>Imagine that planets orbited in randomly selected geometric shapes, and we happened to be on the only known elliptical one, giving us the conditions required for life. Would this lucky fact require explanation?
No more than the existence of a planet of the right size at the right distance from the sun. You still have physical laws which determine what's possible, but they probably won't (and, in fact, don't) provide a complete explanation.
The weakest form of the Anthropic Principle is uncontroversial. For example, we can use it to conclude that physical laws which don't permit intelligent life to evolve must be wrong. Can we use it to rule out physical laws which don't entail the evolution of intelligent life? I would argue yes, but that doesn't require any fine-tuning of dimensionless constants: an infinite (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) universe, or Everett's Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would entail it, given its possibility.
No more than the existence of a planet of the right size at the right distance from the sun. You still have physical laws which determine what's possible, but they probably won't (and, in fact, don't) provide a complete explanation.
The weakest form of the Anthropic Principle is uncontroversial. For example, we can use it to conclude that physical laws which don't permit intelligent life to evolve must be wrong. Can we use it to rule out physical laws which don't entail the evolution of intelligent life? I would argue yes, but that doesn't require any fine-tuning of dimensionless constants: an infinite (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) universe, or Everett's Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would entail it, given its possibility.