In scanning a copy of Scientific American, I came across an article about the ‘universal constants’ of physics and how wonderfully amazing it is that all these numbers just happen to be exactly what they are - because if they weren’t then the Earth wouldn’t circle the Sun the same, atoms wouldn’t form they way they do, and life just wouldn’t be possible. Apparently these constants just happen to be fixed in the only configuration that could ever do.

Something about such a conclusion struck me as being a sort of circular logic, but not being a particularly well regarded physicist myself I mentally shrugged it off. Then I found the following quote Douglas Adams gave at a lecture at UC Santa Barbara:

It’s rather like a puddle waking up one morning - I know they don’t normally do this, but allow me, I’m a science fiction writer. - A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: “This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly… I mean really precise isn’t it?... It must have been made to have me in it.” And the sun rises, and [the puddle is] continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking - and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it’s still thinking - it’s still trapped in this idea that - that the hole was there for it.

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