Attempts to explain the evidence by invoking chance alone or multiple other universes (more on that in Chapter 16) seemed to him to betray a kind of metaphysical special pleading, even desperation. As Longley explained, the anthropic design argument “is of such an order of certainty that in any other sphere of science, it would be regarded as settled.” He continued: “To insist otherwise is like insisting that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare because it might have been written by a billion monkeys sitting at a billion keyboards typing for a billion years. So it might. But the sight of
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