Physicist and science author Paul Davies tries hard to explain the incredible fitness for life of the cosmos without invoking either an intelligent designer or a multiverse:
We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships. I propose instead that the laws are more like computer software: programs being run on the great cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the big bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker's mark.
Davies is much too smart to be proposing something like this as an alternative to an intelligent designer. If the laws of physics are to be compared to computer software then the question shouts itself at us: Who do you think wrote the software? Software does not arise from non-rational, non-intelligent sources. It doesn't just appear ex nihilo. It must be designed by a mind.
He goes on:
Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light. Seth Lloyd, an engineer at MIT, has calculated how many bits of information the observable universe has processed since the big bang. The answer is one followed by 122 zeros. Crucially, however, the limit was smaller in the past because the universe was younger. Just after the big bang, when the basic properties of the universe were being forged, its information capacity was so restricted that the consequences would have been profound.
Here's why. If a law is a truly exact mathematical relationship, it requires infinite information to specify it. In my opinion, however, no law can apply to a level of precision finer than all the information in the universe can express. Infinitely precise laws are an extreme idealisation with no shred of real world justification. In the first split second of cosmic existence, the laws must therefore have been seriously fuzzy. Then, as the information content of the universe climbed, the laws focused and homed in on the life-encouraging form we observe today. But the flaws in the laws left enough wiggle room for the universe to engineer its own bio-friendliness.
Gosh, this sounds positively marvelous. Information - which in our experience is always the product of mind - pervades the universe, constructing it in such an astonishingly precise way that life can exist in it. But, you must remember, it all happened totally by accident - like a million monkeys fiddling with the parts of a computer for billions of years somehow serendipitously producing a fully functional PC, only almost infinitely more improbable.
Somehow the universe in the first nano-seconds of its existence, "wrote" the laws that would subsequently govern it. This raises the question of what laws were operating in the early cosmos that enabled it to "write" the laws of physics as we know them and where did they come from?
Anyway, distinguished scientist Dr. I.D. Finetunski - no doubt an untenured university prof who doesn't want to lose his job - is unimpressed by Davies' theory and proceeds to shred it into little pieces here.
RLC