To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.

It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.

According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe.

The essence of life is to live and die for the principle of the right

You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the
earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it
goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each
twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines,
and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe,
and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not
shine for some one mountain, or for some one island,
or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but
for other planets as well as our earth. If you would
only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground
beneath your own feet, you might all understand this,
and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines
for you, or for your country alone.

Custom is the principle magistrate of man's life