What if it was not chance.

A universe that has been on average expanding throughout its history must have a finite past. The result is the Borde, Guth, Vilenkin theorem of 2003, and it closes most of the historical exits to an eternal universe.[1]Borde, Guth, Vilenkin, Inflationary spacetimes are not past complete, Physical Review Letters 90, 151301 (2003).

A finite past requires a cause that is not part of the universe. Quantum vacua are not metaphysical nothing. A vacuum is a structured physical state with energy density, fields, and laws. To say the universe came from a quantum vacuum is to say it came from something.

The careful skeptic does not need to follow the inference further yet. They need only accept the first claim. The universe is the kind of thing that began.

The fine tuning argument is sharpest at the level of the constants, but its oldest form is chemical, and it is more than a century old. In nineteen thirteen the Harvard biochemist Lawrence Henderson published the reciprocal of Darwin's idea. Darwin showed that organisms are fit for their environment. Henderson argued that the environment, the chemistry of water and carbon in particular, is no less fit for life, and that this fitness is a property of matter fixed long before any life existed to be selected for it.[1]Lawrence Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, Macmillan, 1913.

Water is anomalous on nearly every axis that matters to biology, and the anomalies pull the same way. It is densest a few degrees above freezing and its solid floats, so lakes freeze from the top down and life survives beneath the cover instead of being entombed from the bottom up. Its specific heat is the highest of any common liquid, which buffers cells and climates against swings of temperature. Its structure produces the hydrophobic effect, the principal force that folds proteins and drives lipid membranes to assemble themselves into the compartments a cell requires. One small set of molecular features delivers a thermal buffer, a near universal solvent, and the engine of folding and membrane assembly at once.[2]Philip Ball, Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Carbon is fit on as many axes. It forms four bonds and chains to itself in stable rings and backbones more readily than any other element, which is the combinatorial basis a chemistry needs if it is to carry heritable information. Its bonds are strong enough to hold a molecule together at the temperature of a living cell, yet weak enough for an enzyme to make and break them. Its fully oxidized form, carbon dioxide, is a soluble gas, so a metabolism built on carbon can move its waste through air, ocean, and bloodstream. The usual rival, silicon, sits directly below carbon and shares its four bonds, but its oxide is quartz, a solid, and its chains collapse toward stable silicates. A metabolism built on silicon would have no easy way to carry its own exhaust.[3]Norman Pace, The universal nature of biochemistry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, 805 (2001).

This is not a probability bound, and it should not be dressed as one. There is no theory of all possible chemistries against which water can be assigned a number like the constant of the previous step, and the standard objection, that we could only ever find ourselves in a chemistry that permits us, is correct as far as it goes. What survives the objection is still considerable. The fitness of water and carbon is a fixed antecedent property of matter, not a product of selection, and a large set of independent properties, each from a different piece of physics, cooperate on one solvent and one element with no reason they should coincide. Convergence on that scale is what a design hypothesis expects and an accident does not.[4]John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press, 1986.[5]Addy Pross, What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology, Oxford University Press, 2012.

ATP synthase is a transmembrane protein complex that produces adenosine triphosphate, the universal energy currency of life. A proton gradient drives a rotor that turns inside a stationary catalytic head. Each one hundred and twenty degree turn produces one ATP.

Rotation reaches one hundred and thirty to three hundred and fifty hertz under physiological conditions. Mechanical efficiency in the rotation to ATP energy conversion step approaches one hundred percent. The 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the elucidation of the mechanism. The mechanism is uncontested. The origin of the mechanism is unexplained.[1]Yasuda et al., F1 ATPase is a highly efficient molecular motor that rotates with discrete 120 degree steps, Cell 93, 1117 (1998).[2]John Walker, Nobel Lecture, ATP synthesis by rotary catalysis, 1997.

You produce roughly your own body weight in ATP each day. None of it without this motor.

A multiverse with infinitely many variations of the constants can predict any observation whatsoever, which makes it predict none. Karl Popper would not have called it science. Sean Carroll, who defends it, has conceded that without a measure on the parameter space the probabilities are undefined.[1]Sean Carroll, Beyond Falsifiability, arXiv:1801.05016, 2018.

A multiverse generator is itself a piece of physics. It has parameters. It has dynamics. It has initial conditions. Why a multiverse generator with these parameters and not others? The question is not answered. It is moved.

And the multiverse, taken seriously, is dominated by Boltzmann brains. Random thermal fluctuations into momentary observers, by far the most common kind. We are not Boltzmann brains. The fact is a constraint on viable cosmologies, not a vindication of the multiverse.[2]Sean Carroll, Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad, arXiv:1702.00850, 2017.