2. God Makes Sense of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life

In the last 30 years or so, scientist have come to discover that the conditions that allow for intelligent life were set in place with the Big Bang. It was once thought these conditions would evolve with time, however new discoveries have revealed intelligent life truly hangs in a delicate balance. It has become quiet clear that life-prohibiting universes are more probable then life-permitting universes. For instance, Stephan Hawking estimated that if the expansion of the universe one second after the Big Bang would had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fire ball(A Brief History of Time). Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10^10(123) (”The Anthropic Principle” Particle and Nuclear Physics). Altogether there are around 50 quantities and constants in the Big Bang that must be fine tuned in similar fashions in the examples shown in order for the universe to permit life. Not only do these quantities and constants have to fulfill next to near impossible events happening at just the right moment in time, but their ratios to each other also must be finely tuned. In the end as Dr. Craig writes, “Improbability is added to improbability to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.”

There are only three possibilities to the fine-tuning of the universe, natural law, chance, or design. If the universe is life-permitting by natural law, one has to accept and show that life-prohibiting universes are virtually impossible. However, with the information provided above it seems very plausible that a life-prohibiting universe could very well come into existance. Which in fact our life-permitting universe seemed to have been dangling on a knife’s edge during its creation, where a life-prohibiting universe seemed more possible with the given circumstances of the Big Bang. Also there are universe models that have been created that show a universe can exist different from our present universe. John Leslie, in his book Universes, writes, “The claim that blind necessity is involved-that universes whose laws or constants are slightly different aren’t real physical possibilities…is eroded by the various physical theories, particularly theories of random symmetry breaking which show how a varied ensemble of universes might be generated” (Universes). So the possibility for universes that depend on other forms of natural laws for its existance, does exist. Second, if the laws of nature were necessary for the universes existance, one would still have to supply the initial conditions. P.C.W Davies explains, “Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn’t follow that the physical universe itself is unique…the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions….There is nothing in present ideas about ‘laws of initial conditions’ remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it…it seems, then that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise”(The Mind of God). How about the possibility that the universes fine-tuning is due to chance? As we have seen in the last paragraph, the odds of this chance occurring is so improbable that its really unreasonable to assume such a thing. This sort of improbability would not be accepted in any other circumstance of ones life, for example, a car suddenly appearing in your drive way over night or coming home from work to find a donkey standing in your living room. Thus leaving the “Cosmic Designer” to be a more plausible explanation to the universes fine-tuning. It provides a personal explanation to the universes fine-tuning, much like a potters reasoning to design his or her pot a certain way. The argument summed up:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.

2. It is not due to law or chance.

3. Therefore, it is due to design.

(All material is summarized from Dr. William Lane Craig’s arguments for God)