Anthropic Principle Quotes

• A person whose skin is metallic can no more have its reproduction restricted than a black-skinned person. Regarding life as a form of machinery and intelligent machines as people without our environmental limitations is essential in understanding FAP, the Final Anthropic Principle, which deals with evolution in the far future.

  Frank J. Tipler

  Intelligent, People, Understanding

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• Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, " This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in; fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well! It must have been made to have me in it!

  Douglas Adams

  Witty, Morning, Thinking

  Douglas Adams (2005). “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, p.130, Del Rey

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• And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Intuition, Principles

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.166, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Why is there something rather than nothing?

  Frank Wilczek

  Faith And Reason, God Exists

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• As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency-or, rather, Agency-must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?

  George Greenstein

  Science, Agency, Origin Of Life

  George Greenstein (1988). “The symbiotic universe: life and mind in the cosmos”

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• A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

  Fred Hoyle

  Science, If There Is A God, Common Sense

  "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections". "Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics", volume 20, p. 16, September 1982.

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• A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

  Fred Hoyle

  Science, If There Is A God, Numbers

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• It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.

  Allan Sandage

  Science, Understanding, World

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• An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.

  Francis Crick

  Men, Origin Of Life, Miracle

  "Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature". Book by Francis Crick, 1981.

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• There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.

  Paul Davies

  Powerful, Science, If There Is A God

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• When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.

  John Polkinghorne

  Nature, Everything Happens For A Reason, Law

  "Science Finds God". www.washingtonpost.com. July 20, 1998.

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• Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think, unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just one of many universes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Ideas, Giving

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• The anthropic principle is an unfortunate name as it implies something about humanity.

  Paul Davies

  Names, Humanity, Principles

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• To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others.

  Deepak Chopra

  Christian, Principles, Theory

  "Intelligent Design Without the Bible". www.huffingtonpost.com. August 23, 2005.

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