Greentree Community Church

Before taking the next piece of scientific evidence for God’s existence I want to again emphasize that every argument presented can be rationally avoided at some level and that everyone will find some arguments more or less powerful.  However, if we consider all the arguments together, the weight will be almost overwhelming.  Personally, I believe that one of the most compelling arguments is what has been called the “Anthropic Principle” or the “Fine Tuning of the Universe.”  With modern science, cosmologists have now discovered that the universe’s fundamental forces are intricately balanced, as though on a knife’s edge.  If even one of the scores of fundamental forces and laws were not precisely exact, then life would not even be possible.  Consider the following examples (which are only a few among scores) given by scientist Robin Collins:

1. If the initial explosion of the Bib Bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10⁶⁰, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form.  In either case, life would be impossible.  This degree of accuracy could be compared to firing a bullet at a one inch target 20 billion light years away and actually hitting the target. 
2. If the strong nuclear force which binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible. 
3. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10⁴⁰, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist, rendering life itself impossible.
4. If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, making life impossible.

To make this logic clearer, Nancy Pearcy proposes to imagine that you found a huge universe creating machine, with hundreds of dials, each having trillions of settings representing these forces.  Imagine that what you discover is that each of these dials just happens to be set to exactly the right value for life to exist when even the slightest tweak of one knob would produce a lifeless universe.  Since the ‘knobs’ are not constrained by any natural law, they have all the earmarks of being a product of design or intention.  It is this exact basis which led Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias to say, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”  Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson notes, “It almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”  Not to be outdone, Stephen Hawking concludes, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”  Robin Collins adds the illustration of hiking in the mountains and finding a group of rocks arranged in a formation that clearly formed the pattern, “Welcome to the mountains Robin Collins.”  One way to explain the formation would be to conclude that the rocks simply fell into that particular pattern by chance.  Suppose the only other viable hypothesis was that my brother, who was in the mountains before me, arranged the rocks in this way.  99.9% of us would go with the brother hypothesis.  Moreover, the best atheistic response to the fine tuning argument, or ‘anthropic principle,’ is posited by Richard Dawkins who argues that there may be trillions of universes, and given the enormous number of universes existing over enormous amounts of time and space, it is inevitable that one or a few of them are fine-tuned to sustain our kind of life.  Thus, the argument is rationally avoidable but not, in my opinion, reasonably avoidable.  Alvin Plantinga says that this line of reasoning is akin to dealing oneself 20 straight hands of four aces in the same game of poker.  As his companions reach for their guns, the poker player says, “I know it looks suspicious!  But what if there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of poker hands, there is one universe in which this possibility is realized?”  We just happen to find ourselves in the one where I deal myself 20 straight hands of four aces w/o cheating.”  To push this bit of science even further, consider the regularity of nature in the same light.  All scientific and inductive reasoning is based on the assumption that all the forces in the universe will remain constant.  Water will freeze under the same conditions, an object will fall at the same speed, the earth will continue to rotate, etc.  Bertrand Russell was troubled by the fact that we don’t know why nature is so regular now and we have no justification for believing it will behave that way tomorrow. Thus, science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature; it must take it on faith.  But it is precisely this confidence in a God who created a continuing orderly universe that gave rise to modern science!