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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The first part is not a logical fallacy at all. It’s a perfectly valid statement: The odds of a planet having life as we know it are ~0.
The second part is just formal fallacy (as opposed to an informal fallacy which are all the fallacies that have fancy names) because you cannot derive the conclusion (god must exist) from the premises (P1: the probability of a planet having life is ~0, P2: there is life on Earth)
Or if you rewrite it slightly differently it’s begging the question. P1: life can only exist if god exists, P2: life exists, C: god exists
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.
Something not mentioned in the comments yet is the existence of other habitable planets. To an extent, the odds matter. If Earth was the only habitable planet in the entire universe and the number of planets in existence were far lower than the denominator in the odds, then that would be a bit mysterious to scientists. To necessitate God would be a logical fallacy, but it would indeed be quite striking as a mystery as to how we came into existence with such low probability. However, if we can observe many other habitable planets and the number of planets in the universe are far greater than the denominator in the odds, then there is less mystery. The logical fallacy you are sensing is partly due to different people’s sense of the odds. If an event has a one in a million chance of happening but there were one trillion tries, then that event happening is not mysterious and actually quite expected. Whereas if there was a one in a million chance and only one try, we’d look at the result with a bit of surprise and wonder. The fact that the universe appears to have many habitable planets indicates it is closer to the former than the latter.
Ninety five percent of all known species are now extinct. So one assumes that as conditions for each species changed enough for that specy to die out, then Humans will also reach that stage in the Planets evolution. It is umlikely that Humans have any real influence on the Planets functions, because we do not know how it maintains its funsctions. We make many assumptions but can neve know the answers. There are skeletons of a Humanoid race of twenty foot high Giant Humans. THey are now considered extict, so we pygmies are the last surviviors of the Human experiment.
I’d say it’s a false dichotomy because the alternative is that the Earth doesn’t exist, and we aren’t here, in which case we wouldn’t be able to debate the topic.
About 99% of the Earth’s surface is unsuitable for us to live on. Go above 10,000 feet and it becomes very uncomfortable to breath for many people. We can’t live in the seas and even diving a few meters below the surface puts huge strain on out bodies.
So if this planet was designed for us whoever designed it and us did a really lousy job.
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