The probability of an event can be the probability that it will (or could) happen, or the relative occurrence of the event as that occurrence is observed in nature or experiment.
It is known, for example, that the following prior probabilities attach to the outcome of a single roll of a pair of fair dice:
And if a single person rolled a pair of dice 1,000,000 times or 1,000,000 persons each rolled a pair of dice once, the result would be close (but not necessarily identical) to this:
But the fact that a single player, on a single roll, throws a 2, 5, 9, 12, or any other sum tells us nothing about the number of rolls the player has made or will make, nor does it tell us anything about the number of players who may have rolled dice at the same moment. All it tells us is that the player has attained a particular result on that particular roll of the dice.
This is at odds with the view that there is life as we know it — an outcome with a low, prior probability given the (theoretical) multitude of possible configurations of the universe — only because there are vastly many actual or possible universes with vastly many configurations. In this view, life as we know it is an improbable phenomenon that we are able to witness only because we happen to exist in one of the multitude of possible or actual universes.
So, is our universe and the life that has arisen in it a consequence of design, or is it all a matter of “luck”? And if it is due to “luck,” what created the material of which the universe is made and what determined the laws that are evident in the actions of that material?
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