A Universe Filled with Order – Fine Tuning

In this article, I am going to attempt to break down the argument of fine tuning and explain why this is such strong evidence for God.

Overview of the Fine Tuning Argument

The argument of fine tuning basically says that we live in a universe that is perfectly tuned for life and changing anything in even the smallest way would cause life to never have been created in the universe. The lowest estimate I have seen for the chance that the universe would exist is 1 / 10⁶⁰ but the higher estimate that we exist in this universe goes up to around 1 / 10²²⁴. If you are not familiar with this math term it would be 1 with 60 zeros after it or 1 with 224 zeros following it. Towards the end of this, I will write out these numbers so that you can grasp the likeliness in a visual way. Getting back to the point, the theory says for this to happen it is more likely a creator exists and created it than it was created randomly. Here is how it is written out.

1. If God does not exist, then it was extremely unlikely that the universe would permit life.
2. But if God exists, then it was very likely that the universe would permit life.
3. Therefore, that the universe permits life is strong evidence that God exists.

Fine Tuning in action

Apologists love to use the fine tuning argument in a very simplified way. When you walk up to a building you know the building hard an architect. When you see a beautiful painting on the wall you know a painter painted it. When you see the creation you should know that a creator created it. It would be absurd to suggest that a building or a painting happened randomly without a mind to do it, so why would you suggest the universe did the same?

The argument can even be applied to challenge the theory of evolution. Those challenges typically look at things like DNA. How and why would life have DNA? What is DNA? DNA is data storage in living organisms. Where have we ever seen data storage that was not produced by a mind? Another example of this is the Eye. You see according to evolution the eye did not evolve one time but several times in different animals. It had to because it exists in animals around the world which all date back to similar time periods and are unrelated species and the species before these animals were blind. You see this is extremely unlikely because of the complexity of the eye. The eye would have taken a very long time in evolution to get to where it is. Like millions of years. Random cells and DNA changing the eye would have to start developing many generations before the eye is actually produced. So now we have a thing that is useless that takes dominance over and over again in many generations to eventually produce sight. This seems extremely unlikely. If you hold to the theory of evolution you still have to hold that a creator directed evolution for it to work.

Fine tuning in my opinion is also a very good argument against the existence of aliens. If aliens do in fact exist (I do not believe they do) that makes God’s existence even more likely based on the argument of fine tuning. We know this doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist because he talks about other beings not from Earth in the Bible, Angels. However usually when you hear people talking about aliens and you disagree they will say things like “It is a big universe. Just because we haven’t found life doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. This is true, but the math doesn’t seem to work. So googling how many stars are in the universe returns 200000000000000000000000 that’s a 2 with 24 zeros. our star has 9 planets but let’s be generous and say that each star has 100 planets. That only makes that number 20000000000000000000000000 or 2 with 26 zeros. Again on the low estimate, we are looking at the likeliness of life being 1 with 60 zeros. Scroll to the bottom of the page to get a good picture of those numbers in your head. It is incredibly unlikely that this should happen randomly a single time, now suggesting that it could happen 2 times. wow…

Arguments against Fine Tuning

The Multiverse

The multiverse is the idea that maybe our universe is not the only universe. Perhaps there are multiple universes in other dimensions. There could be an infinite number of universes all with different parameters. (different levels of gravity and hydrogen and things like that that make our universe perfect for supporting life). Then it could be easy to imagine that one of these infinite number of universes has everything needed to support life and since we are here living our universe is the universe that supports life.

There are 3 problems with this argument.

1. There is no evidence of the multiverse. This theory is speculative and unsupported by science. Why not just believe in God since there is more evidence for him than the multiverse?
2. The multiverse doesn’t explain how it was created or how life began to exist. Again even if the multiverse was created, it would still need a creator.
3. Infinite does not exist in reality. In other words, the idea of something being infinite might exist but as of now, there is nothing we have witnessed that is infinite in our world.

The Puddle Analogy

The puddle analogy is the idea that water finds a hole that doesn’t mean the hole is made for the water. In other words if it rained and a puddle came to life he might think to himself “Wow, this hole fits me perfectly” not that he fits the hole but the hole fits him, it was made for him. Obviously from the puddles point of view it does look like it was made for him but we can clearly see and know that it wasn’t. It was a happy accident.

Problems with the puddle analogy is that it is comparing life to water. Where water is fluid and can be housed by any shape hole life is not. We know from what we have seen there needs to be very specific things for life to exist in our universe. That is in fact the argument of fine tuning there are X number of variables that must be met perfectly for life to exist. Any old hole will not do for this. It needs to contain all of these different things. And as science continues to move forward we aren’t finding its easier for life to exist, but harder.

The likeliness of fine tuning written out.

1 in 10 to the 60th power would be:

1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

1 in 10 to the 224th power would be:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000