Suppose that our universe is intrinsically special in a way that it would not have been if the physical constants had taken other possible values. (As I argued in this previous post, it’s important that it be intrinsically special, not just special in the eyes of the creatures who inhabit it.) Then this would seem to raise the credence we should give to the hypothesis that the constants were not randomly set but shaped by a purposive agency of some kind, which sought to produce a universe with this special feature. For the sake of argument, let’s grant that it does.
So is our universe intrinsically special? What might be the special-making feature be? An obvious candidate is life. Life looks pretty special, perhaps even intrinsically valuable. Now, I’m not convinced that life is intrinsically valuable in the relevant sense. (We often treat it as intrinsically valuable, of course, and it’s right that we do, but that’s another matter.) But let’s concede it. And life certainly could not have existed if the physical constants had not been within a vary small range. So we have an argument that a life-seeking agency shaped our universe to enable to it to support life. Cool!
But wait a minute! Our universe’s physical laws and constants may allow life to emerge, but they also condemn life to complete annihilation. The second law of thermodynamics secures that. The relentless growth of entropy, which actually drives the local development of complexity, will eventually dismantle all complexity, leaving the universe a cold, dead realm of undifferentiated low-energy soup. This doesn’t look like something a life-seeking agency would build in. If we were designing a giant spaceship to carry humanity to a new star system, we wouldn’t build in a self-destruct mechanism set to trigger automatically halfway through the voyage.
In fact, a more plausible hypothesis is that the special making feature is the destruction of life, and that the agency that shaped the constants was seeking this goal — an inference not dissimilar to that drawn by Gloucester in King Lear:
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.
A defender of the life-agency hypothesis might reply that the agency could only do so much. It could tweak the physical constants but couldn’t change the second law. But what reason do we have to think that? We know nothing of this agency and the constraints under which it operated. (Unless of course, we think that revealed religion provides such information.) The agency has been introduced simply in order to explain why the universe supports life on the assumption that life is what makes this universe intrinsically special. If the universe is not really so special in the life department, then we can’t save the life-agency hypothesis by saying that the life agency did its best. It’s begging the question. We need to identity the special-making feature independently of the process posited to explain it.
Once an idea such as life being limited to organic material is established and reified, the very rules governing dialectic argumentation become a part of that construct and all of the arguments themselves are contained within that proposition. Therefore, your entire essay becomes self-defeating because your conclusion is a judgement derived utilizing a priori analysis; your assessment does not include the all important synthetic a priori analysis.
On the other hand, if the original proposition is that life is defined as being both organic as well as inorganic then life itself is never destroyed, it merely changes state. So yeah, under this all inclusive assumption, life is pretty special; but neither human beings nor organic life are exceptional.