LETTERS

摘要

From Oliver and Lucy Arditi Mary-Jane Rubenstein offers a fascinating discussion of the historical relationship between theology and cosmology (19/26 December 2015, p 64). But her opening premise is that the universe being suited to life presents us with some kind of dilemma: almost any other set of cosmic properties would be inimical to life, so how did we end up with a habitable universe? However, this doesn't stand up to examination. It is hardly surprising that an environment should appear well suited to the structures that have evolved in it. Are deep-sea thermal vents so well suited to the needs of extremophiles that we should ask whether they are the product of conscious artifice? The universe affords great complexity, and life is an example. Any complex structure is likely to be specific to the parameters within which it exists, but that should not lead us to suppose that those parameters have been established to bring that structure about... unless we already happen to believe in a creator.