Is the universe fine-tuned for life?
Yes, and for a reason. Life is a condition for the universe to create itself consistently. A universe that reads itself into existence needs advanced agents that think and act, that reverse engineer it, and that eventually build the screen it runs on. So the specification of the simulation is one under which life can emerge on its second layer. On the first layer, native observers compute the laws of physics. On the second, living agents evolve on top of those laws. With different constants the universe would not exist, because nothing in it could ever close the loop. The constants are tuned and also forced. Read one cell of an observer's screen from the outside and from the inside, and the two readings must agree, which fixes the strength of electromagnetism at a single value. The solution is 137.035660 against a measured 137.035999, and closing the last 2.5 parts per million is work in progress.
Also in Chapter 29: Why 1/137, and Why Is There a Limit to What the Universe Can Remember?, Chapter 37: Why Does the Loop Have No Beginning?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 33: Why Was Every Open Problem the Same Problem?watch a universe make its own particles