Universes:Ebook Free Download

Ebook Free Download | Universes | Philosophy professor John Leslie does a supurb job of presenting evidence that our cosmos may have been "fine-tuned" for life. The basic argument is that a life-premitting cosmos requires the existence of a very large number of highly specific and seemingly unrelated facts. Were any of these facts changed even modestly, life could have never have arisen. Further, since the probability of all the facts being what are is thought to be vanishingly small, some have suggested that our cosmos may have been "fine-tuned" for life. For some this has seemed a strong argument for the existence of God. But Leslie points out that an equally good explanation is that our portion of the cosmos is only a small part of a vast Universe. The great majority of this Universe is disorded and non-life-premitting, but entirely by chance some portions are life-premitting. That we see a life-permitting cosmos should come as no surprise, because mere chance indicates that at least some areas should be life-premitting and we can exist only in these areas. While Leslie's work is fun and exciting, and while Leslie clearly knows a great deal about physics and cosmology, from a philosophical perspective some of his conclusions seem a bit naive. For example, he defends a bizarre neoplatonic notion that a life-premitting Universe may exist solely because its existence is ethically required, i.e. that an abstract ethical principle may somehow have created everything. While this is a possible cosmogony perhaps on par with the God hypothesis, its implausable nature seems to suggest that we adopt a healthy skepticism about the ultimate origins of the Universe rather than seriously entartain it as a possibility. Leslie also makes some unwarranted assumptions about the possibility of alternative laws of nature. Nonetheless, the book is fun and informative. I highly recommend it.