Allow me to tell you a story. Once there was a hole in a street. Filling the hole was a puddle by the name of Kevin. Kevin was a relatively happy puddle. I don't exactly know what it is that makes a puddle happy, never having been one myself, but I'm telling the story and I say he was happy, but ignorant. Well, one day Kevin was in his hole just looking up at the sky when he began to think of how well his hole fit him. Not just well, perfectly. In fact, this was the only hole into which he could fit. That he was in the only hole possible for him to be in was more than could be explained by mere coincidence. He came to the only reasonable conclusion: the hole must have been made just for him.

I bet you're rolling your eyes now, unless you already know what I'm talking about. It sounds stupid when a puddle says it. But that is just what many of us say. Maybe I need to make myself clear (even more so) because your dumb, or semi-literate, or drunk, or you just like hearing things twice. Your reasons are your own, I'm just trying to meet you halfway. What I'm saying is that we humans are like Kevin, our misguided little puddle. We say things like "if the Earth were eighteen pencil lengths farther from the sun we would all DIE!". The Earth, like Kevin's hole is for him, is absolutely perfect for humanity. We see this and say the world has to have been made just for us. Like Kevin we are looking at things the wrong way around.

The Anthropic principle basically states that the reason the Earth, or any similar planet is perfect for intelligent life is that if it were not then that particular intelligent life form would not be there to observe it. Likewise, if a planet was not right to support people then there would be nobody there to say "If only our planet were eighteen pencil lengths closer to the sun I might exist. Man, that would rock.". I've given you two absolutes here (right for life or not), but that isn't the only possibility as I'm sure some precocious little nitpicker is saying right now. A planet can be suitable for life, just not human life. After all, there are puddles in this world besides Kevin. Fortunately life, thanks to evolution, is fluid. It evolves, changes, adapts and molds to fit whatever container (or hole) it finds itself in. It is not the Earth that fits us, but we that fit the Earth.

Another of Kevin's mistakes we make is thinking that we are the only puddle in the world. Or rather, in the universe. If life fills the holes it finds itself in, doesn't it seem a bit naive of us to think ours is the only hole with a puddle?

I'll conclude by saying that if you think this paper is atheistic or meant to deny the existence of a higher power, you're mistaken. Water has to come from somewhere.