Is. Was. Ever Shall Be.

Hi, my name is Paul Davies, and even though I've never done any original research myself, I have totally written stuff about the Anthropic Principle, which is totally not a half-assed attempt by scienticians in an age of renewed religiosity to pimp their own relevance by proposing a vast, cosmic tautology wherein things are the way they are because they were the way they were which means the must have been the way they must have been. Follow? Let me break it down for you. See, if things hadn't happened the way they happened, then things wouldn't be the way they are. They would be different! And that, like, proves that present outcomes dictate past conditions rather than the other way around. Or something like that. Frankly, I get confused when I try to explain it to a bunch of laymen like you rubes, but I assure you of one thing: It is not question-begging. It is very serious, scientifical analysis, or my name isn't Paul Davies.

Look. You might think I sound like a stoner drop-out who's read one too many Timothy Ferris pop-sci texts and spirituality gobbledygook in order to come up with some crackpot theory that quantum mechanics, the Catholic Church, and Aboriginal dreamtime all combine to necessitate a man-centered universe. But that's not the case. That's not it at all. All I'm saying is that physical laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. I'm mostly saying that because, frankly, I couldn't even make it through Godel, Escher, Bach, which was, to be honest, a little too deep for me, even though my graduate students keep telling me that all proofs rest on externalities and that to try to prove something otherwise is necessarily to engage in tautology, casuistry, circular argument, and bad faith. Yeah, well, who's the director and who's the fucking TA, smart guy? Here is my point: Faith. Stephen Jay Gould. The Laws of Physics. The Goldilocks Universe. Class dismissed.