Musings on Physics and Teleology

The following question has been bothering me for some time now: Why is the universe composed in such a way that it is at all comprehensible? How have we been so lucky as to exist in a place which is governed by regular physical laws, rather than absolute chaos? As Plantinga, I think, argued, it seems ridiculously improbable that the universe would be one of such perfect order. That the world is in fact ordered seems, therefore, to imply that somebody ordered it. And so we have a form of the teleological argument.

The best response to this argument (or at least the most memorable for me) was that there are many planes of existence, somewhere around three quarters of a jillion, and so the chances of there being one which conformed to strict physical laws becomes much more likely. We, as living beings, of course inhabit one of the ones capable of supporting life. But I don't like this talk of multiple universes. It's almost a contradiction in terms; "universe" is supposed to encompass everything.

So here's another idea, which just came to me while I was reading something about evolution. It's also sort of an argument from probability, but a little different. This is more-or-less stream-of-consciousness, so it may not be the most coherent thing you've ever read. But this is a blog, so I don't feel too bad about that. Anyway, I'll begin with a question: What would the universe be like if it did not observe strict laws? In a word, unpredictable. Change would be the only constant. I'm assuming we've still got space and time, or at least some dimensional framework where change is possible, because otherwise I'm not sure we can meaningfully talk about laws, or even a universe. Things would pop in and out of existence, if that's possible, and everything would fly around in random directions, combining and separating randomly. That would mean that, over time, you'd get a lot of different configurations of things with lots of different properties.

Now, some of these properties would encourage stability: I'm just going to generalize them into one property, p. A thing with p would continue to exist longer than an otherwise identical thing without p. So, by definition, while things without p would disappear quickly, things with p would stick around. Over a period of time, then, the universe would contain more and more things with p. Eventually, everything in the universe would be a thing with p. It would take a really, really long time, of course, but it would happen.

So now we have a universe populated with only things that have p. It seems to me that laws of physics are just properties that everything in the universe has, like "being such that it does not spontaneously accelerate nor decelerate (Newton's First Law)." That would certainly seem to encourage stability. The universe is therefore uniformly governed by certain laws, giving an appearance of design where there was none.

I think that pretty much gets my idea across. What do you think?