Ancient Near East beliefs

It seems clear that the creation accounts of early Genesis were designed to undermine the prevalent myths of the time. The following example comes from Egypt, dating to around 2000 years ago. The full text can be found here.

Serve God, that he may do the like for you, with offerings for replenishing the altars and with carving; it is that which will show forth your name, and God is aware of whoever serves Him. Provide for men, the cattle of God, for He made heaven and earth at their desire. He suppressed the greed of the waters, He gave the breath of life to their noses, for they are likenesses of Him which issued from His flesh. He shines in the sky for the benefit of their hearts; He has made herbs, cattle, and fish to nourish them. He has killed His enemies and destroyed His own children, because they had planned to make rebellion; He makes daylight for the benefit of their hearts, and he sails around in order to see them

The Instruction of Merikare

Asa Gray...

Darwinian teleology has the special advantage of accounting for the imperfections and failures as well as for the successes. It not only accounts for them, but turns them to practical account... So the most puzzling things of all to the old-school teleologists are the principles of the Darwinian,... it would appear that in Darwinian evolution we may have a theory that accords with, if it does not explain, the principal facts, and a teleology that is free from the common objection.. if {a theist} cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said 'Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe'

Darwiniana, 1876, as quoted in Barrow and Tipler

The Weak Anthropic Principle

Barrow and Tipler offer this definition:

"The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so"

Here's an example.

We observe that we exist at a point in the life of the universe where carbon is readily available (it wasn't this way earlier on).

But then this would have to be so - because if there wasn't any carbon then there wouldn't be any us.

The Anthropic Principle

In the perspective of these violences of matter and field, of these ranges of heat and pressure, of these reaches of space and time, is not man an unimportant bit of dust on an unimportant planet in an unimportant galaxy in an unimportant region somewhere in vastness of space?

No! The philosopher of old was right! Meaning is important, is even central. It is not only that man is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or the other? Man could never come into being in such a universe. That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to this principle, a life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design the world.

John A Wheeler's Foreword to 'The anthropic cosmological principle' by John Barrow and Frank Tipler