The term “Anthropic Principle” was coined by a theoretical physicist named Brandon Carter in 1973.
It basically claims that the conditions of the Universe as it was unfolding from the Big Bang were so “finely tuned” that if anything was just a slight bit different along the way then our universe would have turned out in such a way that we wouldn’t be here.
Some with a theistic bent use this sort of thinking to claim that the universe unvailing the way it did was so improbable that a Creator must surely be at the controls.
The problem with this sort of thinking (in the context of probabilities of conditions) is that it assumes that we we are *supposed* to be here.
Why is this wrong?
Because in universes where semi-intelligent people (not talking about truck drivers) don’t arise, there is no one there to speculate on their good fortune. It could be that a tremendous amount of universes have arisen and ours happened to be, by chance one where intelligent life could arise.
Here is an analogy: Suppose someone was dazzling you with the odds against your parents conceiving a child with your exact genetic makeup? Because of the number of possible arrangements of genes, the odds are staggering, probably trillions to one against you existing, yet here you are reading this article today.
Does this mean that you were destined to be here? No. If the car hadn’t run out of gas that night or if the liquor cabinet had been empty or if a number of variables had been a little different, then someone else might have been conceived to speculate on their good fortune.
Back to the Creator argument: In order to calculate probabilities, you have to know how many samples you have in a set. The theist asserting that AP supports a creator would likely assert a very low number for the number of universes and most likely they would assert just 1, but we have no idea of how many universes there are or have ever been, so we can’t say. The number is somewhere between 1 and infinity. If you don’t know how many universes there are and if universes unfold in at least somewhat random ways, you can’t calculate the probability of a given universe unfolding a certain way.