The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [71]
“Then you come back a year later. When you look at the dials, you’re amazed to find that each one of them has been carefully calibrated to just the right setting so that life is flourishing in the dome. Twelve dials, twelve different factors—all optimally set for life.
“Do you know what the headline would be in the newspaper the next day? It would say: extraterrestrial life exists. We would take that as proof that an intelligent being had landed and set those dials precisely where they needed to be for life.
“And I’m saying that the dials for the fundamental properties of the universe have been set like that. In fact, the precision is far greater. This would be totally unexpected under the theory that random chance was responsible. However, it’s not unexpected at all under the hypothesis that there is a Grand Designer.”
READY, AIM, FIRE!
Few concepts stretch the mind as much as the fine-tuning of the universe. For example, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose said one parameter, the “original phase-space volume,” required fine-tuning to an accuracy of one part in ten billion multiplied by itself one hundred and twenty three times. Penrose remarked that it would be impossible to even write down that number in full, since it would require more zeroes than the number of elementary particles in the entire universe! This showed, he said, “the precision needed to set the universe on its course.” 25
As Discover magazine marveled: “The universe is unlikely. Very unlikely. Deeply, shockingly unlikely.” 26
In light of the infinitesimal odds of getting all the right dial settings for the constants of physics, the forces of nature, and other physical laws and principles necessary for life, it seems fruitless to try to explain away all of this fine-tuning as merely the product of random happenstance.
“As long as we’re talking about probabilities, then theoretically you can’t rule out the possibility—however remote—that this could occur by chance,” Collins said.
“However, if I bet you a thousand dollars that I could flip a coin and get heads fifty times in a row, and then I proceeded to do it, you wouldn’t accept that. You’d know that the odds against that are so improbable—about one chance in a million billion—that it’s extraordinarily unlikely to happen. The fact that I was able to do it against such monumental odds would be strong evidence to you that the game had been rigged. And the same is true for the fine-tuning of the universe—before you’d conclude that random chance was responsible, you’d conclude that there is strong evidence that the universe was rigged. That is, designed.
“I’ll give you another illustration,” he continued. “Let’s say I was hiking in the mountains and came across rocks arranged in a pattern that spelled out, welcome to the mountains robin collins. One hypothesis would be that the rocks just happened to be arranged in that configuration, maybe as the result of an earthquake or rockslide. You can’t totally rule that out. But an alternative hypothesis would be that my brother, who was visiting the mountains before me, arranged the rocks that way.
“Quite naturally, most people would accept the brother theory over the chance theory. Why? Because it strikes us as supremely improbable that the rocks would be arranged that way by chance, but not at all improbable that my brother would place them in that pattern. That’s a quite reasonable assumption.
“In a similar way, it’s supremely improbable that the fine-tuning of the universe could have occurred at random, but it’s not at all improbable if it were the work of an intelligent designer. So it’s quite reasonable to choose the design theory over the chance theory. We reason that way all the time. Were the defendant’s fingerprints on the gun because of a chance formation of chemicals or because he touched the weapon? Jurors don’t hesitate to confidently conclude that he touched the gun if the odds against chance