Cosmic ReligionOne possibility is to say it means nothing. We inevitably
view this lottery of life from the position of winners, and if we
weren’t winners and so here, ideas about fi ne-tuning wouldn’t
arise. The advocates of a massive multiverse occupy this posi-
tion: it just happens that we live in the one that works for life.
Davies doesn’t like this since it seems to dodge the central ques-
tion by invoking endless, absurd infi nities.
Another possibility is to say that a universe with life in it is
itself inevitable. That is, physics should derive a theory which
cuts out the chance and makes the emergence of self-conscious
observers more or less inevitable from the very beginning. This
can be the position of two apparently opposing views. On the
one hand, it can be the view of atheist physicists who seek a
theory of everything: roughly, a successful theory of every-
thing would be a theory that included necessary fi rst conditions
that would lead to us. On the other hand, it can be the view of
those who believe in a creator God: roughly, a necessary divin-
ity would in some way build in consciousness and us.
Davies objects to both these options since they imply that
the Goldilocks enigma rests on conditions that fall outside the
realm of science – be that necessary fi rst conditions or a creator
God. Both beg the question of why those conditions or why
God. The fi ne-tuning remains unanswered.
The third possibility – and the position Davies likes the most –
is to posit a theory of the universe that contains its own emer-
gent explanation. This might now be possible given two results
of quantum cosmology. First, at the quantum level, mathe-
matics can be interpreted as lumpy, which would suggest that
the laws of nature do not in fact exist in some Platonic realm.
Instead they’d be part of the contingent fabric of the universe.
As Davies explains:
The universe on a mega-scale would resemble a cosmic
United States of America, with different shaped ‘states’ sepa-
rated by sharp boundaries. What we have hitherto taken to
be universal laws of physics... would be more akin to local