Well, that's only the localized version of that argument. The better argument is concerned with the capacity for the universe itself to hold any life whatsoeve

Well, that's only the localized version of that argument. The better argument is concerned with the capacity for the universe itself to hold any life whatsoever. The relationship between the fundamental forces (strong, weak, gravity, etc.) and certain other constants in physics that, were they slightly different, would rending the whole of existence something entirely different. This leads to one of three conclusions. 1) It's a staggering coincidence that the one universe is such that it supports such nuance as life and consciousness. 2) The universe is cyclic and that this iteration happened to be the one where that occurred. 3) There are many universes. The problem with 2 is that it seems that our universe is not going to contract. So you'd have to fold in the likelihood that of the infinite cycles needed to get to this arrangement, this one that works for life and intelligence also happens to be the last one. As for 3, it solves many of the problems, but it's no more empirical than 1. It's favored in philosophical circles because it is naturalistic, but when dealing with questions like this, the idea of a prime mover isn't obviously any less natural than the idea of infinitely many bubble universes. The compelling argument against #1 has always been, "Well, making a god or God the first mover does nothing but shift the question to 'Who made God?'" The response to that it is only our universe in particular that is subject to the evidence that there was a beginning and will be an end state. We know matter is not infinite. We know it had a start, a finish, and we know pretty well that the universe is going to wind down at some point to a static end. This means that it had a definite beginning (or that we happen to be in the final cycle of infinite cycles which is a strange, maybe intractable metaphysical problem in and of itself). Anyway, a first-mover outside of our universe doesn't have any of these pressures on it. I assume that Hawking's work here (I'm not a physicist in the slightest) will seek to establish that there is a gravitational background to existence that is independent of our universe. In short, he's made gravity the first-mover. He's made gravity into god, an eternal entity that is unchanging and requires neither beginning nor end based on our understanding of it. I know that's a huge block of text, but this is an old, old idea. Hawking is hardly the first person to explore this territory, and he's almost certainly not the smartest, whatever that means. It's primarily a metaphysics problem, not a physics problem, but if one could discover in physics something that is independent of our universe, that would have major bearing on the metaphysical problem. TL;DR The anthropic argument is much more interesting when applied to the universe as a whole than to us or our planet in particular. It's an open problem in metaphysics. Hawking may shed more light on it through physics, but this isn't just a case of terribly ignorant people vs. civilized educated people. It's a real question. (Edited because I wrote "week force" which, while I could try to play it off as a novel way to refer to time, was clearly a stupid mistake.)