Does God Exist? by William Lane Craig

Author:William Lane Craig [Craig, William Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Impact 360 Institute
Published: 2014-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMULATION

The fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.

It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

Therefore, it is due to design.

This is a logically valid argument, whose conclusion follows necessarily from the two premises. So the only question is whether those premises are more plausibly true than false. So let’s look at them.

Premise 1: The fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.

The first premise is unobjectionable, because it just lists the three alternatives available for explaining the fine-tuning. If someone has a fourth alternative, he’s welcome to add it to the list, and then we’ll consider it when we come to premise 2. But there doesn’t seem to be another alternative to the three listed here.

Premise 2: It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

So the crucial premise is the second premise, that the fine-tuning is not due to physical necessity or chance. Let’s examine each of these alternatives in turn.

According to the first alternative, physical necessity, the universe has to be life-permitting. The constants and quantities must have the values they do, so that a life-prohibiting universe is physically impossible.

Now on the face of it, this alternative seems fantastically implausible. It would require us to say that a life-prohibiting universe is a physical impossibility. But why take such a radical view? We’ve seen that the constants are not determined by the laws of nature; so why couldn’t they be different? Moreover, the arbitrary quantities are just boundary conditions on which the laws of nature operate. Nothing seems to make them necessary. So anyone who opts for this explanation of fine-tuning is taking a radical line. He needs to furnish some proof. But there is none; the alternative is put forward as a bare possibility.

Sometimes scientists do talk of a yet-to-be-discovered “Theory of Everything” (TOE). But like so many of the colorful names given to scientific theories, this label is very misleading. A successful TOE would enable us to unify the four basic forces of nature (gravity, the weak force, the strong force, and electromagnetism) into a single force carried by a single kind of particle. But it wouldn’t even attempt to explain literally everything. For example, the most promising candidate for a TOE to date, so-called M-Theory or super-string theory, only works if there are eleven dimensions. But the theory itself cannot explain why just that particular number of dimensions should exist.

Moreover, M-Theory doesn’t predict uniquely a life-permitting universe. It permits a vast range of around 10500 different possible universes, all consistent with the same laws but varying in the values of the constants of nature. Almost all of these possible universes are life-prohibiting.

This so-called “cosmic landscape” of worlds permitted by M-Theory has become something of a phenom lately. It’s important to understand that the landscape is just a range of possibilities. Some people have misinterpreted it to mean that all these different universes actually exist. Some have thought it undermines the argument for design because the landscape must include life-permitting worlds like ours.

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