, as a condition of its existence, must be observed, thus implying one or more observers. Stronger yet is the final anthropic principle (FAP), proposed by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, which views the universe's structure as expressible by bits of information in such a way that information processing is inevitable and eternal.[4]

Basically there's a 1 in 10^50 chance of a universe to emerge from a big bang with constants that make it possible for things to work so we can live. Things like the gravitational force being too strong or too weak (and it's already oddly weak compared to other forces) mean that shit would be fricked from inception.

Counter arguments include: All those universes exist but we can only exist in the one that works, hence us being here. Which is still kinda weird that life would be that exceedingly rare, but maybe there's sentient dustclouds in other universes. If Everett's MWH is even valid.

Also the Axis of Evil is interesting (even the Wiki neurodivergent rationalist astroturfing crew wasn't able to bury it):

anomalies in the background radiation have been reported which are aligned with the plane of our solar system. These are unexplained by the Copernican principle and suggest that the solar system's alignment is special in relation to the background radiation of the universe

The "axis of evil" is a name given to the apparent correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It gives the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than might be expected by chance – a result which has been claimed to be evidence of a departure from the Copernican principle as assumed in the concordance model

Lawrence Krauss is quoted as follows in a 2006 Edge.org article:

The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is simply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Sounds r-slurred and I'm not even a religion strag

The weak anthropic principle (WAP)

It's the idea that in order for something to be observed it must allow for observers to exist. So in this case he is saying it's crazy how much protects us from dangers in the universe. But when you consider that only places like this could support life it isn't that crazy. Likely all planets supporting life have similar conditions. Tbh it doesn't actually say much. It just takes "WOW we are so lucky!" to "We exist therefore of course everything lines up with allowing us to exist." which kind of kills the awe-inspiring vibe.

So we either exist and observe a possible universe which allows us to observe it, or a different universe exists where we can't exist and thus can't observe it. In this case, it's crazy that Earth has all these things to support and protect life, until you realize that you are only able to think about this if the Earth has all of that stuff. Otherwise you don't exist.

I remember independently reaching this kind of conclusion after playing too much Spore when I was 12. It's not a very deep thought, imo. It's just kinda like “ah, yeah, obvious when you think about it.” Like realizing how every single other people has an entire life and set of circumstances for the first time.

"Yes, it could literally just be random chance that lead to humanity's existence"

Sorry man, I don't mean anything against you in particular, but you're like the third person to say that invoking anthropic principle is denying God. Why? I don't understand. I never made that claim. I think it's a bad argument against existence of God for many reasons. I'm a member of !catholics ffs. So why is the first reaction of so many people to claim that this is blasphemy? Anthropic principle says nothing about existence of God, and I didn't use it to disprove it either, I don't even see the relation

Is this because everyones exposure to it is through atheist debates or something like that? Just because it's a poor case against teleological argument doesn't mean that it's worthless, it can be applied in other spheres too. It only means that people who invoke the anthropic principle in attempts to disprove God misunderstand what it really says and misuse it

GOD? More like Get On Deez nutz

You might want to stop using rdrama else be doomed to heck

very well put