I believe the universe existed for a very long time before life appeared. In fact, the earth has a very special place in the known universe.
What do you mean by "special?
The Solar system is located in the ideal part of the Milky Way and our planet contains the exact concentrations of chemicals to support life.
Here we have a bit of a problem. Let's say we know the concentrations of chemicals that were able to (and continue to be able to) support life on this planet. This does not mean there is any exact concentrations. To illustrate:
Imagine Einstein had not done the work he did to publish the
Annus mirabilis papers (the research in the papers he published in 1905 was so central to the foundation of modern physics that 1905 is called the "miraculous year"). In particular, imagine he hadn't explained the photoelectric effect by realizing that light was not a wave but composed of "quanta", whence is derived the "quantum" part of "quantum physics".
Does this mean that nobody would have explained it later? The effect itself was discovered in the 19th century, Lord Kelvin had already stated that this was one of the two main issues left for physicists, Planck had provided the theory of black-body radiation Einstein used, and it was actually Millikin (not Einstein) who showed Einstein's explanation/prediction was correct.
The point is that we do not know who may have derived the same result Einstein did, because Einstein did in fact publish his theory in 1905.
Likewise, life on this planet has depended upon certain compositions of chemicals, but that does not mean Earth possesses the
exact concentrations of chemicals to support life, only that it possesses
some particular concentrations
which have and do support life.
If you could show that Earth possesses not
some set of possible concentrations able to support life but rather
the exact concentrations, then you could explain life. After all, the only way to know that some other concentrations couldn't support life is to know how the exact concentrations of life that do support it are able to do so and why no other set could.
[also, as concentrations of chemicals found on, in and around this Earth (around meaning Earth's atmosphere) have changed radically over the period of Earth's history, you would have to know how the different sets of concentrations of chemicals that have supported life on Earth are the only ones that could]
We are also at the right distance from the sun. Further we would freeze, closer it would be too hot for living organisms.
Even Ward & Brownlee disagree. If their
Rare Earth idea is correct, then
multicellular life may be extremely rare (even unique), but extremophiles thrive in the environments they are named for: extreme (boiling jets of water, volcanoes, sea ice, etc.). The problem is that one can just as easily use something like the Drake equation to show how certain it is that intelligent life exists elsewhere, or a Bayesian analysis to show how improbable it is, or a modified Drake equation to make it virtually impossible for life to exist elsewhere.
The earth has the perfect tilt and spin and we can add the atmosphere and magnetic field to the list of things that made life's existence possible. Coincidence as well?
Let's posit you're correct, and that all the things you mentioned didn't just happen such that we find life on Earth, but life would not be possible without such "fine-tunings". How would we go about determining if this were really true (that life can't exist with different atmospheres, chemical compositions, and other elements/factors of habitable zones)? By explaining what life is.
You can't have it both ways. Either we don't know enough about life to explain how it could ever arise, in which case we can hardly say anything about the conditions necessary for it to arise, or we
do know how all the fine-tunings you mentioned are needed. But if we
do know, then we know because we understand how life works (i.e., it requires this set of things to happen, this set not to happen, these compositions to exist, those concentrations to exist, etc.). In that case we'd know how life originated, as the only way we couldn't know that would be if there were some uncertainties as to whether there exists some processes, properties, and/or mechanisms by which life did not arise on Earth but
could have arrived elsewhere. And if those uncertainties exist, then we can't say much about whether or not life requires all the fine-tunings you refer to.
It really looks like the universe and the earth were very well prepared
It really looks like someone carved out a face there (like a bad version of Mt. Rushmore).
I don't know about you, but I see a face not some fuzzy, amorphous,
nebulous, shape.
It really looks like something it is not.
One of the reasons that we tend to see faces in everything from the moon and mars to a sandwich is because we are innately predisposed to recognize faces. More than voice, figure, head shape, etc., humans rely on faces to identify other humans. There is no system on Earth better at facial recognition than the human perceptual-conceptual system. There exists a side-effect, however, to our predisposition not only to classify particular features as "facial" but as a particular face. We are able to differentiate like faces, recognize faces from profile views or in fuzzy photos, etc., because the set of features we categorize as "facial" is so broad that for any face the number of ways we can see differences allows us to distinguish virtually all faces.
However, there are so many such features that they are bound to appear in natural formations of all kinds.
Imagine you were presented with 2 strings of numbers, each one a sequence of a hundred million 0's and 1's. Imagine that the sequences of 0's and 1's in each were identical except for one single place in which one string had a 0 and the other a 1.
That's the kind of thing a computer can distinguish in no time at all. It's extremely difficult for us. Our perceptual system is designed to find "fuzzy" patterns, not specifics. So when some pattern seems to be similar one or more that we have associated with complexity, with design, and with intent, we attribute these things to it. Meanwhile, if you tossed a handful of sand in it where they landed wouldn't appear at all designed. It would look random. Yet the probability that each grain would land exactly where it did is incredibly low and determining these positions in advance exceeds our capability despite all our computer models, laws of physics, mechanics, etc. It seems amazing that vast numbers of different sets geometrical features we are predisposed to perceive as faces show up naturally, even though it would be a miracle if they didn't. The innumerable ways in which thousands of grains of sand tossed into the air can land in unreliably high numbers of ways, however, not only appears unremarkable but there are millions of ways they could land in similar ways beyond our ability to distinguish between these ways.
If evolution doesn't tell us how life first came to exist then how can I accept it as a confirmed fact?
The same way that you accept the theory that the Earth orbits the sun even though this doesn't tell us how the universe began, explain stellar astrophysics, or solve the issues with quantum gravity. You are asking why a theory doesn't give us the answer to a question it was never intended to explain. You may as well ask how you can accept evolution if it doesn't tell you how the Earth was formed or how the solar system was.
For me that is a crucial point.
The origin of life is a crucial question. Modern medicine doesn't tell us how life began. Would you refuse medical treatment because it doesn't tell us how life began? I would bet the answer is no. Why? Because modern medicine isn't intended to answer that question. Neither is evolution.
The idea that life showed up we don't really know how but then it evolved so that's good enough doesn't work for me.
Then look into the research on how it began. Questioning evolution because it doesn't answer what it isn't intended to seems odd indeed.
