Thanks but that was really quite terrible. What Denton appears to be doing can be succinctly summarized as having realized that the outcomes of history depend on prior events, laws, and initial conditions.
He says the entire cosmos seems to be designed for us because hadn’t there been all these facts of the matter that support our existence such as it is, then we wouldn’t have been here and been able to do all the things we do.
He neglects to consider that this would be true for anything no matter what the laws and initial conditions of the universe were like, and that all the facts of the matter he invoke to infer that the universe is designed for us can be invoked to infer that the universe has been so arranged so as to cause the existence, history, and behavior of a particular carbon dioxide molecule on some distant planet in some distant galaxy. There is no objective reason to suppose we are the intended goal of reality any more than that carbon dioxide molecule. Change anything about the laws of nature and initial conditions of the universe, and that carbon dioxide molecule would behave otherwise, have a different history, or possibly not even exist at all.
Now we can proceed to put our universe as it is aside for the moment, and imagine a different reality. A universe with radically different laws of physics, that began with very different initial conditions. That universe is going to have it’s own unique history, it’s going to contain it’s own unique phenomena, and there are going to be contingent outcomes of history in that universe that in every way depend on the conditions and laws of that universe. Regardless of how complex or interesting those phenomena might seem to us, that is going to be true of that universe. Whether it contains life, a vacuum of just ionizing radiation, stars that never produce anything heavier than lithium. That universe is going to have something unique to it, and that thing is going to have a unique contingent history. Pick any phenomena you can think of, such as a particular pattern of radiation that occurred at some period of time. A cloud of gas. A rock surface of some particular shape. That universe can now, by Denton’s reasoning, be inferred to have been designed to produce that specific result. Only that particular set of laws and those initial conditions would lead to that outcome.
And so we come to realize that ad-hoc rationalizations like this can’t constitute meaningful evidence for intelligent design, because it can be applied to all imaginary situations. No matter how interesting or boring we might find them. Universes that are empty, universes that disappear again shortly after they appear. They’re all unique in their own special way and their existence and behavior as they happened to happen would depend on their exact laws and initial conditions.
The end.