“Yet Here We Are”: Why the Skeptic’s Favorite Rejoinder Explains Nothing
How observation selection, probabilistic asymmetry, and the rational structure of reality converge on a single conclusion
Introduction
When confronted with the staggering improbability of a life-permitting universe or the unsolved problem of abiogenesis, skeptics reach for a familiar retort: yet here we are. The phrase carries rhetorical swagger. It sounds like a closing argument. But subjected to even minimal scrutiny, it collapses into a tautology that explains precisely nothing.
This article examines the “yet here we are” response at three levels. First, it exposes the logical structure of the move and identifies the specific error it commits: confusing observation selection with causal explanation. Second, it reverses the probability calculus that skeptics implicitly invoke, showing that a necessary, non-contingent, personal agent is vastlymore probable as an explanation than the naturalistic alternatives. Third, it introduces what may be the deepest challenge naturalism faces: the fact that all observable physical reality conforms, without exception, to the three fundamental laws of logic, laws whose intrinsic rational character points to a rational source. These three lines of argument converge on a unified conclusion that naturalism cannot replicate.
1. The Logical Anatomy of “Yet Here We Are”
The weak anthropic principle, formally stated, observes that any universe we inhabit must be compatible with the existence of observers. This is trivially true and entirely uncontested. The error occurs when this observation is deployed as though it answers the question of why life-permitting conditions exist.
Consider the structure of the exchange. The theist presents the extraordinary precision of physical constants: the cosmological constant calibrated to roughly 1 part in 10^120, gravitational force sensitivity on the order of 1 in 10^40, initial entropy occupying a phase-space fraction of approximately 1 in 10^(10^123) per Penrose’s calculation. The skeptic responds: yet here we are.
What has this response accomplished? It has restated the observation that requires explanation and presented it as the explanation itself. The explanandum has been offered as the explanans. This is circular.
The firing squad analogy, well-established in the philosophy of religion literature, clarifies the point. Suppose you stand before fifty expert marksmen who fire simultaneously from close range. All fifty miss. You survive. The anthropic observation is: “Of course I observe my survival; I could not observe anything if I were dead.” True. But this observation does not explain the event. Why did all fifty miss? The improbability of the outcome remains fully intact regardless of the survivor’s ability to reflect on it. The fact demands explanation: either the miss was intentional (design) or you are cosmically fortunate (chance).
Fine-tuning is structurally identical. Yes, we must observe life-permitting constants because we could not exist in a universe that lacked them. This tells us which observations are possible. It does not supply a cause for the improbable configuration that makes those observations possible. Observation selection is a filter on what can be observed. It is not an explanation for what exists.
The critical distinction: selection effects identify which observations are accessible to observers; they do not account for the conditions that generated the observation in the first place.
2. The Probabilistic Asymmetry Naturalism Cannot Escape
Skeptics implicitly frame the theism-naturalism debate as though naturalistic explanations occupy the default position and theistic explanations bear the burden of overcoming prior improbability. Run the actual probability calculus and this framing inverts.
2.1 The Naturalistic Ledger
On naturalism, the following conjunctive probability must be satisfied. Each element is treated by naturalists as an independent problem requiring its own speculative mechanism:
The universe must originate uncaused (or from an eternal past that raises independent difficulties), with physical constants calibrated across dozens of parameters to life-permitting precision spanning scores or hundreds of orders of magnitude. Abiogenesis must occur: the transition from non-living chemistry to self-replicating, information-bearing biological systems, a problem that remains unsolved after more than seventy years of dedicated research, with the trajectory of inquiry making the problem more acute, not less. Specified complex information must originate in DNA through processes that no known natural mechanism can account for. Consciousness must emerge from unconscious matter, a challenge that the hard problem of consciousness renders not merely unsolved but conceptually resistant to physicalist reduction. Objective moral truths must somehow be grounded in amoral particles and forces.
Each of these receives its own disconnected rescue device from the naturalist: the multiverse for fine-tuning, “emergence” for consciousness, evolutionary ethics for morality, unspecified chemistry for biological information. These mechanisms are not only individually undemonstrated; they are mutually independent and often mutually incompatible. The conjunctive probability of all of them simultaneously succeeding, when none currently works even in isolation, is vanishingly small.
The multiverse, far from resolving the probability problem, intensifies it. The universe-generating mechanism itself requires calibration: inflation field parameters, probability distributions over the string landscape, solutions to the measure problem (which remains unsolved and which different regularization schemes resolve differently). The ontological commitment is staggering: on the order of 10^500 unobservable universes posited to avoid one unobservable God. Occam’s Razor, which skeptics frequently invoke against theism, cuts in precisely the opposite direction.
2.2 The Theistic Ledger
Now consider the alternative. A necessary, non-contingent, personal agent possessing the following attributes: rationality (grounding logical order), power (creating and sustaining physical reality), intelligence (calibrating constants and designing information systems), consciousness (grounding conscious experience), and moral nature (grounding objective moral truths).
The conditional probability P(universe like ours | such a being exists) approaches unity. Personal agents with intelligence and purpose routinely produce finely calibrated systems (engineering), information-rich code (software, language), rational frameworks (mathematics, law), and environments suited to specific purposes (architecture, ecology). A rational, powerful, personal Creator who intends relationship with conscious moral agents would produce precisely the kind of universe we observe.
Every feature that is catastrophically improbable on naturalism is expected on theism.
2.3 The Bayesian Reversal
Even assigning an arbitrarily skeptical prior to God’s existence, the likelihood ratio across multiple independent domains overwhelms that prior. The evidence does not mildly favor theism. It favors theism by dozens of orders of magnitude along each independent line: cosmological origins, parametric precision, biological information, consciousness, moral realism, rational order. And because these are independent lines of evidence, their force multiplies rather than merely adding.
Naturalism needs five or six disconnected rescue mechanisms, none of which currently succeeds. Christianity needs one being whose known attributes predict everything we observe. The explanatory asymmetry is not subtle; it is enormous.
3. The Laws of Logic and the Inference to Mindfulness
The deepest layer of this argument concerns a feature of reality that is so pervasive it often escapes notice: the universal, exceptionless conformity of all physical actualization to the three fundamental laws of logic.
3.1 The Empirical Observation
No physical event, no chemical reaction, no quantum measurement, no biological process in the entire observable history of the cosmos has ever violated the law of non-contradiction (nothing can both be and not be in the same respect at the same time), the law of identity (a thing is what it is), or the law of excluded middle (for any proposition, either it or its negation holds). Zero exceptions across 13.8 billion years, across billions of light-years, across every domain of physical inquiry.
This is not a philosophical stipulation. It is an empirical datum of the highest possible generality.
3.2 The Character of These Laws
These laws exhibit a distinctive profile that naturalism must account for. They are necessary: they hold in all possible worlds, not merely this one. A universe with different physical constants is coherently conceivable; a universe where A ≠ A is not. They are non-contingent: they do not depend on physical conditions and cannot be altered by physical processes. They are normative: they prescribe what can be the case, not merely what happens to be the case. They are universal: no domain of reality escapes their governance. And, as argued at length in “The Necessity Argument Against Naturalism” (Longmire 2025, Zenodo), they are ontologically prescriptive: they do not merely regulate thought but constrain being itself.
The law of non-contradiction, for instance, does not merely forbid us from believing contradictions. It excludes contradictions from reality. Nothing can both exist and not exist in the same respect at the same time, and this holds regardless of whether any mind is contemplating it. Where this law fails, nothing determinate can be said to exist. As Aristotle recognized, any attempt to deny it must presuppose it: to assert that contradictions are possible is to assert something determinate, which excludes the negation of one’s assertion. The very act of denial employs what it denies.
3.3 The Grounding Problem
The naturalist must explain the existence and authority of these laws. The available options have been systematically eliminated.
Psychologism holds that logical laws are descriptions of how human cognition operates. This collapses normativity: if logic is merely how brains happen to fire, then “illogical” thinking is not wrong, just different, and the concept of error becomes unintelligible. Worse, the argument for psychologism must itself employ logical validity to make its case, which presupposes that validity is something more than a psychological regularity. The position is self-defeating.
Conventionalism holds that logical laws are true by linguistic or social agreement. But conventions are adopted through reasoning, and reasoning requires logic. The convention-setting process presupposes the very constraints it claims to establish. The grounding runs in the wrong direction.
Brute fact treatments, the last available refuge, amount to what the Necessity Argument identifies as necessity in disguise. To declare that logical laws “just are” is to assert that they hold necessarily, non-contingently, without dependence on anything else. But that is precisely what necessity means. The naturalist has conceded a necessary, non-contingent, non-physical reality while refusing to name it. “Bruteness” here functions as a label that blocks further inquiry rather than advancing an explanation.
3.4 The Inference to Rational Source
With these alternatives eliminated, what remains? We observe that the fundamental structure governing all actualization in physical reality is rational. It exhibits the character of thought. Not in the reductive, psychologistic sense that these laws are merely thought (they are ontologically binding constraints on reality itself), but in the deeper sense that rationality, logical order, and coherent structure are the hallmarks of mind.
Every instance of rational order in our experience traces to a rational agent. Software has programmers. Mathematical theorems have mathematicians. Legal codes have legislators. Logical systems have logicians. The inference from rational structure to rational source follows the same pattern we deploy in science, forensics, archaeology, and daily life: like produces like.
The traditional designation of these laws as “the laws of thought” carries an intuition worth recovering. These laws bear the character of mind. They exhibit the rational structure that minds produce, recognize, and operate within. That they are also ontologically binding, that they constrain being and not merely thinking, does not weaken the inference to a rational source. It strengthens it. Whatever grounds these laws must be both rational (to account for their character) and ontologically ultimate (to account for their prescriptive authority over all reality).
3.5 The Logos
The Christian claim is that this rational structure is the Logos. John 1:1 identifies the ordering principle of all reality with the divine mind: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (ESV). The laws of thought are the laws of a Thought. They bear the character of mind because they originate in Mind. They are necessary because they reflect the necessary nature of God. They are non-contingent because they are grounded in a non-contingent being. They are ontologically binding because they express the rational character of the one who, as Hebrews 1:3 declares, is “sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
This is not a God-of-the-gaps insertion. It is a positive inference following the same logic we accept everywhere else: rational structure points to rational source, and the more pervasive and fundamental the structure, the more fundamental the source.
4. Convergence: Where All Three Lines Meet
These three arguments do not stand in isolation. They converge on a unified conclusion that naturalism cannot replicate.
The same reality that exhibits staggering parametric precision (fine-tuning) also exhibits inviolable rational order (the laws of logic). The constants are calibrated within a logically ordered framework. The fine-tuning does not float free; it operates within a rational structure that itself requires grounding. Any adequate explanation must account for both simultaneously.
Add the independent lines. Cosmological origins require a transcendent, personal cause. Fine-tuning requires an intelligent designer who calibrates for purpose. Rational order requires a necessary rational mind. Biological information requires an intelligent source of specified complexity. Consciousness requires a conscious ground. Moral realism requires a moral foundation.
Each line independently generates a set of attributes for its explanatory ground: necessary, transcendent, powerful, intelligent, rational, conscious, moral, personal, purposeful. These attributes converge. They describe a single being. Parsimony demands a unified explanation where a unified explanation is available.
Naturalism, by contrast, requires a separate speculative mechanism for each domain. Quantum fluctuation (or eternal universe) for origins. Multiverse for fine-tuning. Brute fact (or Platonism, or structural realism) for logical order. Unspecified chemistry for biological information. “Emergence” for consciousness. Evolutionary psychology for morality. These mechanisms are disconnected, individually unsuccessful, and collectively ad hoc. The naturalist is playing whack-a-mole with individual phenomena while Christianity offers a coherent framework that explains them all.
“Yet here we are” addresses, at best, one line of evidence (fine-tuning), and even there it fails because observation selection is a filter, not an explanation. It says nothing about consciousness, biological information, moral realism, rational order, or cosmological origins. The multiverse, if invoked alongside it, addresses (poorly) one additional line. Five others remain untouched.
5. The Real Objection
The skeptic’s resistance to this conclusion has never been primarily probabilistic. If probability governed the assessment, the Bayesian calculus would have settled the question long ago. The resistance is methodological: a prior commitment to excluding personal agency as a category of explanation for ultimate questions.
This commitment reveals itself when the same skeptic who accepts that intelligence produced the information in software, the calibration in engineering systems, and the rational structure in mathematical proofs insists that structurally identical explanations are illegitimate when applied to the information in DNA, the calibration of physical constants, or the rational structure of reality itself. The inference pattern is identical. The conclusion is rejected because of where it points, not because of how it was reached.
At some point, a framework commitment held in spite of mounting contrary evidence across multiple independent domains ceases to be methodological caution and becomes a faith commitment: the very thing naturalism claims to have transcended.
Conclusion
“Yet here we are” is the anthropic principle with a shrug. It is true, trivial, and explanatorily vacuous. The observation that we exist in a life-permitting universe is the starting point of the inquiry, not its resolution. The probabilistic calculus, honestly applied, reveals an enormous asymmetry favoring a necessary, personal, rational agent over the disconnected speculative mechanisms of naturalism. And the deepest feature of reality, the universal conformity of all physical actualization to necessary, non-contingent, ontologically binding rational laws, points to a rational source that naturalism has no resources to explain.
The evidence converges. Cosmological origins, parametric precision, biological information, consciousness, moral realism, and rational order: six independent lines pointing to one being with one coherent set of attributes. Christianity has a name for that being. It has always had the name.
In the beginning was the Logos.
James (JD) Longmire ORCID: 0009-0009-1383-7698 Northrop Grumman Fellow (unaffiliated research) jdlongmire@outlook.com
oddXian.com | Challenge the Consensus: Working out the harmony of God’s Word and God’s World
References
Aristotle. Metaphysics, Book Γ (IV), 1005b–1006a.
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Leslie, J. (1989). Universes. London: Routledge.
Longmire, J. (2025). “The Necessity Argument Against Naturalism.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18695574
Penrose, R. (2004). The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. London: Jonathan Cape.