 Motivated by the difficulties that arise in attempts to apply the physical and logical notions of probability to fine-tuning for life, contemporary accounts often appeal to an essentially epistemic notion of probability (e.g., Monton 2006; Collins 2009). According to these approaches, life-friendly conditions are improbable in that we would not rationally expect them. An obvious problem for this view is that life-friendly conditions are not literally unexpected for us: as a matter of fact, we have long been aware that the conditions are right for life in our universe, so the epistemic probability of life-friendly conditions appears to be trivially \(1\). As Monton (2006) highlights, to make sense of the idea that life-friendly conditions are improbable in an epistemic sense, we must find a way of strategically abstracting from some of our background knowledge, notably from our knowledge that life exists, and assess the probability of life’s existence from that perspective. (See  Section 3.3  for further discussion.)