Hey friends, Lisa Childers here. Today we're going to be talking about science and more specifically, scientific evidence for the existence of God. We're going to be focusing on the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe with today's guest, Alan Haneline.

Today's guest is an expert in something called the fine-tuning of the universe. He has a degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin and he's done some graduate study at the Science and Religion program at Biola.

He currently runs a small software company that engages in commercial satellite imaging. He and his wife Rose have four kids and this is really interesting. Three of them just finished working on their first or second degree in the engineering or scientific fields at secular universities.

So this is a science family. Alan also heads the reasonable faith chapter at UT Dallas and leads an apologetics ministry at his church. So Alan, I'm so glad that you could come and be on the podcast today. I want to ask you about your kids all sort of surviving the secular onslaught at universities. What was that like for your family?

Yeah, thanks a lot Alyssa. I'm really glad to be on with you here. And yeah, thankfully they all came out strong in their faith. And yeah, at times, you know, one daughter was a biology major and then went to medical school.

And so, you know, she's definitely hit with the evolution. How do I deal with this? And, you know, I tried to give her some intelligent design background and different things like that. And she definitely stayed strong.

My son was it. He's really into aerospace. He graduated from A&M and now he's at Washington University. And but one interesting thing about him is that he, I know when we took a personality test, he scored like very introverted.

But he was, he was willing to like go to the atheist group on campus by himself and just engage with them and evidence for God. And so I was proud of him for taking initiative like that and just going out and trying to defend the truth.

That's, that's incredible. As an introvert, that sounds absolutely terrifying. So good for him.

Yeah.

What did he, what was his biggest challenge when he would go to the, to the atheist groups? Was it science or was it more philosophical? What were the biggest objections he, he came across?

He did end up talking about a number of philosophical or scientific issues. He, I think he was struck by a sort of a lack of depth there that they, they had they didn't really understand, for example, fine tuning.

And he felt it was, you know, is pretty profitable to talk to several of them. So he kept going back a bit. So that was cool.

Very cool. Well, we're going to talk about fine tuning in a moment. But before we get there just to, to let listeners get to know you a little better, I read in your bio that you went through a pretty severe time of doubt and skepticism about the existence of God. This wasn't just kind of a bump in the road. This was a very significant experience in your life.

And then you began to explore all sorts of different subjects, actually, not just science, but the scientific evidence for God was one of the things that brought you back. So what was that time of your life like for you? What, what was it that you think maybe caused this, this time of doubt?

Yeah, it is sort of an important era I went through that I think motivates me a lot now to be involved in apologetics ministry, just like the former drug addict wants to help those that struggle with that as one that struggled for a while without.

I feel very led to try to help people as they try to process different challenges to faith. And I remember thinking for a while there it's like I'm not sure I'm ever going to be like totally confident, but by God's grace, I feel more confident than ever.

Having found that there's not just a lot of good answers to the questions I have, but there's so much evidence that most people are unaware of. It motivates me to try to make people more aware of all the good reasons for belief out there, both in terms of belief in God and in terms of Christianity.

So yeah, I think what it kind of hit me at a dry time in my spiritual walk where I was too into my job and things like that. And I think you know you can make yourself vulnerable when you sacrifice the spiritual disciplines and things like that.

And I had some close friends in college we were going to perhaps be missionaries to China. And they fell away from their faith and it got me questioning things quite a bit. And of course they were citing intellectual reasons.

And so I was examining things. I had always had an interest in studying some of the scientific apologetics type issues, but this led me into a much deeper search to really try to understand.

You know what, how do I know, you know, maybe I've been wrong all this time, maybe it was an emotional experience like my friends were saying.

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