This video by darkmatter2525 makes a bold assertion: he claims the fact that we’ve discovered the 1235 planets Kepler found in a year and a half — 54 in their stars’ Goldilocks Zones, five of which are the same size as Earth — proves the weak anthropic principle even without needing to actually visit one and see life with our own eyes.

He doesn’t mention the principle by name specifically, but he gets all the salient points that argue for it. We’re looking at a very small fraction of the galaxy, much less the universe. Kepler can only detect an exoplanet if it passes directly between us and its star, so only those solar systems that are aligned correctly could ever be detected with this technique. And yet we’ve discovered as many as we have.

And he goes on to further extrapolate that, because of the gravitational eddies scientists have discovered which point to multiple universes like ours, the strong anthropic principle may also be true. We live in a universe that can sustain life because every possible universe exists, and only in the ones that can sustain life will life actually arise to realize it.

Note that this does not cut the possibility of a deity out of the equation yet. But a deity is unnecessary in the face of the realities of quantum physics that could lead to the strong anthropic principle being true. Couple that with the fact that if you add up all the positive and negative energy in this universe, you get… zero. Zero energy. Everything… came from nothing. Every universe… came from nothing. Nothing is an unstable state. We don’t need a designer god or a creator god. Sure, maybe all of metaphysics was set into motion by such a being, but with everything thereafter happening according to those laws of physics he created, and with absolutely no evidence that any divine intervention has ever happened, Occam’s Razor slices your god neatly out of the equation.

I’ve said it before — every deity ever proposed by humankind is very likely wholly and dramatically incorrect. Made from whole cloth. Nothing but legend. So if you want to believe in a deity, fine. Feel free. As soon as you specify one of the existing dogmas of today, you’re very very likely wrong.

Deists are pretty much the only theists that have any sort of leg to stand on, but that’s because they call everything God. And we can see (at least some of that) everything.