Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig, today an excurses

on Natural Theology, part 15.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time we began to look at the argument for design based upon the fine tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

And we saw that over the last half century or so, scientists have been stunned by the discovery,

that for intelligent life to evolve and exist on any planet, anywhere in the universe,

the initial conditions of the Big Bang have to be fine-tuned with a complexity and delicacy

that literally defy human comprehension. In order for the universe to be life permitting, as it is,

the values of the fundamental constants and quantities of the universe must fall into an extraordinarily

narrow range of life permitting values, such that if those values were to be strengthened or weakened by less than a hair's breadth, the balance if those values were to be strengthened or weakened by less

than a hair's breadth, the balance would be upset and life of any sort would not exist anywhere

in the universe.

Now, sometimes people will object to the fine-tuning by saying, well, maybe in a universe that is governed by

different laws of nature, these disastrous consequences would not result from an alteration

of the values of the constants and quantities. But this objection betrays a misunderstanding of the argument.

We're not concerned with universes which operate according to different laws of nature.

We have no idea what would happen in universes that are operating according to different laws of nature.

Rather, this argument is concerned only with universes that are operating according to the

same laws of nature as our universe, but with different values of the constants and quantities. Because the laws of nature are preserved,

and merely the values of the constants and quantities are altered, we can predict what would

happen if these values were increased or decreased marginally.

And so our concern is with universes governed by the same laws of nature,

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