Bork
I am slightly embarrassed here, in that I have lost my original reference.
At this point, I wanted to mention that upon checking the source you supplied above, I found that the article in turn referenced the following book:
Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues Edited by H. Wayne House. This is the only reference the article provides, and it should be clear at this point that the ID movement does not represent any sort of mainstream scientific consensus.
Such factors as the ratio between the power of the em force and gravity are vital in determining the structure of the universe, and life of any kind, even that radically different to ours, would be impossible in a universe with those constants only slightly varying.
That's an awfully strong assertion to make about our physical understanding of the universe, and I doubt you have any facts or citations from mainstream physics to substantiate it. I present to you the following experimentally verified counterexample:
exotic atoms. The muonic atom I mentioned above is one example of such a system. Let no one be confused, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of "exotic matter" hypothesized for warp drives and such. Exotic atoms are bound states of matter possessing similar properties to the atoms we commonly deal with, but they are not composed strictly from protons, neutrons and electrons. Hence the masses, electroweak and colour charges are free to vary without destroying the potential for exotic chemistry. I have also personally witnessed Prof. Sean Carroll, the author of the main textbook I used for GR, discussing the potential for studies of things such as "dark chemistry" based on the hypothetical ways in which dark matter is expected to interact.
Now in practice, the reason we don't see exotic atoms outside of finely-tuned lab conditions is because the particles that compose them don't last very long. On the other hand, if you tweaked the standard model so that the electron were hundreds of times more massive but still the lightest lepton, the atoms it helps form would behave just like these exotic atoms, but it would also be stable, and hence these atoms would live long enough to form molecules and chemicals. Meanwhile, for the universe we actually live in, dark matter is thought to be as stable as regular matter and hence makes a great candidate for a new form of previously unexplored chemistry.
Wiki puts it (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Anthropic_principle )
as
"Some physicists have explored the notion that if the dimensionless physical constants had sufficiently different values, our universe would be so radically different that intelligent life would probably not have emerged, and that our universe therefore seems to be fine-tuned for intelligent life.
Given a sentence with so many conditional qualifiers, how can you draw any decisive conclusions?
(from same article) "The anthropic principle states a logical truism: the fact of our existence as intelligent beings who can measure physical constants requires those constants to be such that beings like us can exist."
Indeed. I believe you misinterpret the meaning of "beings like us" to imply all intelligent creatures of any kind. The truth is, no one has the computing power to reach such a conclusion as yours with any sort of reliability. The question as to what the universe would look like with different physical constants is still completely up in the air. The idea of narrowing this down to a choice between multiverses and Godverses is a red herring put forth by the likes of IDers in order to stifle the debate and back their opponents into a corner.
