When people say that e.g. it’s such a miracle that life on Earth exists because the slightest change in its distance from the Sun or gravity or the lack of water would make it impossible for us to be around – forgetting that our existence presupposes all this. Or an argument for God that it cannot be accidental that we have all the preconditions on Earth to sustain ourselvea and that the way nature and our body works is a miracle – but it’s precisely why it can work and there are many planets where life couldn’t form for the lack of these components.
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I would call it survivorship bias. It is a fallacy because it ignores failure in its analysis, and is therefore no better than anecdotal evidence.
It’s like having a rich uncle who believes everyone should just live like him and do what he did, because it worked for him. He never takes luck into account, like he didn’t face a recession while starting out, his family didn’t suffer a terminal illness, he won a big contract when a competitor collapsed, he happened to be in the shop on a Sunday when a fire broke out.
He’s like our planet, which for a million reasons could have no life at all. The first microbes might have gotten started a bunch of times only to be wiped out by volcanoes. We are living the one sample of success when there were millions of ways to fail.
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