Playing Dice with the Universe

Recently, I read an article on Skeptico that presented an interesting example using dice. Skeptico says:

"Suppose someone is rolling a set of two dice. He rolls a double six- something with a one in 36 chance of happening. Which is more likely, that the person rolled a set of regular dice and just got lucky, or that he rolled a special set where both dice have just sixes on all faces? (Let's assume you can't see any but the sides that are on top.) You might think that since a regular set would produce a double six on only one out of 36 attempts, he is more likely to have rolled the trick dice with just sixes. But after a moment's thought you would probably realize that was wrong. With just one roll of the dice, you would have no way of knowing...."

He concludes this:

"No matter how many dice he rolled at once, or how high the apparent odds against it happening by chance you wouldn't know he was cheating by just looking at the results of one roll."

While I am not exactly sure of his point, Skeptico seems to be saying we cannot tell by just looking at this universe whether it was the result of lucky occurences or if it was manipulated to be the way it is. His conclusion is there's no way we can tell if our universe is the result of the action of a Higher Power.

Really?

I could take the same information and come to a different conclusion. Let me give my take on it. Your friend rolls two dice, (you don't see the roll, ok?) comes up to you and says, "Hey, I rolled two sixes!" To which you think, "Big deal." The odds, 1 in 36 are well within probability. But what if he rolled 5 dice and they were all sixes? The odds for that are much lower, (1 in 7776) and therefore more impressive. Anyone who has played Yahtzee knows the difficulty of rolling all sixes. What if your friend says he opened a bag of ten dice, dumped them on the table and they came up sixes. The odds now become 1 in 60,466,176. Would you believe him? Or secretly harbor a thought that he had skewed them in some way. Maybe he's (very) lucky. (Does he have any lottery numbers in mind?) With a bag of 25 dice the odds become 1 in 28,430,288,029,929,700,000. In case you didn't know, that is a very small probability. For them to show all sixes in a single roll would be, for all practical purposes, impossible.

The point I am trying to make here is that one part of his analogy is right. You would not be able to tell, from a single roll if the dice was manipulated or not. But you could be suspicious. As the number of dice increases so does the possiblity that something else is happening and an alternative explanation is needed.

We should consider that the universe is a lot more complicated than a pair of dice. It is more complicated than 10 or even 25 dice. In light of that knowledge the possible causes for our present reality narrow considerably. Either one has to believe that the universe somehow, someway, came into being in spite of impossibly small odds, or one must cling to a theory that cannot be proved (as in multiple universes) and therefore borders on religion, (Something believed with no cororobating evidence.) or (gasp) that something, or Someone manipulated it to be that way. A Creator, perhaps?

Link here: http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2010/04/fine-tuning-arguments.html.