Okay, we are back with teleological arguments. You'll remember that the last time we spoke, I gave you a list of parameters that are extremely improbable. Their improbability is compounded by the fact that if they were off by just a hair's breadth, for some of them there would be no life at all. And for many, if not most of them, there would be no intelligent life. And then this is compounded by the issue that the very same preconditions for life also happen to be the preconditions for, at least for intelligent life existing in this world or in this universe. The preconditions for intelligent life existing are just precisely the same conditions that are required for doing science. And so it would suggest that we're here for a purpose. And we went through some of the alternatives, physical necessity, chance, the chances are phenomenal, astronomical, that we couldn't be here by chance. And then finally, we looked at the idea of design. And you'll notice that the argument is a design argument that really points to a transcendent designer. So that the cause of the design or the designer of the universe is transcendent and personal. And so this does two things. First of all, it underscores the fact that we're dealing with a transcendent God. And second of all, it underscores the fact that this God is personal. In fact, it highlights the personality of God because of the incredible amount of intelligence that has to go into the fine tuning of the universe. And we looked at another alternative, namely the multiverse. And I gave six arguments against that, one of my favorite being that If the multiverse were true, and we were going to use that as an explanation for why things happen, we would no longer be able to engage in probabilistic reasoning, because literally any event that happens that is extremely improbable can just be written off as explained by the multiverse. So not only is the multiverse more plausible in theism, it doesn't serve as a really good scientific hypothesis. Now what I did, and I just came from my house where I watched some segments of the debate between Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig, and they debated the cosmological argument, the Kalam argument in particular, but they also debated the implications of the fine-tuning of the universe. And Carroll is given what a lot of atheists think is sort of the knockdown argument against the fine-tuning of the universe, and so I thought that It would be good if we went through his basic reasons for thinking that this is just a bad argument for theism. And I'm going to give you the list, and then I'm going to give you the list, the order that he gave them. So this is his order. But I'm also, but I'm not going to address them in the order that he presented them. In the first place, he actually raises the question, is there fine-tuning? Or is the fine-tuning as incredible as it seems? Or is the fine-tuning such that life-prohibiting universes are more plausible than life-permitting universes? By that, he means that it's one thing to say that the universe is fine-tuned for us, and it's another thing to say it's fine-tuned for life in general. In other words, sure, if the universe were just a little bit different, we wouldn't be here. But that doesn't mean that if the universe were just a little bit different, no life of any kind would be here. And that's a very, very common response to this argument. I mean, so what if we wouldn't be here? The question is, Would life of any kind be here if the parameters were changed? And so he draws that question. The second issue, the second objection he gives to the argument, is that God isn't needed, or God doesn't need to fine-tune anything. I mean, think about the kind of God we're talking about. God is all-powerful. So why would God need to fine-tune a universe if he wants life in it? He could put life in just any kind of universe. He doesn't need fine-tuning for that. To say that God couldn't do that would be to deny his omnipotence, right? So you can't say the fine-tuning of the universe points to a God who wouldn't need to do that if he were gonna create life in this universe. Yeah, yeah, God could speak and I could live on Mars and there'd be no problem. Third, fine-tuning might only be apparent So this actually comes up very close to denying fine-tuning altogether. I'll talk about that in a minute. Fourth, he does suggest a multiverse, so he appeals to the multiverse as a better hypothesis than theism. And then fifth, theism fails to predict that this universe would exist. So that's his fifth point. And I think that that's the most important point, because what I noticed in the debate between Carol and Craig is that in one sense they were talking past each other. I don't know if you're familiar with William Lane Craig's work. He is, in my estimation, the greatest living defender of Christianity. He is one of the greatest living defenders of theism. And for decades now, if you get on certain websites like infidels.org, The atheist community will say, this guy has been killing us. He's been winning these debates. And he's been just walking off into the sunset in victory. And they've been licking their wounds after he gets finished with them for many years. Well, the Sean Carroll debate is often now touted as. It took place four years ago. It's often touted as sort of the debate where Craig was finally shown to be the fraud that he is. That's sort of the way it's presented. Finally, somebody cut through all the bull and demonstrated him for the fraud that he is, and he got put out to pasture with this debate. So therefore, every debate afterwards is really just Craig running from Carroll, I guess. I'm not really sure. But the point is, Carroll just totally undressed Craig, totally defeated him, and it wasn't even close. Now, my estimation of the debate I don't think Craig clearly won it, but I certainly don't think Carol clearly won it. And I'm not trying to overanalyze it. I'm not trying to say that just Craig can't lose a debate. I'm not upset because my guy might have lost. It's not that at all. I mean, I listened to the debate. I pondered what they were saying. And I just honestly don't think one of them did better than the other. Carol tried his best to answer all of Craig's points, and I think he did a fairly good job of doing it. And Craig answered all of Carol's points, and I think he did a fairly good job of doing it. with you know I'm just not really sure who won this debate. It was a kind of a stalemate and so you had really two really great minds going at it and you walk away with a little confusion. Now I'm obviously on Craig's side in this but again I'm trying to be objective in judging his debate and I've on plenty occasions I've said this theist lost to to that atheist. So I've seen many theists lose to atheists, so it's not a thing I'm unwilling to admit. But I think the most important issue is this fifth point that Carroll raises, where he says, theism fails to predict that this universe would exist. And it really raises the question as to how you're approaching the issue of God's existence. And Carroll seems to be approaching the issue of God's existence from the standpoint of science, and he's offering theism as a scientific hypothesis that lacks explanatory power. That's the position that he's coming from when he looks at the issue. He says, well, I'm going to approach things as I always do, as a scientist. And he is a scientist. Craig is a philosopher. And so as a scientist, I look at this issue, and I say, well, we have two competing hypotheses. We have naturalism. We have theism. And clearly, theism doesn't do a really great job explaining anything. And what does he mean by that? Well, what he means by that is that in order to have a good explanation for how the universe operates, You have to have in that explanation an element of predictability. What do we mean by that? Does the hypothesis make predictions as to how the universe is going to work? That's one of the hallmarks of a scientific theory. And theism just doesn't seem to be a scientific theory, let alone a good one, because there's no real way to define God in the first place. or measure how he's going to act, or predict why he would act the way he acts. And that's why you have so many different views of God out there. So if you want to invoke God as an explanation, you have a very unbalanced, uneven, and really black, dark explanation. In other words, this is a being that is undefinable, whose actions are undefinable. And therefore, theism can't really be an explanation for anything. This is actually why you get into God or the gaps reasoning with creation scientists. It's kind of like we get to a point where science is bereft of an explanation, and the creationist jumps in and says, ooh, God did it. And so Carroll is saying, theism is the worst of the explanations of fine-tuning, assuming that there's a fine-tuning to begin with. Because very good, so I'm glad you're on track with me. I agree with Carroll. that theism is a terrible scientific hypothesis precisely because God is incomprehensible, as I've taught in this apologetics course. And as incomprehensible, you can't stick God in a test tube and think that God is going to be an explanation of anything in the sense that we're talking about. So I actually agree with Carol that we should engage, when we're doing science, we should engage in methodological naturalism. By methodological naturalism, we say the scientist is always going to look for natural explanations for any given phenomenon. And as a scientist, when the natural explanation is not to be found, you don't say, God did it. You say, I don't know. Now, the question is, Why would I then use this scientific information in an argument for God's existence? And the answer is precisely because I don't believe I'm giving a scientific argument. I'm not giving a scientific argument. I'm giving a philosophical argument for God's existence that uses scientific information. Or to put it another way, I'm taking premises, as Craig would say, theologically neutral premises, that are established by science, and I'm showing that these premises, when combined, prove that God exists. So the argument that I'm giving you is philosophical, even though the premises I'm giving you are established by the sciences. Right. You're exactly right. So I agree that theism is a horrible explanation for the how. In what sense is theism an explanation? It's only an explanation in the sense that it's a broad worldview that gives all of my activities meaning and context. In that sense, science is theistic in my estimation because, as per the transcendental argument, I don't think that you can prove anything without God. But we're talking about our proximate procedures in getting at the truth, whether it's who killed the master of the house, or how did oxygen come into existence, you utilize various scientific methods to get at the truth. And those scientific methods don't look at all like a transcendental argument. The cosmological argument, the Thomistic one, was a purely deductive argument that reasoned from a certain fact, I am a contingent being, to the reality of he who is pure act. And in the case of the Kalam argument, we looked at a fact partially established by science, namely the universe began to exist, and we had five arguments from the sciences suggesting as much. We also had philosophical arguments suggesting that. And given the beginning of the universe, There must be a beginner. There must be a cause of that universe. Now, the reason I think I can do this is because as a human, I am a scientist, not capital S. That's not my profession. But we're all scientists. Every human is a scientist. We want to explore our world and get to know it. And to the degree you explore your world, you're engaging in a kind of science. That's what sparks the scientific endeavor. The little kid who, as Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, the little child who's rolling in the mud outside is basically engaging in rudimentary science because he's curious about the world. He wants to know about the world. And all of us want to know scientific facts. And so I would never want the scientist to give up his quest for naturalistic explanations for anything. But we're not all just scientists. Humans take off the lab coats, whether they're formal scientists, like in Neil deGrasse Tyson, or just a layperson like me. We all take off our lab coats, as it were, and we start asking the why questions. Why are we here? And when I look at something as phenomenal as the origin of the universe, and the fact that it did have an origin, I'm struck with the fact that it has to have some sort of cause, because anything that begins to exist has a cause. And I'm not going to make exceptions for the universe. Well, there you go. I think all scientists, whether they're atheistic or whatever, that utilize the scientific method, they're going to have to realize that at the end of their lives, there will be things that are not proven. And you're either going to dogmatically say that they will be proven by the scientists if given enough time, or you just admit at the end of the day, there's some things that are just not provable via the scientific method. And I think that that's obvious that there are things that are not provable by the scientific method. The laws of logic are not things that you discover through science. Those are things you use to do science. The reality of an external world is a philosophical assumption. that the scientist just takes to his research. Moral values that we all cherish, like truth-telling, which a scientist has to have in his arsenal of assumptions, because there would be no point in doing scientists if we didn't live in a culture in which truth-telling is paramount and lying is a frown upon. And whenever scientists do falsify their research, They are rightly ridiculed. And I think Sean Carroll and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who are non-theists, would rightly point their fingers at them and say, shame on you for falsifying your research. So I think that in treating theism as a hypothesis, he's already off on the wrong foot. I don't believe that theism is a hypothesis in a scientific experiment or meant to be a hypothesis that is offered to explain anything. And when it is, I will join Sean Carroll and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and whoever, Richard Dawkins, and say, no, I don't agree with that. This is one of the reasons why I'm not impressed with so-called creation science. Because it's offering scientific proofs for God, which I don't think that by definition you can have. Science deals with the natural. It doesn't deal with supernatural causes. No, I think that a lot of terms were thrown around, too, to be conflated. Sure. The terms do get thrown around. So like when Ed Fazer gives his Five Proofs of God, he writes a book called Five Proofs of God, he does define what he means. He doesn't mean mathematical proof. He doesn't mean scientific proof. He means There are philosophical proofs utilizing the laws of inference, rounded in certain facts that are demonstrable in our experience, and you infer God from it. And Paul seems to say that very thing. He says God has revealed himself in the natural world. To take God as a scientific hypothesis, in my estimation, would be to sort of demean God. It would suggest that God is univocal. that he causes things in the same way any run-of-the-mill natural phenomenon causes them. Right. Well, yeah, and I would like to add to that, I don't think you could ever scientifically prove or disprove God. I do think you can prove God. I also think you can, in principle, disprove God. If you were to give me an argument that is deductive in character, that demonstrates that God is a contradictory idea, I would not lamely bow out of that by saying, oh, you must be using a different set of laws of logic than me or something. Or I might say, I would never say, well, God is not subservient to your laws of logic. No, I think that when you get into that sort of thing, you just make God unknowable and he becomes just this meaningless concept. And I think that that's what Sean Carroll's rightly trying to avoid, he doesn't want to embrace a worldview in which everything is just up for grabs. That's why he likes science as his paradigm for rationality. He wants to make sure that he has explanations for certain phenomena, and that those explanations have well-defined parameters to them. I would say, and Craig I think totally undresses him on this, on the issue of whether there's fine-tuning and or whether fine-tuning might only be apparent, Craig gives a whole list of scientists out there who would say it's obvious that there's fine-tuning in the universe, not only for us, but also for life in general. You couldn't have any kind of life apart from fine-tuning. Now, Sean Carroll responds to him by saying, well, wait a minute. If you want to just start counting noses, I can count a whole lot more noses than you. I can count a whole bunch of scientists who don't believe that God exists. And so many of these very same scientists who don't believe that God exists are the very same scientists who are saying that there's fine-tuning in the universe. But in my estimation, that goes back to his point that God is a scientific hypothesis. Many of the names that Craig had on his chart of scientists who think that there's fine-tuning actually happened to be believers. Some of them became believers. I'll take that back. I'd have to look at the list again. But I saw, like, the name Frank Tipler up there. Well, Frank Tipler recently became a Christian. And he became a Christian partly from this whole issue of fine-tuning. So there are more and more scientists who are beginning to think there's more to the design argument than we originally thought. And so many of them are either becoming agnostics, moving from atheism to agnosticism, or they're embracing some form of theism, like Tipler. Baby steps, right. Paul Davies went through that same journey. He went from atheist to agnostic. And then he became a theist near the end of his life. And a lot of it had to do with his scientific research. You have others like Robert Jastrow, who was extremely impressed with the fine-tuning of the universe. He thought it was the most powerful argument for God's existence that he'd ever seen. All right, there you go. Francis Collins would be another scientist who did this. His wasn't based on the universe. It was based on DNA. Yeah, yeah, right. Yes, so Francis Collins was very impressed with the fine-tuning of the universe. And then Robert Jastrow, as I was saying, he said that this is the most powerful argument for God's existence to ever come out of science. Now, Jastrow never became a believer, to my knowledge. And I gave you the video, The Privileged Planet, and I don't know if you've looked at it, but. I've started with the cosmic fingerprint. Yeah. Oh, with Hugh Ross's. I started with that first. I haven't finished it yet. How are you liking the Cosmic Fingerprint? I like, you know, his story as he got into it and how he came to that. Yeah. Especially, you know, when he was in Toronto and the people he encountered into the school was very multicultural. Yeah. And he encountered all these different religions in his life. Yeah, right. And none of them, you know, satisfied his, you know, Right. So, Guy Ross' story of encountering all of these different religions and him not getting scientific satisfaction out of them and actually getting it out of the Bible. In The Privileged Planet, where they go into the fine-tuning argument, a version of it, there's a, in the special feature section, Robert Jastrow is interviewed and he said, I'm living in tension. Because on the one hand, I'm a materialist, because that doesn't mean I like big cars and want a lot of money. That means I believe that the only things that exist are basically just matter and chemistry and the laws of physics and so forth. When you count up all the physical entities in our universe, you've pretty much done it. You don't have anything else to do. There's nothing beyond the universe. On the other hand, there's this fine-tuning. which to say that we just got really lucky just strains credulity, so I'm stuck. And he admits, he goes, I don't know what to do. So Carol can say, yeah, most scientists are not theistic, but look at the individual stories of some of them at least, and they're perplexed by this. Even non-scientists like a, not Daniel Dennett, not Richard Dawkins, and not Sam Harris. Why did his name just leave me? God is not great, why religion poisons everything. Yeah, Christopher Hitchens. I feel stupid right now because he's the most famous of the atheists. Yeah, his brother Peter Hitchens is a Christian, but Christopher Hitchens said this is the one argument that's given him pause. And he goes, every atheist needs to stop and think about it. In one sense, I'm totally in agreement with Sean Carroll that you can't make God into a scientific hypothesis. And I think that that's actually one of the flaws of the Young Earth Creationist movement, to be quite frank with you. They're trying to see God as just one of their hypotheses that they just sort of read into the evidence. But on the other hand, I don't see why it's problematic for me to take something that all scientists are admitting, and in and of itself it's theologically neutral, and show how it points to God, how God is revealed in that phenomenon. The argument that I gave you, and I got it from William Lane Craig, is deductive in character. So it's not meant to be an argument to the best explanation. It's not meant to be an argument to the best explanation the same way I would argue for, say, quantum mechanics or gravity or something. It's meant to simply show that these are our possibilities, and since the other two are extremely implausible, design is the best inference. And since the designer, by definition, transcends the universe, it must be a transcendent designer. Nor am I suggesting, and I said this very vehemently last week, we're in the realm of inductive arguments now in the sense that the premises are established inductively. The argument itself is deductive in character, but the premises are established through an inductive inference. And because the premises are inductive in character, we don't have the kind of certainty that we have when we're looking at the ontological argument or the Thomistic argument. Those arguments, I think, do give us a kind of certainty. This one gives us a kind of probability. The probability that the creator of the universe is also its designer and is therefore also personal in character. Some of the other design arguments we're going to look at even move us further in field. In other words, they move from the transcendent to the eminent. so that God is actually involved in history. But this one, I think, does show that God designed and planned out the creation of the universe. I think that you're absolutely right. uh... you're absolutely right and what uh... so that the point you just made so those who are listening to hear it this seems like a very chronological approach where we're giving a full apologetic for god's action in history starting with creation i think you're absolutely right so we have a transcendent timeless being who causes the universe to exist For years and years, 100 or 200 years ago, nobody would ever stipulate old earth versus young earth. It would just be, this is the way it is. You're already so wrong. This is accepting the scientific facts that the antagonists might say there's no way down. So it's because, look at all this evidence for creation. That becomes the very evidence for the reason Sean Carroll, I'm very glad you brought up that point. So your point was that whereas 100 years ago you had a lot of fundamentalists just denying whole realms that the scientists were arguing for. And what's interesting about our case is that we're actually appealing to mainstream science for our premises. And Sean Carroll is very impressed by the fact that so many scientists don't make the inference. And that's why he keeps going back to this theism as an hypothesis kind of stance. And see, again, just to repeat myself, I agree with him. Theism is not a scientific hypothesis. But because I'm offering theism as an inference based on premises that are established largely by scientific discovery, regarding the Klum argument, these are premises suggesting the origin of the universe. And now we're looking at premises that are wholly scientific in character, pointing to the fine-tuning of the universe. Remember, the calm was a mixture of using philosophical and scientific reasoning to give us a beginning of the universe. We haven't looked at any philosophical premises or philosophical arguments to establish the premise that the universe is designed. All of the evidence that I'm giving you is mainstream science. And this is actually one of the reasons why I'm so confident in the arguments, because the people giving us this ammunition are people who don't really have an axe to grind. If anything, their axe that they're grinding is a naturalistic one. In many cases, they're anti-theistic. There's actually a parallel between the kinds of arguments we're looking at here and the ones we're going to look at later for Jesus' resurrection. I'm only going to use facts that the skeptics admit are true, or at least the critics, maybe not the skeptics. And those are the premises that we're going to use to ground our argument for Christ and who he is and so forth. Yeah, it'll be around Easter time that we're going to do that. But these sets of arguments are kind of like that. Jastrow had no axe to grind in this area and writes a book on the origin of the universe. And then he also says in an interview, I'm stuck with this fine-tuning business. or you have a Sean Carroll who has raised questions about whether the fine-tuning is as much as we are suggesting, that would mean that the 200 parameters that Hugh Ross gives in his latest edition of Creator and Cosmos, maybe Ross is overreached. But what's not being denied is that there is at least some set of parameters that have to be such that if they were different, there would be no life, or at least no intelligent life. And then what would be the purpose? So I think I've addressed everything that I've raised up to this point. I'm not going to say much more about the multiverse because the multiverse, I think, has already been well answered. Wasn't that the one where we won the lottery without buying a ticket? Well, OK, the multiverse is just the idea that there are so many universes out there that Let me back up. If you're only working with one universe, then what you have with that one universe are just these laws of physics. And your only option is to either say that we're here by physical necessity or pure chance, if you're going to maintain your naturalism. Now, we could stop right here and just illustrate, kind of bring all the things that I've been saying together right here. It's at this point that we're asking our naturalistic friends to take off their lab coats. I'm not bothered by anything they're saying up to this point, because they haven't said anything philosophically interesting. They're doing their research in the 1950s, and they say, oh, there are a couple of these parameters, which, gosh, if they were different, boy, we might not be here. In the 70s, that number increased to, I think, about 14 or something. And then now we're at 200 or more. And if you wanna just stop and not say anything about that, then fine, you're doing great science, right? Okay, that's the fine, the fine tuning is there. And so you're not forced to be reflective on that. So why a lot of scientists are not thinking about it all that much, there could be a number of explanations for it. Maybe many scientists were convinced at some age that the idea of God is logically contradictory. And so it just doesn't occur to them to think that God might be the explanation. Maybe they read a lot of bad philosophical arguments, right? And so when they get to this scientific evidence, they just don't think to think about God. But what we would like to do is we'd like to ask them, say, okay, take off your lab coat, and look at this scientific evidence from the standpoint of just being a human. How do you explain that? And that's what we're doing with this argument. We're taking something that's already established, a premise that is true, and say, what are our possibilities? And if you only have one universe, it's physical necessity or chance. Or, could it be design? Now, some atheists that I've heard will say, well, it can't be design. Why? Well, Sean Carroll says, theism is the worst explanation Because you're telling me that you have billions and billions of galaxies out there and the only reason they exist is for us so that we could observe them? And I would like to say, well, neither the design hypothesis nor theism says that. According to the Bible itself, God has created many different kinds of life. He's created terrestrial life and he's created celestial life. And if you agree with my view of angels, each angels is a species unto itself. And so that's billions upon billions upon billions of creatures. So according to the Bible itself, God creates all different kinds of life. So there are all kinds of reasons that God may have designed this universe the way it is, according to biblical theism, that goes way beyond just us observing the universe. And Sean Carroll might say, Yeah, that's my point. Theism is not very well defined, and therefore it fails as a scientific hypothesis, which I would say yes, and I would agree with you. It fails as a scientific hypothesis. But we're inferring design from these possibilities. Let's say hypothetically that physical necessity were far more plausible than design. If you convince me to my satisfaction, I would no longer use this as an argument. I would say Craig, Ross, you've taken a wrong turn somewhere, this guy over here has a very good argument suggesting that we're here by physical necessity. I will say as an aside, you can never convince me that we're here by pure chance. Because once you give up physical necessity and you look at the chances that we are here by purely random processes, I don't have enough faith to believe that. And since those two are implausible in the extreme, they're possible. You're saying there's a chance, right? They're possible, but they're just so improbable that that premise that namely to it that we're here by design just becomes extremely probable for me and therefore I must infer therefore a designer of the universe exists. And it's a designer of the universe. Now out of all the worldviews out there, Which one gives us a transcendent and intelligent designer? Well, it's theism. And at that point, when in this argument have I told you anything like, and the only reason all of that exists is so that we could be here to observe it? Craig has never said that. Ross has never said that. Robin Collins has never said that. None of the great defenders of this fine-tuning argument have said anything like that. So who does Sean Carroll have in mind when he says, to think that we're here, that all this is here just so that we can observe it, is strange credulity? I would agree with him. It does strange credulity, but I don't know of any theist that really believes that, nor do I know of any theist that would use the design argument to that effect. Nor do I know of any theists who would want to. I mean, who are we to say that God only has one purpose for doing anything? It's kind of like I teach my history class. There has been a debate among Southerners as to whether the South seceded for reasons other than slavery. And I tell my class, I said, if we had no documentary evidence that the South seceded from the Union for reasons other than slavery, I would still believe that they seceded from the Union for reasons other than slavery. Because nobody, nobody does anything for just one reason. So even if I had no documentary evidence, and I had plenty of it, to show that Georgia, for example, seceded from the Union for reasons that had nothing to do with slavery. But here's the question. Did Georgia secede from the Union to defend the institution of slavery? And unfortunately, it did. The opening paragraph of their Declaration of Independence is an entire paragraph defending the institution of slavery. So therefore, it is undeniable that not only was slavery a reason, it was the main reason why Georgia seceded. It's an unfortunate fact of Georgia's history. But if the Declaration of Georgia's Independence stopped at that first paragraph and mentioned no other reasons, I would say, well, obviously they seceded for other reasons. Because no rational person does anything for just one reason. Now, if that's true of us, who are finite albeit intelligent creatures. How much more is that true of the transcendent designer? Surely he's designed this universe for multiple reasons. And only a special revelation, right, could even begin to tell us that. And I think that the Bible, quite frankly, is fairly vague on the other reasons. But I know, I have no doubt that there are other reasons. And so I don't know why Sean Carroll would pin that on Theis. I don't think there's anything about the argument that suggests that. And there's certainly nothing about my version of theism that would even want to go there and say, God has designed the universe for just one reason, namely us observing it. It sounds like he's trying to move from origin to being, or negative being. Right. It can't be this way. No, we're not just here to observe all this. I agree with that part. We're not just here to observe it. Right, right. But his point is the idea that the only reason that fine tuning exists is for us to observe, to live, to glorify God or whatever. That just is incredible. And I would agree. That is incredible. That's why I don't believe that. I don't believe there's anything about theism that would force you to believe that. And his only comeback is to bring in this theism as a hypothesis. That's my point. Theism is so undefined. And I'd be like, that's my point. That's why I agree with you that theism is not a hypothesis. It's an inference. It's a deductive inference grounded in these premises that are established inductively via the scientific evidence. And it's a philosophical inference. We're saying that theism is true. In this case, we're saying that theism is highly probable because the premises it's based on are based on probabilities. But if the premises are true, then theism follows deductively certainly. Yeah, maybe. But do you get my main point of this interplay between the inductive and the deductive? Well, let me give you the deductive. It's deductive in form, so the fine-tuning of the universe, and notice we're starting with fine-tuning as a basic presupposition. Okay, now the fine-tuning of the universe is grounded in scientific observation and experimentation, so that we know that there's fine-tuning before we even get to our argument. And so that's where the scientist has to take off his lab coat and entertain a philosophical argument. right at the fact of fine-tuning. And so we say the fine-tuning of the universe is due or is explained or caused by either chance or physical necessity or design. Those are your logically exhaustive possibilities. That's true even if there's a multiverse, right? Even if there's a multiverse, those are your three options. chance, physical necessity, or design. And what does the multiverse try to prove? It tries to prove that we're here by physical necessity. Or our existence is so highly probable that you might as well call it necessary. Or it's so highly probable that we shouldn't be surprised by it. See, if you have only one universe, you should be really surprised about the fact that we exist. We shouldn't be here. So, you're a non-believer, you don't think God exists, right? You're a non-believer, you don't think that God exists, and you come across 200 parameters, which if they were just a slightly bit different, one way or the other, there'd be no life, and or intelligent life. And so you're sitting here going, I shouldn't be here, but I am. Now, yeah, yeah, that's before we look at any of the DNA evidence or anything. This is just the physical parameters of the universe. Okay, so he looks at that and he says, am I here by physical necessity or chance or design? Well, if it's only one universe you're talking about, it can't be physical necessity or anything. You can't even invoke the word physical probability. So, because it's just one universe we have. So now we have chance. Well, that's not likely. So design wins on the one universe scenario. So what the multiverse does is he says, we're going to increase our probabilistic resources. And we're going to say there's an infinite number of universes, or trillions and trillions of universes out there, or at least billions and billions. And by doing that, you've lowered the parameters of fine-tuning. You say, all of these universes exist, and we just happen to be in one of the ones that have life-permitting parameters. And voila, here we are. Now what's happened to the math? The math has just exploded. And there's nothing really to explain now. So it's kind of a defense of the physical necessity hypothesis. True. You know, it's not contingent on you, you're contingent on it. Yeah, well, yeah, the universe could exist while you're in it. And what they would say is they would say the multiverse would explain that, too, because, yeah, there are many universes without us in it. Many of the multiverse hypothesis theorists, people who embrace this view, they are saying that these all universes all exist right now alongside each other, simultaneously. And so it's like, well, it's like us. I mean, imagine we're looking at the planets as an analogy. There's only one planet in our solar system that allows for life. We may find some remains of life on Mars. But currently, as we speak, Mars is not habitable, unless you build an artificial environment there. So it's not habitable. Imagine that there are an infinite number of planets on an infinite number of solar systems. And you have Earth-like planets there and there and there and there and there. That would mean that there are an infinite number of Earths with an infinite number of lives there. And many of those lives don't consist of human beings at all in its history. I mean, no humans ever exist on these planet Earths, right? That's kind of what you're supposed to imagine. So just imagine an infinite number of planets out there with life. Now, the more we look into the universe and the more we look at the parameters for life, it becomes less and less likely that either A, there is life in this universe other than us, and B, if there is, that we'll ever run into these guys, right? That's becoming more and more probable as the years go on. And so I'm no longer ever, wholly impressed when they find a new exoplanet and they say, hey, this could have water, or hey, it's pretty close to the sun. Within months, they discover more things about this planet that totally rules out the idea that it has life, and so they move on to the next one. But that's what you're supposed to picture in your head when you picture these multiverses. So you just happen to be living in one that allowed for you to exist. And there's no design about it. It just is. It just is. And I gave you my critique of the multiverse last week, so I'm not going to get back into it. But if that's where you're going to go, notice that you're going to embrace a metaphysical hypothesis. An hypothesis that's no less metaphysical than what you've embraced in theism. And so I would suggest to follow Sean Carroll's line of reasoning, the multiverse is a very bad scientific hypothesis. It doesn't really explain anything. In fact, as I pointed out last week, it seems to destroy the very idea of explanation. All right, so before I take any other steps, do you want to say anything or do you have any questions or thoughts? No, I think I'm with you, sir. Okay. Well, here's the next issue that I would like to raise. And we're going to take a break for the rest of the month into January. And so mid-January, I'm thinking the week of the 15th, whenever that is, that's when I'd like us to start meeting back and we'll connect through email and talk about all of that. But I'd like to start shifting gears now from the fine-tuning of the universe to the origin of life. So we are following that kind of chronology there where, okay, we have the universe that pops into being. Well, you have two choices. It pops into being uncaused out of nothing, or it was caused to pop into being by something other than itself. Well, I don't think between nothing and something there is no competition. you have just on the basis of the origin of the universe. And this is what a lot of Christians don't really appreciate. Forget the design. Forget the fine-tuning. Forget all of that. We have the universe that began to exist. What more do you need? But, if you're going to be an atheist, you not only have to believe that something came from nothing, uncaused, which to me is just sheer nonsense, You have to say that once the universe did come into existence, it just happened to have very specific parameters in place that allowed life to exist. I want to say two things about life. Some people will look at me and say, what do you mean by life? And at a minimum, we simply mean a multi-celled organism that can replicate on its own and exist somewhat independently. And so you can have a picture in your mind as to what I mean by that. That can be everything from various plant life to biological life. Well, that's all biological, but plant life and animate life. And then among the animate life that we encounter, we have the sky's the limit. And we have bacteria. We have some parameters that we don't know if they fit things like viruses. So there is a debate. Most people say virus is not a life, but there's some who do. So we have a debate on what constitutes life on the fringes, but we have a good idea of what we mean by life. Now, at some point, an atheist might say to you, well, then how is theism an explanation of all this when, if God is all powerful, he can create any kind of life he wants? I mean, he could create life to exist in the middle of a star. To which I say, yes, but now we're going back to the, is theism a hypothesis that explains things? Again, we're inferring theism from the evidence. We're not using it to explain the evidence in the sense that you're talking about, right? So that's the first thing they have to point out. The other thing is, is that the reason the fine-tuning, I think, might be important, and again, I'm speculating here, but this fits perfectly with the kind of God we're talking about, the kind of God that reveals himself in nature. If you're going to have a God that reveals himself in nature, It seems he's going to make sure that there are certain signposts pointing to his existence. And so God could have created a universe with a totally different set of laws than the universe that we currently live in. The universe we currently live in have a certain set of laws. And the fine-tuning argument just is that if these laws were any different than they are, we wouldn't be here. And that has to be explained by either chance, physical necessity, or design. And design is far more plausible. But it is a fact that God could have created any universe he wants, including a universe that has absolutely no connection to ours, a universe with a totally different set of physical laws. In that case, the physical parameters for those laws might be far more conducive to life. In other words, maybe on a different set of physical laws, life-permitting universes are far more plausible than life-prohibiting universes. Are you following me? So the question would be, why wouldn't God do that? If God is all about revealing himself, why doesn't he just use a different set of physical laws? Why is God sort of veiled in the evidence, if you will? Why is the design not the easiest thing in the world to detect? After all, it took modern man with his modern technology It wasn't until modern instruments for measurements came along that we were able to even detect the fine-tuning of the universe. Are you following this? Yeah, why isn't he more overt? And the answer could be, who knows? Again, this is why you don't want to treat theism as a scientific hypothesis, because you end up in speculation here. But let me give you a few possibilities. It could be that human beings are such that more overt evidence would do nothing to make them believe that there's a God. I think that you're absolutely right. Imagine that God had written on every cell, made by God. And imagine that God had a big neon sign that has always existed on the moon ever since humans were created that says made by God. And imagine that every Sunday he came down to all the people in all the villages everywhere and said, remember to obey me and shakes the planet and forces everybody to go into church. Well, here's the question. Would more and more people believe that He exists? Sure. You couldn't deny it. He comes down every Sunday. But maybe God's purpose in making us, as William Lane Craig says, is not just to get people to believe that He is, but to fully trust in Him. And maybe only in a world like ours is an actual relationship with God possible, given our makeup, given who we are as creatures. So that's a possibility. And so in a universe in which life-permitting universes are far more plausible than life-prohibiting, that would be a kind of universe with physical laws that really don't point to the creator. Because there, the atheists in those universes would say, hey, this is just physical necessity. And so we would not have an argument for God's existence. if that makes any sense. So those kinds of questions may not ever have answers. Maybe the answer I just gave you about people chafing under a world where there's a Neo sign on the moon saying God exists, maybe my explanation there is not true. But that is nothing to take away from the design argument. Given the universe as it is, it seems eminently more plausible to think that it has a designer than not. And that's why I continue to believe that it has a designer. I think the design argument fits much more closely to what they were trying to argue against Are you trying to say that the universe really does appear like it would appear if the God we worship does exist? Which is funny because, and I agree with you a hundred percent, Sean Carroll would go, no the universe doesn't look like anything that you would expect if theism is true. Well, I don't think that this universe would look like anything that naturalism would predict, precisely because I don't think there would be a universe if it weren't for God, because if there were no God, then there would be nothing to create the universe. And since we know the universe had a beginning, the universe just can't be exactly what the naturalist would expect it to be. If you want to give up the law of causality when you apply it to the universe, that's arbitrary, but that's the only way you can get around the argument, and I find that to be implausible. Now, some people say, but you're giving up the law of causality with regard to God, and I would say, no, I'm not. If God began to exist, then God, too, would need a cause. But because the cause of the universe transcends time, he doesn't have a beginning and therefore doesn't have a cause. So I'm trying to think of more. I know I'm doing a lot of this on the top of my head. I mean, you see the notes I have. They're just little scribblings. So I don't have anything with me that's very specific. So I'm just trying to think of all the arguments that I've heard against the fine-tuning argument. And it really does amount to these kinds of things. I think that if the Kalam cosmological argument, you find it wholly unimpressive, and if you find all the other arguments that I've been giving over the months, and really about a year and a half now, if you find all of those unimpressive, this is not really going to do much for you. It will at most give you pause, like Christopher Hitchens says. But I can totally see why you would live the life of a Robert Jastrow, where you're perplexed by it, but you're not willing to clutch in. But given the case that we've been making for theism up to this point, I think that this becomes a sort of cherry on top argument. Like I always love to say, if you're an atheist, you not only have to believe that the universe popped into being on cause out of nothing, which is sheer nonsense, you also have to believe that once it popped into being, it just happened to have these parameters in place. And increasing your probabilistic resources to get out of the argument seems to me ad hoc or arbitrary, to put it another way, and would in effect destroy the very thing that a person like Sean Carroll loves, namely science. It really does force you to give up probabilistic inductive type reasoning, which is the heart of the scientific enterprise. It takes tremendous faith to be the atheist. All right, so as I shift, the shifting of the gears then is going to go from this fine-tuning evidence to the origin of life. And here's sort of the prelude or the preface, and then we'll get into this in January. Up to this point, everything that I've been telling you is sort of old hat for theists. If you are a theist and you believe in natural theology, if you believe that God has really revealed himself in nature, and not just as a theological point or a point of faith I mean, I hear people all the time say, yeah, I believe that God has revealed himself in nature. And they say, well, do you believe in natural theology? Do you believe that we can infer God's existence from nature? No, no, no, I don't believe that. I think that that's just double talk. I think that natural theology is our way of making good the biblical claim that God reveals himself in nature. And that's why I'm engaged in this project, right? So we infer God's existence from the phenomena that we see. And that's a perfectly legitimate enterprise given what the Bible says, and also given the overall trajectory of our apologetic that started with the transcendental type argument. Sure. He starts with a creation and he starts with, according to the biblical story, a garden. But, you know, Paul is very adamant that we know God through the things he has made. And the Psalms says, the heavens declare the glory of God and so forth. So we have these biblical verses that we cited long ago when we started our project of natural theology, towards our reconstruction of natural theology. And I quoted these verses and I said, natural theology is just a way of us making good this biblical claim. And up to this point, all theists who agree with my overall project agree with almost everything I've said. Francis Collins, if he were sitting here, would agree with everything I've said at this point. He may nitpick the Thomistic argument or nitpick the Kalama argument, but he does believe that a case can be made for theism on the basis of certain phenomena of nature. And one of his favorites is this fine-tuning argument. However, and this is where we begin to depart ways from a person like Francis Collins, the difference between a naturalistic evolutionist and a theistic evolutionist would be that the naturalistic evolutionist will either say the universe is all there is, ever was, or will be, in which case he's not really keeping up with mainstream science. or he'll say the universe popped into being on cause out of nothing, or was able to pop into being because of the multiverse. I mean, that's where the naturalistic, atheistic evolutionist is going to go. And basically, what he wants to maintain is the idea that nature is all there is. Creation without a creator. Yeah, and so he would not even like the word creation. He would say it's nature, and that's it. Matter is the mater, right? Matter is the mother of all. And that's just it. And that's where we're locking arms with the theistic evolutionists, and we're saying, hey, there's so much evidence that you're wrong, from the Thomistic argument, to the Klum argument, to the fine-tuning argument, and so forth. OK, so far so good? Well, now we're about to depart ways. We're about to leave our theistic evolutionist friends. Because the difference between us and a theistic evolutionist, like the BioLogos group, is that our friends at BioLogos are going to argue that the fine-tuning of the universe is not only a necessary condition for life, but is a sufficient precondition for life. So that all God really needed to do was create the universe and feed into the Big Bang these parameters that we're talking about. And voila, life becomes virtually inevitable. And so the BioLogos crew, they're going to look for they're going to maintain that there's a purely naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Now, you might have some theistic evolutionists. Origin of life, yeah. So there's a purely naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. We haven't addressed the origin of life yet. We haven't even begun to talk about it. All we've talked about are the preconditions for life beginning. And they'll say, yes, those are necessary, but they're also sufficient. So all you need is that. God has done all he has to do, and everything else has a natural explanation for it. And once again, I'm going to agree that we should follow methodological naturalism. The scientist is to look for no other explanations in doing his science than mechanistic naturalistic causes. However, I still think there are some things in nature that the scientist is going to bump into that, as a scientist, he simply can't explain. He's supposed to just put a big question mark there. And therefore, there is no such thing as a scientific theory of origins to which God did it. But I think that what we're looking at right now is that we have no scientific theory for the origin of life. All we have at best are naturalistic hypotheses that have absolutely no or very little evidence supporting them. They have very little predictive power. And our prediction is that this is going to be a black box that the scientists will never be able to open. They will simply have to take off their lab coats and reflect on this philosophically. And I think that what they're going to realize is that not only is the fine-tuning best explained by design, but we also have life being best explained by design as well. And so what that does is that moves us from the transcendent God who created all things to the God who's eminent and who actually enters into history itself and actually causes a miracle to occur. And that's what we'll pick up in January.