Questioning

I was listening to a podcast today, and the host brought up the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis. Listening to him, it struck me that what may actually have been at work was an answer to a mystery that exists mainly in people's imaginations.

The general gist of the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis is that the constants of nature, including the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, et cetera, have to be within very narrow parameters for "life as we know it" to exist, and this isn't something that can be easily (if at all) explained by the Anthropic Principle. For instance, if the strong nuclear force were the slightly-to-somewhat stronger nuclear force, and everything else were unchanged, fusion would work differently than it does in our current universe and so stars would operate differently.

The idea that the constants of nature being their current values purely by chance is highly unlikely gives rise to the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis being part of an argument for Intelligent Design; something had to set the constants to their current values, and that something is an immensely powerful deity.

Fair enough, I suppose, but... how, exactly, do we know that there are lots of different possible values that these constants could have? After all, we have a sample size of precisely 1. And, given that the whole of the Universe and the Observable Universe are not the same thing, potentially less than that.

And in this sense, the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis seems to be the answer to a question that there isn't actually enough information to ask. Rather, it's a solution to a question that comes into existence if certain assumptions that have been made about the nature of the physical laws of the Universe turn out to be correct... and even that assumes that scientists will be able to test them at some point.

Granted, I'm neither a scientist or a theologian, but I'm at a place in life where I'm okay with not knowing, and the very distinct possibility that no-one will ever know. It's a mystery to which I don't need a solution. The question is only as interesting as the answers that people produce to it. In part, because there are other, closer questions; ones that it does make sense that we may be able to answer, and those seem to be much more fruitful places in which to invest attention.