A Very Short Essay: The Statistical Universe
When people invoke the "but the universe must have been designed for us" fallacy , it reflects our anthropic and survivorship bias. We perceive the universe as fine-tuned for life, not because it was "designed" for us, but because only a successful optimisation allows us to exist and question it. If the universe were incapable of supporting life, no observer could exist to contemplate this fact. But this doesn't imply intentional design, only that we're observing from within one of the very few successful optimisations— 99.9999999999999...% of the universe's optimisations fail at producing complexity, let alone biological life. Mathematically, as time approaches infinity, it becomes inevitable that low probability events, such as complex biological systems, will arise from lower levels of complexity. The supposed 'paradox' disappears because we don't see the infinite number of failures because failures don't leave observers behind to ask such questions.