Flying Saucers & Spaghetti Monsters –– The Sciences
Flying Saucers & Spaghetti Monsters –– The Sciences
On the Origin of Life and Cosmos and the Fine-tuning of the Multiverse: Atheism's Scientific Pretensions in Light of the Evidence
Didn’t read Part 1? Click here to read now.
The Origin of Life
In 1953, outspoken atheists James Watson and Francis Crick stood on the shoulders of Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher (among others) to prove the double-helix structure of DNA, the “molecule of heredity”. It would make way for the rise of molecular biology, genetic engineering, biotechnology, the soft chants of gene therapy, and forever reshape the twisted ladder into a modern icon of science[1]. Kudos. But there was a problem. Like the apple falling on his head, a visible language structure was effortlessly made out and exploded in his face like a flying plate of pie. This would not do. The origin of life, its apparent design, and a sense of teleology seemed too self-evident. This was a big problem for Crick and his colleague Leslie Orgel, a biochemist of mutual temperament. So, what was their alleged proposal? –– Flying saucers. Yes, aliens. Little grey men (presumably) had deliberately infected earth billions of years ago and flew away. This was an immediate alternative and intellectually satisfying explanation for the simplicity and universality of our genetic code. It was too elegant, you see, and God was not an option. The Directed Panspermia theory was first presented at the conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence in front of Carl Sagan[2]. They liked it. It flew! The theory was plausible.
Scientific? To call it a theory is far too becoming. To call it scientific is silly. And this is not because aliens are implausible. It is that there is no evidence to even infer aliens as the cause of life. The writing is on the wall. A very large wall. If atheism were actually the natural default position of humanity, and neutral in its pursuit for true knowledge, then whether it is God or aliens at the source in the origin of life is, again, redundant. When It’s advantageous to appeal to a mystery as a brute fact, “aliens” fill in the gap quite suitably. Because, at the end of the day, there is a gap that needs to be filled with ultimate questions such as this, and it is better to have something fill in the gap than nothing–––and yet, absolutely nothing is the cause of everything, so they say. So, how come God hinders science but nothingness does not? The same old nudging polemic collapses into itself like a dying star. Directed Panspermia theory is of the same substance. It is a passing thought dispatched as a hypothesis that sets out to answer nothing. Instead, it shifts the problem elsewhere – a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away[3] – and avoids the most honest, intuitive, and ultimate inference we all draw when a language exists at the center of life itself: God’s hand.
Not so fast! Hold the phone! Don’t move... Invisible language or not, super intelligence and hyperdrive is all that’s needed here. Warp speed might be a necessary condition, too, galactically speaking. Fermi’s paradox is highly speculative. Don’t be xenophobic. There’s no teleological basis for DNA, there’s no purpose or meaning behind it, no good, no evil. I’m almost certain of it. Biology tells me so!
Funny that, in spite of the fact that there is no scientific basis to support the belief that non-life can create life, no observable, experimental, or empirical evidence to even suggest the laws of physics can create life, no initial mechanism anywhere to be found to even propose that the universe itself can create life (let alone itself), here we are: Aliens did it. It’s a faith that pops out of the flying pan into the fire.
I ask you, what is more dogmatic, what is more religious: Crafting a ‘theory’ out of thin air to provide an alternative explanation for the origin of life or just letting God be probable? If living organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed,”[4] what exactly is our intuition guilty of? Either adhering to Ockham’s razor or trusting our gut like any other primate. That said, one could hold fast to an honest agnosticism: ‘I don’t know how it all began’. A much more respectable position, in my view, and it is true of all of us for the origins science of how life began. The science can only get us so far because we’re dealing with matters that rest well beyond the scope of scientific norm. So, then, to repudiate God as possible on this matter seems a bit immaterial, don’t you think? For good measure, evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin summarizes the motivation:
We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[6]
Likewise, Crick thinks that a biologist’s brain ought to be “immunized” against intelligent design because such thinking is embedded naturally[5]. God forbid!
Don’t worry; after death, little grey halflings with enormous brains and tiny blond combovers will hover above our rotting corpses’, finger point, and hold us all genetically accountable for our brazen impertinence, lack of political correctness, and environmental debauchery. If only we had known!
Wait... Where am I? This isn’t... My G––I’m woke. It’s all connected–––the simulation, the aliens–––all of it. But wait, there’s more. The aliens are humanoid… are they?... Yes. They’re human. Too human; from the future–––Homo alienus. They’re wearing lab coats, check-marking dossiers, whispering amongst themselves, peeking over their shoulders–––Oh no... there’s a twist. There is judgment after death. I’m doomed!
While there might be a 50% chance of second death, either way you cut it, what are the odds of first life coming into existence, let alone flourishing, by a sequence of undirected accidents? To that, we attend to other big picture questions.
A militant atheist can throw “Who made God?” around like a fact, but the question of “Who made the aliens?” is even more troublesome, given the fact that the universe – space, time, matter, energy, gravity, force, consciousness, everything – exploded into existence like popcorn without a kernel.
The Universe Began to Exist
Defending theism in light of the atheistic spin on scientific data, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig revitalized a medieval argument based on purely empirical premises that he coined the Kalām cosmological argument, which has now become one of the most widely influential and intuitive philosophical formulations for the existence of God today. That is, given that all modern cosmological models indicate that the universe had a beginning to its existence –– a creation point, as it were –– then all spacetime, matter, and energy have a cause of its existence[7]. The argument’s explanatory power and scope is so powerful, intuitive, simple, and universal that it has become well known among academics and laymen alike, sparking a myriad controversy in the camps of New Atheism. Craig’s philosophical depth and logical expertise even forced a high-ranking officer of the militant atheist regime, neuroscientist Sam Harris, to notoriously confess that Craig is “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”[8] Even Richard Dawkins refuses to debate him. And there is good reason for that.
The late world-famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who championed the “big bang” and expansion of such theory[9], admits the theological implications of this universal beginning point “smacks of divine intervention”[10]. So much so that he drew up a new proposal attempting to usurp the theological implications of an “imaginary friend” for “imaginary time”[11]. The only thing imaginary here is Hawking’s philosophical assumptions that an absolute lack of causation caused absolute causation, which is empirically and metaphysically absurd. Even if the latter model is plausible, that a ball-point pen is not technically a point, it is a given that space with “no boundary” and imaginary antecedents implies a self-contained eternal space since there is nothing before it. But this is not a viable conclusion and Hawking even admits it. There is ultimately a beginning moment in his new proposal when spacetime emerges, “All evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billions years ago. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology. Yet it is now taken for granted.... [T]he universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang.”[12]
Interestingly enough, prior to this creation point discovery, the naturalistic presupposition was that the universe itself was eternal. While this idea has long since been overthrown, a first cause to the universe was initially unwelcomed by atheists because of its clear theological connotation. This just goes to show how powerful the case is for the beginning of the universe, that Hawking himself was not willing to invoke an eternal universe to justify a no God scenario. And so, Hawking’s question begging confession is far from absolved: Why did the universe come into being at all?
On this logical argument alone, then, ridiculing religiously minded people on the premise of God looks more like aimless pie-throwing than it did before. God is a rationally justifiable belief based on the interpretation of scientific data. If atheism were true, we should be more surprised that there isn’t a flying spaghetti monster popping into existence right now. After all, why has the arbitrary, mindless, randomized mechanism for creating matter suddenly stopped? It’s all too convenient.
The “Fine-Tuning” of the Universe
It was a scientific norm to presume the big bang was utter chaos. This normality is now conjecture. Physicists, cosmologists, astronomers, and scientists of all kinds can no longer overlook the data of the low entropy state of the early universe – it was complex, orderly, and fixed. The exquisite structure, function, organization and interconnectedness of the physical universe and the delicate calibration of the laws, characteristics, parameters, and values of each condition necessary for intelligent life to exist immediately implies a deliberate and directive mind behind its apparent design[13]-[14]. To give you a glimpse, the fundamental constants of the universe – physical constants such as gravitational force, electromagnetic force, strong and weak nuclear forces, expansion speed of the universe; initial conditions and “brute facts” such as velocity of light, ratio of masses for protons and electrons, mass excess of neutron over proton; local planetary conditions such as the right amount of water in crust, large moon with right planetary rotation period, steady plate tectonics with right kind of geological interior, proper concentration of sulfur, right planetary mass, near inner edge of circumstellar habitable zone (often called “goldilocks zone”) and also within the galactic habitable zone, to name just a few – are all balanced on such an inconceivably fine point, to call it astronomical is to grossly misconstrue just how precise these measurements were set into motion. Scientists are left God-smacked. It is not something you would expect if it had all been plunged out of a cosmic toilet bowl. Physicist Paul Davies notably remarked that “Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact.”[15]
From physics to biology, the tuning appears so exact that it is impulsive to think a supernatural cause or agent had a purpose for it. God – as the immediate gut reaction goes – is what holds brazen opponents, such as proponents of New Atheism, culpable. Rather than let it be, or posit deism, they reject this inference as primitive jaw droppings of merely “natural” intuitions. It begs the question: Whose intuition should not be trusted here?
God, as a fact or hypotheses, best complements the elegance and fine-tuned clockwork characteristics needed to satisfy the interwoven complexity of our universe in order to create and sustain everything we see, feel, and understand simply. It is this simplicity of everyday experience that likewise veils a rich depth and complexity that many take for granted and more expect to see from an elegant designer's handiwork. This has left the “anthropic question”, why the laws of nature are fine-tuned to permit life to exist, at the forefront of this discovery. And it is compounded even further when we, conscious entities who are able to quantify, predict, and comprehend such are thrown into the mix. In other words, it is not just a fine-tuned cosmos or cell that sparks reaction, it is how consciousness is fine-tuned with it.
Acclaimed physicists and Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose, not to be mingled with the New Atheist regime, said the probability of the big bang occurring by chance is virtually incomprehensible, “There’s got to be fine-tuning. This is fine-tuning. This is incredible precision in the organization of the initial universe.”[16] and that “This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in the ordinary denary notation: it would be `1' followed by 10^123 successive `0 's! Even if we were to write a `0' on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe–and we could throw in all the other particles as well for good measure–we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed.”[17] If you didn’t catch that, there are less sub-atomic particles existing in the entire known universe than there are zeros. To give you another idea of the big picture, Craig points out that the number of seconds in the history of the universe (all the way back to the big bang) falls short to reach the decimal places required to match the probability if its occurrence. It is, by all scientific standards, impossible. A divine foot is in the door.
Furthermore, there are conservatively twenty-two (some argue over twenty-six[18]) necessary parameters and conditions that we know of that must be fine-tuned in order for intelligent life to exist, let alone flourish[19]. In fact, just one extraordinarily minuscule alteration in one key parameter in the laws of physics would render life impossible, not just here, but anywhere in the universe[20]. According to Bayes’ theorem, the probability of a divine designer can readily be assumed. In this model, if a sufficiently powerful being exits, such as the Judeo-Christian God, then the fine-tuned fundamental constants of the cosmos act as a prerequisite to enable intelligent life to exist; it concludes that the degree of belief in a divine designer ought to be more than half[21], which is greater odds than the Computer Simulation hypothesis (not that this logically conflicts with the existence of God but that it is an emotive deterrent from religious convictions). God is a perfectly coherent, justifiable, and all the more likely.
Hawking said, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”[22] Astronomer Fred Hoyle, a cantankerous panspermian like Crick, commented, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.”[23]
Physicists, astronomer and former head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Robert Jastrow said, “This is the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science.”[24] He continues, “[The scientist] has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”[25]
I hope the point is clear. None of these scientists are theists, and yet the immediate intuition, inference, and implication we all draw when we look at the early universe and its life-permitting qualities is unanimous: Superintelligence. Creator. God. Atheism is not the absence of belief; it is an outright rejection. And there is nothing in the sciences that demands or warrants rejection, at best you are left with a thoughtless global skepticism.
Dawkins confesses that it is one of the best arguments against atheism and seems to recognize the weight of the argument, as well: the mathematical odds of it occurring by chance alone, with no fine-tuning mechanism to point at, is utterly diminutive to consider plausible. While Dawkins agrees with Crick, that we ought to be immunized against God, he is obliged to agree with Craig that “the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable”. Craig continues:
There are a number of such quantities and constants present in the big bang which must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. So improbability is multiplied by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers. There is no physical reason why these constants and quantities should possess the values they do…. Our discovery of the fine-tuning of the big bang for intelligent life is like someone’s trudging through the Gobi Desert and, rounding a sand dune, suddenly being confronted with a skyscraper the size of the Empire State Building. We would rightly dismiss as mad the suggestion that it just happened to come together there by chance. And we would find equally insane the idea that any arrangement of sand particles at that place is improbable and so there is nothing to be explained. Why is this? Because the skyscraper exhibits a complexity which is absent from random arrangements of sand. But why should the complexity of the skyscraper strike us as special?[26]
The Multiverse Alternative
Be that as it may, Dawkins adopts the World Ensemble hypothesis (often called the many-worlds interpretation, known in mainstream science as the “multiverse”), for which there is no evidence and, presumably, scraps the canons of observation and experiment in a desperate attempt to dull Ockham’s razor when the edge couldn’t be any finer. Keep in mind; many of these New Atheists lean on Ockham’s razor to evade prospect of the Computer Simulation hypothesis, which is a coin toss. The inconsistency is staggering. Like pulling principles out of a Scrabble bag –– apply this now, apply this then –– without rhyme or reason (or for personal rhyme or reason), this is just how life works; chemicals mudslinging language at the laws of physics, anything is possible, anything believable, if slime is given enough time and chance, the rules for the game will just come about on their own accord to play itself.
As of yet, no simple explanatory mechanism for a multiverse has been identified, nor will it ever be, but it is flaunted about as though “it is the truth”[27]. It is an unfalsifiable, philosophical pretension fantasizing to be empirical, measurable, and scientific. Even famed atheist Michael Shermer, a science writer who sets out to debunk supernatural or pseudoscientific claims as the founder of The Skeptics Society and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, agrees, “the fine-tuning of the universe is the best argument for a theological perspective,” and goes on to say, “because the natural explanation for the fine-tuning is not all that great and I don’t either side has a scientific explanation. I think at that point it ends up being theological and metaphysical, but not physics.”[28] Like Sean Carroll before him, but far crotchety than his colleague Dawkins to be fair, he also appeals to a virtually infinite “bubbling universes” as an alternative explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe and that it was inevitable for one universe (ours) to “win the lottery”.
To think physics and fortune are compatible presupposes something beyond observation. But this is not uncommon when luck is anchored in hope, a hope beguiled to lower the odds and rid the world of our improbable existence once and for all. That is, if you have enough monkeys aimlessly bashing on typewriters at random, eventually (given that chance has had enough time) it becomes statistically likely that one monkey is bound to type a word or two in English; and once a language is had, a perfect literary masterpiece is not far off, followed closely by the Mona Lisa, J.S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins, and rocket science.
“Albert! Ham! Please, stay seated. This is no time to monkey around.”
While “de-coherence” is the first word that comes to mind to sum up this view, there’s a red herring with this logic that ought to be drawn out first. Mathematicians of probability have concluded that the current inference for a multiverse from fine-tuning is, more or less, an inverse gambling fallacy[29]. That is like a gambler who goes into a casino, gambles all night long with no luck and assumes the odds will change the longer they go at it, when in reality the odds are the same each time the dice are rolled. Multiverse theorists do just that, but instead of being the gambler, they walk into the casino and immediately see the gambler win a big pot and assume they must’ve been gambling all night long. Both are wrong for the same reason – time and amount do not change the odds. And even if it could, the mechanism that produces bubbling universes would need to be fine-tuned, too, in order to create a fine-tuned universe. The multiverse solution only multiplies the problem.
That we are here inside the masterpiece, and we see everything functioning in proper working order, our immediate gut reaction is not, “There must be many more monkeys bashing out universes like this one,” it is “Which monkey on a typewriter made all this?!” After all, it is all we have to go on.
In a final blow, Shermer lays the groundwork for his presuppositional diversion against God; that it is “anthropocentric” (or “egocentric”) to think we are the only universe to bubble–––It is a “moral” reason: It is arrogant to think we are alone in the universe (in spite of the scientific fact that there’s no empirical evidence for infinite bubbling universes). It is apparent that Shermer’s metaphysical framework (of atheistic materialism) betrays his intuition and transcends his scientific skepticism. If we lean on science, then we lean on evidence. If evidence, then probability. And if something’s probable, then it’s presumable, warranted, and reasonable; in this case particularly, a statistical certainty. Tell me; why is it unscientific to infer God from fine-tuning but the multiverse is exempt from such unscientific inference? The dice are clearly weighted.
At bottom, the multiverse is a metaphysical claim thrown into the mixing bowl in order to lower the perceived odds of a fine-tuned universe and dull that razor’s edge down to a blunt club. If you stare long and hard enough, the universe will collapse down into a wastebasket of brute facts (no interpretation needed). But, of course, it can’t – it’s a completely perceptual cause.
Roger Penrose, in response to Hawking’s proposal that M-Theory proves the universe can create itself, said, “What is rereferred to as M-Theory isn’t even a theory, it’s a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations. It’s not even a theory. And I think the book [by Stephen Hawking] is a bit misleading in that respect. It gives you the impression that here is this new theory which is going to explain everything. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s not even a theory.…”[30] He goes on to say, “It’s not an uncommon thing in popular descriptions of science to latch onto some idea, particularly things to do with string theory, which have absolutely no support from observation. They’re just nice ideas that people have tried to export…. They are very far from any sort of observational testability. They’re hardly science.” In fact, to appeal to a multiverse as an alternative to fine-tuning, as Craig points out, could be its most reassuring compliment.
Not to beat a dead horse, but herein lies the point: the multiverse has no observable or empirical evidence to support it scientifically. While God Himself may fall outside of the scientific purview, God is not physical, He is a spiritual, nonmaterial being, which requires different forms of proof to substantiate a case. But the multiverse is physical, so it should have physical indicators or markers to suggest otherwise. It does not. So, whether you believe in the Big Bang, Darwinian Evolution, or take it all to be fake, it is neither here nor there. These scientists believe it and ridicule God as reprehensible, objectionable, unscientific nonsense and, therefore, are morally culpable come Judgment Day based on what they reject in light of the evidence. All this drama shows is the length some people are willing to take to deny theism, as if science has something to do with it.
God as an explanation for all things is simple, intuitive, and elegant, and satisfies the extremely complex interplay between our basic everyday experience and the laws of nature that govern our perception of reality. When attempting to understand the origin of the created material universe in contrast to why we are here and alive in our present conscious condition, not just how, it brings the question of meaning to the forefront of thought yet again: Why did the universe come into being at all?
Matlock Bobechko | First published on August 5, 2021 – 9:00 AM EST
[1] The Discovery of the Double Helix, 1951-1953. The Francis Crick Papers. U.S. National Library of Medicine.
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/sc/feature/doublehelix
[2] Christian Orlic, The Origins of Directed Panspermia. Scientific American. Published on January 9, 2013.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-origins-of-directed-panspermia/
[3] To accept or affirm such a view does make you wonder if they also believe that a world like Star Wars is a legitimate plausibility.
[4] Richard Lewontin, Adaptation. Scientific American. San Francisco: Freeman, P114-125.
[5] Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit, 138. New York: Basic (1988). “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”
Ibid. “Design intuitions, however, do not seem to emerge as novel construals from creative grappling with data, but are embedded in our thinking nearly naturally—so much so that, again, Crick thinks that biologists have to be immunized against it.”
[6] Richard Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons. NY Review of Books. Published on January 7, 1997. Full quote:
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”
[7] The formal kalam cosmological argument:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.
[8] William Lane Craig, Sam Harris, The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig (Debate Topic: “Is Good from God?”). University of Notre Dame. Published on April 12, 2011.
[9] In the early twentieth century, cosmologists Alexander Friedman and Georges Lemaître based their equations on Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the universe, and in doing, shattered naturalism’s utopic dream of a static eternal model for the universe when the equations pointed to a creation point lest all mathematical integrity be compromised. This led to the standard “big bang” model.
[10] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (ed. Bantam, 2011)
[11] Together with James Hartle called the Hartle–Hawking state or the “no-boundary” proposal.
[12] Stephen Hawking, The Beginning of Time. Lecture (1996). Hawking.org.
https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/the-beginning-of-time
[13] Ratzsch, Del and Jeffrey Koperski, "Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/teleological-arguments/>.
[14] The formal fine-tuning argument:
1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.
[15] Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon & Schuster: 1992), 16.
[16] Roger Penrose Fine Tuning. James Cagne (YouTube channel). Roger Penrose gives a lecture on entropy and the initial conditions of the universe.
[17] Roger Penrose, Emperor’s New Mind, pp 339-345. Penguin Books (1989).
[18] Ethan Siegel, It Takes 26 Fundamental Constants To Give Us Our Universe, But They Still Don't Give Everything. Forbes. Published on August 22, 2015.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/08/22/it-takes-26-fundamental-constants-to--us-our-universe-but-they-still-dont-give-everything/?sh=505efe9b4b86
[19] Jay W. Richards, List of Fine-Tuning Parameters, Discovery Institute (2018).
[20] Lewis, G., Barnes, L., & Schmidt, B. (2016). A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316661413
[21] Friederich, Simon, "Fine-Tuning", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/fine-tuning/>.
[22] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 125.
[23] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science (November, 1981), 12.
[24] Robert Jastrow, "The Astronomer and God," in The Intellectuals Speak Out about God, ed. Roy Abraham Varghese (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1984), p. 22. Extracted from William Lane Craig, What is the evidence for/against the existence of God? Reasonable Faith. First published April 1998. William Lane Craig vs. Peter Atkins. Carter Presidential Center, Atlanta, Georgia, United States (April 1998).
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/what-is-the-evidence-for-against-the-existence-of-god/
[25] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 116. Extracted from William Lane Craig, What is the Relation between Science and Religion. Reasonable Faith.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/science-theology/what-is-the-relation-between-science-and-religion/
[26] William Lane Craig, What is the Relation between Science and Religion. Reasonable Faith. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/science-theology/what-is-the-relation-between-science-and-religion/
[27] John Horgan, Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science: New books by a physicist and science journalist mount aggressive but ultimately unpersuasive defenses of multiverses. Published on November 25, 2019. Scientific American. Sean Carroll’s full quote: “As far as we currently know, quantum mechanics isn’t just an approximation to the truth; it is the truth.”
[28] Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Michael Shermer - Why a Fine-Tuned Universe? Closer to Truth (YouTube Channel). Published on August 4, 2014.
[29] Roger White, Fine-Tuning and Multiple Universes. First published on 17 December 2002. Wiley Online Library. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.00210
[30] Justin Brierley, “Hawking co-scientist Roger Penrose debunks M-theory on Christian Radio.” Unbelievable? Premier TV. Published on September 20, 2010.