What’s the name of this logical fallacy?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

The phenomenon is called the anthropic principle, an instance of survivorship bias, which in general refers to the universe as a whole not just the earth but also applies in that more specific case.

You basically have the gist of it already, that we observe a universe (and a planet) in which the conditions are right for us to exist, because if they weren’t we wouldn’t be there to observe it.

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