By naturally I mean without the influence of an external higher intelligence/god/divine being.

Up until the last few years, opinions not supported by science would be quickly down voted to nonexistence on Hacker News. The discourse remained high level enough to dissuade people who don't know what they're talking about from participating. Something has unfortunately changed recently. I have my thoughts on what is causing this, but one thing is for sure - Dang's job has gotten exponentially more difficult in recent years if he wants HN to remain a bastion of elevated discussion on the internet.

No, that actually is still "a few puzzle" pieces compared to the entirety of the geologic record, relatively clear progressions of life forms over time that broadly line up with physical and genetic taxonomy. There are some gaps, yeah, but enough to clearly imply that the overall picture is correct.

By contrast, the epistemological picture for creationism is a trash fire. It requires an ever increasing amount of special pleading to explain all the other evidence. And you don't get to complain that "abiogenesis is entirely unproven", about an event that necessarily happened long before recorded history under entirely different conditions, unless your own theory can stand up to a higher standard of evidence. Which it can't. Speaking, again, as someone who grew up under creationism and had to lever myself out of it piece by piece of evidence.

(Oh, and if you think "nobody has a clue" how abiogenesis worked, you're out of date. Try reading about the work of Nick Lane and Jeremy England, IIRC.)

As it's often used, the anthropic principle is fatally flawed.

It often starts with an argument between a creationist (could also be an advocate of intelligent design, but I'll just call them the creationist) and an evolutionist. The creationist says, look, the origin of life by purely naturalistic means is ridiculously improbable (and therefore it's reasonable to consider the possibility that God did it). They trot out some generally-accepted scientific principle, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and come up with a number that is, in fact, ridiculously improbable.

The evolutionist responds with the anthropic principle - if no life had arisen in this universe, we would not be here arguing about how life arose. This is clearly logically correct. It is also completely irrelevant.

The creationist didn't argue that life couldn't have arisen in this universe. They argued that it could not have arisen by purely naturalistic means. They're arguing about how, not about whether. The creationist might answer: "Yes, I agree that if life had not arisen in this universe, either by creation or by naturalistic processes, then we would not be here having this conversation. But the question is, which way did life begin?" The anthropic principle doesn't address that issue whatsoever.

It doesn't address that issue unless you add an assumption - that life had to begin by purely naturalistic means, that is, that the probability of creation is precisely zero. Then the anthropic principle is relevant, but then there's a new issue, that of begging the question.

I suspect that this assumption is present on the side of everyone on the evolution side that pulls out the anthropic principle in an argument with a creationist, but I have never heard it explicitly stated. I'm not even sure the evolutionist realizes they're making an assumption - it's so ingrained in their world view that they can't think that the alternative might be possible.

I grant you that the universe is huge and the evidence available is small. But that can turn into an "evolution of the gaps" argument quite easily, so I'm not sure you want to seriously use it.

I know it was just a typo but "arthropic principle" sounds like something from A Deepness in the Sky

The anthropic principle is ridiculous. Suppose that, against all odds, you survive the worst plane crash in history. Then you ask NTSB what caused the crash and why you survived. They answer:

"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."

Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.

Anthropic principle is the most useless of all and it's used to avoid explanation instead of trying to find one. Imagine Newton answering to why objects fall with "because if they did not we would be asking different questions"... what a great advance for humanity /s

Fine tuning for the earth might be able to be explained away most easily, like you said. Fine tuning for the universe, though...

Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable.

When you said:

> there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life

You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like:

> You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing.

— https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-ex...

You’re misunderstanding the point about fine-tuning entirely. It doesn’t matter how many billions of years it took, if some of the parameters of fundamental physics were slightly different, even trillions of years would’ve resulted in nothing.