The Anthropic Principle Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 757):

Roughly speaking, the anthropic argument takes as its starting point the fact that the universe we perceive about us must be of such a nature as will produce and accommodate beings who can perceive it. We could use this argument to explain why the planet upon which we live has such a congenial range of temperatures, atmosphere, abundance of water, etc. etc. If conditions were not so congenial on this particular planet, then we would not be here, but somewhere else!

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this fact misconstrues a past event as a future certainty. The fact is simply:

the universe we perceive about us is of such a nature as did produce and accommodate beings who can perceive it.

Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory distinguishes two general types of cause: reason/result and purpose. The fact, then, proposes that humans are the result of how the universe is. The anthropic argument, thus, tries to explain the reason (the conditions) by the result (humans), instead of explaining the result (humans) by the reason (the conditions). That is, it mistakes the result for the reason.

By a further step, the anthropic principle mistakes result for purpose, so that it explains the reason (the conditions) by the purpose (humans). In this view, humans are misconstrued as the purpose of the universe.