Our place in the cosmos

Abstract

Our universe seemed fine tuned for life. Does the cosmos contain many universes, only the appropriately tuned ones being observable by living organisms? Alternatively, did God act as “Fine Tuner”? God might exist because of an eternally powerful ethical requirement. J. L. Mackie saw ethical requirements and their creative power as queer but logically possible. Their unreality or their powerlessness would therefore be matters of synthetic necessity. Theists could maintain that the synthetic necessities were instead ones making ethical requirements real and creatively powerful. Yet why, then, would there exist anything but divine thinking? A Spinozistic answer is that nothing else exists.