James the Giant wrote: You are falling into the trap of the Anthropic Principle, which is human-centric, somewhat similar to thinking we are the centre of the universe, and the sun revolves around the earth. It does not. But it looks that way.
Which do you think it more likely...
A) That the universe fits us perfectly?
or
B) That we fit the universe perfectly?
Douglas Adams used the metaphor of a living puddle examining its own shape, since, to those living creatures, the universe may appear to fit them perfectly, while in fact they simply fit the universe perfectly, as a consequence of having grown up inside it.
And only in a universe where life and thinking beings have arisen, will there be living beings capable of observing it.
A universe where intelligent life has not arisen, will go unbeheld.
I'm familiar with the argument. But I don't think the anthropic principle is 'a trap' unless you're looking for a way to escape the idea that our existence might not be fortuitous. It might suit us a great deal more to believe that it is.
One of the motivations for 'the multiverse', fantastic as it might seem, is that it does provide an explanation for the uncanny fact that the universe is just such that it gives rise to living beings, when it seems it really might not have done. In other words, in all the other versions of the Universe, the laws of physics might not hold, no living things could eventuate, and so on. So people are seriously prepared to engage in the most fantastic speculations, to avoid the implications of the 'anthropic principle'.
Me, I think this is what the Mahayahanists called 'prapanca', conceptual proliferation.
Anyway - back to the point. If you believe, like Camus and Sartre, like a lot of 20th Century philosophy, that the universe is basically dumb, that we are simply pond slime made good, there is not much of a basis for 'rationality', in the end, is there? We are just smart monkeys who ought to have no reason to believe that anything we believe is true, as distinct from just useful, from the viewpoint of survival of the genome, and so on. So, I am saying that 'the viewpoint of modernity' is really not ultimately rational, because it can't really conceive of any kind of over-arching raison d'etre. This is reflected all over the place in modern life, isn't it? Isn't that why one begins to study something like Buddhism?