The requisite number perches, precariously, preciously, between .006 and .008. And that's just one of Rees's six numbers. If you toss in the other five, life and the structure of the universe as we know it become unlikely to an absurd degree. Faced with such overwhelming improbability, cosmologists have offered up several possible explanations. The simplest is the so-called brute fact argument.
Many scientists are satisfied with that.
Rees objects, drawing from an analogy given by philosopher John Leslie. Suppose you are in front of a firing squad, and they all miss. But it is still something surprising, something that can't be easily explained. I think there is something there that needs explaining. Meanwhile, the numbers' uncanny precision has driven some scientists, humbled, into the arms of the theologians.