Transcript
A (0:03)
Ladies and gentlemen, do you have friends that are atheists or agnostics? What is the most difficult argument for atheists or agnostics to answer for God? Some say, well, it's the argument from the beginning of the universe known as the cosmological argument. But in recent decades, scientists, even atheistic scientists, have admitted the most difficult argument for them to answer is, from a atheistic perspective is why is the universe so fine tuned for A, the universe to exist and B, life to exist here on Earth? That argument is so well explained in a brand new film called the Story of Everything. And the brains behind that film is my guest again today, the great Stephen C. Meyer. Again, normally he's in the People's Republic of Washington, but today he's in Washington D.C. and we had him on last week to talk about the evidence for the beginning of the universe from his film, the Story of Everything. Now, Steve, we're going to dive in a little bit into fine tuning. Can you kind of give us kind of an overview of what this argument is all about?
B (1:17)
Yeah, sure, Frank, but I would just tell you I'll come on every week if you play that little clapping thing for me that just, you know, gets the juices running. I'm feeling great here. Yeah, well, and one other preliminary comment. I don't think the fine tuning argument is the hardest argument for the atheist to answer. I think it's a very, very hard argument for them to answer. I don't think they have a good answer for it. We'll get to that. They call it the multiverse, I think, but I think the case for design in biology is even stronger than the case.
A (1:49)
Okay, we'll get to that, too. We'll get to that, too.
B (1:51)
But I don't want to let them off the hook. That's a cop out on their part. Yeah, all right. Yeah. Well, the idea. Let's just start with the phenomenon of fine tuning. And that is that physicists have discovered that the basic parameters of physics, the strength of physical laws, sometimes expressed in what are known as the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe and many other contingent properties of the universe, all fall within very narrow tolerances or ranges outside of which life and even stable galaxies and basic chemistry would be impossible. And the cumulative probability of these parameters all falling in those narrow ranges is infinitesimally small. And so the expectation you would have if there was no intelligence involved is that we would end up in a life unfriendly universe that invariably, if there was only natural processes at work, then we would end up with in one of those many other values that would preclude the existence one of those values would fall into a range that would preclude the existence of life. Instead, what we see is exactly what you'd expect if the universe was a setup job, if there was someone fine tuning things to ensure that there was the propitious outcome of a life friendly universe. Fred Hoyle, the scientist who discovered some of the first of these important fine tuning parameters, was so shaken in his scientific atheism that he was, as you said in our episode last week, he was later quoted as saying, a common sense interpretation of the facts, meaning the fact of fine tuning suggests that a super intellect had monkeyed with physics to make life possible. So fine tuning points to a fine tuner. It provides the basis of a design argument, it seems.
