I'll answer my question. The reason we are right to suspect cheating in the instance of 4 straight royal flushes but not four other random hands in a row that are just as unlikely is because we know there exists beings (people to be specific) who intend royal flushes as a target and have the ability to manipulate the cards to achieve this end.
Right. But it is just as unlikely to see four of this hand as any other hand.
In short, we know people have the means, motive, and oppurtunity to cheat. When you compare the likelihood of that occurring with how unlikely it is to happen in a random shuffle, we are then right to suspect cheating. It is our experience with humans that allows this conclusion.
Now your turn Kevin.
Huh? That's it? That's how you explain the purpose driven universe? By comparing it to a card game and then using human experience as the excuse as to why we only perceive "cheating" involved? Come on!
This analogy simply won't wash.
The universal constants are not things that can be explained by mere chance. Yes, there is a chance that if I drop 100 pennies, they will all land on heads. But that doesn't explain laws of the universe, such as gravity. Why is gravity what it is? Scientists really don't know that much about it or understand it other than to know that "it is."
We are not talking about things that can possibly fall into place by chance. We are talking about laws that were written and work together for the same purpose (electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces etc), things that are clearly mathematically intertwined in a way that serves the single purpose for our existence.
And yes, the multiverse is being used by atheists to mitigate the significance of the anthropic principle. This was revealed in 1973 when Carter presented his paper called "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle." This called for a complete overthrow of the Copernican revolution. Science had been taking us down a different path up until that point, toward a mechanistic, impersonal, random view of the cosmos. No longer was Russell's claim taken for granted, that man was just a "curious accident in a backwater."
Carter was only using the discoveries of physicists Robert Dicke and John Wheeler from the 60's. But when he did this in 1973, for the first time ever, an explanation was finally offered for one of the biggest mysteries in physicas: the values of the fundamental constants.
Carter showed that if gravitational forces had been tinkered with, in relation to electromagnetic forces, then the universe would not have stars like our sun. There would only be red or blue suns, incapable of sustaining life. Any weakening of the nuclear strong force would result in a universe consisting of nothing but hydrogen! And this is just the tip of teh iceberg if you think about it. Through the years the list of improbable coincidences multiplied. Their only common denominator seemed to be that they were necessary for our existence.
The nature of water is a mystery in itself. Without it there could be no life. Another happy coincidence I suppose, is that water is lighter in its solid form (ice floats). If it didn't, then the oceans would freeze up and the earth would be covered with solid ice.
I don't have Leslie's book in hand, but there are tons more. So no, we are not talking about mere luck or chance, comparable to a guy getting four flushes in a row. If you really want to use the card analogy we would have to see it as hundreds of flushes in a row.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein